Six years ago, in September 2020, I was hospitalized with COVID and had one of the strangest, most profound, hilarious, and life-changing experiences of my life. It was also one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. It changed the course of my life, reconnected me with my faith, and gave me a new curiosity and love for life and just how strange and magical it can be.
At the time, I was livestreaming from the hospital most nights. It was the height of COVID, I was isolated, and going live helped me feel connected to my community. It gave me people to talk to and a way to process what I was experiencing in real time. Friends and family were worried. There were calls to the hospital asking them to take my devices away. There were concerns about what people would think, whether people would think I was crazy, how that might affect my career, and the list goes on. I know much of it came from genuine concern, but it also came from fear. People were responding based on what frightened them about what I was experiencing rather than trying to understand what I needed. And what I needed, alone in that hospital room, was connection. I needed to talk. I needed to explore what was happening to me. I needed to find the curiosity, humor, beauty, and meaning in an experience I didn’t fully understand but was absolutely intrigued by.
But there was another layer to it. Some of what I was experiencing challenged people’s religious and spiritual beliefs. Growing up and living in Alabama, I had rarely felt safe talking openly about my own spirituality when it didn’t fit neatly within what the people around me considered acceptable. My desire to talk about the most interesting and inspiring thing that had ever happened to me was constantly at odds with concerns for my own safety. People close to me were often hostile, ugly, dismissive, and incredibly opinionated, without showing even the slightest curiosity about my experience as I actually experienced it. That included “good people,” “kind people,” and people I once called friends. The anger and irritation from some of the people closest to me whenever my COVID experiences came up was palpable. Eventually, you learn which parts of yourself are safer to keep quiet—and who in your life actually cares about you, rather than the role they’ve assigned you in their own life. But I refuse to live in fear or be silenced.
Fear wasn’t the only thing that made this story difficult to tell. It was a complicated new experience that took time to digest—and to translate in a way other people might be able to understand. I’ve been telling pieces of it as I’ve worked through it, finding different ways to explore what happened, what it meant to me, and how it continues to shape my life.
In fact, a lot of my art works this way. Sometimes I can make something immediately. Other experiences unfold through the work itself. I return to them again and again, understanding something new each time. Sometimes I need distance. Sometimes I need a different medium. And sometimes examining the work itself is how I figure out what I’m trying to say.
I’ve shared some of the original videos, but they’re incredibly raw. It’s difficult to get past the puffy pale face, altered speech, and everything happening on the surface to see the story underneath. So I’ve kept experimenting with other ways to tell it through photography, composites, writing, video, and now music.
This year, I think I got a little closer.
For the sixth anniversary, I went back through my journals, photographs, videos, and memories and used details from those days to write a song. Then I created a video combining images from 2020 with footage of myself dancing from the last few years. My dance style, Shiatra, is a big part of my spiritual practice, so bringing it into this story felt natural. And yes, I’m noticeably thinner, healthier, and more attractive in the newer footage, which helps balance out the images from 2020 in which I looked, to quote one friend, “a bit rough.” I’ve also been playing with humor and the absurd, including AI portraits of myself as Carol Jesus, because those bits of absurdity help lighten the seriousness of the story.
What I experienced was incredibly scary. A lot of people thought I was going to die, me included. But what I experienced spiritually, regardless of how you choose to label it, was a powerful, life-altering gift. It turned one of the scariest moments of my life into an incredible adventure, as though I were Alice following the White Rabbit down the hole into Wonderland. I began rediscovering parts of myself I’d buried under years of armor—the curious, playful, spiritual part of me that still believed life could be strange and magical, including my connection to God.
And yes, I experienced things I like to call magic: premonitions, channelings, near-death experiences, visions, and other things I still don’t entirely know how to explain. My entire world opened up. It felt a little like Peter Pan remembering that Neverland was real and finding his way back.
I don’t care whether other people share my beliefs or believe in me or my experiences. I’m sharing it because it happened to me, because it’s important and special to me, and because it’s a GREAT FREAKING STORY. We should be able to talk openly about our experiences without fearing ridicule, hostility, or harm. The fact that we often can’t says so much about our society and how conditioned and fear-driven everyone is. Well, I’m tired of allowing other people’s discomfort to determine which parts of my own life I’m allowed to talk about. I refuse to live in fear of being seen, and I refuse to be silenced simply because my experience doesn’t fit neatly into someone else’s understanding of the world.
That’s also part of why I keep returning to it through art. Art gives me a way to reclaim the parts of my story I once felt pressured to hide. I can examine them, question them, laugh at them, dance with them, turn them into photographs and songs, make them beautiful, make them absurd, and keep discovering what they mean to me. In that sense, making this work has become its own act of rebellion.
And holy shit, it really is a great story. And one day there will be a book and a movie, even if I have to make them myself, because the world needs my story.
But for now, this is where I am with it. Enjoy!
