Living Life As It Is: Chapter 3

Understanding Our Own Stories

Understanding Our Own Stories

How can anyone see straight when he does not even see himself
and that darkness which he himself carries unconsciously in all his dealing.

~ Carl Jung

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Rabbit Holes of Fear, Anger, and Hatred

During the fraught times of 2020-2021, we started hearing more and more about “rabbit holes,” describing how people lost themselves in Internet tunnels of ideas and theories to help them feel better (or worse) about how and why the pandemic happened, and why the charged political climate came to be the way it was. People were hooking into webs of theories that reassured them that they were one of the few that knew what was really happening and were part of a ‘secret’ society. The explosion of political, cultural, and spiritual gurus finding popular and, many times, lucrative platforms to espouse their theories sucked many people down deep holes that rival even Alice’s Adventure.

Again, I’m referring to this in the past tense, but as of this writing in 2025, many people are still in rabbit holes that have grown to become whole cultures. Despite the prevailing moods and associated behaviors of most people in the U.S. who have “quit” the pandemic, deciding it is over, it isn’t over. And there are new possible pandemics and disease spread on the horizon, caused by vaccine avoidance, that are more likely to overcome our public health systems than Covid did because public health is targeted by the new regime for destruction.

As we enter 2025 and one month after Donald Trump took office again, we are witnessing a rapid dismantling of our government and democracy, and a diplomatic realignment of the U.S. with Russia, while dismissing our allies. All of this led by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, JD Vance, and whomever else is providing structure behind their frenetic demolishing of the systems, departments, and agencies that keep our country running.

Prior to what is happening as I write this chapter in late February 2025, we had another ‘never-thought-I’d-witness-such-horrors’ event, with the violent storming and attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Then there was a mass pardon of the convicted insurrectionists when Trump took office. It gets worse every day, with a clearly audible drumbeat leading the march away from democracy and to authoritarian and fascist rule. It is hard to believe and even harder for me to write about this, but things are more fraught now than during 2020-2021, when I started this book.

Add to that, climate change is no longer just a concept argued about by those living in the normal comfort of first-world countries. Many of us have experienced increasingly intense hurricanes and major storms, floods, unrelenting heat resulting from heat bubbles, wildfires, and persistent air quality alerts. Because of the unsteady political, social, economic, and climate conditions that now seem the new normal, people are continuing to live in their rabbit holes, or they have come to the surface to be with the tribes they found in their rabbit holes. The clash of realties continues.

Despite our instinct to point to “them” as the ones living in ignorance, we are all ignorant. It’s our human heritage. We have been changed by the pandemic and the upheavals of our government and climate. No one is quite the same as we were in 2019. Despite the massive changes of the past few years, many of us have found ways to adjust, trying to balance ourselves as wave after wave of health, economic, and social tumult wash over us. When I say adjust, I don’t necessarily mean a positive adjustment. We may feel as if we have adjusted by going deeper into our rabbit holes, where what we see is only the flickering projections of a story of reality that is playing like a movie on the dark sides of the rabbit hole we’ve taken residence in.

Most of us have tried to settle back into our pre-pandemic existence and some of us tried new ways of being in the world, but our new reality of Trump 2.0 has knocked us off any footing we may have found from 2021 to now. The fear, anger, depression, and anxiety that surrounds us now is a thick fog of trauma that many of us have no idea how we will see our way through.

It can’t just be me that notices how others, close to us or in the broader culture, and ourselves have been changed by world circumstances. The Buddha taught that it is our human nature to meet change through clinging to what was and what we’re comfortable with, while pushing away what is. It is getting harder and harder to not cling to some distraction or avoidance, instead of looking at what is.

During the early days of the pandemic, I had to face the fact that, despite my Buddhist practice and worldview, the rapid social and political changes were conditions that triggered a traumatic response in me. That trauma caused me to respond in fear and anger. I found myself circling in traumatic stories, which tended to rise like angry waves that tossed me repeatedly until I remembered to reach out and take hold of the life preserver that is the Dharma. And when I wasn’t overcome by disruptive thoughts and emotions, I needed to check to see if I was avoiding, burying, or compartmentalizing those feelings and stories.

