2016: The Year I Burned Down and Began to Rebuild Myself

This year, y’all. This year.

As everyone knows, the world has suffered deeply this year … and my own personal experience has dutifully mirrored it. (Seriously. I was supposed to be in Nicaragua right now.)

This year has not been fun. It has been illness, confusion, desperation, heart palpitations. It has been the inability to sit up and support my body weight, and subsequently lying on my bedroom floor crying about everything I’ve lost. It has been existential crises, and the occasional suicidal thought. In short, it has been the consummate death of my entire life, and its subsequent partial resurrection. Make no mistake about it: I am still alive at the end of this year due only to a desperate hope, an inexorable resolve to live.

But they say the hottest fire makes the hardest steel, and the trauma of this year has changed me for the better. Late last year, before I left for the Peace Corps, people would tell me repeatedly, “You’re going to come back a different person! This is going to change you in ways you can’t yet imagine.” And while I’d always laugh and nod, I’d never truly believe them — I felt like I was already the person I wanted to be; like I had already done all the tough introspective work I could imagine ever needing to do.

I had no idea how wrong I was. And this year, as a result, was the year of uncovering all the crap I needed to heal.

Let me sum up what my year looked like, for those who haven’t been following along:

After three months spent mysteriously ill in Nicaragua that tested everything I was made of, I was forced to leave behind my Peace Corps experience, the one I had been dreaming about since age 14. This experience itself was heartbreaking at best, and traumatic at worst.

Unexpectedly back in the States, I spent the summer in utter battle with my body and brain. As I lay bedridden in my childhood home in the suburbs, I spent every waking second trying desperately to find every possible explanation for (and solution to) my mysterious and debilitating health issues. I began by doing everything Western medicine had to offer — I went to an internist, a gastroenterologist, and an endocrinologist, and had dozens of blood tests, urine/stool tests, CT-scans, and even a full colonoscopy —but it was all to no avail.

When Western medicine couldn’t give me any answers, I spent upwards of 800 hours googling — reading endless forums, finding others with similar stories, and begrudgingly opening myself to alternative philosophies of healing. Desperate to find answers and willing to try every possible solution on the internet, I:

• went to a mystic herbalist
• took obscure and expensive supplements
• cut out gluten and dairy
• lay on a EMF mat to let the magnetic pulls of the earth “realign me”
• received massages
• put my finger into a “health analysis machine”
• altered my breathing to “breathe less” with the Buteyko Method
• stared at myself in a mirror and recited affirmations about my “perfect health”
• ate pounds of kale
• did extensive psychoanalysis on myself and journaled daily about my childhood wounds (taking John Sarno’s advice, which was absolutely invaluable)
• tapped on my energy meridians
• identified my Ayurvedic dosha
• ordered and applied “magnesium oil”
• performed healing meditations and visualizations of my mitochondria
• …and more

And as ridiculous as it sounds, I started healing. I have no idea what worked and what didn’t, and honestly I don’t even care. I’m just so absurdly thankful to have exited that horrible, horrible period of my life.

Then came August and September, which were months of absolute existential crisis — “What do I do with my life now?”, I would ask myself every day. I threw myself into a desperate job search centered around teaching and the education sector, only to be denied at every turn, and to find in the end that I didn’t even want to teach after all. I was back at square one, and wasn’t even sure what my skills were anymore.

At the end of September, as summer was turning to fall, I finally took a deep breath and dove head-first into a new home and new life in New York City — without a job lined up. And even though I was feeling significantly better, life kept sending me storms, as I fought battles on all fronts: the fruitless job search battle; the continuing-health-issues battle; the personal development / fighting-my-anxiety battle; and the battle against the inevitable change of the seasons towards my least favorite: the impending reality of winter. My life continued to feel like a mess, a shadow of what it had once been.

Now, it’s the end of December, and the last two months have been ones of transformation. I still don’t have a full-time job, but I’m also no longer sure I even want one. I’m here in Brooklyn, settling into a community I adore, teaching myself to code, and meeting incredible people every day. Despite the atrocity that largely was this year of my life, and despite the huge amount of uncertainty about my life direction that I’m currently facing … I’m happy.

And as I reflect on this unexpected year, I’m realizing that all the internal work I’ve been forced to do has resulted in far more awareness about my own darkness, my limiting beliefs, and what steps I need to take from here to heal them. My mind has opened so much this year, not only to my own wounds, but to so many ideas, solutions, and states of mind I never would have accepted before. These include:

1. An open-mindedness about alternative healing modalities and the duality of mind and body

• Exploring chakras, Kundalini, and the feeling of inner energies … and a deepening of my yoga practice, as a result
• Opening myself to ritual, “witchiness”, and a respect for the possibility of supernatural phenomena

2. A decrease in anxiety and a newfound comfort with uncertainty

• Realizing that perfectionism is killing me and making me sick, and I need to change my type-A personality in order to be healthy and happy
• Not allowing uncertainty in one area of my life (e.g. right now: career) to hijack my overall happiness

3. A coming into my power, intuition, and sense of self-worth

• Saying “no” to anything I don’t actually want to do, and eroding my people-pleasing tendencies
• Reducing the number of OCD compulsions I give in to
• Eliminating guilt about deleting podcasts I don’t actually want to listen to
• Learning to listen to my intuition and becoming aware of my bodily energy and wisdom (Hey, when the world had no answers for me, I learned I have to do what I feel makes sense)
• Embracing my feminine side and sexuality, and, for the first time in my life, feeling comfortable talking about it
• Showering myself in self-love and self-care to slowly increase my sense of self-worth and make it unconditional, rather than conditional on health, appearances, and others’ opinions

To steal my friend Connor’s phrase, 2016 was definitely the year of “NO”, the year of doors slammed in my face — from my Peace Corps dream, to doctors without answers, to dozens of rejected job applications. But perhaps “no”s are just life gently (or not-so-gently) guiding us towards the wisdom we need, the life we’re ultimately meant for. Maybe everyone needs a year of “no” in order to arrive at the “yes”s that are right for them.

And while my “home” has changed an uncomfortable number of times this year — from the shores of San Diego, to a tiny pueblo in Nicaragua, to my parents’ house in Pittsburgh, to my new home in Brooklyn — and while the fog of uncertainty I’m standing in is incredibly thick, I feel closer to finding my true home — my true life — than I ever have before. The rebuilding has just begun. Here’s to 2017, a year of starting from ground zero and building something better.

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If you enjoyed this piece, I’d love it if you hit the green heart ♥ below, so others might stumble upon it. You can find my projects, my Peace Corps blog, and more of my thoughts at http://www.sophiaciocca.me.