OCD, Plant Medicine, and the Body: Reclaiming Neurodivergence Beyond Western Psychology
- Kiing Curry
- May 12
- 8 min read
There are certain griefs that only arrive once the body becomes quiet enough to hear itself.
OCD, Plant Medicine, and the Body: Reclaiming Neurodivergence Beyond Western Psychology
I Know Tings
A study of embodiment, pattern, survival, and liberation through lived experience.
Each essay is a return to the body.
There Are Certain Griefs That Arrive After Silence
There are certain griefs that only arrive once the body becomes quiet enough to hear itself.
Not healed.
Not fixed.
Not suddenly free.
Just quiet enough.
And what I heard underneath all the noise was devastating.
My body had been trying to tell the truth my entire life.
Not metaphorically.
Not spiritually alone.
Literally.
The loops.
The overwhelm.
The repetitions.
The sensory intensity.
The fixation.
The pattern tracking.
The exhaustion.
The rituals.
The spiraling.
The inability to let certain thoughts go once they entered the body.
All of it was communication.
And almost no one cared what any of it meant from inside of me.
They only cared whether I could still perform normal.
That is the part I think western conversations around OCD, neurodivergence, embodiment, and mental health often refuse to touch.
Not everyone enters these conversations through care.
Some of us arrive through abandonment.
Some of us arrive after decades of being translated away from ourselves by family, religion, school systems, labor systems, gender systems, racial systems, and psychiatric frameworks that were never actually built to see us clearly in the first place.
And that distinction matters.
Because I did not spend forty-two years deeply held by systems of care.
I spent forty-two years surviving systems of correction.
There is a difference.
I think sometimes people hear critique of western mental health frameworks and immediately assume someone is anti-healing, anti-support, anti-care.
That is not what this is.
This is an essay about what happens when a person who was never fully seen by the system is still expected to trust the system’s interpretation of their body over their own lived experience.
How exactly was I supposed to do that?
How was I supposed to trust institutions that historically pathologize Blackness, queerness, transness, sensitivity, difference, noncompliance, and bodily deviation while simultaneously refusing to diagnose or support those same populations adequately?
How was I supposed to trust frameworks that often only recognize distress once it becomes disruptive to other people?
Especially when my entire life had already taught me that my role was not to know myself. My role was to remain manageable.
There Are Certain Griefs That Arrive After Silence
That grooming started early.
And I use the word grooming intentionally.
Religion.
Gender performance.
Behavior correction.
Forced emotional suppression.
Compulsory productivity.
Respectability politics.
The constant pressure to appear “normal.”
All of it was placed onto my body long before I had language to refuse it.
But I also need to be clear about something else.
My family did not exist outside the violence of the system.
They reproduced it directly onto my body.
And I need to say that plainly because people are often too eager to romanticize Black familial survival while refusing to acknowledge the violence many of us endured inside it.
I was being physically abused from the moment I entered the world.
My nervous system was not shaped inside gentleness.
Not inside curiosity.
It was shaped inside fear, punishment, correction, religious coercion, behavioral control, and bodily interruption.
Even as an infant my body was being disciplined.
I used to bite while breastfeeding and my mother responded by pinching and popping me.
Raised Toward Acceptability
People dismiss moments like this because they happen early.
Because they happen inside motherhood. Because they happen inside normalized violence.
But the body remembers before language does.
My brain was never given the conditions necessary to settle into safety.
It was trained toward hypervigilance almost immediately.
And that pattern continued for decades.
So when people speak about healing as though it is simply positive thinking, therapy language, breathing exercises, or mindset shifts, I struggle with that framing deeply.
Because some of us were never allowed to develop inside nervous-system safety in the first place.
Some of us were trained into fragmentation before we even had words.
I was not raised toward embodiment.
I was raised toward acceptability.
Toward stillness.
Toward masking.
Toward compliance.
Toward performance.
Toward making other people comfortable inside my body even when I was nowhere inside it myself.
No one asked:
What does your mind feel like from the inside?
No one asked:
What overwhelms you?
What patterns are you tracking?
Why are you exhausted?
Why are you spiraling?
Why does your nervous system seem permanently electrified?
Only:
Can you function?
Can you perform?
Can you pass?
And because I could perform enough.
Because I could speak enough.
Because I could intellectualize enough.
Because I could remain useful enough.
The deeper fractures disappeared into the background.
Colonial Psychology and the Limits of Diagnosis
This is why I struggle with the flattening language around OCD.
Because much of the western framework centers symptom interruption without fully interrogating the conditions that produced the nervous system in the first place.
Exposure.
Response prevention.
Behavior interruption.
Habituation.
And I understand the architecture of those approaches intellectually.
But I am not interested in pretending western psychology is neutral simply because it has institutional legitimacy.
These are colonial systems.
Systems built alongside slavery, racial hierarchy, forced assimilation, carceral logic, and the pathologizing of deviation.
So no, I do not feel obligated to center western psychological frameworks as the highest authority on healing simply because they were formalized through institutions that never intended to fully recognize my humanity in the first place.
Especially as a Black person whose family line was already forced into survival structures through slavery, religious conditioning, labor extraction, and generational violence long before I was born.
We carry knowledge outside the colonial frame.
Embodied knowledge.
Communal knowledge.
Plant knowledge.
