13. My 27th Birthday... I Never Thought I'd Be Here.

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to a chat with Uma, with me, your host, Uma R. Chatterjee. On this podcast, I bring together all of my roles as a neuroscientist, researcher, board certified mental health peer specialist, mental health advocate, community builder, and a survivor with lived experience to bring you honest and unfiltered conversations exploring our true human experiences in their fullest form. Every week, I'm bringing you conversations bridging the gap on all things neuroscience, psychology, mental health, lived experience, advocacy, psychedelics, and more. This is a space for raw unfiltered truth to truly explore ourselves for who we are and how we are. I cannot wait to connect with you, answer all of your questions and co-create this with you. Welcome to a chat with Uma. Hello, beautiful friends. Welcome back to another week of a chat with Uma. And specifically, I am so happy to be talking to you on this particular episode, which if you happen to notice like the minute details of consistency and expect the podcast every single Monday, you'll notice that this particular episode did not come out on Monday of this week. It's coming out on Tuesday and that's because this Tuesday today is my birthday. It's Tuesday, April 25th of 2023 and it's my 27th birthday. And I just really wanted to take this week and this episode to really reflect on existence and making it to 27 and just a lot that comes up for me in this time of year and the specific day. And I could have recorded this a few days ahead of time and just put it out as a birthday week episode, but something in me just really wanted to get on the mic and be flexible and just capture the day as it actually shows up for me today because there's nothing quite like the actual day of your birthday, at least for me. So here we are real time on by the first day of my 27th revolution around the sun. And yeah, everyone has birthdays. Everyone turns a different age every single year. Nothing particularly unique or special to me except for the fact that it's a day of me just really reflecting on being alive and there's so much in that for me and I just feel like I really want to just share truthfully and authentically and honestly about reflecting on existence and being alive because that's something that I just do not take for granted in any way, shape or form. And every year, with every year that passes by and every year that I exist, it's more and more amazing to me that I am here and that I am around to be aware of my birthday to celebrate my birthday to have this day marking another arbitrary subjective revolution around the sun and that time is passing by and I'm still here. And not only am I here, but I'm living and I'm being and I'm conscious and aware and present. If you hear that, that's being sneezing in the background. That I am conscious and present and that I'm alive like truly and literally that I'm alive. And why that's so top of mind for me every year on my birthday, at least it has been the last few years, I would say the last three years. And that's no coincidence, I think. I was diagnosed with cancer the day after my birthday four years ago, 22, turning 23 and my life was completely utterly just broken. I was completely dysfunctional on a new level. I was dead inside. I was passively waiting around to die. I was holding on, but not necessarily with grit so much as just passively holding on until life took me out. I was floating by. And in the years previous to that, I had been actively suicidal and thankfully it did not pan out and work out in the ways that I tried. And I just became more and more numb, more and more just waiting for life to take me out. And then getting diagnosed with cancer and going into survival mode because that's what that does. Realizing how much pain I had within me and starting to get lots of levels of healing and recovery and help that I needed for a long time and didn't have access to all of this is in my past podcast episodes so you can hear all the details there, but just high level reflect they got that. And then going through treatment, getting a second chance at life, going through recovery for so many of the things that had been debilitating me for so long and starting to live life with some level of interest and aliveness and gaining back function or whatever, just gaining function 'cause I really didn't have any before. And just starting to gain presence and gain access to my emotions, gain some modicum of capability to work through my fear and to start accessing little hints of passion and curiosity and immigration and connection with people and love and just starting to live life, starting to recover and heal and live bits and pieces of life and that compounding and growing and having that start contrast really. I think that's why the last three years, my birthday has really felt like just an awe, just being an awe of being alive and how easily I could not be alive, either from ending my life, like I had intended to for so long actively and passively, also just kind of wishing that I wouldn't be alive and successfully maybe acting on it to all of the wild health things that I've lived through that could have also ended my life and somehow through all of that still being here and having the privilege and capability to live and to experience the breath and depth of life, the spectrum of experience and emotion and having the gift of life, like that's really, really what I feel on my birthday every year, I