27 | No One Makes It On Their Own

0:09Speaker 1:You're listening to a Live Again a production of Psycopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

0:16Speaker 2:This beach was dangerous. I just realized that, being sucked down the coastline, and then I just see ocean, trying to stay oriented and now you know, and then facing these waves and try to time my breathing. Meanwhile the panic is setting it and in my body it felt like I'd been doing this forever, because I was just feeling how heavy and fatigued I was getting. As the water is going up over my head. There was that initial I'm going to fight it, and then I made peace with it.

0:54Speaker 1:Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death. Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

1:29Speaker 2:My name is Frankie Mullinix. I was originally born in Toronto, Canada and then my family moved with me when I was about six years old to Vancouver, so we're right on the West Coast, and I lived there until I graduated with my undergraduate degree, and then I ended up moving from there to live in Brisbane, Australia.

1:52Speaker 3:I moved to Australia because I had graduated from this wonderful theater program and in the course of that program, on the side, there was a theater company that was coming to Vancouver and teaching, but they were located in Australia, and.

2:09Speaker 2:The people involved, it was like everything they were doing was what I wanted to be a part of. And I thought that the discipline, the rigor the forms that they used to create with I was like, this is it, this is this is my life. I'm going to move to Australia. I'm majoring this theater company and that's it. I was almost twenty five and I had met this individual. And I don't know if it was the place that we met. We kind of met it like a weekend retreat sort of thing, so like you know, meditation, like just feeling a little removed from the hubbub or whatever.

2:46Speaker 2:And I met this beautiful, beautiful stunning individual and we had an Easter break. We were going to spend Easter living out of a van, tooling up and down the coast of US. And I am not a fly by the seat of my pants. I don't think of myself as like fun. I also know I was raised like I have a mother who likes things to be planned. You know. I'd have friends made pick up the phone and be like hey, come over.

3:14Speaker 4:Now.

3:15Speaker 2:That was very disruptive, right, So things had to be very planned, and so it was kind of exciting to try this persona I can be fun, I can be whatever this is. I could be semi farah living out of this van, but is not my natural state. I believe we'd been together for about three days or so, and this individual liked to surf. We went to a beach and by this point I was a little bit bored. I don't want to sit on the beach read my book. I am a doer, and so this individual had gone out to surf and I was like, you know, I'm gonna go for a swim Like I used to be competitive swimmer. I need to swim, I need to move my body a little bit. Time for me to go swim, get into the water, and the surf on this beach was no joke, not really having a good time, just kind of getting far enough out from the crashing waves that I'm not constantly ducking and getting slammed in the face with the water. I look back on the shore and I realize I have been dragged significantly past where I entered the water. There's an undertow going on, and the surfers are way over on the other side of the beach. I have no experience with this whatsoever. Vancouver.

4:50Speaker 2:We are protected by islands. It's a pretty, you know, calm area in terms of beach life, and this is not that. I just realize I'm being sucked down the coastline and all I can see is an outcropping of rocks, and then I just see ocean. I have no mental map of this, and so I decide that I'm going to try to kind of turn in swim to the outcropping of rocks that are in front of me and try to drag myself up. So I'm swimming to with the rocks, trying to grab onto rocks, getting sucked out by the waves, and then I'm having to turn around and face the waves so that as the wave then crashes over my head, I can take a breath, duck underneath, turn around and try and grab more rocks. So I'm trying to prevent the rocks from hitting my head, and this is happening over and over and over again, trying to stay oriented and not you know, and then facing these waves and try to time my breathing. Meanwhile the panic is setting it so I can feel this sort of anxiety hyperventilation thing building and building inside of me.

6:05Speaker 2:I did have a moment where I broke and started to cry out help. Something about being raised as a girl and a woman is kind of this, like don't let anyone see you struggle. You don't admit that you are not okay, internalize everything, kind of laugh it off and then go have a meltdown later. Time telescopes right, and because it was this repetitive thing of facing the wave, taking your breath, decking under, turning around, you know, holding rocks, just having to find this rhythm with the ebb and flow of the waves, and in my body, it felt like I'd been doing this forever because I was just feeling how heavy and fatigued I was getting every moment feels menified. I am sure. It was just I don't know, three five, seven minutes, it just it kind of felt like this is it. And I had this moment like you know what, I am am fed, I am done?

