The night after I got home, I was at my little sister's volleyball game and almost passed out and then started uncontrollably shaking and crying. My mom drove me home and took me right to bed, but she didn't leave my room because I think she knew something was wrong. I remember her asking me what was wrong/how I felt, and all I could say was that I was so tired.

I closed my eyes and felt myself lifting out of my body as my mom's voice faded away. I was floating in a dark abyss. It was how I would imagine floating in outer space would be, except there were no stars; it was just complete emptiness in every direction. I did not have a body or anything physical that I could see, but I was still me. I was "me" in my purest form. I was floating forward, not of my own doing but it almost felt like I was gently being pulled. I was moving towards a bright white light that looked like it was shining out of a doorway.

As I was floating, I felt like I was basking in unconditional love, acceptance, and peace. All my feelings of unworthiness and shame melted away. All of a sudden, I understood how insignificant and irrelevant these fear-based emotions are because the amount of love and beauty in the universe is infinitely more abundant. I was a very closed off/numb person before, but I felt all this numbness fall away into the abyss. I felt totally safe to just be me without any masks. It left me with the urge to cry, not tears of sadness, but tears that could finally express full emotion. It felt like I had tears bottled up in me from years and years of suppression that finally could be let out. I felt my heart open and I had a brief moment of feeling everything that I hadn't allowed myself to feel when I was closed off. It was pain and joy and sorrow and love, but it was all beautiful. None of it was scary, it was all just so beautiful. I realized the beauty in being able to feel everything.

I then heard a voice from the abyss. It sounded like it was coming from my left underneath me, but it vibrated everywhere. I heard it but I also "felt" the words. It said, "You are not done here yet." I was halted from floating forward, and then it felt like I got sucked/zapped back into my body. Then I was back lying in my bed.

My left hand started tingling, and it quickly spread until the whole left side of my body was numb, the left side of my face was drooping, and I was talking very incoherently. My mom drove me to the emergency room where they thought I was having a stroke. A little after I got to the emergency room, the tingling/numbness started travelling up the right side of my body as well. I spent the night in the hospital and they did several tests (MRI, blood draw, EKG, etc.). The woman who did my MRI asked if I had been drinking/doing drugs that night, which I had not. There was no conclusion to what happened to me because my heart appeared to be totally fine. They called it "a cardiac event that mimicked a stroke."

I spent the summer months at home focusing on rest and spending a lot of time in the sun. I was completely blissed out all summer. I felt untouchable. Things that used to bother me just rolled right off my back. I had a very strong gut-feeling sense, which was something I had never experienced before. Life became so simple and I stopped worrying about the future because the answer always came to me at each moment. I was extremely present because I felt like I had everything I needed at any given moment. I felt complete. I became totally uninterested in going out and drinking. I noticed my sensitivity to screens increased, and I started avoiding them in the morning and at night. I spent a lot of time sitting and doing nothing because I still felt so connected with the presence I had felt that night.

I did experience a healing of sorts. Prior to this event, I had been struggling with a pretty severe eating disorder in college that no one knew about. I was purging every day, sometimes twice a day, for the months leading up to this. It felt like a habit that I was chained to. My digestive system was pretty messed up as a result. I was constantly thinking about food and how I needed to lose weight. But these obsessive thoughts completely stopped after the event and I stopped purging. It did not even cross my mind to go to the bathroom after meals anymore, which was a complete flip from what it had previously been. Also, my digestive system started functioning so well.

After these few months of bliss in the summer, I went back to school and quickly fell into mental health struggles. I was not doing anything differently when I went back to school, but I think the event made me extremely raw and sensitive to things that had not previously bothered me. Being on a computer most of the day and not being outdoors was a sharp adjustment from the summer months that I had spent mostly outside. I tried to push through but ended up pulling out of school halfway through my junior year. I was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder.

The reason for this stroke-like event finally fell into place a year and a half later. I learned that, because I had been binging and purging for months leading up to the night I ended up in the hospital, I could have killed myself. Purging seriously disrupts the electrolyte balance in the body, particularly potassium which is linked to the heart. There are official terms, like hypokalemia and heart arrhythmias, that explain sudden death in people with eating disorders. When I opened up about my eating disorder, I was told that I was extremely lucky to be alive and that people are dying of this every day.

It has been almost four years since this event happened. I have only very recently been talking about it, but it still feels so real and vivid when I think back to it. It makes no sense in the context of the beliefs I learned and lived by growing up, which I think is why I have been hesitant to talk about what happened to me that night. But I am more convinced that what happened to me that night was true and real than I am of any of the beliefs about religion/death that I learned growing up.

I am not scared of death, and I do not believe there is a judgement day where people are either sent to heaven or hell. I am convinced that when all our human-made emotions are washed away, only beauty and love will remain as our true nature.