just think back to how much I wanted to die for so long and how much I wished I would die and that my pain and my suffering would end and that life was not worth it and had that happen, whether it was me acting on it or something doing it to me, had that happen, I would never have experienced anything I've experienced then, had life taken me out, had I succumbed to all that my mind was screaming at me to protect me from the incomprehensible pain I was in for so long, had that happened, I would not know the amount of love and immigration and care and excitement and possibility and sheer utter just serendipity and like truly what the fuck life has become just in the short time, just to think that there was such a possibility and such a likelihood of me never getting to experience any of this, all I can do is be in complete shock and gratitude for the gift I've been given to be here and to have lived this long and to be here see other parts of what life can be. And you know, it's really interesting because one could hear all that and think that you know, wow, like life really sucked and now life is good. And that is not how I see it at all. I accept so many co-existing truths and experiences for me personally in that I have experienced recovery and growth and healing and all of those beautiful things in amounts I never thought was possible. And life is so much better, I guess is the best where I can think of by all accounts. And and a huge and as I've talked about candidly on the podcast so far, I am still hugely struggling like yes life is suffering, life is struggling like in general of course it's not like I'm striving for this level of perfection that doesn't exist or is not attainable. It just outside of that like I still have so much room to grow and recover and heal on so many fronts and I mean in speaking about suicidality like frankly I I still experience suicidality like chronically it's what my brain defaults to in the chronic amounts of distress I experience and especially when things are really really bad and hard. It is a natural tendency for me to feel like the easy way out is to end my life completely personally it just feels like it's not even the easy way out it's like the way out the path of least resistance to getting through the amount of pain I still experience and struggling and dysfunction and fear and debilitation that I experience it it does still feel oftentimes on a subconscious primal level that it would be preferable to not right but at the same time what gets me through and why I'm still around and why I'm still here and mom still talking about this is because I have lived through that before and I live through it now and I allow myself as best as I can to honor that experience and a genuinely having and I also let it pass and let myself experience the spectrum of life that can exist which includes that for me right now and everything else that I said that I've been such olive just all of the growth and learning and community and connection and invigoration and passion and excitement and learning and joy and awe and peace and catharsis and pain and true feeling and being being on that path to experiencing feeling even more of that because so much of my life was numbed to feeling those things because they weren't safe and because to experience all of the quote unquote good meant to also experience the depths of despair from the things I've been through and just the way my my brain and mind is and how it's responded to my environment the complexities are unending but you get the idea somehow I'm still here somehow I've been lucky enough to be able to still be here and I think about people who are not here who have left this earth from their suffering and their pain being too much way too much to handle and people who have been taken from this earth by physical reasons and and everything in between and I just I'm so acutely aware of how easily that could be me that that could have been me and that could be me and yet at this time and through this whole time it hasn't been and to me that I'm just so grateful and not the kind of grateful that is forced or that you really at least for me that I have to like tap into or find gratitude amongst all the the painful things in in no way like toxicly being positive or or spiritually bypassing like not that type of gratitude just like this visceral this visceral awareness and acceptance of it all not just gratitude for all the good again in quotes the good that I've gotten to experience but being able to be alive to experience at all because that includes all of it and when I've acutely started to really embody and understand experiences that being alive for me is the gift and that includes the parts that are preferable the parts that are not and they come with each other and either I have both or I have none and in this stage and in this time of my life I get to experience it all and even being here to experience it is mind boggling and you know have you if this is your first time hearing this podcast well this is an interesting introduction to it and there is a lot more detail in context about this in previous episodes but really just the sheer amount of transformation and growth and pivots and healing that has occurred for me in just the past few years after just decades of being of course like experiencing so much and learning so much but just really being dead inside like the amount that has happened in the past few years it's just so mind-blowing to me that I don't even I could never ever imagined that life could