7:18Speaker 2:Why am I fighting this hard? I can feel my body getting more and more tired fighting the ocean? No one, I'm not going to win this. And so I completely had this moment of giving up, complete surrender. My life did not flash before my eyes, but I just felt my body like it was almost like opening my arms up and just being like, all right, you got me right. At that moment, the lifeguards show up, so you know, of course, with they're training, they're not gonna get down where I am because it is the worst place to be.

8:01Speaker 2:I am now stuck. Well, I guess I have to try a little longer. And this man, this random man who probably just came for a beach day, he shows up on the rocks where I'm trying to hold on. He gets down and he manages to grab me and kind of push me up or pull me up just enough on the rocks, and he kind of helps me to where the lifeguards are. And at that point he just disappears. He is the hardest person for me to fill in, which is so strange. I have no memory of this man's face. That's sort of the mythic part of this. So he deposits me with these lifeguards, goes off, and the lifeguards are administering me oxygen and they were sort of sticking all this little butterfly thingies on me, just cleaning my wounds and everything. And they explained to me how dangerous that area was. They said, we had death, you know, five days ago in the same area. They really wanted to impress on me, like how near to dying I had come, and how dangerous that area was.

9:21Speaker 2:I am in so much of a panic and kind of a shame spot, like I all they know is that I'm saying like I'm sorry, I'm so embarrassed, over and over and over again. And they realized that I was in need of a little more first attention than they could give me on the beach, and so they put me in their van and they drove me down the road to wherever their sort of lifeguard building. They didn't have to do stitches, but I was. I was cut from the chin down.

9:54Speaker 5:I was just like raw lots of slashes all over my body, and so they basically like cleaned me up, slapped a bunch of those butterfly things like escape my skin to edges together.

10:09Speaker 2:Now that I'm thinking about it. There was a debate about whether they would take me to the hospital, and I was like so in my shame spiral that I was like no, absolutely adamant that I did not want you. I had this person I barely knew, I didn't have my own car, and I'm like, what is going to My phone is over? Like no one is going to find me if they take me off to the hospital. And they ended up driving me back and like deposit me on this beach as this individual that I've been seeing walks out of the water looking very confused. So like I am in trauma, and I'm like I cannot rely on this person to take care of me in any way, right, And so again I go into my zone of like I can tell you that I've had a more eventful afternoon than you have. I'd had this sort of idea that for an Easter I could kind of like live in this van, you know, not take things too seriously whatever, And then I nearly died. I felt like I was supposed to have died. So after the Easter break, I came. I came back in de rehearsals, and everybody was sort of relaxed, and it had RESTful Easter.

11:34Speaker 2:The idea was sort of, now we're ready to leap in again, and then we're gearing up for opening night. For the most part, I was fairly physically unscathed. I have a couple of horrible scars I had, like for the longest time, I had a really really deep gash scar on my left hip. But I went back into these rehearsals. Ironically, the play was Dante's Inferno, and so then the idea is we're getting kind of in towards the center of health that is heavy, and I would have flashbacks in the middle of rehearsal all of a sudden, seeing almost like in real time, these waves crashing into my face, Oh you know, over my head. That's almost like a horror movie experience, right, You're like reaching for security or for something and then feeling this like force that is that is greater than you, just tearing you off and tearing you back. And so I was reliving that while in rehearsal. I basically walked out of that situation after the performances and what I think I'm done with acting. I think I quit. For me, what really made that experience so significant was that I accepted death in that moment, that I had this moment of there

12:57Speaker 2:is no point in me fighting this, I surrender to it. I'm done, and then it not happening, and then there being this huge, like existentialist breakdown of what does this be? So when I looked at my life, like I had images of twenty two, I like, I just there was a picture there at twenty three, twenty four, and twenty five. It was just blackness. It was just a void, and I was like, I just feel like this story ends at twenty five. And so to have this near death experience just like a week or two before my birthday, I was like, oh, that was where that ending was supposed to be.

