Author: Sarah K Reece

Art at a mental health conference

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

The conference is over, and I’ve done what I came to do. And we did it!

Calmer on the second day, more prepared, more sleep, all the incredible goodwill of my tribe behind me… I was having hysterics on Facebook, so distressed, and also had to be bold enough to ask for money as the fuel costs were higher than I thought they would be and I didn’t have enough money to get home, also unless I paid my phone bill my mobile was going to get cut off within a few days. People responded to my cry for help with messages of support and encouragement and a bunch of deposits pending into my account.

I cried with gratitude. We chose our clothes carefully: the silver velvet dress, not corporate culture, not trying to blend in. But also feminine and non threatening. And not the slip on shoes but the boots, because we are far from home and need to be strong. The dress belongs to one of us, the boots to another. They are a powerful combination, one gentle and thoughtful and the other strong and grounded. Thus, we went to the second day of the conference.

This conference had an artist in residence, who was painting at one end of the foyer, next a table with crafts for a collage mandala set up. We quickly made friends and this was my home for the second day. It had everything I needed, close to a charger for my phone, toilets, drinks, and next to a door where the main talks were happening.

The speakers voices were broadcast into the foyer, so we could hear them clearly, and if I sat in a particular seat I could also see them or their PowerPoint through the little window in the door. Perfect. I sat in two sessions directly at the start of the day and very much loved both of them, but once I found that seat I was much more comfortable. The protocols around listening are hard on me, I often need to fidget, split stream (one of us might be writing a blog post while another one listens), get up and move about – fibro pain has been very bad this trip dur to the cold weather and so much sitting, or in the case of a speaker who is distressing me, leave. All that is horribly rude and distracting for a speaker and in most cases they’d assume I’m bored which is far from the case usually considering the effort in making to be there.

Out in the foyer I could do all of those things as I needed and they were none the wiser. In many cases too, speakers who were already confident voice projectors were being given microphones linked to speakers at high volume, I was literally being shouted at and found it unbearable. Out on the fringes I took what I could and stayed out of the middle where the fire burned too bright and too hot.

Funny for someone who’s usually in the middle doing the talking. I’m reconsidering everything I do and all the ways I do it.

My goal was to be present, to remain calm enough to be able to see the rest of the people as human. At first I struggled. The first speakers were both incredible and I related a lot to them both, in the sense of their wildness – they were not the obedient and conforming ‘recovered’ peer workers in used to seeing at these events but people with raw, rich, complex stories to tell and a fierce, gentle kind of pride. Hearing people speak my truths from the stage calmed the anguish in me. I didn’t need to find a voice in this space anymore. Once again I was struck by the folly of my own ego, my sense of urgency that I must speak the burning truths I know! Other people know these truths too, and are speaking them. I am not a lone saviour, but part of a rich, complex community, and not an essential part at that. I let go.

Over the day, I sat at the art table and people came and went as they wished. At first, I hated the mandalas, they seemed so tame and empty. Art for people who don’t understand art! And all the usual conversations awed, and disconnected “I could never do that, I’m not an artist, I can’t draw”, the same distancing and stereotyping I’m used to and hate…

But each person who came by said something that resonated. One came through and mentioned how they had torn the little coloured papers, instead of cutting, so they would have more interesting shapes. Another proudly showed me how they had glued the feathers into the work, to give it texture. One came back pleased to find that a colourful pattern they’d started – to disrupt the existing block colours, had been continued by other hands. One sat and talked a while and created complex zentangle type patterns within the shapes. One mentioned to me how someone had told them they must not go outside of the lines, and how they’d obeyed them and then later felt annoyed with themselves for not pushing back – but they were happy to return and find that someone had taken the mandala outside of the lines for them.

I started the day with my own stupid, quiet sneering that these people were so domesticated they could not even colour outside the lines and merely continued the patterns left for them by others. By the end of the day, I felt so much compassion for the complex choices they faced every day, working in dehumanising systems and being forced to obey, conform, adapt, over and over again, a thousand tiny cuts, tiny insults to dignity, tiny losses of their humanity. And yet. Every single one of them found a way to contribute something meaningful to them, within the constrains of the pattern. Pushing the limits but not destroying the whole. Working collaboratively. Each showed me their work, sometimes almost conspiratorially, or with sadness – “They never let us have any colour. Not in our clothes, our buildings, our paperwork.” There was a sense of deep loss, the subtle wordless grief of a people who have been quietly bled to the point of numbness.

But they were here. Showing up. Being present, like I was. Still, despite their numbness, determined to be part of change, to bring good into the world. It was honourable and piteable and so terribly human in its own bitter-sweet way. I saw them, and they saw me. I had amazing moments of connection, over and over again. A new friend sat by me and told me “they are all so afraid. Their body language is anxious. Even the important speakers as unsure what to do, who to talk to.” I was astonished. I saw only the armour of professional competence. I sat with her and shared her eyes and began to notice what she saw. The little tells of stress and fatigue. I’m outside that culture. That means I see some things more clearly, but others I miss. My friend works in that culture. To her it was obvious. I saw and I felt compassion and kindredness.

Everything everyone said to me had a profound ring to it. It was like I was hearing people for the first time, really hearing. Everything they said and did, spoke to me, and rang with deep wisdom. I felt like cataracts had dropped from my eyes and the world was shining so brightly it was almost too much to bear. People were connecting with me, sharing with me, and offering me help, and asking for support, in little, quiet conversations that I was glad to be part of, all day. This was more my language, my style.

At the very end, after most of the people left, there was a world Cafe, kind of speed dating with ideas. Arana was curious and snuck over to join in partway through and invited me gently in his subtle way. Helen Glover was pouring out the last of her energy into it, trying to make something happen, trying to make something new and enduring. She burned almost too brightly to look at, but she put down her microphone so I could bear to come to the edges and look.

