Lay Back, Let it Happen, Remember to Breathe
I write this from home, recovering and resting.
One month and one day ago:
I was with my team at work having our weekly kick-off meeting. While sipping a delightful Americano I began to slip into what I now know as an “Auditory Hallucination (AH).” The term is pretty literal— but let me color it in…
Imagine having a song stuck in your head— this is a good place to start. Add in the following:
Ambient sounds, like the hum of the room, the air conditioning, and anything else coming in through your ears conflate with the song.
The conflated sounds and experience become too real to put in the background and compete with doing regular things, like running your weekly staff meeting.
I stopped what I was doing, told my team I was a little “out of body,” sipped some water, and tried to get through the sensation. This wasn’t my first AH. I had experienced a few after really long (100 mile+) rides during the fall that I chalked up to dehydration and fatigue, but I knew as I sat there that this was the biggest one yet.
In each of my AH experiences, the AH was always a song, and usually, one I’d listened to recently. For this big one, the song was Remember to Breathe off of Sturgill SImpson’s 2019 album SOUND & FURY. Give it a listen if you want to get into my head.
A month or two prior, this album was my team’s “album of the week,” and I’d taken a big liking to it. I tend to binge albums that I like and probably listened to it a dozen or more times before the AH.
As the AH continued on, I tried an experiment…
There is a sixteenth note hi-hat pattern through the chorus that drives the tempo, and as it started to kick in I rubbed my hands together (like you would do to warm your palms on a cold day) at the same rhythm as the hi-hat pattern to see what would happen.
The swooshing from my hands conflated with the hi-hats and as the sensation got deeper and more intense, the last words I heard were:
“And just lay back,
Let it happen,
And remember to breathe.”
Which I have to say, was a pretty great stanza to bookend my last moments of consciousness before seizing and entering this adventure of a lifetime. In the last month, laying back, accepting, and remembering to breathe brought me through some pretty intense and important moments. Sound advice, Sturgill.
And finally, some gratitude:
When I went dark during my staff meeting, my team sprung into action and made sure I got help… They’re a talented bunch in many ways, but they made sure I didn’t hurt myself when I went unconscious, found an EMT serendipitously already in the building, contacted my family (don’t be a dummy like me and make sure you keep your emergency contact info up-to-date), all which ultimately got me to a hospital in probably just about a half-hour. My collective team, my support network, is woven into every part of this story— I’m grateful for your presence, and for how loved I feel right now.
