Infinite Retreat Curriculum (Pt. 1)
I have apparently been on retreat for like 2 years now
Welcome to the retreat. This is going to take up the next few years of your life, so settle in. I’d ask whether you want to continue or not, but I hope you understand that this question is not relevant.
Let’s run you through the retreat schedule. You haven’t really laid out the whole thing back to back before, so this should be interesting.
Pre-Retreat
On the day after Christmas 2023, you end up in the emergency room in Tirana, Albania. Your whole body shakes, you are filled with a sense of cosmic doom and oil-slick death moving through your tissues.
The doctors won’t be any help, but at least they have white coats and tell you to wait out the [serotonin syndrome? thyroid storm? pranic derangement?] — this bad trip that’s making you feel like hell is alive in the translucent squeaky folds of your brain and nerve tissue.
Pacing the hall with a heart rate of 170, you’ll take consolation that at least the last few years of meditation have given you the ability to both dwell within a horrifying panic attack, and to have spaciousness around it, so that this vast claustrophobic dying isn’t the only thing present. There’s also a soft, blue-ish space surrounding the whole experience, holding it somehow. —Which doesn’t diminish the shimmering void-slime that’s cannibalizing your soft tissue and sanity, but it does keep you alive through it.
Over the next weeks, the body horror will increase in ways you can’t communicate. You’ll try, but. Nothing captures what it’s like, does it? It feels like you’re trapped in a chemical fire and the chemical fire is your bloodstream and there’s nowhere you can go to escape it. Not while you’re living in this body, anyways. You become slowly aware of the fact that if this continues beyond a certain time horizon, suicide becomes a question of when, not if. '
The chemical fire is alive and alien and has goals you aren’t even capable of perceiving. It is a wildcat dragon made of hell and worms and bad mutation. It is a sentient realm where reptiles go when they die of heartbreak. It is twelve eldritch god-demons vivisected together and fed a diet of liquefied Van Gogh nightmares. It is an ocean of satan’s electric piss, and god is slitting gills into your throat so you can breathe its fetid heat.
You’re veering into gross-out zine territory, but there aren’t many other registers that can capture what this was like.
You and your girlfriend have lived together for 5 years; she moves out during this period, into her own apartment. Who could blame her. If you could stop spending time in a room with yourself, you would too. Now you have plenty of time to contemplate the hell realm that is your body. You faint a few times. Your body temperature behaves erratically.
At one point, you have to narrate your intentions aloud to yourself so you can hear them and remember if you lose track. “Go downstairs. Find taxi. Emergency room. Downstairs. Taxi. Emergency room. Downstairs, taxi, emergency room.”
The taxi driver seems bewildered at your repetition, but he does get you to the emergency room in record time. By the time a doctor can see you, your body has normalized, and they treat you like you’re an idiot for wasting their time. Before leaving, you sit on the floor and cry in the airlock between automatic doors.
A week after she moves out, you wake up at 11:45pm, February 6, deaf in your right ear and with the loudest roaring tinnitus you’ve ever heard. Your left ear has something wrong with it you can’t describe, like it’s open and you can clearly hear everything that happens inside your skull. (The doctors will soon teach you the word patulous.)
You’ll go to the hospital. They will be useless again. They will run the wrong blood tests. They will find out from those wrong blood tests that you have Hashimoto’s disease, and will invite you back tomorrow for more scans. They want to see how much damage your thyroid has taken, and also want to scan you for a brain tumor, in case that’s what’s pressing on your ear.
The openness in your left ear will go away after a few hours. The partial deafness and roaring tinnitus have never gone away, even two years later while you type this.
The ultrasound tech is a comic genius. She shows you your thyroid, and said “see this little grey streak right here?”
You nod, “yeah, is that a problem?”
She gives you a look, “No, that’s the good part. All of it should look like that.”
Looking back on it, the laugh track is almost audible. Ba dum tss.
With ultrasound gel on your throat, you break down crying.
In the hallway, your girlfriend is waiting for you with some chicken and sweet potatoes she baked for your long day of scans. You eat it with your hands and sob a little in the hard plastic seat.
You don’t have a brain tumor, so that’s nice.
Your hands and arms look like you’re dying of something. Throughout the day, they’ve drawn blood twice, hooked you up to three IVs, and injected tracking fluid into you for the MRI. You don’t have a vein in either elbow, forearm, or hand that hasn’t been pierced and bruised. It feels like you’ve entered into another world, the world of The Sick.
You have. You’ll learn to live there.
“It feels,” you’ll muse on a call the next year, “like I’ve been tasked with living joyfully in hell.”
Let’s scrub ahead a bit. Western medicine is famously inept with chronic illness and autoimmune diseases; you know this, your mother has had Hashimoto’s Disease your whole life, so you kind of know the drill.
Someone introduces you to an Ayurvedic doctor, and this woman gets you stabilized and on your feet in a month or two, something no doctors have really managed to do for your mom in the last 3 decades. You decide to trust this Ayurveda thing until you find a good reason not to.
Your girlfriend breaks up with you, finally, as soon as you’ve stabilized. You’re sad, for a couple weeks, but mostly grateful. Your self-worth has never been lower, and you know you wouldn’t have had the courage to break up with her. It needed to end, so you’re relieved she took the initiative — but still though.
She keeps the cats, which feels right, but also heavy. Out of the many difficult things in the months and years to follow, losing the cats is one that sits heavy the longest.
You’re invited to Portugal for a month-long co-working event with twitter friends.
This, River, is where the endless retreat begins.
Portal (Porto, Portugal)
Everyone is supposed to bring a project to Portal. The hosts have gotten a shared house for everyone to use as a co-working space, and the idea is to get together, chat, cross-pollinate, and activate the social fabric.
You don’t even bother pretending to bring a project. You’ve been to a 2-month twitter co-working event the year before, in Berlin. Little to no work got done there. It turned into everyone just hanging out. Someone coined the term interpersonal microwave to describe the vibe there, like the event space was a microwave and all of you were forks. You all just buzzed against each other and got fried. Sometimes pleasantly so, sometimes not.