13:38Speaker 4:And now what because the end is easy to me?

13:42Speaker 2:The end is easy, there's no like it's hard for maybe other people who are left behind, but for you, it's like the must story is done and I don't fear death. However, I mean I did feel in that moment there was that initial I'm gonna fight it. I'm gonna try, and then to fully just give in, you know, I made peace with it and then almost be like robbed of that. You know, I'm twenty five, I'm maybe a quarter or a little more than a quarter. I don't know of my life. I got a little longer to go. Maybe I should go see a dentist, you know, Maybe these teeth have to have to stay in my head a little longer. Maybe I should worry about like the well being of my body. That's when the work begins, right, That's when the looking at yourself and going like what is important? And I can choose to continue as I have been, or I can change or let it soften me, or let it open me up, or give me a new direction or a new value system. Because now I have the chance to readdress that. I guess that's act too.

14:58Speaker 2:Now what I am not somebody who's going to be like I'm so grateful for my trauma. Like I'm like, look, I don't think I needed to be like smacked on the head to learn things. I'd like to think that I can learn in other ways. I do think though that. I mean, I had someone show up out of nowhere and save my life. I can take meaning from that, maybe that the universe is like you're not done, or like we got you, or even just there's a there at least one good person out in the world, right, like there is a lot of goodness to draw from that right needing help and not being able to refuse it really showed me, you know what it is to be human. We aren't made to be alone. We are slow, we don't have very good clause, terrible teeth. We're not here to hunt for ourselves. We have to operate as families and clans and communities. And I feel like even now, more than ever, there's this pressure to have a narrative that's like I made it on my own, nobody makes it on their own. Stuff with that, like it is okay to say someone gave me a financial gift or a loan that helped me, or somebody lent me their car so I was able to move, or somebody even

16:37Speaker 2:named me in a room that I wasn't in and suggested that maybe I would be a great candidate for the job. We have to acknowledge that we need each other and that we're better when we have each other. We need to have people stop pretending that they're supposed to do it on their own, or spreading a narrative that makes other people think I must be broken because I'm not able to put the pieces together. If anything is.

17:08Speaker 4:Going to save us, that is going to save us.

17:33Speaker 1:Welcome back. This is a live again joining me for a conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive against story producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Day, and I'm your host, Dan Bush. I love what is revealed in the story, and it seems like it's a theme that keeps recurring. Often, people having a brush with death will not speak up or call out for help because they feel like they need to put on this brave face, you know. And I feel like the story, it's just fascinating to me that somebody who's at the you know, at the brink of death, and they have realized that there's nobody coming from them. It's only way after they probably should have that they're willing to show what they maybe later categorize as weakness. It's only way after they're already into this desperate situation that they're willing to call out for help.

18:27Speaker 6:Yeah, And at that point in our conversation when you hear them talking about like, no, we need other people. I have seldom seen a person more impassion behind the mic than they were in that moment talking about that takeaway like no, we actually need one another to survive. And it made me think about how, you know, conversations I've had with I have a friend who's a sociologist who will you know, She'll die on the hill of this idea that human beings do not exist in solitude or in isolation. We don't. We only exist as we exist to and with other people. And I find that to be a really beautiful takeaway. You know, we have young Frankie here literally dying in this ocean, and they would have died had it not been for this stranger who comes and saves their life in that moment. And then their task is to sort of reconstruct themselves and figure out, okay, what they are because they had given up at that point they thought, okay, no, life is over.

19:36Speaker 6:I'm going to die, and they'd even seen that coming earlier. There's sort of this idea of like, I'm not going to live to be twenty five. So there was almost like a oh okay, I made it now.

