Days 0815 & 0816

When I was 18 and had been assaulted in an elevator by a complete stranger, I was desperately looking for things I could control in my life. I felt like everything I understood to be true was no longer so. Things like: if you treat others well, others will treat you well. Kind of the basics of sanity really.

Looking back I can see that the two things I grabbed and ‘controlled’ were my own emotions: I’m absolutely fine! (An utterly false ‘control’ of course – much more of an ignoring and suppression.)

And the second was how what had happened to me made other people feel, specifically the people I cared about.

I didn’t want them to be upset or sad or scared because of me.

Good people don’t make other people feel bad.

Or so my logic went at the time.

So I spent an inordinate amount of energy convincing people I was fine until I had numbed every nerve in my body.

I remember lying in the bathtub late one evening and thinking how my skin couldn’t feel anything, including the heat of the water. I resisted the urge many times to test that theory by hurting myself.

Now, so many years later, I can see clearly that numbness was not the absence of feeling, but the overwhelming of it. So much so bottled up.

And sometimes the safest way to feel those feelings is to share the privilege of them with others.

Day 0240

What is the purpose of grief?

Pain teaches you stuff — unless it’s chronic: then it just tires you out.

But most pain serves as a warning. The stick part of our body’s ‘stick and carrot’ approach to survival.

And love and happiness and elation steer you towards things that are (hopefully) good for you.

Sexy feelings direct you towards procreation, which is what it’s all about after all: sex and death and rock and roll.

But grief, what does it do other than eat up your insides, make you wish things were different and crush your spirit?

It doesn’t teach: it punishes.

And grief carried alone, grief not shared, grief ignored, grief against which the only one who could share it with you turns their back … that kind of grief does nothing for any one.

 

Day 0238

Please note that this post is in no way saying that I actually wish to careen madly through space by jumping from an airplane.

I’ve never been much of a flyer either in spite of because my parents travelled me all over the world in many and varied winged appliances through my baby, child and teenagehoods. I get very jumpy – mostly when I feel the surge of engines thrusting the sardine can forward, the force of being pulled up from the solid ground and that bloody banking turn they always seem to do where the comfort if the earth through the window turns into all water or all sky.

But anyway … I’ve always been one who, when I allow my mind to wander, can feel the thinness of the metal floor beneath my feet and the thousands of kilometers of freezing nothingness under there that I could fall through.

On one of my more recent winged trips though I had an odd change of perspective. When I had that moment of feeling the nothingness wanting to grab me and take me away, down, down, down, instead of white, hot panic, I felt a lightness, a relief.

In fact that relief felt so real that. Tears began to pour out of my eyes the way they
Do when you’re waiting for bad news and get good news instead; or even when you’re waiting for bad news and at least get it so it ends the waiting.

I was embarrassed – not that anyone was looking of course. And the tears kept coming, like they were happening for me and around me and were something I had to just wait for.

My brain worked away at the question of why I felt relieved, and it was this: (please don’t think less of me) if the air and wind and clouds and gravity swallowed me whole, I wouldn’t have to do anything, figure out anything or make decisions any more.

I know it is a false relief – while I love the concept of giving up responsibility and the sharp pain of feeling every thing, I would hate every second of a life lived like that.

This is the paradox of me.

Day 0232

I used to be able to make myself disappear at will. My body, of course, would still be sitting wherever I’d plonked it, but the rest of me – the important bits – would disappear. I wouldn’t say it was a nice feeling exactly. But it was a useful one.

I haven’t used it in a good long while. Not because I haven’t needed it.

Something inside me won’t let me use it any more.

And I know all the self-help types would fall all over themselves telling me how that’s ‘awesome’ and that I’m beginning to ‘take control’ and ‘know myself’ but that is a load of codswallop.

I think I’m just plain tired out.

Which means that there is no strength behind my lack of disappearance and that I no longer have that protection mechanism to draw on. I don’t really see this as A Good Thing.

The biggest advantage of Disappearance Act was the numbness it provides. ‘Can’t feel a thing’ was my mantra as metaphorical swords slashed through my innards and unwanted hands grabbed at me.

Now, I know full well that only really delays feelings, but at least they are somewhat weaker feelings courtesy of the delay.

Today is one of those days when I would either like to disappear completely or have the pain externalised.

I resolved this year that I would not will myself to disappear. But I can’t quite cope with fully feeling  the feelings that are grabbing at me today. So I will visualise them instead as a compromise. This is what they are like:

They are just that side of cold. They have weight. They are slimy but also firm and have sharp edges. When they hit me, they leave a mark on my skin. They thud, they whack, they produce a dull ache and a harsh whipping snap.

I suddenly have an image of myself being slapped repeatedly with a large salmon. At least that made me laugh. And the scales left on my skin with each slap must twinkle slightly in the light.

Day 0201

Yesterday, with the support of an inspiring lady, I stood up for myself.
I was given an unreasonable request.
And instead of my usual ‘ohhhh, ok’ I stood there and said ‘no’.
It was a loooong process as the request travelled through all the twisted pathways of my mind, conscience, sense of obligation, politeness training etc until the no came out my lips. But still, it got there.

And it wasn’t just a logical no either. It was a ‘the very idea makes me sick to my stomach and I shouldn’t and don’t have to feel like that anymore’ kind of no. One where I didn’t just dismiss the feeling in the pit of my stomach but instead said: ok, I’ll listen to you. I’ll still weigh you against rationality but I’ll listen.

For me, this is a major breakthrough.

Especially as my no was accepted.

I felt good because of it.

And, most important lesson: the world did not stop spinning.

Day 0182

I was thinking too much today.

And I got to tossing around the idea that all feelings have a temperature and a texture.

To me, anger is cold and hard.

Sadness is cold and sharp.

Love is light and warm.

Betrayal is chilled and cloaking.r

 

Days 151 & 152

When I was a child, I learned that being passive was the only effective counterattack to violent anger. My sister would punch me, and kick me, hit me with things, suffocate me under a pillow, scream at me and hold my head underwater while we were swimming. The only thing that ended these sessions of good sibling ‘fun’ was acting like I didn’t care.

I foiled her by reacting to violence with peace, to anger with calm, to yelling with quiet.

It was so effective that she showed me off to her school friends by asking me to stand still while she hit me and they all watched. I obliged. it was so much easier to stand there on the sidewalk outside the school living inside my head, than to react and get hit again.

The school friends all laughed, of course, but I’m not convinced a couple of them didn’t look at me like they found my sister’s behaviour a little concerning.

And that is exactly where I still go when confronted: though I’ve expanded the menu somewhat, offering a la carte servings when my feelings are being hurt.

‘Just go into your head,’ I tell myself, ‘just stand here and think for a moment, and it will all go away.’

The last time I did that was a year ago today when someone I thought cared a lot about me said something that made me feel cheap, unimportant and hurt beyond measure. And doing that to myself yet again finally made me realise I am not going to do it any more.

After four decades I am  realising none of ‘it’ has gone ‘away’. All those times I forced myself inward, I forced those feelings inward too. They didn’t go out into the world and disperse with the evening breeze, they piled inside me on top of one another, stomping the preceding ones down until they sit there in hardened shapes that shift and groan like tectonic plates.

Day 0018

Learning ever so slowly not to just be a ‘head on a stick’. Embracing it all. I mean, at least I can feel things, right? Some people can’t even get that far. And life is definitely richer for it.

Arsehat men directly dealt with: 0.1 (again with that empty/confused husk)

Tomorrow is going to consist of watching old men in suits tell me they know better than me and almost every other Tasmanian. After a year-and-a-half of work and passion, it’s not going to be an easy thing to see.