This is a blog written by Heather King. Heather is an Air Force Veteran, Tillman Scholar, and Alumni of the Strategic Public Relations Program at George Washington University. Her healing journey has led her to become a certified psychedelic preparation and integration coach for the Heroic Hearts Project. Her journey with psychedelic therapy led her to dedicate herself to supporting Veterans seeking healing.
The sagest advice I’ve ever received came from a 78-year-old man. He has been instrumental in my character development over the past few years. He told me, “You are never who you say you are and never who you think you are. You are always what you do.” After much discussion, he posed this question, “So, who do you want to be, and what are you willing to do?” It’s taken years to have an adequate answer. This is simply a collection of my thoughts, reflecting on where this question has taken me and where I am… today.
A few years ago, I stumbled upon the writings and teachings of Baba Ram Dass, who formerly identified as Dr. Richard Alpert. Ram Dass told the story of his journey into becoming nobody. He talked about all the identities he had worn over a lifetime and how each felt like an ill-fitting suit. What truly struck a chord in me was when he said our first experience with identity comes from our parents in the form of a name. For him, as early as he could remember, the identities imposed on him or he willingly took on weren’t the full amalgamation of who he was. There was a dissonance between who he thought he was and some unnamed feeling.
This resonated deeply. For so long, I felt like an imposter, but I could not comprehend or articulate why I never felt comfortable and at peace with myself. Perhaps I was wearing an ill-fitting suit of identities.
While my path to becoming no-body hasn’t mirrored Ram Dass’s and all his adventures around the world, it has been an illuminating adventure into recovery AND psychedelics.
At a very early age, I began to identify as “other.” I grew up in the South, during a time when people kept their hoods in their closets and their bigotry under their breaths. I had an all-white family, was raised in predominantly white neighborhoods, and attended predominantly white schools. In elementary school, I could count the number of people who looked like me on one hand. In fifth grade, I won an essay contest with a grand prize of winning a full-ride scholarship to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama. This was also the year I found out I was “other.”
Fifth grade is when the state starts collecting demographics through standardized testing. Standardized tests usually involved scantron selection sheets. Like all my young classmates, I learned to fill in my name by finding the corresponding dots and filling them in completely. Easy. Age? Easy. Grade? Easy. Race…? I was stumped. The options were black, white, or other. I asked my teacher if I was supposed to fill in the circles for black and white, and she told me I couldn’t. I had to choose. How was I supposed to choose? She reiterated I couldn’t fill in both circles because it would throw the scantron off, but I couldn’t choose other, as it only reflected Alaskan or Asian-Pacific Islander. My teacher asked me what I identified with most. I didn’t feel like I could choose black. I had no black role models, influences, or people in my life to relate to. I didn’t want to choose white; it felt like some unknown betrayal. She encouraged me to “just choose” and get on with the test. So, I did. I chose other. I continued to choose “other” on every standardized test throughout my middle and high school years.
The feeling of otherness became my identity. I existed in this place of racial limbo and ambiguity. I often found myself too “white-passing” for some circles and just black enough not to run in others. People often told me who I had to be in what circle, so I learned to adapt. I could morph into whatever racial identity I needed to fit in. This was the pattern for my adolescence and my entire military career.
When I left the military, I became heavily involved in politics. I was writing speeches for local politicians with congressional aspirations. I was even the chairperson of our local political party. I ran in very well-known and affluent circles. I was well-read and admired for my intelligence, articulation, and wit. Well, at least that’s what I thought they admired. In reality, I was just a young black woman who happened to be a single mom of two they could exploit. I was the token black spokesperson. I became painfully aware of who I was to them during a tumultuous election cycle, ultimately resigning and withdrawing from the political scene. I began to question what racial identity meant to me. I wrestled with how people saw me and the dissonance it caused in how I saw myself. I remembered the time my high school English teacher wrote on a college recommendation letter, “Heather is articulate for a young black woman,” or the time my flight chief told me if I got out of the military, it would only be a matter of time before my son was in jail, and I was on the streets, because I was a single mother, raising a black son. I thought about the countless times people made similar comments and realized how many people in my life held low expectations of me simply because I was black. To them, it was my whiteness that attributed to my success.
What followed was a spiral of shame, guilt, self-pity, and self-hatred fueled by the only thing that had never betrayed me or cared about my identity: alcohol.
I had a long love affair with alcohol. I had been labeled a drunk more times than I could count. I just didn’t care. I may have been a drunk, but at least I had a mind-blowing professional resume, and from the outside looking in, I had a fantastic life. The only problem was my insides didn’t match my outsides. The internal agony of my shame, guilt, and struggle with the many facets of my identity was only lulled by expensive whisky. Eventually, it stopped working.
In 2016, for the first time and with all the sincerity a spiritually dead person could muster, I identified as an alcoholic. Unbeknownst to me, identifying as an alcoholic would lead me on a journey where I could explore my identity. It gave me a process to examine my thoughts and beliefs about myself and the actions I take when I believe them. It also allowed me to take actionable steps, be accountable, and discover who I am by seeing who I no longer wished to be. It’s where I learned I wasn’t who I said I was, nor who you thought I was— I truly was what I did next.
Recovery was transformational. However, after four years of growth and dedication to my program, there were still blocks I could not work through in recovery or with a therapist. I began to feel like I was permanently broken by trauma. The hope and freedom I felt began to slip away. Once again, I became desperate, at least until I was introduced to the powerful and healing world of psychedelics.
My journey with psychedelics hasn’t been quite the existential crisis I imagined. More like deep existential panic, with a sprinkle of serenity. I truly attribute this to the foundational work I did in recovery and with a therapist.
My first experience with DMT was not an out-of-body, launched deep into the cosmos experience. My eyes were closed. Everything became eerily quiet. My body felt heavy but also light. An overwhelming feeling came over me like a wave; the only thing I could feel was love. Love so deep I could feel it on a cellular level. Love was so deep that I remembered where and what I came from. Love truly has no name because there are no singular words, groups of words, colors, thoughts, or concepts to describe it. As quick as the feeling came, it went, and I was very much in my body, writhing with pain. Not physical pain; this was worse. Deep, guttural, emotional pain— pain I now call the pain of forgetting. I walked away from the experience, realizing in my search for identity, I had forgotten who I truly was and where I was from: LOVE.
Since that night in 2021, I have trudged the road of remembering who I truly am while exploring what it means to have an identity and let go of it.
When I forget I come from this place of love, I sit in separateness. That separateness creates the feelings of “otherness” I felt my entire life. It keeps me sitting in my shame and guilt. It acts as a subconscious force dictating my actions of insecurity. Inevitably, I cause harm to you and me both.
For the past three years, I have examined every identity I’ve held and every label I have ever worn. I have looked at them with curiosity and love. I’ve asked myself, what is identity? In its simplest definition, identity is how a person feels about themselves. The person, not society, defines identity; it is the culmination of who I see when I look in the internal mirror.
Today, I simply identify as a human. That’s not to say I do not hold other identities. It means I no longer wish to see how I am separate from the world. All of the many identities I hold come together to create my human identity as a loving being, trying their best to navigate the complexities of being human. In that, my work is to advocate and create safe spaces for others to explore their identities, release what no longer feels comfortable, and give them the space and invitation to remove their ill-fitting suits.