In her bestselling 2012 memoir, Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner details her experience of getting a neck-lift, noting that she “never imagined” that it would be a “transcendental, life-changing experience.” She titles her epilogue, in which she gives a play-by-play of the surgery, “The Epiphany.” It’s a term that describes “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something,” or the presence of a “deity.” Jenner talks about her abject fear of losing control, her love for her family and friends, and the deeply held faith in God that allowed her to come through the procedure successfully.
Many people don’t understand that the Kardashians are Christians. Their faith might not look like your faith, but even the earliest episodes are filled with religious — even traditional — values of the importance of family ties, perseverance, hard work, and forgiveness. The storylines might strike some as calculated and contrived, but they are constructed to flow like parables. Under this rubric, something worldly like plastic surgery can lead to an experience of the divine.
I share this because my experience of receiving the vaccine was profoundly mystical. I am searching for a way to talk about mystical experiences with others in a way that is not instantly dismissible, that can be understood even in the context of our corrupt world. I never imagined that getting a shot would become a rite of passage, or that I would be willing to undergo it more than once.
When I received the first Moderna dose, in April 2021, I felt nothing. I worried that my arm hadn’t been pierced at all, so anticlimactic had the injection been after a year of isolating, waiting, and hoping. But by the next morning, a faint soreness had set in, and I was relieved something was taking effect.
The second shot was a different story. I had been warned that side effects from this dose might be more intense, especially for young people with healthy immune systems. But I was not prepared for what happened that night, when I woke up in the darkness, curled and writhing, nausea filling my chest and heart pounding. My bed had become a wave, and with each breath I struggled to stay above the black, bottomless water. I called Rite Aid twice to beg them to tell me this was normal. It was 3:00 a.m., and a kindly voice with an Indian accent told me on the other side of the line that yes, unfortunately, this was nothing out of the ordinary.
It happened again at 5:00 a.m., when I woke up only to think that I was passing out, and contemplated going to the hospital. Again my hands were numb and an alien substance coursed through my limbs as my body struggled to keep hold of itself.
The next morning I thought, never again. I have a natural skepticism of medical interventions that are not completely necessary. I am a faith and flag conservative in many ways but I also have a hippie-dippie side and a penchant for holistic cures — kind of like if Ainsley Hayes went to the Lilith Fair. It’s part of why I never wanted a fool like de Blasio to coerce me to take the vaccine, part of why I wanted to leave New York City for good, part of why I continue to believe in bodily autonomy and applaud the Supreme Court for striking down the preposterous OSHA workaround.
I had planned to become a kind of folk-libertarian. To rent a single wide mobile home on the edge of a field and firmly plant a Don’t Tread On Me flag. To live without needing a single soul, to never fuck again. And certainly to never get married or have a family. Freedom at all costs! There are many reasons why I arrived at this conclusion, but around Christmastime, something began to crack.
Jenner writes that in preparing for her surgery, she began to reflect on how “hard” it was for her to “let things go:” “Fear became my enemy. Fear was overwhelming and powerful … Making plans for this neck-lift reminded me how important friends were and are to me, and I knew I needed them.” On “the morning of the surgery,” she “burst into tears, overcome with emotion.” As the “nurses wheeled [her] into the operating room,” she acknowledged that she “took people for granted the first time around.” Now, in preparing to “begin again,” she was “able to find a complete peace.” She realized that “we are all God’s children … here to help someone else, encourage someone else, be a blessing to someone else.”
In deciding to get the booster last month, all I could think about was how much I wanted to be around other people again. I wanted to come out of the isolation and the wilderness and be with others without fear of getting sick. I knew of a couple that was unboosted and had fallen ill. As much as I despise the jab pressure regime and the CDC, and have come to loathe Covidians and support the loosening of all restrictions, as much as I feared a reprisal of the side effects, I decided to get the third shot.
I knew what was coming. That evening I lay in bed, prepared for the nausea and heart palpitations, put on a podcast and kept the lights on. I wanted to be ready.
Around 5:00 a.m. I woke up with the same familiar feeling of aches, as though my muscles were seized by the negative underbelly of a full-body high. My stomach rose into my throat. Sweat oozed out of my forehead and I placed my hands over my eyes and told myself to focus on Jesus.
Jesus. Jesus. Please help me.
I closed off my consciousness to anything other than that image of Christ before me, looking at me with an outstretched hand.
Immediately a voice spoke.
“There is nothing to be afraid of.”
It was God. I knew it was God. I took a breath. I agreed on some subconscious level to let go of all fear. That is what He was asking of me. The nausea started to subside. I heard it again.
“There is nothing to be afraid of.”
That calm, unmistakeable voice. It started to speak to me, not just of the absence of fear but of other things, like what I would do in my life, where I was going, and the people I would know. It told me that this moment was simply something I was passing through, that there was life beyond this instant, that I would be ok.
Two minutes later I lay there damp with sweat, my hands still over my eyes and my chest shuddering. But something had passed through me. Something had visited me. The worst was over.
Buddhist thinker Huang Po, who died in 850 AD, said that “men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the void is not really void but the realm of the real dharma.” I have realized that this is what I want in life — an experience of losing control so completely that one has no choice but to encounter God, and to feel His embrace as He reminds us that He is the only real security we can have. We cannot keep our bodies, we may not always be able to pay our bills, but we have God. And if we believe, He has us.
This is the surrender that I need. I do not care about going to church to be “a good person” or a “kind” and “respectable” member of society. If when I walk into a church there are not people there with their hands raised in the air while they sing or testify, I do not trust it. As Twitter user Wokal Distance writes, “I am, after all, a Pentecostal.” This is why when I lived in the city I often felt more comfortable as a guest in the Black church, where people shouted back “Amen!” at the pastor, than in Episcopal spaces where people sat with their hands folded in their lap. My people were Baptists too, “holy rollers.” They were not ashamed to be overcome by the Holy Spirit. Too often Christianity is only palatable to educated elites if it is tepid or restrained; any wilder, freer experience of faith is suspect.
Jenner concludes her neck-lift story by saying that as the anesthesia was administered and she “lost consciousness, [she] exhaled and, finally … let go, trusting in God.” She writes about waking up and realizing that “somehow, some way,” she had “made it through.”
I am a very armored person, and it takes a special act of God to allow me to open myself to others. As Jenner notes, “I took people for granted the first time around, in my first life.” I am determined not to do that this time, after the pandemic. We need each other too much, and our time is too limited. I believe God wants us to come back to each other.