Everything Is As It Must Be

On resistance, the exhaustion of fighting what already is, and what becomes possible when you finally stop

I did not arrive at a ceremonial ayahuasca retreat as a spiritual seeker.

I arrived as a scientist with twenty-odd years of professional experience, a working understanding of the pharmacology involved, and a nervous system that had been carrying unresolved childhood trauma for four decades while successfully performing functional, professional, present. I arrived because I had tried most other things. Because the exhaustion of managing everything competently while feeling strangely absent from my own life had finally outweighed my resistance to sitting in an ayahuasca ceremony room and drinking plant medicine with strangers.

Ayahuasca is a brew prepared from Amazonian plants — specifically the Banisteriopsis caapi vine combined with leaves containing dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The vine contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors that allow the DMT to become orally active. The result is a psychedelic experience that can last four to six hours, traditionally used in Amazonian shamanic practice for healing, and increasingly studied in clinical settings for its potential in treating PTSD, depression, and addiction. I had done the research. I understood the mechanism. I had taken every reasonable precaution.

None of that prepared me for the first twenty minutes.

The fight

Within minutes of swallowing the medicine my body knew something foreign had arrived and wanted it gone. The nausea was immediate — not illness exactly, but rejection. A biological argument. I held it down through will alone, which in retrospect was the first act of resistance in a night that would be defined by it.

When the medicine began to work I fought that too. The icaros — the ceremonial songs that are supposed to anchor you — irritated me. The space felt wrong. My nervous system, trained over decades to maintain control and catalogue threat, ran its familiar subroutine: this is not safe, this is not right, make it stop.

I wanted it to end. I wanted out.

And then, somewhere in the exhaustion of fighting something that was not going to stop regardless of my resistance, something shifted. Not a decision. More like a muscle finally giving out. I stopped. And in the stopping, something opened that the fighting had been keeping closed.

That opening is what this piece is about.

The mathematics of resistance

Most of us who have survived difficult lives are experts at fighting what already is. We fight the past — replaying it, resenting it, constructing elaborate alternate histories where the harm didn’t happen or was answered differently. We fight the people who hurt us, carrying the argument forward into decades they no longer occupy. We fight the version of ourselves that was shaped by what happened, as though the shaping could be undone by sufficient force of will.

The cognitive load of that fighting is immense. And it achieves nothing. The past is the only thing in the universe that is completely, permanently, immovably fixed. Every joule of energy spent fighting it is energy that cannot go anywhere useful.

Let me be precise about what “everything is as it must be” does and doesn’t mean. It is not a statement about causality. It does not mean everything happened for a reason, or that the harm was necessary, or that suffering is divinely intended. It means something much simpler and much more useful: everything that has happened now exists as reality. Reality isn’t asking for your approval before it becomes true. You can dislike it. You can grieve it. You can rage against it. But you cannot make it become not reality. And as long as you are standing on an imaginary version of reality — my life should have been different — you cannot build anything stable, because your foundation doesn’t exist. Acceptance is not the finish line. It is the starting line. The survey of where the river actually is, before any calculation becomes possible.

Oprah Winfrey said something I have turned over many times:

Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past could have been different.

Not excusing. Not forgetting. Not reconciling with the person who caused the harm. Simply releasing the hope that what happened could un-happen. Because it can’t. And the hope that it could is the thing keeping you trapped in it.

Your father left when you were young. Your anger is real and valid — the abandonment was real, the hurt was real, the consequences were real. But somewhere in the years of carrying that anger, a secondary abandonment happened. You abandoned yourself. You were so busy fighting the person who left that you stopped being present in your own life. The person who needed you most — the child who was hurt, and the adult that child became — was left alone again. This time by you.

Acceptance doesn’t excuse what happened. It ends the second abandonment.

Why meth felt like home

For trauma survivors, methamphetamine doesn’t feel like a foreign substance. It feels like a place you already know.

This is not accidental. Trauma dysregulates the norepinephrine system — the nervous system runs in chronic hyperarousal, always scanning, always managing, always one step ahead of the next threat. Meth hijacks that same norepinephrine pathway. The neurological signature is familiar because it maps directly onto what trauma already built. The substance isn’t introducing a new experience. It’s activating an existing architecture.

