Letter 8 — Before Any Of This
Before the system arrived, something was already cracked. Not as an excuse — as a context.
Members of the jury,
I ask you to remember this.
Before the system arrived, something was already cracked. Not as an excuse — as a context. The shaman didn’t build from nothing. She inherited.
I had been building a way back.
A year and a half of French classes. DELF B2 certification, good enough to work as a nurse in Quebec. A university that had agreed to take me back. I had prepared myself for the return, cut my ties with my tutees, and reorganised my life around the path I had constructed.
Then the visa rejection letter arrived.
Not because I had failed. Because of a letter of leave of absence filed during a mental breakdown, I had once been honest about. The country reviewed it and decided: we don’t want unhealthy people entering our society. The university said yes. The country said no. The door closed because I had once told the truth about struggling.
That was when I met her.
And I did what you do when you love someone and you need the story to make sense: I rewrote the visa rejection as destiny. I was cosmically meant to be here. The door closed so I could meet her. What had been bureaucratic cruelty became meaningful.
I don’t regret the rewrite. It kept me going. But I want to name it for what it was, love constructing a narrative around wreckage so it could continue.
Her mother once called me a fraud.
As a joke. She said I spoke with too much fluency — no pauses, no searching for words, confident delivery from first sentence to last. She said I was a good pitch-woman. She was laughing when she said it. It was the kind of teasing that means: you’re impressive and I find that slightly funny. I filed it as a compliment and moved on.
I think about that sometimes now.
The same quality — the fluency, the confidence, the no-pause — arrived later in a different context, received by a different framework, and became evidence. The shaman had a word for it: cleverly evil. The person who appears good to ordinary observers but is seen clearly by those with sufficient moral perception. The person who makes a strong case is not, in this framework, making a strong case. She is performing one. The confidence is not confidence. It is concealment dressed as composure.
The mother’s joke and the shaman’s verdict were looking at the same thing.
One found it charming. One built an indictment from it.
The quality didn’t change between those two assessments. What changed was who was doing the assessing, and what they had already decided before I opened my mouth.
Her mother called me a pitch-woman and laughed.
Her daughter eventually accepted that I was a fraud.
I would like to think there is something worth noting in the distance between those two moments. The same woman, who had done real work to accept me — the café, the cold tea, the I accept you too she had arrived at after months — somewhere along the way filed the joke as data and stopped laughing.
I don’t know exactly when. I wasn’t in the room.
There is something that sits underneath all of this. Something that explains — not excuses, just explains — how I arrived at that first shamanic consultation the way I did.
I was so hungry for a mother figure.
We had no money when we started to date. She was unemployed, and I only worked part-time. My ex suggested her family’s house as a retreat. I agreed. Her mother welcomed us at first. And I — already performing, already trying too hard with women of a certain age — I gave good parent vibes with everything I had. Over-extended. Over-present. Doing what BPD and mummy issues produce when a woman in middle age is in the room: trying to be so likeable she couldn’t help but keep me.
We stayed too long. We used the hospitality past its limits. Her mother noticed. And then she noticed what we were — and that her daughter had never told her, and that I was the first, and that she had no framework for any of it.
Instead of naming her discomfort directly, she reached for the language that would do the most damage.
That girl is like a fox. She scratches the place where it itches and uses you.
A fox. Not I don’t understand, or I’m not comfortable. A predator. Something that finds your weakness and exploits it.
My ex told me at the bus terminal: It’s weird. Usually she likes everyone I bring.
I stood there and cried.
And then I did what BPD does when a mother figure rejects you. I painted her as a villain. I know — she was genuinely warm and caring in most of what she did. But my nervous system had been hit in the exact place it had always been most vulnerable, and what came up was fury. I am not proud of it. I name it because it would be dishonest without it.
I went to therapy because of that moment at the bus terminal. In a brief, violent flash of imagination, I saw myself driving past her mother on the street and not stopping. I felt the cold thud underneath. I needed to understand what had happened in me, why a woman passing on her mother’s words could produce that level of response.
My therapist told me I had initially chosen my ex’s mother as my mother. That I had been looking for a mother figure in that house. That the rejection had landed on the original wound, not just the new one.
She told me to become my own mother.
I wasn’t ready to be a mother. But I kept going to therapy anyway. Once a week for two years.
The tools she gave me were real. The meek container. The understanding that my ex’s avoidance was a pattern, not just personality. The recognition that I was choosing women who needed me to be their direction, and resenting them for handing me their responsibilities, while loving them madly.
Two years of therapy does not make you immune to a closed system. It makes you better at surviving one.
I was seeing my ex’s family traits within her and it was making me hate and love her simultaneously. My therapist told me this was the work. That both are true and neither cancels the other.
What I didn’t know at the time was that my ex was going through the same thing in the opposite direction. She was seeing my parents’ traits within me. Resenting them. Loving me madly and finding it hard to hold both.
We both needed help with the same wound.
I reached for a therapist. She reached for a shaman.
The tools we each chose shaped everything that followed.
There is something else about who I was before any of this happened. Something I hold with both hands — as real, as mine, not as a verdict.
I have always felt like an echo. Like something hollow that learned to sound like whatever room it was in. Not in the shaman’s sense — not cleverly evil. In the ordinary sense of someone who grew up without siblings, mostly around adults, who learned to interact by reading books and taught herself to adapt to whoever was in front of her. I didn’t know who I was underneath the adaptation. That had always been the question.
Before therapy, when strong emotions hit me — the hurricane kind, the ones that should have been processed — I covered them by singing an intense musical number. Sometimes the emotion didn’t arrive in my own voice at all. A lyric or a melody would appear first. I would recognise what I was feeling only after hearing it in someone else’s words.
Echo seemed like a reasonable description. I empathised with fictional people because that was easier than being inside my own feelings. The real ones stayed in a closet. My therapist friend, though not my therapist, from middle school called me a delulu with main character syndrome. Problems didn’t land on my skin the way they should have.
When I told my ex about the closet, she said: you prefer a clean environment, right? If you keep things in closets, they will rot and grow cockroaches. Take them all out. Fill it with new things. Fold them neatly.
That was who she was when she was being herself. She took my image and extended it into something practical and a little funny and completely right. I started opening the closet.
Together, we found something like an inner child — mine and hers both. Turns out, we both wanted a mother figure. We fostered them inside the relationship. That was real. We were doing real work. Until my body broke down and the geometry shifted.
And then — with all of that behind me, with all of that work done — I suggested we go see a shaman.
From a temple where I’m learning that the system inherited its material — it didn’t create it — and that knowing the difference matters.