You can’t get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride
To whoever is reading this, I want to tell you that I’ve learned, I promise. I really have this time. Over the past few years, I’ve gone through some life-changing events that ended up affecting me tremendously. Looking back, I think they were meant to teach me something…but just didn’t really stick with me for long, or I was too busy to pay attention to what it was. Hence, I kept getting hurt whenever I experienced something remotely similar to the past. I’ve started to believe that I was stuck in some sort of time loop. From all the movies I’ve watched, I knew that the only way to get out of it is by acknowledging what’s happening and sharing what I’ve learned from it. And that’s exactly what I plan on doing in the next couple of lines because I’ve had enough and I really need to get out of it.
Let’s dive right into it
Have you ever heard about Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride? It was a ride designed by a twisted (or genius) videogame user in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, a game that aired in the early 2000s. What was absolutely terrifying about his creation, was that the passengers were unaware of their fate. The ride lasted for four years of game time for each virtual passenger and included an exit path that led back to the entrance of the ride. The passengers, sick and tired of it kept screaming “I WANT TO GET OFF MR. BONE’S WILD RIDE!” When they finally got to what they thought was the end, they were greeted by another skeleton saying: “The ride never ends”. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Well, I feel exactly like those passengers. The last couple of years have been tough, to say the least. I was hit by the sudden loss of people that were very close to me. Each of those deaths shook me to my core. It made me witness how fragile life is and dissolved all of the cognitive models I used to make sense of the world into a pool of despair. I quickly spiraled into having daily panic attacks and experiencing sheer terror, because my mind just couldn’t grasp the concept that it was possible to lose people so close to you in such a short manner of time.
So, I said to myself: “You need to learn some coping mechanisms, do a deep dive into yourself to discover where all of this is coming from”. I promised that I would use all of the resources I had available to pull myself together. Long therapy sessions, energy alignment therapies. I started meditating daily (I haven’t stopped, still going strong!). Eating healthy. Working out. Discovering what an inner dialogue was and modifying it. I felt like I was rebuilding myself from the inside out. To be honest, it was one hell of a ride, but I got out of it in one piece, having learned a whole lot.
Ok, so things must’ve changed, right?
Enter 2020. We all know what that cursed year was all about. I was feeling glad that I had those crises back in 2019 because if I hadn’t, I would’ve been really ill-equipped to handle all that was coming. I just needed to pull out the big guns. Try to readjust, once again.
The pandemic hit us hard in Peru. We had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns and still ended with one of the highest death tolls per capita in the world. Being a person prone to anxiety, I decided that I should stick to just seeing my family because I was afraid of infecting them if I chose to go out. So, I barely saw any of my friends for almost a year and a half. How I kept sane, I honestly don’t know at this point. At that moment in time, it was not only the pandemic taking a toll on us, but we were also enduring a handful of political crises in a short period of time. We had 5 presidents in 5 years, isn’t that quite something? I guess it’s part of the value proposition of living in Latin America.
Going forward into 2021, I needed a mental break. I wanted to go one day of my life without thinking about getting severely sick or putting the people I loved in danger. I also needed to put aside for a brief moment that our country was about to implode. I was on autopilot in this wacky ride and wanted the craziness to stop. I kept repeating to myself over and over again “I WANT TO GET OFF MR. BONE’S WILD RIDE!”. But I wasn’t really sure how. The best way out of it, I thought, was to get the COVID vaccine. With it, I could regain some sort of control of my life, reclaim my social life and start thinking of a brighter future. However, vaccination in Peru was going very slow and was just beginning to pick up. But, given my age, my turn to get the shot would’ve probably been in December and my mental health just couldn’t wait for it any longer.
I had the privilege of traveling to the US to get vaccinated with my family. We arrived in New Orleans in June and lived there for a month. To be honest, it felt like a different world, a world where there was no trace of fear, or that covid ever happened. We had fun, started living a bit while we pushed the fear aside, soaking up all the new experiences, while still being cautious.
