This is Known as Transcendence

A Reflection on a Traumatized College Experience, and Graduating From It

Seven years ago, at age 18, I entered university with an undecided major in the liberal arts program. At 5’2 and 120 pounds, wearing all men’s baggy clothing from Goodwill, struggling to shower or brush my teeth, and pensively walking around campus yearning for, yet failing to, make any connections, I was depressed, suicidal, and identifying as an FTM trans man. Being autistic and having yet to be diagnosed with CPTSD from childhood trauma, I was immature for my age, having never had a job, done my own laundry, had a romantic relationship, or maintained my own money. I was overwhelmed with anxiety and pain from years of unprocessed trauma, unable to care for myself, and I was now living in the dorms and starting a “new chapter” of my life. Hope was impossible for me as I possessed no stable identity or sense of self other than being a “depressed piece of shit.” I was still caught up in a toxic unrequited obsessional love for my previous gay male best friend who had moved to New York to attend art school and leave me behind in Wisconsin, alone.

While other students my age were apprehensively but willingly beginning independence and college life, going to parties, making new friends, and joining extracurricular activities, I spent my days skipping class so I could catch up on sleep because I stayed up every night, weeping with agony for my broken childhood heart, petrified with suicidal ideation and terror, fantasizing jumping out the window of my 26-story dorm. I went through the motions of student life as a young queer-identified girl would, enjoying my women and gender studies courses, distracting myself with black racism in America, and visiting the campus LGBT center where I was disappointed to not make any connections either. I did enough work to get by, but I was constantly contemplating death, love, and how worthless and ugly I was both in my body and mind.  Truly, a philosopher’s life.

In my second semester in the dorms, the staff forced me to move to the 1st floor of the building due to a report of my suicidal ideation from my former object-of-affection who would rather avoid texting me back than reporting me to the campus police. It was at that time I came out officially as a trans man, and begrudgingly accepted that I would have to transition and further alienate myself and my body, never being a real man, and doubting that I would ever feel or be loved, regardless. Still, in my mind, this was my only way to be myself, the pathetic weirdo who had always been picked last for groups or teams, and who wasn’t capable of producing serotonin. I hated myself to the core, and thus, longed to escape from my reality. Being a stoner since 15, I didn’t need an introduction to alcohol or drugs from my college peers, but rather I had already become accustomed to drinking and abusing substances alone in my room.

I passed the time by writing miserable poetry, drawing pride flag art, and cutting up counseling magazines to create collages. I borrowed my parent’s car so I could cruise around in the twilight hours and stonedly listen to James Brown, whose music I had embraced as a form of connection to some kind of group, even if it was some distant connection to a “minority” experience of alienation, with the black working class funk lifestyle more relatable to me than my put-together, innocent, white peers who had no idea what to do with an offbeat autistic girl battling severe depression and gender dysphoria. As a self-soothing humorous way to create an identity from my despairs, music taste, and limited acknowledgement of my soul, I created another Tumblr aesthetics blog with the URL ‘funkgod.’ Even though my artistic interest and any executive motivation was diminished, I dreamed of attending a school where I could become a comedy writer, and although I was accepted into Columbia College of Chicago which hosted such a program, the money was not there to allow me to attend. I resigned myself to taking general education requirements, English, and queer theory, where I was barely engaged and relying on my academic disability accommodations to pass my classes with my knowledgeable work, but poor attendance.

In short, college was a chore to me, just another extension of middle and high school education where I was severely depressed, disconnected, and dejected. In my dorm I had the freedom of isolation to worsen all my maladaptive coping habits, especially missing class, using drugs, engaging in porn or sketchy hookup apps like Grindr and Tinder, eating junk food for every meal, and ruminating on my self-disgust which I labeled “gender dysphoria.” Yet, I was intelligent, and used to skating by on my natural wit and accommodations, and for the next 3 years of worsening trauma I stayed in the liberal arts college and worked towards my degree, all the while, longing for tender love, calm, and peace, but feeling nothing but jagged, bitter cold.