be like this in the depths of being so deeply traumatized by so many horrible things that happened and being at the behest of my mind my brain that was already so traumatized from the abuse that I lived through and the pain and then also the dysfunction that came with my brain with OCD and so much of what it was already doing and then also the depression the PTSD the anxiety the disorders the self-harb suicidality the all of it that was all of it is a complex interaction of what I was already predisposed to and reacting to my really really painful and traumatizing environment for years and years and years and living through physical abuse emotional abuse sexual abuse as a child living through a cult living through decades of undiagnosed physical chronic illness that debilitated my body and rendered me completely useless and I thought that that was life and that there was nothing else available to me and being completely alone in the world and being undiagnosed and untreated for all the not just physical but the severe mental dysfunction that had me effectively confined to my bed or to whatever setting I'm a stuck in right couldn't move and just being so broken and so dead and then living through cancer and somehow managing to buy so many strokes of luck and just how the cards unfolded for me climbing out of that and living through that and somehow through the cancer getting all of this diagnosis and recognition of the things that had been going on within me for so long that no one had recognized within me medically mentally and physically and then somehow getting function and capability and awareness and recovering healing in ways that I didn't even know or possible because I didn't know life was anything more than what I had experienced nobody does until they experienced something more right and then somehow turning my whole life around giving up my music career because I lost my voice to cancer and in just you know three to four years losing my voice going through cancer going through intensive treatment for the things I had been undiagnosed for for so long going back to school after piecing out with a 1.83 GPA and completely failing and not thinking it was for me and that I was capable of anything because I was not at the time. I was so so so debilitated but I thought it was because I as a person was fundamentally incapable of anything only to take that face my biggest fear do the one thing I never thought I'd ever do which was go back to that one school after the cancer and retake all my classes make all A's and get my GPA to a 3.56 pivots and neuroscience start a masters be a 4.0 student join a lab face some of my biggest fears my biggest exposures of my memory my mind my trust in myself my trust of harming other people and other things pursuing my own research project starting to win awards for my research presenting it I don't even know how many conferences starting to be flown out to speak at conferences internationally doing my research at school to have a my own independent project first author somehow becoming an advocate for OCD and mental health publicly beyond the things I had been doing in my own life already being a national commercials for OCD meeting and creating a community of people where we advocate and make a difference bridging my entire identity together my lived experience my research my background becoming a board certified mental health peer specialist starting a global cancer support group out of having cancer I'm just like I'm not even done and I'm like what the fuck is even going on getting into a PhD program one of the top PhD neuroscience programs who exist to study psychedelics and OCD oh yeah doing psychedelics becoming a psychedelic organizer starting to do research in psychedelics becoming a director one of the on the board of directors of the intercollegiate psychedelics network becoming an advocate for the International OCD foundation starting this podcast all of this and more oh wait I'm not even done that was just all of the what the fuck like things professionally quote unquote that I never thought were possible but also maybe even more importantly becoming present enough in my body to start actually engaging in treatment and recovery where I have a long way to go but the amount that I have been able to do and all and everything I said before is a reflection of the amount of recovery I've been able to experience even though it's nowhere near fuller complete but all that I was able to do just from being able to recover as much as I did and become functional in a person in a way that I had never been before in just like three years and more importantly being able to really start connecting with people and showing up as myself and having deep loving friendships and I do not show them up in them perfectly I really really struggle still to be consistent and to show up constantly for people but nonetheless still having some of the deepest most loving friendships with people across the world in a way that I never thought was possible because I did not have friends I did not I was not accepted I was bullied I was the weird person and then I internalized I was beliefs and believe that I couldn't actually have true friendships and that's why I still struggle because I still am working through those beliefs and day-to-day action in life but the fact that I even have the opportunity to work through them with people who I love and trust so much is so beyond wild to me and that I'm constantly met with love and compassion from people when I never thought that