19:48Speaker 1:What I gleaned Like, So, I have a part of my background where I studied a lot of anthropology cultural anthropology, and I gleaned from that as well as and it's something I carry into in my film work and the other sort of storytelling that I do is I and I sort of everything that I do that's fiction, even it starts with this idea of all humans have this base need to belong. And I put forth the idea that the need, the human need to belong far out weighs our need to survive or our need to preserve life.

20:23Speaker 1:And this story speaks to that. Incredible. I mean, there's a lot of stories where I keep hearing, especially in your inner talks with these people, there's this consistent theme of people getting into these situations, these high risk situations, and ignoring their instincts and getting into them because of this base need to belong or this need to present themselves so that they can fit in.

20:47Speaker 6:Because belonging means you have a self, right, it means you are a person.

20:51Speaker 1:So and so what we do to compensate for our lack of sense of belonging is to identify with one thing or another, we become you know, we might joining gang or become a deadhead, or become a you know, like there's all these things that we do to identify to be a part of something. But specifically in Frankie's story, I hear them wanting to the need to present this strong persona, to not admit to weakness even when they're dying.

21:21Speaker 6:Can I tell you something that I'm really that I love as sort.

21:24Speaker 1:Of a coda absolutely to the story.

21:28Speaker 6:I want to tell you what Frankie's up to today, because they've really brought together their you know, their passion and talents for theater and movement and trauma recovery and sports strangely enough, swimming as it were, right, So they run a really dynamic physical theater company and it's actually called Burning Bones Physical Theater. So they didn't leave, they didn't leave theater. They came back to it, and I just I want to to let listeners know that they came back to it. So they came back to their passion.

22:05Speaker 2:And they do.

22:05Speaker 1:Mental health work.

22:07Speaker 6:So having this trauma and thinking about these sort of separated selves, right, they help their climb their clients overcome trauma. And on top of that, they're an internationally ranked competitive endurance athlete. So it's really to me, I think it's really neat to see how their present day life feels in some way like the culmination of events that we see in this one the story from like this one thing that happened to them.

22:35Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, although.

22:37Speaker 6:Of course there are other stories and their life as well that has brought them to this place.

22:41Speaker 1:You know, what else is that I find fascinating is that before with whatever acting troop they were in where they were using trauma and in the wrong way, they were using trauma as an access to some sort of truth on stage or character. Sounds like that might have been what was going on. Now now Frankie is doing that the right way in some way, like, you know, does that make sense now?

23:07Speaker 4:Yeah?

23:07Speaker 7:No, And in a sense in the earlier way and the sort of like Strasburg Methode and I hope you could hear me rolling my eyes. It's it's exploiting your own PTSD for the purpose of the play. They're honoring what happened to them and creating work that that elevates and that explores what happened to them, and and their trauma.

23:35Speaker 6:What was the premonition that they were having it was It wasn't a premonition like a vision. It was just the sense of they sort of had a sense of where their life was going to go, and when they saw age twenty five, there was nothing.

23:49Speaker 2:It was just like darkness.

23:52Speaker 1:So it really is a literal like I'm trying my hardest to survive and just the moment of giving up in the hand. That's symbolic, Yeah, a kind of metaphorical.

24:02Speaker 6:Yeah, because that is what happened their life.

24:04Speaker 1:Yeah, the old me is going to die.

24:07Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

24:17Speaker 1:Next time on Alive Again, we meet Aileen Murray, a cancer survivor who later narrowly escaped a gunman's bullet. Her story reflects on the power of community and compassion.

24:27Speaker 7:The bullet if it was just a millisecond earlier, like it would have gone in my temple.

24:37Speaker 1:Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die Nicholas Duakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, Additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers are Rima L. K Ali and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Gerhartslovichca, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben love It and Alexander Rodriguez.

25:07Speaker 1:I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thank you to Frankie Molinex for sharing their story. For more about Frankie, visit their website Frankiemolinex dot com. Alive Again is a production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l I v e A g A I N p R O j E c T at gmail dot com.