The Dharma has helped me to surface many times when I felt I was losing my ability to cope. Yet, I needed the extra help of therapy to be able to steady myself and emerge from fight, flight, or freeze, before I could even consciously decide to reach for the Dharma.

It’s All Delusion

Whether it is fear, anger, or hatred, it’s all delusion. This delusion is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s our natural state. And, despite how depressing that sounds, knowing that it is a natural part of who we are makes it hopeful. What is depressing is not being aware that this delusion is inherent in our human condition. We live in an illusory world. When living in an illusory world, we live our lives as if all our thoughts and emotions are the truth and our perspective of life is reality. It is why we suffer. It is why we are angry or afraid. It is why we see “others” as the cause of our problems.

We believe what we think. Our old stories and the emotions they create become the kings of us. We react to our emotions, believing when we feel something, an immediate response is necessary. We don’t question those feelings or our reactions. We never ask if it’s true or if it’s what’s happening now. We buy into our delusions as the truth—as just the way it is.

Nope. It is not how it is. It is how we think it is. It is how our self-referential minds see, interpret, think, and feel about things that happen to us. We rarely question how we think or feel about something to check if it is based on any objective truth. We rarely redirect our gaze from “out there” to inside. Doing this takes courage but it is the anecdote to the fear, anger, and overwhelm of them-against-us that seems to be the prevailing mood of our current time.

We Are Story Tellers

We are natural story tellers. The stories we tell include the stories we tell ourselves. We weave narratives about everything that happens to us, turning ourselves and others into characters. The thing about creating our own narratives is that they’re easy to remember. Our stories are so easy to remember that they become our memories. We believe everything the story says.

Of course, we make ourselves the hero or victim of those stories. Our memories are focused on the stories of ourselves, the heroes or victims, and we walk into our days with expectations and reactions based on the memories our stories form. The problem with this is we can’t be sure these memories are based on how things really were. And it is probably more realistic to say we can be sure these memories are based on how we ‘thought’ things were.

We aren’t the heroes, nor the victims our altered memories make us out to be. And the ignorant people “out there” only appear to be our enemies. But we can be heroes by recognizing and acknowledging that our memories may not be how things really were and, through awareness or mindfulness, see that our thoughts and emotions tend to react to our storylines rather than things as they are.

Part of My Story

Early in the pandemic, I saw that I was very much at risk from Covid due to a compromised immune system and age. And I also saw that—even early on—many people, both near to me and in the broader culture, essentially dismissed the harm Covid could cause. Some dismissed it out of fear, pretending everything was OK. Some dismissed it because of misinformation and disinformation. And some feared the vaccine more than the Covid virus. And, in my story, these people emerged as real threats to me.

I, too, found my own rabbit hole that embraced my stories. I found like-minded people among the immunocompromised that were speaking out on social media. They made me feel less alone, but as the years went by, they also exaggerated and misinformed some dangers, causing even more fear in me, and more dependence on what they were reporting. Consequently, my partner and I sealed ourselves in our Hepa-filtered home away from family, friends, and neighbors, emerging to meet up only outside in the fresh air. Every visit to a store required a KN95 mask and we never ate in restaurants, only take-out.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when I first felt threatened it triggered an activation of complex trauma, I wasn’t consciously aware I had. I have read and heard from therapists that trauma reactivation and the experience of new trauma is a scary side-effect of this pandemic and one that we, as a global community, will be dealing with for many, many years.

The more I read and explored what I was experiencing, the more I realized I wasn't alone. However, when the reactivation began interfering with my behavior, relationships, thinking, and an ability to cope, I couldn't deny it, cover it up with excuses, or hide behind my strong meditation and Buddhist practice. The crack was getting bigger, and it was showing.

Yet, I kept thinking and saying to myself, I've done all this work through Buddhist practice, surely, I don't have that big of a crack. I can handle this. I'm not REALLY broken.

But I am.

I am broken.

We all are, in places.

And for me, it's a very big break that goes back many, many years. And only then, four years ago, at 68 years old, I discovered and looked at all those broken parts, with the help of somatic and trauma-healing practices, and working with a therapist who specializes in trauma.

