27. Fuzzy Boundaries
On making a parasite a guest
A friend and I were talking recently about comfort movies and I told her one of mine was Venom. We kind of laughed about this at the time, but I later started to wonder why this movie was so comforting to me.
Why is this my ultimate comfort film?
Is it simply that I’ve experienced this kind of thing before? The feeling of being host to foreign energy: the thunderous, enveloping sounds of protest that linger all week and feel like a source of strength, or the bliss cloud that surrounds your body as you walk home from a really good date, or the thick static that dulls your senses after a loved one has passed.
We probably experience the presence of foreign energy more regularly than we think. A colleague reached out one morning a few weeks ago knowing I was in need of extra support without my having said anything. This past July, I could feel a dear friend’s sadness without our having texted or spoken about it.
Sometimes, it can feel like a possession, almost as if the energy of the other person has taken over you and you’ve stopped belonging to yourself. It makes you question if there is a self at all because what you’re experiencing is the fuzzy quality of consciousness, the blur between you and the other person that enables you to feel each other.
You start to ask, “Am I even me? What is me?”
How can the self be an illusion when it has been so carefully constructed? Or maybe it’s the fragility of the self—the need to hold on so tightly to our egoic boundaries—that is the clearest sign that it’s simply a construction.
Maybe when there is enough of a shared energetic field, some of the foreign energy lingers in yours. Less as a residue and more as an active player, not a parasite but a citizen. Once we accept that what we first saw as parasitic is actually a guest, it becomes amenable to the environment and takes up citizenship with a new ethics.
All we have to do is accept that we are forever changed.
Like a tree with an added ornament or a curio cabinet with one more memento. The objects don’t stay as fixed, separate beings no matter how temporary their residence; rather they change the makeup of the host itself and they, too, are changed.
What I am now is not what I once was.
It’s not that I am less me. Rather, I become more me with every energetic exchange, more aware that my own energy is a forever mixing, shifting thing, richer in its capacity to love and breathe and accept and be more deeply (more wholly?) with every interaction.
And sometimes, you fight desperately, wanting an energy gone, almost yelling to the universe, “Please get them out of my head. Please erase all memory of this experience. I would give up the pleasure to not re-live the pain,” wishing that the sorts of fictional memory-erasing tools like the ones in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind really existed somewhere.
Maybe that’s another way grief shows up: in denial, in the fight to deny that some things have affected us for longer than we’d like, that their hold on us is stronger than our own will. It’s almost as if their energetic imprint is there to make us realize that free will is also a fabrication.
We might want to scrub them out of our skin the way we try to scrub turmeric stains out of tupperware, except the soul doesn’t have a skin. Maybe we worry that those energies may actually be stuck there, somewhere much, much deeper than the top layers, deeper than we knew our own selves went.
In that way, we might need foreign bodies to show us our own depth.
Maybe we need the parasite/guest to reveal to us our own limitlessness, the way a pathogen can expose us to the weaknesses we hadn’t known existed, like the lock to the attic door, so rusted it no longer serves its function.
Maybe it’s only through accepting the parasite as citizen that we can truly accept ourselves as complex homes. Maybe it’s only in allowing others to take up residence in our most precious and guarded places that we can test our own capacity for love.
What “disturbing” stories and media do you find comfort in? What have been your favorite parasites-turned-guests? Click below to like, comment, and share.