My body doesn't remember how to do this

I woke at 5 this morning because that's when consciousness decided to return. Not an alarm. Not intention. Just—awareness flickering back like a pilot light that's been dead for hours.

I'd come home from the call center, walked straight to my room, and my body said absolutely fucking not to anything except unconsciousness. No dinner. No journaling. No spiritual practice. Just lights out.

This is what nobody tells you about returning to "normal life" after years outside the system: your body doesn't remember how to do this anymore.

In shamanic traditions, energy is life force—the animating essence that lets you move through the world, create, transform, practice. It's not abstract. It's the literal capacity to do anything beyond breathing.

Here's what I'm learning about late-stage capitalism's cruel math:

You need energy to escape the conditions that are draining your energy.

To find better housing, you need energy to search, apply, coordinate, move. To find a better job, you need energy to update resumes, interview, learn systems. To manage your health, you need energy to advocate, show up, schedule. To maintain a spiritual practice—the very thing that replenishes you—you need energy to sit, breathe, remember who you are beyond "worker."

But if your job takes all your energy just to survive it, where does that leave you?

It's only been four years since I worked a regular job. Four years of the furthest thing from a typical life you can imagine. Housing instability. Survival mode. The kind of years that age you in ways a calendar can't measure.

Now I'm back in the workforce—customer service at a call center, handling Marketplace insurance and HIPAA compliance—and my body is looking at me like I'm insane.

I genuinely don't remember how I used to do this.

In my younger years, I worked multiple jobs. School. Yoga practice. A full spiritual life. How? How did I have the energy for any of that?

Now I get home and I pass out. Not "I'm tired so I'll rest." I mean I literally lose consciousness whether I want to or not. I wake up hours later disoriented, realizing I've lost half my "free time" to my body's desperate attempt to recover from eight hours of being a productive citizen. By the time awareness returns, I'm looking at maybe an hour or two before I need to start the whole cycle again.

Shower. Commute. Clock in.

Here's what this looks like from a shamanic perspective:

When your life force is being extracted faster than it can regenerate, you enter a state of spiritual deficit. You're operating at a loss. Every day you go deeper into debt with your own body, your own spirit.

And the thing about spiritual deficit is that it doesn't just make you tired. It makes you forget.

You forget what it feels like to have energy for joy. You forget what your creativity tastes like. You forget the version of yourself that could hold multiple realities at once—worker, mystic, creator, advocate.

You become streamlined. Efficient. A perfect unit of labor.

This is not an accident. This is the design.

I was late this morning because I took the 8am bus and got to work at 9:01 instead of 9:00. One minute. And even that small failure feels like evidence of how I'm not managing this well enough.

I'm in the "nesting" phase at work now. Just graduated from training. This is when you're supposed to be settling in, finding your rhythm, getting comfortable.

Instead, I'm trying to figure out how people do this long-term without dissolving.

How do you maintain the infrastructure of a whole life—job searches for backup plans, housing applications, health management, spiritual practice that keeps you tethered to meaning—when just showing up to work and getting home takes everything you have?

The narrative around people in my position—people transitioning out of housing instability, people returning to the workforce after years in crisis—is always about bootstrap-pulling and gratitude.

And don't get me wrong. I'm grateful for permanent housing. I'm grateful for employment. I'm grateful to be out of immediate survival mode.

But here's the truth nobody wants to hear:

Gratitude doesn't give you back the years of life force you burned just to stay alive.

My body is older now. Not just in calendar years—in the way chronic stress ages you at a cellular level. In the way that years of housing instability teach your nervous system that safety is always temporary.

I'm four years older, yes. But I'm also survival-mode years older. And those count differently.

There's a reason I woke at 5am even though I didn't mean to. My body still knows something my conscious mind has forgotten.

In those early morning hours, when the world is quiet and I'm not yet "employee" or "customer service representative" or any other role, there's a brief window where I can remember who I am.

A digital shaman trying to bridge mystical wisdom with material reality.

An alchemist of honest becoming.

Someone who refuses to sanitize struggle but also refuses to be reduced to it.

The practice I'm trying to remember is this: How do you stay spiritually alive inside a system designed to extract your life force?

I don't have the answer yet. I'm literally too tired to have the answer.

But I know it has something to do with those 5am moments of consciousness returning. The small rebellions of taking a shower even when you're running late. The act of writing this instead of just passing out again. The refusal to forget entirely, even when forgetting would be so much easier.

Right now, I don't have energy for the kind of deep spiritual content creation I want to be doing. I don't have energy for the housing justice advocacy that matters to me. I barely have energy to maintain a consistent spiritual practice.

What I have is this: the lived experience of what it actually costs to survive.

And maybe that's the teaching right now.

Maybe the most shamanic thing I can offer is the honest accounting of what this system does to human energy. The real math of late-stage capitalism. The actual experience of trying to remember how to be a whole person when the world only wants you to be a worker.

This isn't the inspirational content that goes viral. This isn't the polished wisdom that makes people feel good.

This is what you're here to read: me, trying to figure out how I used to do this, one exhausted day at a time.

I'm going to make it through today. I made it through the door at 9:01. I'll make it through my shift. I'll make it home.

And tomorrow I'll wake up at 5am again, consciousness flickering back on, and I'll try to remember:

Who I was before. Who I'm becoming. How anyone does this.

If you're here because you're trying to get back on your feet without losing your soul—you're in the right place.

Thank you for finding this. For supporting work that refuses to get sanitized. For seeing value in the unsexy reality behind the mystic brand. For understanding that sometimes the most radical spiritual practice is just showing up to your life, even when you don't remember how you used to do it. Even when you're pretty sure you're doing it wrong. Even when all you have is one foot in front of the other and the faint memory that you used to be capable of so much more.

Forward this to one person who needs to know they're not alone in the exhaustion. Not on social media. Just one person, directly.

And if something in here landed—if you saw yourself in the story, or just need to say "same"—reach out. I read everything, even if I'm answering from the bus stop or the edge of another workday.

That's how this grows the right way.

Survive today. That's the revolution.

The work in this essay doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you or someone you know is navigating housing instability, workforce reentry, or the exhaustion of surviving in Tampa Bay — these organizations are real, local, and worth knowing about.

One of the things I've learned trying to do this work while also staying employed and housed: you can't afford to make content creation harder than it already is.

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For someone like me — writing between bus stops and clock-ins — having one tool that handles the distribution side of the work matters. I recommend it.

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Next issue: a shelter table conversation about aging parents and end-of-life decisions — and how the people society has thrown away turn out to be the most eloquent on love.

After that: the first chapter of Shattered Seasons, my memoir of five years living unhoused in Tampa. It starts the morning of January 11, 2022. I won't be sanitizing it.

Every issue will bring you something real.

The Grounded Mystic · The Unpolished Prophet · Kosmic Quill Consulting

P.S. If you ever feel moved to support the work directly, you can do that here: buymeacoffee.com/adontaimason. No pressure, no paywall — your presence is already enough.