In that time, I fulfilled my terrifying goal of medical gender transition, including having a double mastectomy and doing testosterone treatments, when I was 20. I continued to try, and fail, to have an intimate relationship or make new friends, even losing the former couple friends I had due to my emotional instability. I lived at home, retreading childhood traumas and staying in a state of learned helplessness, being unable to keep a basic job for more than a few months, and blowing off life to sleep, eat, and do drugs. By the time I was 22, when I taken my second semester break from college to cope with my suicidal mental health issues, I was faced with Myself and My Life.

“Should I actually kill myself, or not?”

“Am I more good than bad, or more bad than good?”

“Am I strong enough to change?”

“Am I too worthless to be successful?”

And

“How do I begin to heal when every single thing is not working?”

I began by undergoing a full panel psychological evaluation to determine what exactly was wrong me. This examination provided me with life-changing information, not that I was just depressed and anxious, but also that I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. I had never considered before that I might have this disorder of PTSD, assuming like most people, that it was a diagnosis only for survivors of war or victims of sexual violence. Yet, this was me? I researched the symptoms and accepted it to be true. I had PTSD they said, from the gender transition and identity crisis, from childhood emotional and psychological abuse, and from social alienation and abandonment. At that low point, I had no reality to fight against, and could only acknowledge with humble fatigue that I was neurologically damaged, and more fucked up than I had even realized, despite the countless hours of self-abuse punishing myself for it.

The PTSD diagnosis opened my awareness to the complexities of my situation, and most significantly, that all this suffering was not my fault. It was not that I was inherently ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘worthless’, ‘stupid’, ‘lazy’, ‘helpless’, or particularly, uniquely, tragically, ‘broken’, but in fact I had experienced clinically understood symptoms of abuse, emotional, and social traumas sustained over years of time, and especially during critical brain development. I was able to breathe a little deeper and release some tensions that I had been warring with myself over for half of my life, it made things clear, although still in a distortion of brain fog and jaded shock.

Feeling that I was not inherently wrong just for the sake of Being, and that there was actually a label and resources to accompany my suffering, helped me to relax my self-hate and become curious about treatments and starting to heal. In part, my inclination to avoid healing and just waste away until I died was a reasonable solution, because the more I examined myself and my existence, the clearer it was that most everything was indeed, fucked up, and the healing process was just as painful, if not more horrific than the original experiences. The healing process and bringing awareness kept every single painful emotion and thought, only now entwined with every aspect of grief, especially shame.

Around this time, I had found my way into more awareness that catapulted my life and was another earth-shattering revelation. Always with a critical eye on the social justice trans movements, I discovered radical feminist materials on Tumblr with stories of women who transitioned due to traumatic experiences. I began posting about my own experiences of gender and trauma and was invited into a private Facebook group for detrans and desisted women, under 200 people. Through the lens of trauma, I realized that my entire experience of gender dysphoria and reasons for transition were just the same as all these young women, alienation from femaleness, womanhood, being autistic and never fitting expectations of girlhood or femininity in society, severe mental health issues, and thinking transition was a way to relieve the burden of The Self. With this solidarity, I understood that the transition had not changed anything about me, for better, or worse, besides disfiguring my natural body. I was still the same person, and still, inside, a wounded little girl and child.

With this level of awareness, I had to do something, and for me in my hesitancy to do any more damage to my life, this meant at first, NOT doing things, like putting aside my craving for love and sex, being celibate, ceasing use of most drugs, and not wasting time with school anymore. I decided to finally declare a major after 4 years and missing graduation alongside my classmates I had entered college with. I played it safe, just wanting to find something stable where I might be able to use some of my writing skills, but which would not pressure me. For one semester I was a Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies major, with an intent to become a literary editor. However, over the summer in August when the next semester was looming, I was still filled with dread at the obligation of taking boring media studies classes. After working out my existential concerns through a Jim Carrey erotic novella where I projected my psyche on Jim Carrey who gave me the advice I found it tough to give myself, (yes, this is objectively fucking hilarious) Jim Carrey/me convinced me that in order to radically accept Being and try my hand at life, I needed to have the courage to embrace my true nature and follow my dreams. As gut-wrenchingly petrifying a prospect that was, I admitted to my most fragile self that what would be more painful and difficult than healing, would be to not change, to stay the same, and continue the life I was leading.