That’s why it feels like relief. That’s why it feels like coming home. That’s why it works so specifically and so well on people carrying unresolved trauma — because it speaks the nervous system’s native language.

But it doesn’t heal what it finds there. It activates the pathways without resolving them. It hides the unprocessed material without touching it. And when the crash comes it doesn’t return you to baseline — it drops you below it. The depressive state that follows lands on a nervous system already carrying everything the substance temporarily dissolved, now heavier for the depletion, now more raw for the brief absence of pain.

Acceptance is the only thing that actually moves something. Not quickly. Not cleanly. But in the direction of resolution rather than concealment. The past cannot change. Therefore all remaining energy belongs to the future.

If you are in it right now

This section is for you. The person still using, or newly stopped, or somewhere in the grinding middle of early recovery where nothing feels resolved and the pull is still loud.

Your trauma is real. The hurt is real. The anger and the grief and the specific exhaustion of carrying a wound that was never yours to carry — all of it is real and valid. Nobody gets to tell you it wasn’t that bad or that you should be over it by now.

And the substance made sense. I want to say that plainly because it’s true. For a nervous system shaped by trauma, something that activates those pathways and delivers temporary relief is not an irrational choice. It is a logical response to a real and unresolved need.

But it doesn’t heal the need. It exploits it. And the crash lands on everything the substance temporarily covered, now heavier. Sometimes low enough to be dangerous.

If you are reading this from that floor — if the crash has brought you somewhere that feels unbearable — that is the neurochemistry talking, not the truth. Your story is not over. Your potential, your purpose, the life that exists on the other side of this — none of it has been cancelled. It has been buried under a chemical debt that will lift.

You have survived things that should have broken you. You are still here. That is not nothing.

Do not let it end there.

If you love someone who is in it

This section is for you. The partner, the parent, the friend, the colleague who watches someone they love disappear into addiction and doesn’t know what to do with their own helplessness.

The person you love is not using because they don’t value their life or their relationships. They may be using because the alternative — facing unresolved trauma without anything to take the edge off — is a level of pain that is genuinely difficult to hold. The substance found a wound that predates you and predates the relationship. You did not cause it. You cannot fix it.

What you can offer is presence without pressure. The evidence — real, patient, consistent evidence — that something exists on the other side. That the wound has edges and the edges can be reached. That acceptance is possible without the substance that currently makes it feel survivable.

You are allowed to protect yourself. You are allowed to have limits. Both of those things are true at the same time as loving someone who is struggling. Carrying someone else’s pain without boundaries doesn’t heal them. It depletes you and leaves you with nothing left to offer when they are finally ready to receive it.

What acceptance actually opens

When I stopped fighting the medicine, when the muscle gave out and the resistance collapsed, I didn’t find emptiness. I found space.

Space to be present. Space to look at what had happened — in my life, not just that night — without the exhausting overlay of fighting it. Space to find the child who was hurt at the center of it all and simply be with him, without agenda, without trying to fix or resolve or reframe. Just present. Just there.

Everything is as it must be. Not because the harm was necessary or deserved or divinely intended. It shouldn’t have happened. It simply did. Reality isn’t asking for my approval before it becomes true. And I am still here — which means everything that was built in surviving it is mine to use now. The hypervigilance that became analytical precision. The self-reliance that became competence. The sensitivity that became the ability to write about pain in ways that reach people. All of it mine. On my terms. In the direction I choose.

You cannot get there through the substance. It finds the wound and exploits it. Acceptance finds the wound and begins, slowly, unglamorously, to work with it.

Acceptance isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting line.

And from here, finally, something can be built.

Steve Harrison writes about functional addiction, the shadow population nobody talks about, and what recovery actually looks like from the inside — including accepting the most difficult events in his life despite the pain that he is still suffering — because through acceptance healing can begin. He writes from the middle, not the finish line. Dances with the Aunt is his forthcoming memoir. Find him at medium.com/@steveharrisonauthor.