I survived Beyoncé’s concert at FedEx Field on Sunday, and I will never be the same.

I stood in the stadium corridors, packed in with hundreds – maybe thousands – of other Beyoncé fans, unable to move. Every few minutes, I took a step while grabbing onto my friend so as not to lose her in the crowd. She was holding onto another friend who was shouting, but for the most part I couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

It was 8:30 – a bit after the concert start time of 8 – and we were trying to get to our seats. Apparently, before we’d arrived a shelter-in-place order was issued for thunderstorms. Presumably this was why there were so many people in the corridors. At several points, I was forcefully tumbled through the crowd. Bodies were touching bodies where they shouldn’t be touching. “This is too intimate, too intimate!” a woman shouted. “I’m scared,” another muttered to a stranger. “Black Lives Matter!” the crowd suddenly began chanting.

I’m writing this on five hours of sleep after what felt like a life-and-death nightlong struggle in which I ran (I never run), survived a thunderstorm (and, without a poncho or silver cowboy hat, got completely drenched), and waded through the densest crowd I had ever been in.

By the time my friends and I got to our seats – at the very top of FedEx Field’s open-air stadium – it was well past 9. But that was only the beginning. We stood exposed to the elements, including rain, heat, and potential lightning, in the uppermost seats of FedEx Field for what felt like hours in torturous anticipation. (The concert, according to my friend, would start at around 10). We were informed there was lightning reported in the area, and once again, the crowd was asked to please seek shelter. My friends and I, as perfectly rational people with their priorities in order, did not move. Sure, lightning could strike us, and we could die. But we had risked too much and suffered too long to leave our seats.

“I feel really good,” my friend said cheerfully as the rain began to peter out. As though in response, the rain began to pour down on us again, this time in torrents.

We began to catastrophize. We could get struck by lightning. Worse, the concert could get canceled. I prayed (to Beyoncé), literally clasping my hands together. Please Beyoncé, please relieve us of our suffering. We sat – along with most people in the audience, wet and ignoring the warning. It disappeared after several minutes to loud cheers, but it continued to pour.

By the time she appeared – a beautiful, glittering, ant-sized speck surrounded by swirling stage clouds – my chest was heaving and I was clasping my hands to my mouth. I think I was sobbing. Or maybe that was the rain.

There were several points during the concert where I swore I saw flashes in the sky. I couldn’t be sure if that was the light show from the concert or the dangerous storm. Indistinguishable really. Witnessing Beyoncé in a certain state of mind, as I was in, is just as overpowering, and potentially as deadly.

I’d grown up listening to her. And still nothing prepared me for her voice. It seemed to fill my entire body. Maybe I had died at some point, in the rowdy crowd in the stadium corridor or struck by lightning at the top of FedEx Field, and there she was, welcoming me into the afterlife, rewarding me for all of my toil and suffering on earth.

As distant and goddess-like as she was, there were several moments where I felt like she was someone I knew personally, directly speaking to me and my friends, not a crowd of approximately 50,000 people (totally not having delusions here). One of my friends was celebrating her 25th birthday. When Beyoncé said, “We have some birthdays in the house tonight,” I thought “of course, she knows.” When she said “Love yourselves and take care of yourselves,” I thought – “you knew I needed to hear that this week, thank you.” When the concert was over and she began to levitate (literally) and said, “get home safe,” it was like a friend telling me to text her when I got home. When she told us we were one of her favorite audiences (and declared D.C. the errbody on mute war winner), I thought “of course! I’m here.”

The most surreal moment, however, might not have been the concert itself. It was hours back, while I was in the crowd in the stadium corridor, moving at a pace that felt like two footsteps every five minutes. That morning, I had secretly dreaded coming, because I don’t like crowds (especially after a fatal crowd crush last year in South Korea, where I grew up), or summer heat, or running to catch the last Metro train well after 1 a.m.

I was standing in that crowd, wondering if anyone had been injured, prompting the chant of Black Lives Matter. I tried to assess how dense the crowd was. I was still able to move, but not without bumping into someone.

Then there was deafening screaming all around me. I whipped my head around – at some point I felt a painful snap in my neck from straining. Hands shot up with phones.

“She’s here!” my friend shouted.

“What? Where?” Around me were swarms and swarms of people. I couldn’t see anything.

“She’s above us.” He looked almost panicked. “She’s right above us.”

I looked up. We were below some kind of ledge. On the escalator leading to that ledge were people, still screaming, their phones pointed toward the ledge.

My friends and I couldn’t see what was on the ledge. But we’re convinced Beyoncé was standing there, directly above us. She was right above us, very close, closer than most people could get to her physically in a lifetime, surrounded by screaming.

Physically, I’m in my eerily calm apartment the next day typing this, my hair still filthy from yesterday’s rain and I’ve got dark circles under my eyes. Mentally, however, I’m still at the stadium, and may be there for a long time, wet and crushed in a crowd, Beyoncé a few feet above my head, very close, unseen, but there like some omnipresent divine being.

Life can be dangerous and tedious, but she is there. Take care of yourselves, she says. Thank you, I say, hobbling on the half-hour walk from FedEx Field to the Metro, looking like a clown with my ruined makeup. Thank you.