Overcoming Fear & Something Something India
Read more back-story on my life here. Also, if you’re squeamish or in a hurry, skip to the end of this article. You’ve now been warned.
How often do you experience fear/personal doubts? I did for a long time, and I still do, but now the difference is that I don’t let them dictate the decisions that I make in my life. I’m going to tell you a story about when I lost the man that raised me, dropped out of school and went back-packing through India to study yoga. It’s kind of long, and not a story for the feint of heart, but censoring it or limiting the length wouldn’t do the overall experience justice.
Having grown up without my biological father in my life, my grandpa assumed many fatherly responsibilities. I lived with him, he took me to and from school every day, and as far as I was concerned he pretty much was my dad.
He was eventually diagnosed with congestive heart failure, which lead to a long, sad, and arduous death. This was the first time in my life where I had experienced real grief, and the type of emotional processing that came with it.
I was premed at the time, financially independent, working full time at a medical marijuana dispensary and going to school as a premed science major(I didn’t know what the tech industry was at this time). I was absolutely devastated after hearing the news, and had very little ability to cope with or handle the full spectrum of emotions that I was left with. I knew that I needed to take care of myself emotionally, and felt that distracting myself with work and school probably wasn’t conducive to my healing process. I was just distracting myself. I was avoiding sitting with all of the emotions that were trying to surface.
Something needed to change. This lead me to making the decision to drop out of school, save up enough money(12.50/hr at the pot-club) to go backpacking through India to study yoga and “find myself.” As a side note, I would like to add that before my trip I was very much a privileged, “woosy” American who was deathly afraid of bugs, needles and many other “conventionally” terrifying things. When I was younger and would go to get a shot or blood test, I would literally faint. Multiple times I have also thrown up on the nurses after regaining consciousness. I was also mentally conditioned to be afraid of bugs and spiders. When I was younger, we had rose bushes at my house. My grandpa was a troll(a really loving troll), and he would find leaves rolled up and tell me to come over to look at the “butterflies”. He would unwrap the leaf and I would scream in horror as a swarm of baby spiders ran out. To him it was harmless, but it definitely conditioned me mentally to having a fear of bugs that stuck with me later on in life.
Why India? Well, I was broke as shit and really liked yoga. Those two reasons were valid enough for me to embark on what ended up being an incredibly uncomfortable, but transformational life-changing experience.
Everything was tumultuous, even from the beginning. Right before my journey started, I ended up catching the worst bronchitis of my life. I would lay on my back, try to breathe, and it sounded like there was a death-rattle inside of my lungs. But I’m stubborn… when I set my mind to doing something, you bet your sweet ass I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen. I worked really hard to save up enough money for this trip and I wasn’t going to let getting sick prevent me from going. Plus, I had a week before I actually left to go to India. I flew from SFO to NY and stayed on the East Coast for a week before I left at my friend’s house. In the process of flying from SFO to NY, I slept most of the way but woke up mid flight and had to go to the bathroom. I start making my way to the restroom and ended up fainting. I sent the entire plane into a panic, and woke up laying across my own row of seats with an oxygen mask on my face. I was fine, just extremely sick and dehydrated. I got pretty lucky also because there were ~15 doctors on the same flight on their way to a conference. Plus, I had always wanted to try an oxygen mask (it was awesome).
I get to NY and go see a doctor there. She prescribed me 99 days worth of antibiotics to double as treatment for my lung infection and anti-malaria medicine. They didn’t work. I started taking them as soon as I left for my flight to India and didn’t feel any better. I’m also not the type of person to be spoon-fed anything without questioning it. 99 days worth of antibiotics sounded really superfluous. When my lung infection wasn’t going away(because it was viral teehee) and I found out on the internet that there were no known cases of malaria in the areas I were going to be traveling in for at least 30 years I stopped taking them.
So I get to India, and goodness was I unprepared. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into, so I was learning with trial-by-fire. I went there during tourist off-season so merchants were thirsty and relentlessly trying to scam me. I fell for it in the beginning but quickly learned my lesson. About a week into traveling around(still with bronchitis), I got the stomach-bug. Let me start off by saying that EVERYTHING in India is more intense than America, and I mean EVERYTHING. The bugs are faster. The rains are harder(I lol when people in SF complain about rain). Americans have to worry about mice and rats but in India you have to worry about monkeys, which are essentially little adorable hairy demons with opposable thumbs. My body was not used to the bacterial flora there, so it hit me really hard. I wasn’t absorbing anything. I would drink water, hear the sound of it rushing through my intestines, and then 10 minutes later **pardon my French** go pee it out of my ****. In addition to fighting off viral bronchitis, and a bacterial gut infection, I wasn’t absorbing nutrients and was experiencing chronic lethargy. Somehow I still managed to travel around until a week and a half in I made it to Rishikesh where I was going to stay for a month and a half and do a 200 hr yoga teacher training.
When I made it to my hotel in Rishikesh, it was very late at night when they let me into my room. I ended up having to move rooms because I found bedbugs under the mattress of the first room they gave me. The second room they gave me, I could hear the sound of all the bugs(mosquito & friends) that came in when they opened my door, and it was really unsettling.
