A year ago, towards the
end of January, I was asked by my psychiatrist to either go home or
be institutionalised. I was having what I believed were "panic
attacks", which turned out to be episodes of deep-rooted anger
and sadness, which were very destructive both towards myself and
towards people that I loved. specifically, these episodes affected my
boyfriend, who I was living with at the time. After three months of
episodes which occured almost daily, going back to my hometown (away
from the boyfriend) was a welcome respite.
It made no sense to me.
Though there had been some indication of a deep-rooted problem in the
past, for which I had sought therapy at a time, there really had
never been any kind of conscious awareness of such deep hatred for
myself, such anguish and fear of abandonment and such terrible anger.
It seemed as though my body
had preserved these experiences and feelings for this time, when they
were triggered and it was sort of "safer" for them to
emerge. I was breaking down, and I see this as an elaborate process -
a process that is still ongoing and through which I lose parts of
myself and recover others, and become a fragmented, sometimes hollow
and sometimes messy, visage of my former self.
I am writing this right
now, with the same man lying next to me and snoring gently, because
two nights back I slid back to that dark space. And yet, despite the
horror of the days before, today there is a shift (so palpable that
even I, instinctively sceptical about my body, believe it) towards
something that feels like togetherness and safety.
I also am writing this
because I want to acknowledge and celebrate the many hours of
practicing Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication, therapy,
Eugene Gendlin's Focusing and just plain old support and acceptance
from my friends and family, and these fine, somtimes infinitesimal,
momemts of connection and hope. I also want to acknowledge and
celebrate the joy and tremendous value of being broken because I
think most often we measure the "success" of our stories in
terms of whether or not we are "better" or "happy"
without recognising that happy, better and wellness are not states of
being so much as they are processes.
For some reason, a lot
of people I know are going through this kind of shift. Perhaps it is
simply that I have finally found some sort of direction I want my
life to move towards that I am reading a lot of articles and books
about just this thing - imperfection, being broken and fragmented,
being many weird parts of oneself at once and nothing specific. I
also want to write because I have a need for contribution. I want to
say that every step, no matter how small it is, matters.
Last year, on the
anniversary of my mother's death, I drank a reasonably decent single
malt and committed to working on myself. At the time, it was a
commitment constructed on an amorphous sense that I could be happy,
better, well, and a palpable reality that my relationship was not
working not because there were differences between us that
could not be resolved but because of the indefinite, borderless
reality of my struggles with myself. It wasn't the absence of love or
connection, but the presence of such huge loneliness in me that it
was difficult to reach beyond it.
In the last couple of
months I've touched on an image within me: the image of me, alone, at
a huge beach with great vastness and emptiness of land and ocean all
around. I have realised this image on the tangible level - in that
every part of my body seems to feel this image. Focusing teaches us
that the body preserves our expereences and that in accessing and
accepting those parts of yourself that seem stuck, you can heal. As a
child, I feared the ocean. I feared that it would suck me in and take
me far, far away from the known and loved into the unknown and
unreachable, and I would be lost and never found again. It was a
terrible fear, and stretched also to my mother - in that I feared it
would take her away.
In some senses, the
ocean was life itself, and I recognise now that love is, for me, that
unknown quantity, the continent from which I fear I cannot return.
The truth, or so it
seems to me, is that every moment of connection is like this ocean.
Every connection invariably and infinitely transforms us. We cannot
make an honest connection with someone without being changed in one
way or another. Also, we are not in control of this, and that can be
really scary. But at the same time, I think that is the point, pretty
much, of living. That is the living energy they speak of in
Non-Violent Communication, that fundamental life-energy one touches
on in Focusing.
I'm writing now to say
that this ocean (which may be different for everyone... for some it
may be a desert, for others it could be a sock... that's not really
the point!) isn't crossed in a day. Tt requires a leap of something
along the lines of faith, which is difficult to define and different
for everyone. and really sometimes steps towards this seem really
stinted. You may not really know what you're doing and how it helps -
whether it is yoga or NVC or meditation or whatever the hell. It's
not important what it is; what is important is the intention. The
intention to change. The willingness to accept your own brokenness
and falling-apart-ness and mess.
Yesterday, a year or
more after the beginning of my spiritual awakening (i.e. my huge
meltdown), I had a total freak-out and felt pretty much like the
world was coming to an end. My lover - the keeper of my things - told
me that he wasn't leaving. I know now that that's not a blanket
statement that binds him to me for all eternity. The point is I could
hear him. I did sit and cry like a mental patient; but, overwhelming
though my feelings were, I remembered my Focusing practice and found
that I could distinguish between my Self and my feelings. And when
eventually I could go to bed, I looked myself in the eye in the
mirror, and told myself this: "I love and accept you. and no
matter what happens, I will never stop loving and accepting you."
I think we, those who
are in the process of huge changes and also little changes, are never
not broken, like the Goddess
Akhilandeshwari (who I honestly know very
little about, but she is awesome), who is the patron of cataclysm and
rebirth and who is beautiful in her vulnerability. We are never not
broken and that is glorious and important... because without being
broken, we would never see anything beyond the uncracked surface. And
within this never-not-broken-ness, when we make shifts, they are
small but they are hugely significant.
Everything is not
not broken for me, but for the moment I have learnt this: every
single small thing you do for your well being - whether it is to read
a "silly self help book" or to take a yoga class or to draw
something or to call a friend or to simply write out your junk for
the internet to read - it matters. Keep it up. Take small steps.
Celebrate little moments of connection. Love and accept yourself...
and no matter what happens, or what you do, never stop.
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