was possible and I'm alive I've been alive long enough to experience that the beauty and the depth of that and to be so fully loved by my husband to be married to have my best friend in the whole world be my life partner to have our little family my dog to co-create a family that we both never really had that were on our own terms I didn't know love like that existed I didn't know a home like that existed or that family like that existed and I would never have known if I didn't live this long and living a life of passion even having a glimpse of passion like I I have such a long way to go and I have so much I need to work through it with making space for myself beyond the productivity and the things that I do that I love and care about but that are work quote unquote and all that and that's valid and true and we'll talk about that more as I navigate that on the podcast but right now just in this moment the fact that I have so much passion for what I do and I have so much fear and shame and resistance and I work through intense amounts of fear and shame on a minute by minute basis and the amount of blockages I have to be able to do what I do and how hard it is is I cannot even overstate that yet the fact that I get to do them anyway the fact that I somehow have the capability to make to work through that and still live my life like I just gave a talk at the biggest psychedelic conference in Europe one of the biggest conferences in the world I gave a full talk about my research and my lived experience and was met the whole weekend with conversation about how that was the best presentation people had heard at the conference and how people have learned about OCD for the first time so my heroes came to that that's a whole recap that will be coming soon because that was amazing but the point of that is I was just so dysfunctional before and was so petrified of being bad being wrong all of the intrusive thoughts and fears I have about my character and my capabilities far beyond just stage fright or panic about presenting it was like the fundamental core of all of the intrusive horrific thoughts I have and it was I was so close to not doing it and the fact that I didn't anyway the fact that I somehow had the capability of not not even just like getting the talk which is wild but like doing it I would never have known that that's possible I would have never known any of this that I had within me or at least now I have within me with the resources and support and capabilities and recovery that I have that any of that was even possible and I'm just rambling at this point but that's what I'm sitting with today the all had gratitude for life the impossibilities of life that I truly had no concept of love connection passion recovery feeling the whole spectrum of feeling being alive he didn't know it was possible and I get to live that and I'm here today living that and hopefully I'll continue to do that and to be here and to be here for 27 years like I never thought I would live to 27 I never thought I never thought about living like every year that I lived was like oh somehow I'm here I didn't think about the future it's common with people with extreme mass trauma just being in survival mode there is no future there is no thinking of aging or of goals or hopes or dreams or passions or even just excitement for the future because I don't necessarily think you need to have goals passions dreams like I don't really have a concrete vision of anything because I'm just living and I'm just life is just taking off and I don't really know what's gonna happen I just authentically want to show up as myself and be of service and be passionate and integrated and being community like however that looks it'll look but even just having any level of thought about the future excitement like 27 is not an age I thought of 25 was not an age I thought of hell even like 22 was not an age I thought of I feel old Not just because of how much I've lived through, but because I didn't think about aging, about being the sage or any age, and I'm in awe of that too. I'm in awe that I'm in a place where life is looking different and looking like thinking about the future even if it pans out nothing like the way I think the fact that I'm even thinking about it at all and that there is any part of me that looks forward to it as much as there is also so much fear and dread and discomfort and terror and I get stalled and brought to my knees with the overwhelming fear and shame so much the fact that there is a future to even feel that for and then to also feel other things occasionally is wild and that today on this day there are people messaging me about this day of birth for me and celebrating my 27th revolution around the Sun and sharing their love and care with me That's wild to me the fact that I'm around for people to show me their love and truthfully I don't even I mean I'm still at the point where love and compliments and kindness like feels like fire to me feels like a threat and I'm working on that but the fact that that's even happening and I get the opportunity to work on it is a miracle the fact that I'm sitting here in front of my laptop with a microphone talking to you rambling to you about my all of life and that you are all here sharing the space with me and you show up every week and listen to my reflections and perceptions on life and my intersections of being a scientist and mental health peer specialist and advocate and human and all the things I do the fact that I'm any of those things the fact that you all exist