At this age, I rarely thought of myself as a marginalized gay woman. But my past was full of both active and veiled dismissal of the gay me I identified with as a young pre-teen, teen, young and middle-aged adult. Now, in my senior years, it seems very far away and very close. There were many traumatic events connected to my struggle to be who I was while also struggling to fit in, to be accepted, to be loved.

It was a very different time in the 1960s, compared to today. Society at large associated any sexual identity or orientation, outside of cisgender and heterosexual, as deviant. In sociology, deviance describes an action or behavior that violates—yes, violates—social norms, either formally or informally.

I realized this was a problem for me at a very young age. I realized that the me I knew was 'in violation' and I needed to be hidden. I remember listening to talk radio on my transistor radio at night in bed. I remember one show very vividly. It was an interview with lesbians. The thing I remember the most was learning about the Greek island of Lesbos and its mythical (or not) association with lesbians. Then and there, I decided that that would have to be my future home as an adult. I didn't know how that was going to happen, but I knew that I couldn't live here where I was a deviant.

Since that time, I struggled with both being me and hiding me. Falling in love with my best friend and writing about that love and our sexual experimentation at 12-13 years old, in my diary, hidden between my mattress and box springs, initiated the first major trauma of my young gay life. Because homosexuality was considered deviant during the 1960s, parents were faced with very different challenges when confronted with a child identifying as lesbian, gay, or transsexual. It would be natural for a parent to react in shock and fear, and try to work it out with other adults, without consulting with their child or without consideration of the potential trauma that could cause a young personality.

And that is, in fact, what my mother did. She consulted with my friend's parents, and I believe the school, too, and a proactive campaign of separation was launched. We were not to associate with each other again. I imagine the thinking was that, like the harmful effects of drugs, you must separate your gay child from their temptations to save them from their deviant selves.

I honestly understand that thinking, from the perspective of what things were like in the mid-1960s. And I have come to accept what my mother did as coming from a place of love and protection for me. Yet that acceptance of my mother's compassionate intention and understanding did not help soothe the rejected and traumatized child of the time or the one that still lives inside of me.

That was just the first in a series of life-denying events surrounding my sexual identity, but I believe it was the deepest wound. Later, at 18, off to college with my best friend and my college roommate, the tension of my hidden sexual identity exploded. I communicated it and my love for my friend, thinking acceptance for me was a given, even though I knew the type of love I felt for her was not reciprocal. Again, a life-denying series of events were set in motion by that innocent confession. I was removed from our shared dorm room, relocated to a group room of jocks, put into therapy, and eventually drank, took drugs, missed classes, and ended in a breakdown.

Leaving college, I was admitted to a psychiatric ward because of my depression, by my parents. I submitted because there was not much life left in me. I was crushed. I had a therapist who was trying to change me from gay to straight, and because of little success in reversing my condition, plans were made for electroconvulsive therapy as the next step. Thankfully, my parents did not sign the papers, and I was released from the hospital.

It was a long and painful road from then on, with multiple rejections and dismissals of who I was by family members and friends, leading me to leave and move in with a woman who verbally abused me throughout our relationship. I was young, scared, and confused, looking for love and acceptance, and easily fell prey to her narcissistic abuse.

Remember, this happened soon after the time of the Stonewall Inn raid in 1969. I experienced police raids of gay bars in dangerous sections of Cleveland. I was poisoned in one and I have haunting memories of rushing out of bars through back doors and weaving our way through alleys to make our way to the safety of our car and back to our suburban apartment.

I am sharing this meandering trip through my past to remind all of us that each one of us may be carrying around trauma that has been triggered by the psychological and sociopolitical effects raining down on us from the chaos in our inner and outer worlds during these past years. Trauma like this makes a practice of right view in the moment impossible to grab hold of. Buried hurt and anger coming from a much younger you steer emotions and reactions before you even have time to see what is happening.

The betrayal I saw in the people around me during the pandemic triggered traumatic reactions to the past that had lived quietly inside me for many, many years. I had a brush with its reappearance in 2011 during the fight for marriage equality and at other times after deep hurts from friends. But this time it went deeper and hurt more. Or maybe, I looked it in the eye rather than repressing it, so I felt more.

The pandemic and a seemingly broad social dismissal of those over 60, or with compromised immune systems and underlying health conditions, triggered the resurgence of my past trauma in periodic bouts of depression, anger, and even rage. I was feeling again that somehow I didn't matter. That I was deviant.