We returned feeling refreshed. I was ready to resume my life, see my friends and just enjoy myself a bit. To go back to whatever sense of normal you could have at this point in time. Of course, I was feeling super anxious. It felt like my social skills were rusted to the point of decay. Also, my sense of fashion evaporated and left me completely naked. I had been wearing sweats and baggy shirts for almost two years. So I prepped accordingly for these encounters. I wanted to reenter my social life looking good. I ordered some clothes online. Dusted off my make-up skills. Meditated to get grounded. Everything was going to go according to plan.
I had dinner with a few of my friends. I had completely forgotten that people take pictures of their meals and post them on Instagram whenever they go out. I celebrated my boyfriend’s birthday. I invited some of my friends to see the new place I was living at with my boyfriend (none of them had seen it and thought the apartment was a myth). I went to have a massage done to decompress. It felt like things were getting slowly back on track.
Until they weren’t. And I lost my sense of taste and smell. And I got dizzy. And so tired that I couldn’t get out of bed. And yes, of course, it was COVID. I never knew how I caught it. And it’s been rough, despite the fact that I was vaccinated. I had to abruptly put my life on hold for 2 weeks. One of the toughest parts was trying to convince people that I really had COVID. I guess it’s scary to admit that you can still get a milder version of it despite the vaccine.
What I’ve learned from all of it
Being isolated for 14 days while feeling your worst gives you a lot of time to think. You just have to stay put and let your antibodies give one hell of a Marvel fight. And while they were doing their thing, I was also doing mine. I finally had the time to process it all. This sickness ended up showing me what I really needed to know: there’s no such thing as having things under control and that you can’t ever plan a thing. Every day is a mystery.
There were days where I woke up with my eyes burning as if they had been scrubbed with red peppers, while the next morning, my body was trying to cleanse itself with bouts of diarrhea. There was no way to know what was going to happen next. I felt helpless. All I had to do was play it by ear. Listen to my body and what the doctors were telling me. Rest, eat, drinks loads of water, and repeat. For 2 weeks. When you’re stripped from your regular life and every single day is the same, you put things into perspective. You let yourself get taken care of by others and hope that you will get better soon.
All of these years I’ve been trying to deny the fact that you can’t control the majority of events or their outcomes, because it’s a concept that’s really hard to grasp. I want to believe that death and all of these abrupt recent experiences were helping me build a new framework that would allow me to have a different outlook on life.
All we have is the present. And that’s all we need. There’s no reason to obsess, there is no such thing as control. It’s just our minds trying to make us feel secure, to create some sense out of this madness. The only constant is change, and we have to embrace it. I’m going to warn you: if you try to live life like I’ve been trying to do so for over the past 30 years, I assure you, you will have a harsh time. Because you will be in constant denial, fighting yourself and others and feeling that you’re constantly being thrown off. Just get out there, live life to the fullest, and do whatever your heart tells you to do. We need to stop paying attention to the what-ifs, and just direct our attention to ourselves, to the people that love us, and to our communities.
As I write this, fear is evaporating from my body. I’m staring at it directly. After I beat this virus, hopefully without having any kind of complications, I’m willing to put all of these into practice and really get out there. I want to feel everything. To melt into a hug while my favourite song plays in a distant speaker. I’m eager to surround myself with the people that I love. To embrace uncertainty. To enjoy the chaos of it all without attempting to change or control every single aspect of what’s going around me. It’s true that you can’t predict or control your future, but what you get to choose is how you handle a situation that’s thrown at you. And that in itself is what I truly believe life is all about.
It’s also a fact that you can’t get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride, but what you can do is simply take a deep breath, accept that you’re stuck in a hellish loop, and use that time to reflect, to be awake. To snap out of the autopilot, out of that panic. Once you realize where you’re riding, you have a choice. You can either keep on going down the same path, doing exactly the same, screaming to be saved, hoping to experience a different outcome; or, you can start from scratch, accept that it will never end, break over that third wall, and build your own kind of ride. A ride where you get to make your own set of rules. Hell, maybe just play a completely different game. One where you get to play on your own terms, enjoy the beauty of it, and where you finally, feel truly free.
