Burn It All Down

Last May, at approximately 5:15 in the morning, I experienced what I can only describe as a profound rupture in my relationship with reality.

I was half asleep and felt something on my pillow near my (excessively) curly hair. I assumed it was a leaf or a piece of grass because apparently my brain’s first instinct is always whimsical forest maiden instead of “venomous desert creature.” I flicked it onto the floor, realized something felt off, and turned on the light.

It was a scorpion.

Now, before we continue, I would like to point out that I live in Texas, where people say things like, “Oh, they’re usually harmless,” in the same tone one might discuss seasonal allergies. I would also like to point out that I am both a trauma therapist and a person with a highly enthusiastic nervous system. These two facts are important.

I said words unbecoming to both a Buddhist and a Southerner.

That incident altered me at a cellular level. For the past year, every single time I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I have turned on the light first. Every time. Which seemed, frankly, a little dramatic even to me, considering that statistically speaking, most nighttime bathroom trips are not interrupted by arachnid-based psychological warfare.

But then today, one year later, I walked into the bathroom, felt something in my hair, reached up absently—and pulled out another actual scorpion.

Y'all.

There are moments in life when the nervous system takes over so completely that language itself leaves the body. I screamed with a level of commitment that probably activated dogs in neighboring counties. I tried to trap the scorpion under a glass, realized the glass was too small because this scorpion appeared to be training for combat sports, ran to get a larger glass, returned, and discovered I had lost it.

It remained at large in our home until Kris came home, and in accordance with his partnership vows, found and dispatched the scorpion. I'm not proud of being part of killing something, but I'm also incredibly grateful that I don't have to keep looking for the dang thing. Like every time something touched my neck, I was reacting like my nervous system had been hired by the Department of Homeland Security after the first scorpion incident.

I briefly considered burning the house down, shaving my head, and moving to Vermont.

And before anyone says, “Well, now you’re going to be hypervigilant,” allow me to clarify: I have been hypervigilant for a year. My nervous system did not create this problem out of whole cloth. It identified a real pattern and then reacted exactly the way mammalian survival systems are designed to react.

This is the deeply annoying thing about trauma and anxiety that people who have never experienced them often misunderstand. Sometimes the nervous system has receipts.

People love to say things like, “You can’t live in fear,” which is easy to say when you have not personally removed a scorpion from your own hair on two separate occasions.

The body, unfortunately, does not care very much about statistical rarity once something has been tagged as Relevant To Survival. Rational Brain says: “Scorpion encounters are uncommon.”

Body Brain says: “Counterpoint: HAIR SCORPION.”

And honestly? I cannot argue with Body Brain. Body Brain has a point.

I spend a lot of time helping people understand that hypervigilance is not stupidity, nor weakness, nor irrationality. It is a nervous system attempting to protect us based on prior experience. Once your body has learned that danger can arrive suddenly, invisibly, and while you are vulnerable, it becomes very difficult to convince it to stand down entirely.

Especially because every once in a while, infuriatingly, the nervous system is right again.

This is also why healing is so complicated. The goal is not to become oblivious. It’s not to shame ourselves for having survival responses. It’s to slowly teach the body that vigilance does not need to become our full-time occupation. We learn to widen our lives again. We learn discernment instead of constant scanning. We learn that safety is not the absence of all possible danger, because that standard would require most of us to live in climate-controlled bubbles under armed guard.

(Although to be clear, I remain open to the bubble concept.)

There is also something strangely humbling about realizing how thin the veneer of spiritual maturity really is. I have done years of meditation. I understand mindfulness. I believe deeply in nervous system regulation, grounding practices, compassion, and intentionality.

And yet when confronted with Hair Scorpion II: The Reckoning, I instantly became an Old Testament prophet calling curses down upon the land.

Somewhere, a Zen master is reading this and thinking, “Actually, maybe that one doesn’t count.” Because, hello, SCORPION IN MY HAIR.

The redemption arc, if there is one, is probably this: I laughed.

Eventually. Not immediately. Immediately I panicked, checked every towel in the bathroom like a raccoon on methamphetamine, and informed my family we would now be relocating because Google Fiber had apparently disturbed the ancient scorpion burial grounds beneath our subdivision.

(Which, frankly, is just another way of saying that sometimes Texas opens a tiny portal to Australia for a few weeks after construction projects.)

But eventually, I laughed.

Because human beings are ridiculous. Because nervous systems are weird and earnest and overprotective. Because sometimes the same nervous system that exhausts us is also the one that keeps us alive. Because the body keeps trying to save us in ways that are sometimes inconvenient and sometimes hilarious. Because if you survive long enough, nearly every horror eventually becomes either a story or a personality trait.

And because if I can turn “I pulled a scorpion out of my hair” into a blog post that makes someone else laugh while also feeling a little less ashamed of their own vigilant nervous system, then maybe all is not lost.