I fully feel the rage of any marginalized people. I fully feel—in a completely embodied way—that fatigue in fighting for your inherent right to live your life and just be who you are. I do not pretend to totally understand in that same embodied way how it feels to have black skin and carry multigenerational trauma on your back, but I DO understand how it feels to be marginalized by major aspects of your very being, like your health, illness, or your sexual identity.

Reaching for The Life Jacket of the Dharma

I kept looking for ways to accept the woundedness, the hurt, and the anger full-on without repressing it. Repression causes anger. Opening to your own hurt is a compassionate response. It is the first verse in the Metta vows and first part of Metta practice:

May I be happy and well,
May no harm come to me,
May I learn compassion.

I began a long healing journey that even in its beginning stages revealed again one very important Dharma teaching as I reread the book, Dharma Breeze: Essays on Shin Buddhism by Nobuo Haneda (Dharma Breeze - Amazon affiliate link), a wonderful teacher in the lineage of Bright Dawn Center and its founder Rev. Gyomay Kubose. The teaching was from Shakyamuni words and Haneda’s pointing out instruction. As Shakyamuni was dying, he said:

"Ananda, this world is so beautiful, so wonderful."
And, as Haneda points out, "This world is wonderful
precisely because of the suffering and tragedy."

That framing of suffering helped me broaden my perspective and open the windows of my thinking to embrace a me that is a part of everything. And the me that isn’t a victim of life’s circumstances.

In one of the essays within the book, "The 'Priceless Jewel Within Us", Haneda helped me to see beyond my victim identification and trauma from betrayal, which wasn’t wrong to feel hurt from, but it was wrong view to hold it as the truth and as the discrete me. I wanted to connect to this 'priceless jewel', the perfect that exists within us.

The stories he relates within the essay point to the ways we usually search for priceless jewels or something perfect, like enlightenment, spiritual peace, happiness, or whatever we consider that perfect thing. We search and search on the outside because we don't see anything in us that is perfect.

Haneda points us to the exact spot where we will find what we're looking for. He points to what we already have within us, here and now: LIFE! And he says that life "may not sound like a profound religious or Buddhist concept. But there is no greater or deeper religious concept." And, he says, as many teachers teach, "Becoming a Buddha means becoming awakened to life."

Haneda shares one a simple but profound story that will stay with me for a long time. It’s a story I believe we could all use to replace the doom stories that we are telling ourselves now and that have been circling around in our heads, in the past five years. It is the story of the Shin follower Hisako Nakamara, who lost her limbs to frostbite in childhood and had to resort to working in the circus. Despite her hard life, she wrote the poem titled, Aru Aru Aru, meaning "I have it, I have it, I have it."

In my case, focusing on my brokenness: immune deficiency, age, trauma, etc. I began focusing on the mantra, "I have it, I have it, I have it. Being broken is the clue to where the jewel is hidden. Like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, or golden joinery, where broken pottery is mended with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. This art expresses the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, or embracing what is flawed or imperfect, which is life as it is. Repairing broken parts with gold is to honor the whole self, in all its brokenness, illuminating rather than hiding what is broken.

This is how I slowly clawed my way back to looking at the existential happiness at the core of my being. I did so by learning how to dive in there, into the core through deep body or somatic experiences and through meditation encompassing both top-down (conceptual then down to the body) and bottom-up (body to the mind). I discovered how therapists and trauma healers talk about the Self. Self with a capital "S". I think the concept of no-self is so misunderstood as a denial of self rather than a confusion about what self is. We have disconnected from our bodies and disconnected from real and true practices of self-compassion and self-love.

These practices are not about being all ego, but about discovering the priceless jewel. If that jewel is covered in broken bits at the pit of your stomach, or wherever else you bury anxiety or trauma, you will not have the capacity—or have limited capacity—to have compassion for anyone, because you disconnect from that source, the energy of boundless light and love that lives within you. That energy of light is right view.

Despite all the things we felt that we were losing during the early years of the pandemic and the things we are frightened we are losing now, during the social and political upheaval of 2025, we need to replace the doom stories and anxiety jumping around in our minds and bodies with this:

I have it. I have it. I have it!

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