Full Circle: The “Celebrate the Love” Edition
On a sweltering Portland evening a couple Sundays ago, I hosted a party at Helioterra Wines to celebrate the 30th anniversary of my move to Oregon. Admittedly, it was a last minute decision to throw this party. To some, it may have seemed a bit bonkers to do it, as many of my ideas tend to be. But as the summer had been unfolding so beautifully and continued to reveal a happier and healthier side of myself after a rather rough 2022, celebrating seemed like a darned good thing to do.
(I also think it’s a good idea to commemorate important life milestones that our society doesn’t typically recognize. I — and so many others — don’t commemorate events such as the First Day of School, Mothers Day, Graduation Days and Moving Into the Dorm Day. And yet, my life and the lives of so many others are also worthy of celebration. We are all worthy of celebration. Our society is ritual impoverished, and that has profound consequences on all of us, not just those of us not commemorating, but that’s another blog post.)
It’s always good to feed at least two birds with one scone, especially when you’re going out on a limb to throw a party on such short notice. I was especially motivated to plan an event (for 75 people in less than 2 weeks!) that would give me a chance to call everyone’s attention to the Love Oregon festival, coming up on Labor Day weekend. That event is, in so many ways, an embodiment of the things I love about Oregon. Being in a beautiful place surrounded by trees and creeks, listening to talented musical artists, dancing under the stars (really!), and eating lovingly prepared food sourced from local farmers. (The last day to buy tickets is Tuesday Aug. 29!)
My “30th Anniversary of Loving Oregon” party turned out to be a blast, even though we had to move it indoors to the wine cellar (aka wine barrel warehouse complete with forklift) due to the heatwave, and the AC blew out mid-party. IT WAS SO EFFING HOT. But seeing so many people from so many parts of my life show up in one place gave me a chance to feel even more grateful for my life in this beautiful place I have called home for 30 years.
On top of all that, I got to reconnect with my musical self and sing a few Shawn Colvin cover tunes (and one Bonnie Raitt for good measure!) with the remarkable guitarist Scott Weddle. What a gift to the world that man is! Not only is he a talented musician without a current website that I can link for you here, he also built a truly beautiful fence and arbor for me earlier this summer. (If you’d like to connect with him about fences, arbors, guitars and more, let me know.)
And if that wasn’t enough, I got to support a local, woman owned business (get to know the remarkable Anne Hubatch!) and several friends became Helioterra wine club members. It felt so good to be able to do something with and for Anne, given everything she and so many women business owners have been up against. One thing our city, region and state fails to do in substantive ways is support women business owners. Our city, region and state excels in supporting these women in performative ways that provide elected officials lovely opportunities to post photos at events that show them supporting women business owners, but at the end of the day, there are Tweets without systems change. If you want to learn more about supporting women entrepreneurs, one place to start is Xxcelerate.
But on to happier topics!
I’m genuinely thrilled to share this lovely photo album to give you a sense of the joy that we experienced that evening. You can check out the photographer’s website here.
It was so awesome being with good humans who have worked so hard to create goodness in our community — both locally and globally.
It’s not all cherries and puppies and rainbows, of course. Life hasn’t always been a great experience for me here in Oregon. When I showed up in Eugene on August 13, 1993, just in time for a friend’s wedding before starting grad school the following month, I was reeling from the tragic death of my father (just 6 months before) in a plane crash. While in grad school, I began taking antidepressant medications and struggled with severe anxiety. Over the course of the next 29 years, I would be prescribed literally dozens of different kinds of drugs, and at one point in 2009, I was on 6 medications at the same time.
At the party two weeks ago, I was able to share a bit about the profound healing I’ve experienced over the past 8 months and the fact that I was just days away from reaching my Zero Milligrams Goal. Over the years, I have written (mostly on Facebook) about my mental health in an effort to address our society’s ridiculously oppressive stigma around it and to show solidarity with others who struggle. In light of all that sharing (or oversharing?), it seems appropriate to also share about the remarkable healing that can take place when new resources are brought to bear.
One of my new resources came in the form of a psychedelic journey consuming psilocybin mushrooms back in January. I will write about that experience some other time, but I’ll say for now that thanks to that experience, followed by receiving EMDR therapy from a very gifted therapist here in Portland, I am now free of pharmaceutical antidepressants for the first time in my adult life. (For those not familiar with Oregon’s new law, here’s a good place to start if you’d like to learn more. Thank you, Nathan Howard.)
PRO TIP: Next weekend’s Love Oregon festival also includes workshops about psilocybin in Oregon and other healing modalities. Here’s the full schedule. Hope to see you there!
It’s stunning, really, to experience such deep healing, and I feel compelled to share one specific story to highlight just how truly transformative this experience has been for me.
In 2009 when I was experiencing suicidality (likely due to a horrible concoction of prescribed medications that were making me worse, not better), I forced myself go to the Hawthorne Street Fair — held the last weekend of August every year — to get out of the house and to be around people, instead of isolating in fear. I don’t remember what happened there. Nothing in particular, I’m sure. I walked around and checked out the food and artisan booths, just like everyone else did that day. But because I was experiencing a mental health crisis at the time, my memory of the Hawthorne Street Fair has always been full of fear. Ever since then, I would be overcome with dizziness or nausea when seeing posters for the upcoming Hawthorne Street Fair. Classic PTSD symptoms.
This year, not only was I completely unfazed by my state rep’s invitation to come say hi to him at the Hawthorne Street fair, I made a plan to attend. I thought it’d be good to re-experience this iconic neighborhood event with new eyes and a healing brain. If it hadn’t been for having such a delightful time in my backyard talking with friends all afternoon, I would have been there.
It’s not lost on me that my opportunty to experience this level of deep healing is afforded to me by a level of economic privilege that is an outgrowth of when, where and to whom I was born. I’ll write about that another time, but suffice it to say that I’m very aware that others who have similar mental health challenges do not have the luxury of Time Off To Heal.
Instead, they struggle desperately because the economic system in which we all live our lives extracts so much from so many and rewards so few. Sadly, those few are represented by individuals who run toxic political campaigns that demonize the very people who are suffering at the hands of the economic system that writes their big checks that keep those toxic political campaigns going in your social media feeds, encouraging you to hate the victim instead of the system that created them.
Rather than getting the opportunity to heal, these economic refugees find their illnesses compounding upon one another, and they end up living in the streets of our city instead of the verdant backyard in which I gratefully find myself right now.
I will get back to work soon, informed by my experience of healing, empowered by gratitude and the love of so many truly kind and wonderful people who did not give up on me, and in service of those who haven’t had the same healing and celebratory opportunities I have been so fortunate to experience.
Home, that’s where I want to be….Never for money, always for love.