and that you are here with me and that we have a community what is what is life what is life and I guess what's coming to me is we can just never know what is possible there's just no way to know we could have like perceptions and ideas biased ideas oftentimes that we've been conditioned to know we can only have schemas and frameworks based based on what we've experienced so far and there's no way to protect what we don't know and what might happen and what might shake us up and just blasts into our lives what we may find what decisions we may make what people we may need we just can never know and I could have never known a year ago turning 26 what this past year of absolute catalyzing growth in every single way I could have never predicted one thing of that I mean I think I could have hoped that I might have predicted that I would since I was in my master's program that I would like graduate this year that I'd be on time and that even I will never claim to be able to predict anything like that given my experiences and entrepreneurial students and also just knowing that should can happen at any moment but that's like the one thing maybe in this year that I could have maybe thought I could expect anything else no not in this latest what I was expecting and thinking of life last year this time last year I mean I thought I was gonna have to quit everything I was doing maybe get my master's done but I couldn't get through my lab get through the science I was doing I was too stupid I had no concept of my independent project being anything but an idea in my head and winning an international competition to then start presenting in all these conferences and applying to little and getting into a PhD program so early relatively in my career like I would have never imagined one thing the people I've met and the world of advocacy my friends with mental illness like me my friends who organize and experience life and work in psychedelics like me the people all across in between that I have nothing to do with anything I'm doing that I've met I literally could not have predicted one thing and that seems like the most radical bet on life and seriitivity and I guess if I've taken away anything other than I could have never predicted anything and so I'm grateful that I around to experience the growth and expansion and changes that I never thought were possible it's also that life has met me in the tiny little decisions toward what I think are my values because I can never know for sure and I can sit pathologically guessing at any moment in what direction is the right way to go but whatever decisions I have made life has met me there and I had to engage with life and be present in life for anything to meet me back and that is how anything has happened in any sort of way at all I mean just one tiny example I guess I mean these are chains and chains of reactions but I was at the International OCD Foundation Conference last summer which already was just a massive leap of faith I went there to present my research and then also attend the conference not knowing what the community existed and what was possible and I attended one panel that I really wanted to go to but I felt like I had to go to other panels that were more sciencey or talking about treatment but somehow I got drawn to going to an advocacy panel and I did and I felt compelled to ask a question to one of the panelists Valerie and I did talking about people of color and the complete lack of representation of my group of humans that exist at the conference and how to bridge conversations and gaps with communities that are really resistant to mental health conversations I asked that question to Valerie who also comes from a marginalized group and because of just asking her that question and receiving that answer which is already so beautiful and such an amazing experience to have to just have that conversation publicly I then leave that panel and I'm just you know on my merry way to the next presentation I'm on the escalator and two humans just pop out of nowhere corner me on the escalator and basically just tell me hey we just saw you talk and ask that question at the panel we were on the panel it was Katie and Ethan Katie O'Don and Ethan Smith from the IOCDF they were on the panel they watched me ask this question to Valerie like just out of nowhere come chase me down the escalator corner me and say that basically I needed to be in this commercial series this national OCD awareness commercial series that Ethan is directing that is being filled in two weeks am I available to fly to LA what the fuck and I always say this it's hilarious to me because you know with my fear and everything it's like I could have easily just said yes and then like I could have flown out I could have been murdered for a while and I don't know these people at all but I was like yeah let's do it send me an email like let's make it happen two weeks later I fly out to those commercials actually do them meet some of my dearest friends through that whole process and then have been so many things all the advocacy that's happens and said but that only happened because I listened to my inkling to ask a question and I did and then life met me Katie and Ethan happened to see me ask that question they were on that panel they watched me do it and somehow they decided that my perspective was important to have in this commercial series and then that happened like that like what that was just for me asking a question and that's to me just one of a billion examples of life just meeting me