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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23
8:00am, my tambo
I woke up intensely sad and filled with pain. Not physical pain but the pain that comes with emotional despair. The only way to describe the intensity and the totality with which it consumes me is like this: imagine your phone rings, you pick it up, and the person on the other side tells you horrible tragic news.
They tell you something severe, like your parents have been killed in a car crash, or they confirm your lover cheated on you, or they tell you there's been an accident and your kids died, etc. Now think of how it feels the instant the bad news ripples through you. Like a violent earthquake, it shakes your very core, and rips apart the foundations of your strongest beliefs.
That is the kind of pain I am trying to describe. The difference is that what I'm experiencing is not a single ripple of bad news. It is painful waves from an unknown storm, crashing over me each time I take a breath.
I feel broken and confused. Why today and why now? I don't want to feel this lonely. Wasn't I just starting to get better?
11:00am, my tambo
The emotional sadness, the dark thoughts, they're killing me today. I don't know why they came back and it confuses me to no end. I thought the overpowering darkness that brews inside of me, occasionally boiling over, was cooling down. If I've been healing the way I thought I was, why did it come back? Have I not taken fuel from the fire, letting the flames burn themselves out?
The pain stings. I was not prepared for it to take over so suddenly; there is no reason for it, nor was there any warning. It hurts like if your hand was being held on top of a red-hot stove. I think that's why people kill themselves. Burning and burning in pain, eventually even the toughest person will cry for relief.
Yesterday, I felt so optimistic and like myself for once. Now, today, I wake up feeling complete desolation and despair, isolated anguish, and a disappointment with my meager existence. It's frustrating. It's not how I want to feel, but it's the way it is.
There's no way to escape it, and on top of that I can't stop thinking about the ceremony I'm supposed to take part in tonight. I'm trying not to attach how I'm currently feeling to the decision of whether or not I'll participate. I don't feel ready for it. I am not ready to be a warrior right now. It is taking all of my strength just to defend myself and there's no way I could fight through it. I'm exhausted, so exhausted.
Part of me feels like it might be an after-effect of the Ayahuasca, but another part of me knows it's much more than that. This suffering I'm going through is something personal. I've been denying it for too long. I need to figure it out once and for all. I can't keep living a life that is so closely attached to so much pain.
Yesterday, Otillia told us sometimes when you have two ceremonies on consecutive nights, the first ceremony will show you something which only makes sense after the second ceremony. Maybe the feelings of pain I'm feeling are the yin to tonight's yang. Hopefully, if I participate tonight, I'll be given the opposite feelings from what I'm dealing with now. That is seriously the only thing I have to look forward to at the moment.
