I want to tell you the story of how my perspectives on perfection, spirituality, the body, the mind and love have changed, and what I’ve learned from that journey. It’s sort of a mix of groundedness and impermanence and collective consciousness. It’s Buddhism, it’s quantum physics, and maybe it’s nonsense, but maybe that’s a good thing.

I want to give a disclaimer that I’m going to mention some potentially triggering topics on suicidal ideation, so read with discretion.

I can connect every anxiety and every bit of shame I’ve ever had to perfectionism, confusion about ethics and love, and a narrow, dismissive view of health. Even today, with my more “enlightened” mindset, I still wrap up so much of my self-worth in the work that I do.

My most recent semester at St. Lawrence University ended with a mental breakdown because of how hard I pushed myself academically and as an athlete; how much sleep I lost; how many times I made myself sick with work.

It all got me into a headspace where I felt claustrophobically trapped in my own skull — trapped with all this work that I had to do but couldn’t. I also felt unlovable and unhealthy. I hated myself in a deep, visceral way that I’d never felt before.

I suddenly wasn’t afraid of death because I didn’t think it could hurt more or be emptier than my life was at that moment. I went up to the top floor of a notoriously tall building on campus and stuck my head out the window to visualize falling. I want to be clear: I’m not in danger of hurting myself, and I never will be. I have had a supportive environment that has helped me to nurture internal characteristics that make me resilient. But my point is that the issues I’m talking about here are real problems that can make even resilient people crack sometimes.

Something that helped me put my breakdown into context and helped me to assess and overcome it was a theme I explored in my global health and justice course a couple semesters ago. The course challenged me and my classmates to question the colonial definition of health in contrast with the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, whose ways of life were systematically erased by colonialism.

We learned that colonial structures of knowledge, morality and self-perception endure into the present on a global scale — this is called coloniality — and, by design, these structures continue to exploit and marginalize people based on differences in their identities and bodies. Coloniality is spread not only through overt discrimination and violence, but also subtly via colonial portrayals of humanity and our world in the educational system, political discourses, the arts and biomedicine. This is how coloniality injects a dominant belief system into both those privileged, like myself, and those marginalized, without most of us being aware of it.

One dominant belief is that humans need to constantly evolve to be above “savage, inferior others” (i.e., marginalized people). While my focus on perfectionism and valuing my self-worth through socially defined norms wasn’t intentionally an effort towards superiority, I can trace it back to the colonial narrative that makes us idolize people with successful careers — the most “socially evolved” people, that is.

When it comes to health, the colonial narrative defines it by the presence or absence of an observable biological problem. Yes, viruses, diseases, etc., are bad and biomedicine can help fight them. But in this class, we learned that there are deeper colonial wounds that biomedicine and psychiatry cannot address and even worsen and hide them in a colonial context.

Coloniality reduces people to objects, creating binaries in gender, ethics and religion so that we perceive a colonizer who is separate from their environment, and in whose best interest it is to exploit that environment as a resource, even when that “environment” is not just our beautiful natural world, but something as sacred as another human being.

This is manifest destiny. And it is unhealthy. Especially for marginalized people, who can only heal from their colonial wounds not through a quick-fix “cure” but through a process of being heard, listened to, understood and given space to take back their intersectionalities — their own unique blend of identities and experiences — for themselves.

My greatest insight came after reading Ruha Benjamin’s “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want” for class, when I realized that even people like me, who are privileged by coloniality, are made unhealthy by a society that is designed to exploit our fellow humans. This explains so much about the breakdown I had at the end of last semester when I judged my performance so harshly.

Benjamin explains humanity and our planet as an ecosystem, which makes sense, because however we perceive ourselves, we always will be animals, and our world will always be a habitat, even as it gets polluted, deforested and so on.

As a good Adirondacker, I know enough about the interconnectedness of ecosystems to know that when you fill one wetland, crush one ant, poison one drop of water, it can harm everything.

Benjamin also talks about quantum physics as an analogy for her idea that small kindnesses can produce large-scale change, which makes sense when energy and matter are so infinitely interconnected and time and space are so relative and non-linear.

This interconnection has resulted in not just a new understanding of science, but a way to make spirituality more grounded for me. With such oneness — such an ecosystem of energy and collective consciousness and symbiosis — spiritual phrases that used to sound hollow to me, like “we are all One,” have come to mean so much. It all gives me new reasons to live a full life and live for my individual and everyone’s collective health (which are one thing) instead of for my personal perfection.

If we are all One, we have to be healthy together, and to me that means loving each other. I think we should all find a unique meaning of “health” for ourselves, which I got to see happen communally at an event I attended as part of my class, and Love is a good place to start. That’s all kinds of Love, but Oneness has helped me to be less confused by consummate love, a balanced combination of intimacy, passion and commitment.

I used to be very confused by whether it’s okay to love someone that way because, on paper, it kind of looks like the only difference between consummate love and platonic friendship is a physical aspect, and I didn’t want to reduce anyone I cared about by implying that I was only physically attracted to them. I now believe that sexuality is a type of oneness itself, in which there is a more-than-physical connection, but that is also other than a platonic connection. We are biologically driven to love through all the forms of connection, and this is a spiritual calling, too.

I think that when people are hateful, it’s not “human nature,” it’s simple unhealthiness, derived from society. As the opposite of hate, that makes Love healthy, and its repression unhealthy; it makes it worthwhile to believe in Love. Maybe we need to decolonize Love a bit? Maybe marriage and even labels are too institutionalized to be healthy; to escape the coloniality that controls our institutions. But no matter what, Love can transcend entrenched institutions and any of that unhealthy stuff.

A while ago, a friend introduced me to “Nothing But Flowers” by The Talking Heads. The song describes a world in which all the constructs of manifest destiny have been lost to time, and the natural environment has reclaimed the Earth. I think that song is scary when you’ve internalized coloniality. But maybe let’s all let that go and try to find that place where there’s nothing but flowers inside ourselves — where not just environmental destruction, but also unhealthiness, is six feet deep in a bed of roses and “the birds and the trees are smiling upon [us].”

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Galen Halasz is a music and English double major at St. Lawrence University. His favorite things in the world are his family, any kind of outdoor adventure and any kind of artwork that pushes him to expand his worldview.