putting myself out there in some way and I don't mean like literally putting myself out there like I have to go be public or ask a question but just like acting on a thing rather than sitting and festering in the fear of what if this question was bad what if I shouldn't ask it what if I sound stupid what if I take up too much space what if I'm too loud what if people hate me this you know all the intrusive thoughts all the fears whatever like I just didn't and then life met me and obviously I'm not expecting that everything I do life is gonna meet me with some bizarrely amazing situation but so many times it has and that's just like what is even happening what's happening I'm in awe and that's that's life that's a metaphor or a representation of life for me just like I could never know and expect anything and So often times in the depths of my pain and fear and dysfunction and one thing gets really really hard and my brain and my mind defaults to just telling me I shouldn't be alive anymore which is still very often when that happens. I don't think there's a way for me to escape that and if there is maybe that's cool and it'll happen one day, I don't know, but for me right now I can't escape it but I do know that it will pass because everything is temporary and when I say it will pass I don't mean like the again will never happen again it's just that that acute overwhelming experience will pass and for me at least it's telling me something like I am overwhelmed and it's too hard and this is my my systems response to it and rather than act on it and listen to it and believe it just give it a beat give it a chance and keep on keeping on because if I listen now which I am not in any way shaming anyone who has listened to it or succumb to it because I completely understand how much pain it requires to make that decision and I've been so close to it so many times and I've made that decision a few times and just happened to not be successful at it earlier in my life. The point is amidst that I have lived enough to have the experiences of seeing how much is possible if I don't do that and if I let myself continue to exist and feel that pain as absolutely overwhelming and too much it is and sometimes it renders me ineffectual and I just can't function for that day or longer and then it passes and other parts of life come and sure I would love a life where that didn't happen as much and I hope and believe that that will lessen and lessen over time because there's such a long way to go for me with my treatment and healing and growth and processing and I'm it's never a evolving journey and that's life but to still be here through all of that to still be alive is the greatest gift it's the greatest gift and I'm just so viscerally feeling that right now and I'm really grateful to have an arbitrary marker of that day once every 365 or 365 days every revolution around the sun to sit in that because it doesn't happen super often but this day does bring that and this day also brings to the forefront of my existence the duality of gratitude and joy and also pain and fear and survival mode and suffering and in particular the same thing I referred to earlier in the episode of the last three to four years being the greatest most present and healed and recovered beautiful years of my life as a result of everything that's happened downstream from being diagnosed with cancer and all of the things I've had to contend with and had the opportunity to work through it's the same reason that the day after my birthday every year since then I experienced the depths of fear and my mortality and sadness and pain and grief and not fully processed trauma of being diagnosed with that very cancer because as fate would have it for me I was diagnosed a day after my birthday four years ago that last birthday that I was completely dead inside and the day that started off this whole new chain of events in chapter of my life there's so much duality in that and it's really confusing to feel all of that at once I think today on my birthday it's like a lot more of the gratitude and joy and presence but there's also the sadness that exists and I've always in the last few years like been perturbed by what that is and how I can feel all of that at once and then that really sets in the next day and it's it's the sensory cues and the it's our system remembering we remember memories that are very very profound and take in cues and time and it's a safety mechanism to keep us apprised of a threat that we have once experienced in these exact circumstances and now they're happening again and that is my cancer of hercery that's why that term exists in the world of cancer survivors and having that for me be right next each other the day of my birth and the day of facing my impending mortality and death which again is a thing that is certain for everybody but actually facing it is something completely different and that all co-exist together and that's hard and beautiful that I get to experience it all at once and not in a bypassing way again but in the fact that there was a version of me that did not have the capability of feeling any of this and just passively felt it and it ate me alive inside and I just was so disconnected and dissociated like truly physically and psychologically dissociated and just in the depths of PTSD flashbacks and hypervigilance and having constant obsessions and doing compulsions and just avoiding anything that I felt there is a world where I couldn't even acknowledge or feel them and it's not perfect now but the