Why you feel like shit sometimes

Do you ever feel like the Universe sometimes conspires to create the most painful situation imaginable for us? Like it knows our deepest weakness and creates a scenario that’s perfectly designed to inflict maximum emotional pain?

In 2017 I hired a relationship coach to help me attract a soul level relationship. I told her that the history of my love life had been basically a tragic comedy so far, and I shared my whole story with her in writing. She read it and said she saw it more like a hero’s journey. I liked that perspective better.

My journey was that I had experienced a lack of intimate connection for a long time and it made me feel like I was missing the best part of life. I felt unhappy and lonely. After some sketchy sexual escapades, I found out I had herpes and that took my emotional distress to new heights. My weakness was being amplified.

I’d been friends with Alexandra for 5 years and we had grown really close … best friends. Her boyfriend broke up with her so she came to stay with me in Whistler and ski. There had always been sexual tension between us. Now I see her get naked and change clothes in front of me, sleep in my bed, cuddle with me. Basically use me as a rebound boyfriend, except after I brought it up she admitted, “You’re right, we would be having sex right now, but you have herpes, so it’s not worth it.”

The thing I most wanted in the world, by far, was to be with her. I constantly thought about how much I wanted her and how unfair it was that this experience was seemingly stolen from me. I was being rejected for something that wasn’t even inherently me.

During this time Maximus invited me to go sled skiing and filming in Haines. Of course I had to say yes. I’d never been to Alaska before. The whole trip, when my mind had a moment to wander, would drift to Alexandra. Even on the mountain, if my attention wasn’t directly engaged I’d be thinking of her.

I’d been smoking weed pretty much every day for the previous 10 years. I’d quit before the trip and my 10 day sobriety streak was the longest in years. When it came to April 20th, 2016 though (the worldwide stoner holiday) I gave in and smoked with Max and Gab before we headed out on our sleds, on the last filming day of the trip.

Max was in a rush to get footage because we hadn’t gotten much so far. Avalanche conditions were sketchy — we’d set off some big ones already. First line of the day Max got sluffed into a bergschrund and buried, and we didn’t extract him in time. It took us a while to realize something was wrong because I mistook Gab’s voice on the radio for Max’s. Gab panicked and rushed off with my sled back to camp leaving me there alone with Max half extracted in the bridged bergschrund. I called a heli to extract him. The story that got back to our friends in Whistler was one of a failed rescue due to the rescuers’ incompetence. We might have saved him if it weren’t for the miscommunications leading to a slow response.

Death is a sudden thing. Once it’s done, there’s nothing you can do about it. I knew it was a sign my life had instantly changed course and my focus on skiing was over. The first person I called was Alexandra.

Because I was already emotionally hurt to the maximum, I had no room to hurt any more. I still had Alexandra in my life, I still had the situation to navigate. We continued seeing each other after I returned. One night we halfway hooked up, but in the end she stuck to her initial feeling that it wasn’t worth it.

Emotional pain is absolute, not relative. A person can be rich, famous, or whatever — it doesn’t make their pain hurt less. I ended up going to Peru for a 10 day ayahuasca retreat a couple months later with the intention of healing my emotional turmoil. It did help kickstart the healing process.

In the end Alexandra and I remained friends. I felt that she handled the situation poorly, but it was due to her own fear and ignorance, not malice.

The Universe conspires to hurt us where we are weakest because that’s where we most need to heal. Like the Peruvian Shamans say, the worst ayahuasca experiences are the ones where the most healing happens.

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