Ritual knowledge.
Pattern knowledge.
Spiritual knowledge.
And I am more interested in those lineages now than I am in seeking legitimacy from systems that historically required our fragmentation in order to function.
Because what happens when the body has spent decades learning that vigilance is necessary for survival?
What happens when your nervous system was shaped inside instability, coercion, hypervisibility, racialization, gender enforcement, religious fear, and chronic emotional abandonment?
Compulsion vs Ritual
What happens when pattern tracking was not irrational but adaptive?
That does not mean every compulsive behavior is sacred.
It does not mean suffering should be romanticized.
It does not mean distress is not real.
It means context matters.
Deeply.
Because there is a difference between compulsion and ritual.
Compulsion says:
If I do not complete this correctly, danger will happen.
Ritual says:
This action helps me return to myself.
Externally those behaviors may look similar.
Internally they are worlds apart.
One collapses agency.
The other restores it.
The BespokeCurry Cosmos as Embodiment Mapping
One is coercion.
The other is relationship.
This is also what I am mapping through the BespokeCurry Cosmos.
Not a singular healing method.
Not a guru framework.
Not rigid doctrine.
A sovereignty practice.
A way of learning how to remain in relationship with yourself instead of constantly abandoning yourself in order to survive systems that require fragmentation.
The diagrams.
The waters.
The rituals.
The sensory mapping.
The food.
The astrology.
The repetition.
All of it is asking the same question:
What helps the body remain audible to itself?
Because healing, for me, is not becoming acceptable.
It is becoming inhabitable.
After the Plant Medicine Shift
And that shift accelerated profoundly through plant medicine.
Cannabis. Fungi.
Not as trends.
Not as aesthetics.
Not as escapism.
As interruption technologies.
As bodily portals.
As methods of disrupting the architecture that had been built around my consciousness for decades.
What frustrates me about conversations around cannabis and fungi is how often people flatten them into recreation, spirituality, or self-destruction without acknowledging the immense intelligence these relationships can require.
Because at this point my relationship to plant medicine is deeply technical.
Deeply observational.
Deeply embodied.
I am not randomly consuming substances searching for transcendence.
I am studying interaction.
Dosage.
Timing.
Terpene profiles.
Sensory response.
Nervous system fluctuation.
Pattern interruption.
Mental pacing.
Energy movement.
Overstimulation thresholds.
Body memory.
Sleep architecture.
Cognitive sharpness.
Emotional accessibility.
I am mapping.
Intentionally.
Because my goal is not to become neurotypical.
My goal is to build days where my mind can operate within the normalcy of its own neurodivergence without constantly being forced into violent spikes by systems that fundamentally do not care whether I remain alive, regulated, rested, or whole.
That is different.
Cannabis has taught me that not all mental speed is anxiety.
Fungi has taught me that not all pattern disruption is destruction.
And both have helped me recognize how much of what I once considered “myself” was actually chronic nervous-system adaptation to coercion.
People speak about plant medicine as though it simply creates altered perception.
But for me the experience was often the opposite.
It removed distortion.
Or at least interrupted it long enough for me to recognize how profoundly separated I had become from myself.
The body does not lie the way performance does.
Becoming Audible to Yourself Again
And once the body finally became audible, grief arrived immediately after.
Because there is no easy way to metabolize realizing how much of your life was spent outside yourself.
There is no easy way to process the possibility that your body was communicating clearly for decades while everyone around you continued teaching you to mistrust it.
At forty-two years old that realization is not inspirational.
It is catastrophic.
There is grief in understanding how much of your personality was adaptation.
There is grief in realizing how many relationships were built around your performance instead of your actual embodiment.
There is grief in understanding that people often preferred you dissociated because that version of you was easier to navigate.
And there is rage too.
Rage at the institutions.
Rage at the family systems.
Rage at the spiritual coercion.
Rage at the forced normalcy.
Rage at how many people benefited from your disconnection while calling it love.
Because what is called care is not always care.
Sometimes it is merely social conditioning wrapped in concern.
And one of the hardest things about reclaiming yourself later in life is realizing how many people become uncomfortable once you stop participating in your own disappearance.
Once you stop overriding your body. Once you stop minimizing your needs. Once you stop masking continuously. Once you stop translating yourself into something more digestible.
People call it change.
But often it is simply return.
I do not believe every loop is meaningful.
I do not believe every repetitive behavior is liberatory.
But I no longer believe every form of repetition is pathology either.
Some of us developed elaborate internal systems because we were left alone too long inside environments that demanded fragmentation.
Some of us became hypervigilant because the world required it.
Some of us learned to dissociate because embodiment was punished.
Some of us learned to perform sanity instead of experiencing safety.
And some of us found our way back to ourselves not through institutional recognition but through experimentation, embodiment, ritual, plant medicine, observation, pattern literacy, and finally learning how to hear the body underneath the performance.
That is not failure.
That is survival becoming conscious of itself.
And maybe that is where healing actually begins.
Not in becoming normal.
But in becoming audible to yourself again.
Tongue Check
Taste the air.
Taste the residue.
Taste the years spent disappearing.
What was forced.
What was inherited.
What was survival.
What was never yours.
The body remembers before language does.
OCD, Plant Medicine, and the Body: Reclaiming Neurodivergence Beyond Western Psychology
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