So there I am, in India, 90 degree weather and 85% humidity, with no air conditioning, television, or internet(in my room). In my room there were hundreds of visible bugs on the ceiling, and even a few really adorable lizards. I would wash my clothes in a bucket, leave them out to dry, and they would start molding because of the humidity. I was experiencing grief having just lost the man that raised me, was coughing up phlegm and peeing out of my you-know-what in a hot/humid hotel room filled with bugs. Pretty fucking uncomfortable. I have always been like a magnet for mosquitos — I’ll wake up covered in bites and no one else sleeping in the room will have any. India was no exception. After the first night of me sleeping in my Rishikesh hotel room, I woke up with over 80 mosquito bites on one side of my body. My body also illicits a mild allergic reaction to mosquito bites, even in the absence of scratching them they last for over a week and get huge/puffy. I also had great difficulties sleeping because it was so hot/humid and I would just lay there, terrified of all the buzzing I could hear outside from underneath my stuffy little cotton sleeping bag. I eventually had to just accept everything and find a place of mental peace. The bugs weren’t harming me. They were making me really uncomfortable, but I found a lot of strength in acknowledging that I couldn’t change their presence and was finally able to accept them around me.
I had made it to Rishikesh! The place where I was going to take my illustrious yoga teacher training! I woke up thinking “wow, this can’t get that much worse” and the universe so kindly reminded that well, it always can. I was covered in mosquito bites, feeling immense grief, with both food poisoning and extremely bad bronchitis combined with intermittent and recurring fevers. At this point I told myself that it couldn’t get any worse. This is when life so ironically taught me, that it can always be much worse. The type of birth control I am on (Mirena IUD) made it so that I hadn’t gotten my time of the month in over 2 years so I basically never had to worry about it. Guess what happened the first day of my yoga teacher training? I woke up only to find that I had started my period literally for the first time in years. There really is nothing quite like waking up to unexpected vaginal bleeding and crazy hormones. At this point it just felt like the universe was trolling me. This string of events pushed me to the farthest I’ve ever been out of my comfort zone. Reaching a breaking-point of ultimate discomfort, I surrendered everything and prayed to whatever universal parental-unit that I could learn some really valuable lessons there.
I ended up having to go to the hospital 4 times while I was there. I took 4 sets of antibiotics and tried 9 types of Ayurvedic medicines. They worked(kinda) for the food poisoning. As soon as I would take them the stomach bug would go away, but nothing would provide aid to my lung infection[that I ended up having for 30 days into my trip]. In addition to all of the various things that were causing my life discomfort, I also chose literally the worst time to go to India that you could ever possibly choose. Monsoon season came early, along with the worst floods in over 100 years and 30,000 people went missing and there were dead bodies in the river.
The country was in a state of natural disaster and most of the governmental resources were being used to ferry people down from the top of the Himalayas. Entire villages were completely wiped out by floods. This means that in addition to a bunch of dead bodies in the public water sources and a country in a state of natural disaster, much of the bacteria was airborn due to the rains and increasingly high humidity levels. As soon as I would take antibiotics, the stomach bug would go away, but it’d come back literally as soon as I would finish the cycle. (Side-note: food poisoning in America isn’t even close to what people deal with in India.)
When I had to go to the hospital in Rishikesh, it was this really sketchy hospital/ashram(holy-ground) space with blood stained sheets and half-naked sadhus(holy-men)walking around. My treatment was a whopping $18 and was administered by a doctor who’s English I could hardly understand. I’m by myself, in India, with all of this *shit*[pun-intended] happening around me and my worst fear in life happened to be needles. I’m sicker than I’ve ever been, grieving, covered in mosquito bites and bleeding from my vagina. Then they tell me they need to stick an IV with electrolytes and antibiotics in me. Hold on now. I have this deathly fear of needles, and now this doctor wants me to be consciously hooked up to an IV. I’m not exactly proud to admit, but I literally had doctors in my family forge school papers that I got my shots because I was so deeply terrified of them. There I was without any other choice. In my mind I knew that I needed treatment, but the delivery mechanism was being presented to me in a way that triggered the deepest fear that existed inside of me. (I literally had recurring nightmares after seeing the movie SAW where the woman got pushed into a pit of needles). I was presented a situation where I didn’t have any other choice to face my greatest fear, if I let my mind get the best of me like it did in the past, I would only be making a really shitty *no pun intended* situation even worse. I closed my eyes and accepted my reality, and let my breath guide me through the experience. In that moment I was able to overcome what had been my greatest fear for 20 years. It no longer held any power over me.
What is your greatest fear? Would it kill you if you confronted it? If the answer is “no,” why not seek to overcome it? Things are generally much more intimidating when they are unknown/in our own minds. They only have power because we allow them to have power. After my experience in India, I developed a framework to apply to my own life. If I hold an unnecessary aversion to something, or find myself carrying unnecessary discomfort, I intentionally confront these thoughts and try to explore them. I try to get to the root of the aversion/discomfort and then evaluate if my own fears are really serving what’s best for me. I don’t like feeling held back or restricted, and one important lesson I’ve learned is that in many cases we are responsible for mentally holding ourselves back, but it doesn’t need to be that way.
This type of mental conditioning has served my life extremely well. Now when presented with massive/terrifying opportunities I say “YES” and don’t let my decisions be dictated by fear and doubts(i.e taking on a challenging engineering feature or speaking on the main stage of GHC15 23 mins into this video). If you get out of your comfort zone, and push yourself to confront the unnecessary psychological barriers that you create for yourself, you will end up much stronger, and ready to challenge the opportunities that the world presents to you. Don’t miss out on opportunities because you have fear/doubts.
@isisAnchalee || isis[at]ilooklikeanengineer.com