access I have to feeling all of it is is a live-ness to me and something that I don't talk about as much for whatever reason but it's coming up right now and is definitely something worth talking about especially and the intersection of cancer survivorship and mental illness and trauma and all of that is what comes up in my cancerversary and just reflecting on the journey of experiencing and living with cancer is something that was really scary which was actually feeling like I was facing a choice of do I actually want to live through this or is this the answer to what I've been waiting for to take me out and that's so intethetical to human existence because we are meant to live and keep ourselves alive and like I talked about in the previous episode like survival mode and going into action survival mode protection is what we're wired to do and that did happen to me on a huge level it activated something within me to start engaging in cancer treatment and all of the things that you know rendered me unable to process what it was actually going on for me but was valid and what happens people facing their mortality and having a life threatening illness and also I was so passively suicidal and just waiting for life to take me out that I remember sitting before my surgery having just time sitting in the hospital like well maybe maybe they'll just fuck something up and it'll be over maybe they'll find out it's a lot worse and it'll be over and that's so scary for me to think about right now because that shows how much I was so so did just so much pain and how poorly I was doing and how even in the depths of survival mode and that primal instinct of wanting to live and move forward that I still was having thoughts of maybe this is a good thing and they all coexisted it's not a binary it's not like I only felt that or I only felt like I wanted to live and I do feel like I felt both of them at the same time or talkled each other for quite a while and yet as I recovered more I realized that I was even feeling that and I think psychedelics helped me a lot with that actually in the preceding months which I talked about in my yes I'd run psychedelics episodes so check that out if you want more of the details but I started to really contend with how much I didn't want to live and how afraid I was of being alive anyway and how I was in a sense faced with the choice of it either wanting to live or not and I feel like my life's inside has been taking a bat out of but I want to try to keep living and I want to try to keep being and I want to fight not just physically not just through treatment but also through showing up and being alive and taking advantage of the gift that is this aliveness and presence and opportunity I have to breathe and exist and live and there's no way I'm doing it perfectly and there's So many ways which I still fall, big demons to come to, those thoughts and to passive suicidality or whatever you want to call it, but it's so much less than literally thinking that as I'm having the privilege of going through treatment and having the chance of gaining my life back from something that could have killed me. And that all comes up this time of year two. And so this episode probably sounded really, really, really beautiful and grateful and happy and I'm here to tell you that life is a full spectrum at all times and maybe this is an extreme because the day of birth and the day of impending death being right next to each other and having that all come up at once and for someone who has a lot to work through with emotional experience and regulation, it's kind of hilarious that that happened that way for me. But this is just an illustration of the spectrum of life and how multiple things can coexist and the most meta point from all of this is that I get to be alive to experience all of it and to keep growing and to acknowledge this and to more importantly for my values, share it with you and create this space where I'm not the only one being honest and open about this but creating a space and giving you permission to experience that and be honest about that with yourself, with me, with your family, your community, your friends. I think most importantly with yourself though, because everything else comes down stream from there however you want to show up and that just leads me to just saying thank you because of all the things I have to be grateful for and of all the things that I am in awe of of being alive to experience, having you all in my life is one of the greatest ones because I have suppressed myself throughout my whole life. I've silenced myself, I've held back my voice, I've been so deeply afraid of taking up too much space and continuing to be bullied and judged from childhood for being too much, experiencing too much, saying too much, feeling too much and I shrink myself to close to nothing and it wasn't just that, it was that and my environment and my experiences and my system not having the support to be and experience and feel all that I am because it was too much and shutting that down in the process just though losing my voice metaphorically and then literally from cancer. And just really operating from the belief that there was no place for me in this world, that there was no space for me to even start to explore who I am, for there to even be an eye, for there to be anything to explore, I didn't know that this much love and compassion and community and connection could exist and I can't overstate how powerful that is in the human experience because we're meant to be supporting