I am Screamish Joy
This is the Why.
I am Screamish Joy, an intuitive empath living on a small farm outside of Austin, TX. I have spent most of my life as a high-functioning, creative, business professional managing Complex PTSD trauma and the extreme anxiety and panic related issues that often accompany such trauma. My varied trauma experiences include: surviving multiple childhood medical traumas, adult medical trauma, abduction, sexual assaults, near-fatal overdose with NDE, high-impact car collisions, tornados, and losing my home to a flood. I have also experienced more than 20 surgeries and over 100 ER visits. The culmination of these experiences resulted in sometimes debilitating chronic pain requiring medication (including narcotics), intervention (painful shots or surgeries), and much manipulation with therapies.
After spending my entire life deeply enmeshed in the medical system, I gradually became aware of my relationship to the system itself as a dependency and that if I did not address it, it would eventually kill me. I wanted and needed to be healed, but as my awareness of my needs became increasingly holistic, the solutions and providers seemed even more linear in their focus. And I became so tired of repeating my story to physician after physician - the list of surgeries, previous traumas, and medical anomalies.
I began to explore and decided not to begin with (or possibly end with) asking Why? Why was too hard, and somehow asking it immediately made me feel like a victim. So I sidestepped “Why?” for all the other questions: What? How? Where? When? And all of these gave me answers that were important to my journey. I began to learn Yoga and more importantly meditation and the ability to control and manage my thoughts and perspective. I explored food as medicine and changed my relationship with food and my body. I finally allowed myself to release shame and accept my nearly lifelong “recreational” marijuana use as being truly medicinal. Knowing that even though it makes me a daily criminal in my current residence, it is most likely responsible for actually keeping me alive.
I changed my lifestyle, leaving an intensely corporate career for the ambiguity of building value and self-worth in other, maybe more personally meaningful ways. And I shifted my expectations around timelines and success, learning to appreciate that sometimes the greatest growth happens inside the tiniest moments or that subtle changes might take a lifetime or more. On an even more visceral level, I began to reconnect to Nature, and through her, myself.
While exploring all of these questions and all of these answers, I came upon the most important question of all. That question is Who? The reason that question is so important is that the answer is Me. I am the only person holistically qualified to heal myself. More specifically, no one is more accountable to this than I am. This is true for all of us.
With that simple awareness, I began the long and deeply fulfilling process of learning and unlearning, shedding and regrowth. There is unquestionable value to be found in the wisdom and healing of those around us, but I have learned that for someone else to be truly capable of healing me, it is imperative that I am a conscious participant to that process. Active, not passive, and that the more I understand myself and the better I know my truth, the more collaborative and resourceful I can be to my own healing process.
Having taken this journey, I have made many discoveries that I think would help others navigating similar (or different) challenges. My life’s work is moving towards sharing and encouraging creative exploration and expression through connections with Nature, Art, and Community. I believe these powerful connections are all avenues that help us discover deeper spaces within ourselves and create pathways to true freedom.