I had already gone through hell, suffered endlessly, destroyed myself, wasted my life, youth, and opportunities, all to escape the pressure of failure and the fear my traumatic insecurities and shame had developed to convince me I should just give up. I unfortunately already knew what the outcome of my life would be if I did not start listening to my body, heart, and soul, and what it desperately wanted and needed. I listened to what Jim Carrey, my comedic idol said in one of his college speeches, that you can still fail at something you don’t care about, so why not at least fail doing something you love. That advice inspired me not only to believe in my academic prospects and choose an appropriate college major, but also as an overarching philosophy towards life and healing; I failed when I was barely trying, settling for far less than my abilities, intelligence, or spirit was capable of, so why not put some energy into caring for and loving myself, instead? Surely it could not be worse than self-neglect and meandering through life in a chaotic haze of despair and achieving nothing. Maybe if I believed in myself a little and made small progress on what I really cared about that I could feel better.

Although I doubted my ability to ever find peace, love, or happiness, and was still unhealed from trauma, I timidly changed my program from liberal arts to fine arts and joined the ranks of other creative people in art school. I had always done many creative pursuits, yet none consistently or with much discipline, and my lack of skills shamed me when I thought of ever having a career or making money from creative work, but I pushed through those doubts and began the new journey of college. Although I’d been going to the same school and being a student for 4 years, in the art school, college felt like an inspirational, engaging, and welcoming place for me to belong. After wiping away the mountains of dead leaves, wood, and garbage from my mind, underneath revealed a burning vitality or power and passion to create and express myself. I realized that this had always been there, I was always in my core a creative soul, although my energy had been deferred by insecurity.

As if the planets starting aligning, every experience of my life and self started coming together under my new identity “Artist.” Being An Artist, and my preferred title of Eccentric Artist, at that, was pivotal in every aspect of my life. I began reaching back into myself and extracting my essence, realizing it had been raging like a furnace forever, and barely tapped into. I was starved for self-acceptance, and like with the PTSD label to describe my pain, now too did I have a worthy descriptor to encapsulate myself. With the accurate labels of woman, artist, and traumatized, I also recalled that I had another label, back on my aesthetics Tumblr blog, one that perhaps fit better than any other term and which could be used to describe myself in cathartic totality. FUNK GOD. My spirit was on the right track when I titled my identity in this way, and I sought to live up to the notion of what Funk God meant and who Funk God was as an artist and person. I viewed Funk God as my ego, a self-preservational persona, but a prosocial and adaptive presence, rather than my other self-destructive survival methods or self-concepts.

For the next 3 years, I struggled through PTSD symptoms, therapy, and self-healing while I circled closer to some unknown center point of creativity which would hold my focus. I had so creative interests that were dormant or stunted for so long that I could not possibly choose just one area to focus on or one skill set to develop or make a career path from. The unknown of a creative career is confusing and difficult for any art student, but especially with so much void, grief, and distraction of trauma competing for my attention. Yet with each class and project I worked on, I felt a pull towards the future and saw that I was unfolding my own path and carving out a niche for myself as I discovered and learned more about myself and the available avenues of opportunity. I became dedicated to myself and therefore dedicated to The Journey itself, as my creative energy led the way, leading me to approximate where I belonged. This is known as Transcendence.