connected and I lived so alone for so long and I truly believe without a shadow of it out that I was not worthy of being seen or taking up space or being carried and connected for and too. I didn't, I mean I tried my best to show up for other people but it was truly, it wasn't true because I wasn't letting myself be seen and this experience is a whole new radical reclamation of my voice and I, and learning of how I get to show up as fully and openly as myself because all I want for all of us is to be able to do so and I realized how much of a hypocrite I had been preaching that to other people and trying to create that space for other people and asking them questions and I got a lot of feedback from people and people wanted to be my friend or whatever because I let them do that but I wasn't doing that and that didn't feel right and okay and yet I didn't think that I just accepted the foreground conclusion was like life is just solitude and I'm too much and this, I mean everything I'm doing but especially this podcast and talking to you all every week and hearing from you has been a weekly exposure to that extremely pervasive fear of being too much and being unlovable and being unworthy of love and care and yet every single week you give me yourself, you give me your time, you give me your love, you give me your space and then you physically talk to me and share with me endlessly about how much this is made a difference in your life which so shocking to me still and is such a gift because all I'm here to do is be of service and if me being myself makes any difference to you and you getting to experience more connection and joy in loving your life and feeling more accepted and however that plays out for you and the way you show up in the world and what you experience in the world that's what life is all about for me and so thank you for giving me this gift and showing me what's possible that this is another profound maybe the most profound example what I truly thought was an impossibility this space, this love, all of it and I'm so grateful and I'm so honored to have this with you and thank you for giving me this gift. I'm so grateful to have made it to 27 to see what more is possible in this life with you, with me, with all of us and having us journey together through this wild experience that is existing on this planet at this time especially you're not alone and I want you to know you're not alone and life can change, life can change, there's no way you or I could ever know what could happen beyond this moment and if you are feeling like things are too much it's okay, they can be too much, it's okay to admit that and to accept that and allow that and just because it's too much now does not mean things can't change, does not mean life can't be different, it doesn't mean that it's forever, it's so valid to give the due amount of diligence and attention to your very real reality and to not suppress your experience and to accept it and allow it and recognize it and also hold that things can change, things can grow, things can evolve, life is a journey and you never know what's possible and nothing lasts forever, not our life, not our joy, not our pain, not our circumstances, not our experiences, not our memories, nothing lasts forever and I can be really scary and I can also be really liberating because so much is possible and it won't always be exactly what you're having now, what you're experiencing now and I say that as someone who fully works through that myself and that's why I just wanted to show up and be honest about it all and why I do that every single week and why this exists so I will stop rambling now, I can go on forever but I just want this to be a big ass hug to you all just letting you know you're not alone and I'm here for you, I'm holding the vision for you, I am continuing to show up so that I can make space for you all to show up for yourselves too and I'm sending you all so much love and thank you again for being here with me as I start my 27th revolution around the sun and so much more in life happens and I'm so grateful to journey along all of it with you, so thank you as always for being here and if you love the show, if you love these episodes and they bring you anything to your life, as always it would mean the world if you just took the next 5 seconds to subscribe to the show wherever you're listening to it and to leave a 5 star rating and review because that is what helps this show be what it is, it supports me and being able to continue creating it and showing up every week. and it really supports other people feeling safe and joining this community. And if you could also share the show on your social media, link to your favorite episodes, share the videos I make of the podcast. Just link this episode and send it to whatever friend you think would enjoy these types of conversations. That would be the absolute world to me and would really, really, really support me in continuing. And as always, thank you for being here. Your time and space need more to me than you'll ever know. I truly am so grateful. And I love you all endlessly. And I am so excited to show up next week with another episode of A Chat With Uma. There is so much goodness coming. So many amazing guests lined up. Break-up of Break Convention and Michael trip to England. And just so many more conversations we are just getting started. And I cannot wait for everything that is to come. So thank you for joining for another episode. And I will see you next week. Send a huge so much love, as always.