I lie in anxious anticipation on the couch at the beginning of an all-day therapeutic session. I wear an eye mask that blocks all sight, all light, and yet I am acutely aware of my two guides sitting in front of me on either side, their silent presence against a backdrop of gentle music, their attention turned toward me. Already I can tell that this is going to be a very turbulent ride, as the psychedelic compounds in the mushrooms I ate a short time ago take effect. Nothing as frightening as the initial sense of loss of control, my thoughts, perceptions, and sensations starting to shapeshift in a kaleidoscopic display, my familiar adult persona giving way to an underlying stream of vivid impressions. 

I clench my belly and chest, constricting against a wave of nausea. Sensing my distress, one of my guides comes over to me and holds my hand. With her touch, under the increasing influence of the mushrooms, I suddenly regress to an ambivalent, tantrumming two-year-old, turning toward her, then away from her, then toward her, but not removing my hand from hers. “Fuck you!” I bark in a toddlerish whine, taking my distress out on her, hungry for her presence yet at the same time compelled to push her away. “This is hard. I know. I’m here,” she replies in a soothing tone, her voice a beacon of tenderness and stability as I continue to toss and turn.

“I’m letting go of your hand now, okay?” she says, as my discomfort lessens and I begin to relax. “Okay,” I reply, not wanting her to let go but trusting her and sensing the rightness of her judgment. It’s time for me to plunge deeper, accompanied and witnessed by my guides while leaning on my own resources. She withdraws back to her chair. I sniff the air but lose even the comfort of her scent to confirm her proximity, and the atmosphere around me turns dark and stagnant. Now I am a small child, all alone. The world outside feels terrifying, indifferent to me, oblivious to who I am and to my needs. I curl up into a tight ball and withdraw inside myself for protection. Try as I might, I can’t find a center of agency, a foothold, a stable sense of self. Desperate thoughts proliferate and pile rapidly one upon another in an impossible tangle. I am dizzy with disorientation, as if lost in a maze. Life is overwhelming and unmanageable. Nothing seems real. I float adrift, unreachable, in this agonizing no-place. 

A prickly curiosity pokes through my cocoon of fear and I become aware of my surroundings again. I unfurl my body, now an agitated adolescent on high alert. Everything annoys me, everything is suspect. I hear a clatter. “What’s that?” I demand to know. “I’m just letting the dog out. Everything’s fine,” comes the unruffled reply. Internally, I feel swamped by members of my adoptive families, blended with them, chameleon-like. Where do they end and I begin? I can’t seem to differentiate, even though I’ve worked so hard over the years to identify myself as not-them. Who am I, anyway? Then the music stops abruptly, shaking me out of my reflective reveries. I wait for the next song on the curated playlist but hear nothing. 

“Did you turn the music off? Are you fucking with me?” 

“No, the music is still playing. It’s soft now. Can you hear it? Ocean waves.”

I attune my ears to the subtle sounds. I catch hold of them and their natural rhythm captivates me, pulls me in. I hear the rich reverberations of guitar strings, and to my surprise, seemingly independent of my volition, my hand lifts and starts to move seamlessly with the music. As if standing apart, still observing from a posture of suspicion, unaccustomed to my body’s spontaneity, at first I wonder if I am some kind of puppet. Who or what is moving me? Then my other hand lifts and moves in a graceful arc. Soon, while still lying on the couch, my hips begin to sway and gyrate. In spite of myself, I am dancing. 

Song after song, I continue to move with the music, and as I do, something new emerges. I descend into my body, inhabit my bodiliness in a fresh way—inhabit something whole, real, connected, and alive, a larger ‘me.’ Who is this strange creature, so full of vitality, sensitive and responsive, so fearless? No, not fearless, just not paralyzed by fear. In my mind I am still assailed by terrifying thoughts, still distressingly fused with my past, struggling for differentiation and identity. But this creature that I am, my body, is not deterred by any of this, does not pause, constrict, or withdraw, does not struggle or lose itself in endless futile reflections but dances with all of it, moves through it. My mind craves resolution to the myriad problems it creates, but my body only wants to dance with life, respond to life’s promptings. Is this what agency feels like? 

The music washes over me, colors and pulses through my body sensations, stimulating my muscles and imagination. And underneath it all, I feel a pervading sense of friendliness supporting me, rising up to meet me, embracing everything, alluring me into movement, moving with me. 

Nothing is resolved, and everything is fine. 

When I was an infant, and then again when I was nine years old, I was bought and sold, relinquished and adopted, without my consent. Like being dressed and undressed and re-dressed all over again in garments that didn’t fit, that squeezed me into shapes that were supposed to meet the needs and delight the eyes of those who signed the contract to make me their own. But I did not meet their needs nor delight their eyes because, beneath these garments, I was not the person they needed me to be—impressionable flesh upon which they could imprint their own reflection. 

What could I know of agency? How could I inhabit my body when I had to wear the projections of my adopters who did not biologically mirror me in the first place? How could I develop a sense of self apart from them when, inside my self-negating role and identity as a twice-adopted child, they defined the boundaries of who I could and could not be, and nowhere within those boundaries could I locate myself? How could I learn to trust my instincts and spontaneity when my very bones cried out that something was horribly wrong, while everyone around me acted as if nothing happened—acted as if I were just another member of the family who inconsequentially happened to live an elusive, shadowy non-existence until I landed on their doorstep? 

I used to think that life only truly began at the end of a long struggle, of problems solved and wounds healed, a road that ever stretched beyond the visible horizon. I used to think that my path to wholeness lay in disrobing myself of the garments other people dressed me in, the deforming, disfiguring roles, relationships, and identities I was forced to wear. I hoped that, in discarding these garments, my true self might emerge. Now I am discovering that there has only ever been a single garment knit for me, only one life to be lived, woven of threads of choice and choicelessness, an unresolvable mixture of joy and suffering, gain and loss. Not a problem to be solved but the unbroken truth of who I am. Not a destination to be arrived at but a body to respond to the allurement of life in sheer, unbidden amazement.

And I am still dancing.