Through radical self-acceptance, forgiveness, love, care, respect, and devoting my passionate love to understanding my psychology and the philosophy and spirit of the world and creation, I was born again as who I always was, a sensitive, quirky, artistic, weird girl, and thoughtful, passionate, clever, curious, and soulful creature of the earth. It turned out I really was Funk God, after all, and after 3 years of awareness, healing, expression, and courageous trying, I no longer doubted what I needed to do, I had already created my own philosophies or Dao based in my experiences which became the main principals of Funk:

1.      Embrace Your Funky Self

2.      Cultivate a Funky Lifestyle

3.      Subvert Bad Funks Into Good Funks

4.      Spread the Gospel of Funk

5.      Don’t Forget to Boogie

My artistic joking absurdist schtick had become a profoundly soulful and healthy way to live, how funky is that? I realized Funk God was not just my aggrandizing, ironic, egoic compensation for suicidal self-hate, or even a Higher Self to emulate or strive towards, with “me” --Laura, the traumatized, lonely, and sad, human creature, separate from that beautiful and idealistically groovy persona of someone or something worthy of love, appreciation, or success, but that it was everything behind the egoic defense. Funk God was my spirit, my soul, my heart, and consciousness itself. It transcended even the brutal trauma and heartache of the world and allowed me to access the most meaningful divine things in life, especially creative self-expression for healing purposes. You better believe I became my own God because I really enjoyed funk music.

Funk God Graduation…

I realized this each day, “leaning into the bit” of Funk God, as I watched myself, although excruciatingly painfully with daily and nightly breakdowns and mourning sessions, synchronize each smaller element of my life to create stability and make room for peace and joy. Despite each day in my final semester of art school being painful, lonely, and uncertain, I stepped willingly into challenges and cultivated a sense of purpose and plans for the future. I learned what I wanted to eventually Know, Do, and Teach…. Knowing, Doing, and Teaching, themselves. I realized I wanted to pursue expressive arts healing where I could combine my experiences in Knowing (awareness and psychology), Doing (art and expressive creativity) and Teaching (helping others cultivate themselves through mindful expression.) For my senior thesis I created and led mindful collage workshops in the community and worked as an art teacher with kids, staving off the dread of graduation which meant a launch into extreme chaos, for better, and worse.

Wearing my Blood and Visions shirt in the Doorway of the FUNK ZONE

Now I have reached the developmental milestone of Being 25, and even 1-2-3 years ago, I would never have thought I could accomplish or achieve any of the things I have; my degree, being an art teacher, creating the work I have done including writing a successful Substack, writing and producing an album of funky jams appropriately titled Funk God, because that is what cool musicians do, designing an immersive Funk God website, hosting and producing a podcast on transcendence, finally turning my long-winded self-therapy sessions on my voice memos into The Funk God Hour vlog series, creating art and photography that I actually like enough to put on my walls, publishing art in magazines, owning the funkmobile with the custom FUNKGOD license plate, perhaps making me the coolest cat in Wisconsin, having my own apartment which is, The Funk Zone, being interviewed by journalists and media about my healing story, and getting hired as an expressive art therapist in a psychiatric hospital, and pursuing art education after I graduated.

Moving On

Most of all, I never thought I would like or love myself the way I do now. I am by no means healed or thriving in all areas of my life, and I have a lot of steps to take and practice so I can continue this development and reach my goals, but my suffering finally has had some utility in that the suffering, combined with awareness, and a dedication to self-love and re-parenting myself as an adult has allowed me freedom from the chains of my own unconscious and consciously fruitless patterns of self-devaluation. I still have numerous triggers, am highly neurotic, am dealing with depression and anxiety, and make love to the void more than I would like, but I have seen through small funky baby steps that I can come out of hell, pass through limbo, and start walking the path of transcendence, and I did this mostly by myself, alone in the trenches of the unknown and questioning often what the point to anything was, but still Trying anyway. I am proud of myself that I can now look back, and forward.

My OG 2019 Graduation Class Shirt…From 2022 Graduation!