If you were nothing OR how to know if you really almost just died

When I started graduate school, I joined my first ever formal meditation class, offered free through university health services.

One week, we drew ten concentric circles. We were supposed to start at the outside and answer the question "who am I?" With each smaller layer, we answered again, ultimately, in theory, arriving at something approaching our essence. An outer circle might say "a woman" or "a human" or  "a student" or "a Wisconsinite." Really whatever first came to you. Your innermost circle might say "a mom," "love," "peace." Whatever seemed most true.

We were then led through a guided meditation, where we practiced dropping away each layer of our identities. First, for example, dropping away the distinction of being a woman. Until you arrived at that final circle. Perhaps "love."

Then the teacher asked us to let that one go too.

I balked.
I told him I couldn't. I
 disagreed.

I couldn't simply be nothing.

I was at least love.
Wasn't I?
At my core?
Doesn't the Dalai Lama say we are all fundamentally good?

My teacher looked at me with the panicked look I'm sure I get too during certain teachable moments... The ones where I see a gap between the student and the material and I lack the abilities in that precise moment to spontaneously bridge them.

I left our class certain I was right. He left our class certain he was.

I am not doing it on a sheet of paper anymore.
It is my every day. 

As I get older, I realize how long life truly is.

If I began to chart the circles, and watch them fall away. If I catalogued how many had already fallen.

Where would it end? What would be left? Who would I be? (Do I even need to know?)

For a number of reasons, these questions are no longer academic. 

My body went into anaphylactic shock last weekend. I was sitting quietly at dinner with friends, before one pointed out my face was swelling. I could feel it, but, I thought, surely the numbness wasn't noticeable. Within an hour, I was sitting in a hospital bed, having adrenaline injected into my IV. And we waited to see if the swelling would stop, and hopefully begin to reverse. No one discussed with me what would happen if the swelling continued to spread, and for some time, initially, it did. Would I be intubated? Put under? Injected again? My mouth was so swollen, the skin on my lips began to tear. I couldn't move them anymore. Questions had to be delivered through telepathy.  

"The Benadryl might make you sleepy" the nurse said, as I looked down through eyes nearly swollen shut, at arms that were shaking like dying fish. I didn't mumble a question about the shaking. Anyway. I figured it was a less important question than plenty of other ones that were going unanswered. Within an hour the swelling stopped spreading.

Afterwards, "I was really scared."
"I don't think you would have died."
"I don't know if we would have known for sure. Until it was too late to stop it.

It's happened three times now, though that one was certainly the most extreme.
And there are no foods that overlap between any of the reactions.

I flew to Wisconsin hours after being released.
It was reasonable to infer that if the reactions were isolated to my time in Louisiana, something there could be avoided. By the miracle of aviation. 

Maybe it will pass.
Maybe it was seasonal.
Maybe it would have happened wherever I went.

Who can know?

But it is one more thing that leads me to questions.

About what is in that center circle.

And if even that, too, can fall away.

And how come my teacher never mentioned any other circles when we did the exercise?
Is it some weird sign of Western individualism? That you don't get to share your circles with anyone else?

Did he know some deep truth about how we're always in all of this alone anyway?

Sitting alone in that hospital bed, I listened to them administer Narcan to the man on the other side of the curtain. Compassionless, professional voices, urging him to wake up, trying to explain they were drawing blood, asking again and again if he knew what he'd taken, explaining that he was found seizing on his own front porch.

"What is your name?"
"Do you know where you are?"
"Do you have family here?"
"He's coming in and out," one of them said to the other.
"Have you heard about the elephant tranquilizer that isn't responding to Narcan anymore?" the other one asked.
"Yeah, we had a case at my other hospital."
"Well, we don't know what he's taken."
"Just keep trying to wake him up."

"What is your name, sir?"

I wondered if they really wanted to know.

Or if they were just trying to fill the space between themselves and him.

So that it felt less dreadful. 

"Do you know who you are?"
"Do you know where you are?"

We all have to answer the same questions in the end, I suppose. 

I listened.
They looked at the two of us as if we had nothing in common.
This was no subtle secret.
Presenting as a middle class, white lady, this is among the privileges I receive.
To be interpreted as fundamentally different, from that man.
Whose ailment is socially understood as preventable, by him alone.
While my IV was administered for reasons beyond my control.

Except, as far as I can tell, that night, medical professionals thought us both in danger of ceasing to breathe.
And as far as I can tell, that means we aren't so different, after all.

We are all born. We all get sick. We all die.

We are all terribly interconnected, and completely and utterly alone.  

Me and that man, whose face I never saw, we have to answer the same questions.

When everything else falls away, who am I?
When everything falls apart, whether you "chose" it or not, who am I now?

Maybe my teacher was right. Maybe your answer is just something you learn to erase anyway.

And answering just tells you where to begin.

And you begin again.

Half asleep on Benadryl.
Or still shaking from an Epi pen.
Or inside of a police car. 
Or weary, weary as hell, because life, it seems, is longer than perhaps you imagined it could be.
And nothingness, apparently, is scarier, than all of that combined.