Jim Harris
speaker
92 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jim Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So we're going to just keep doing this until we can't stand each other? until we're really, really resentful and bitter. So in some ways that separation, I think there was some mutual compassion of like, maybe there's something better out there for you. And then I left on this trip to Patagonia that we'd been planning for a year and a half.
And all of a sudden that trip took on a different sort of texture for me of like, well, now I get to go grieve and self-reflect and do this out of the spotlight of social media or shared friend circles. Like I can go have a month of something like near solitude and have really something else to focus my mind on and not have to have a Facebook breakup or something.
And that didn't quite play out the way I expected.
That was a, maybe she was just at the end of a rope with us. I'm not sure. She's like, you guys are not getting a hint here.
We did. We stayed close through that first year of my recovery. So we weren't dating any longer. Um,
There was some real reassessment and introspection around whether we would be more compatible now that I was wheelchair-bound, that one of the conflicts had been how much time I was away and the sort of dangerous activities I was engaging with, these sort of dangerous mountaineering photo and video jobs I was being offered online.
Now that I was kind of housebound, I was like, oh, maybe we're more compatible now than we were before. And then I think after some reflection, we both came to the conclusion that our initial decision to separate was probably still for the best.
Yeah, I would sit on the ground, but then getting back up off the ground was a little bit of a struggle. It wasn't until after spinal cord injury that I was like, I have no idea how I used to stand up off the ground. This is something I'd never really paid attention to. But the way I had learned to stand up was sort of like...
being on all fours and pushing my butt up towards the sky and getting in kind of a downward dog position and then slowly walking my hands back one at a time towards my feet until I was sort of bent over and then grabbing onto Walker or a person and standing the rest of the way upright.
I remember trying to like have this dialogue with my body, which was something that I had become really familiar with in that spinal cord state of kind of like, negotiating with appendages and muscles that felt like they were part of me, but also that I didn't really have full agency. And there was like a, like, hey leg, can you do this thing? Can you help me?
Can you, let's all do this together now. And movement through spinal cord injury began feeling like a lot more of a team effort versus like whatever the center of my consciousness is extending out to like my fingertips and toes. And so I remember being like, okay, okay, muscles, can we take a deep breath and can we unlock, can we stop doing that?
And as a part of that, I was kind of trying to shuffle my feet and being able to shift body weight and flex and unflex muscles voluntarily was a way to stop these spasms from happening, to kind of stop this sort of muscle vibration sort of pattern.
And in that process, all of a sudden I realized there were muscles that had not worked since the time of my accident that all of a sudden I could voluntarily control.
It was mysterious, and it wasn't really even the center of the attention at the time because there was, like, this amazing sunset happening. There was a headlining act playing, like, the crescendo of their set. There's, like, thousands of people around. Like, there was, like, a lot of stimulus overload happening, right? Yeah. But I do remember having conversations about it, like,
Hey, guys, look what I can do. And you know, my physical therapist had been assigned to my case was there and had seen my progress for months. And all of a sudden, like, look, look what I look what I can do. And she was like, Oh, did that? Did that like just start happening in the last couple weeks? And I was like, No, it just started happening like, right now.
It did seem like it got weaker as that psychedelic experience kind of came to a conclusion, like that ability to control that muscle was not as strong as it had been a few hours earlier. So I wasn't sure if that meant that it was from the psilocybin itself or just from fatigue.
But it really wasn't until like maybe the next day where it seemed like there might have been a cause and effect between the psilocybin dose and these muscles that still were working the next day. I was like, also still a possibility. It's all a wild coincidence.
And that just happened to be the exact moment that some nerve pathway that had been healing for eight or nine months finally made the connection.
Yeah, exactly. If I'm being really scrupulously analytical about it, that would be a reasonable thing to say, right? Like, I feel like I have a feeling, an inner sense, an emotional feeling or suspicion that it was related to this psilocybin experience.
But I think kind of from a really hard rationalist science-y view, there's an argument that this was like, those were two unconnected events that just happened to co-occur.
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