I shared what I do – networks, community, service design, policy. I offered to host their new network, help them find an online home and nest their ideas. They were deeply interested and uncertain about such a different structure to the ones they work in, asking intelligent questions and spinning off my ideas into rich and detailed ideas of their own. This is what a community is. I spoke and then I was silent. Arana sat next to me and made little jokes and fed me jelly beans. I ate the black ones. I trembled with exhaustion but I was there. We all formed a plan and made a time to speak again. And then we broke apart and left.

Some of us went to dinner together and I invited myself. People were tremendously kind, they gave me money for fuel, paid for my meal, bought me supplies. They are part of my tribe now too. We see other. I was able in the quiet spaces over our shared food, to ask a few questions and I gleaned some important information.

Actually I learned a lot about the speaking role from many of the speakers – Heath Black, who was amazing and insightful, gave me a gem – that he copes with the stress of the speaking by having someone available 24/7 for phone debriefing, and that he rarely speaks to hostile audiences anymore because it’s too hard to recover from. He also gave me a copy of his book for my library.

Nicole, who is behind http:// rogueandrouge.org.au , and who spoke eloquently of love and friendship as essential responses to suffering, alienation, and abuse – she tells me, kindly, how she turns off her energy when she isn’t in the right place to be present and connect. I watch her wake and dissociate through the evening, the moment its too loud she is gone, present in body only. And it’s such an elegant use of dissociation, so nuanced and practiced and clearly valuable that I feel like a child who has been thrilled with finger painting, stumbling into an art gallery of masters. We know so very, very little in mental health, really.

If we want better answers, we must learn to ask better questions. And if we want new answers, we must learn to ask them in different languages, invite new voices.

At midnight the last connection was broken, for a time, the last exchange, the final parting in the parking lot. And I decided to leave the city and find a quiet place.

The hotel were superb, they clearly could teach us something about organisational culture, every person I spoke to was professional but personal, kind and friendly. They let me sit in the foyer to recharge my phone, and the woman at the bar made me a take away hot chocolate and filled both my hot water bottles.

image

I drove out to the nearby conservation park and found a spot near the water, it’s stunningly beautiful. As soon as I leave the city lights behind me I feel something unknot within me and I know I’ve made the right call. I curl up in bed utterly content and go to sleep.

Two hours later I wake, at the conference one of the people had asked me to please write my ideas about mental health system reform. Apparently I was listening, because I wake with a book in my brain. This is getting tiresome! I don’t have hours in my day to write everything, think everything, feel everything. Life is almost overwhelmingly alive for me, even in the quiet moments I’m rocked by profound epiphanies and even in the times I’m getting away from it all, my mind is overflowing with inspiration and my heart with deep feelings.

image

I write about 20 pages of policy development and try to go back to sleep but it’s too cold. Even after I put on all my warm clothes, it’s too cold to sleep. I rest anyway, hopeful I might drift off. At dawn I cast a glance beneath my curtain and literally catch my breath. The sky is on fire. Out the other window, the bay is covered in a thick mist. As I watch, a dolphin swims past, regal and relaxed, very close.

image

I set up my chair by the edge of the water, wrap myself in a blanket and watch. The dolphin is swimming with a young calf. I think of my beloved Rose at home, and how hard this trip has been on her, how much she believes in what I’m doing and the sacrifices she makes behind the scenes, and I weep with joy. She is a mother, and she is here with me.

My tribe is here with me, and my new tribe is here also. It’s been imperfect and exhausting and bewildering and painful. But it’s also been exactly what I hoped and more, the meeting of tribes, the sharing of knowledge, new skills in the art of being human.

Back home Rose is being loved too, and in so grateful I cry again. We’re not alone.

I think of the rest of the delegates asleep in the hotel and, beautiful as it was, I feel sorry for them. I wonder what a conference would be like if we sat here at the end of it, together, around a fire, watching the dolphins. Life is beautiful and I’m exactly where I need to be.

Learning through love and pain

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I got some sleep! Thank the gods of small items that get caught in drawers.

And everyone who was kind to me yesterday. I am so grateful, and learning so much – or rather, relearning things we knew but have almost forgotten. How kindness can clothe us when we are naked.

The place I was in yesterday – triggered to the edge of hysteria, raw in the presence of people who were not raw. I used to live there! I remember.

Coming out of it for me yesterday was the intellectual grounding of my people, saying to me in many subtle and overt ways, that it’s okay that I’m different, okay that I’m human, okay that I’m raw, okay that I’m triggered. Over and over again. The balm of acceptance, like oil poured into the painfully self aware distress of my public hysteria. I am learning so much, less from the conference then from all of you.

What happened when I was raw to that place of screaming? I couldn’t see them as people anymore. They couldn’t see me. I would smile at strangers and their eyes would bounce right past me. Embedded in a culture dominated by the ideas of the somebodies and nobodies, I was a nobody far too heartsick to fight to be a somebody, too sickened by the fight and the process, by the shouting at each other from podiums.

I don’t even feel alive when I sleep indoors every night in my own tiny, beautiful, personal home. Out in my van under the stars I’m far from the gradual dissociating provess of a life seeking comfort. Here in this hotel, temperature controlled to a warmth that makes me eyes feel hot and my lips in the mirror this morning seems dry and slightly swollen, a soft bee stung swelling and a shade of pale skin as if I’ve been sucking out poison from a wound and a little is left in my face. Here I’m far from home.

In an online forum I’m part of, a different group of people are talking about the ways peer work is most effective – and it’s excellent and well thought through and observational and drawn on years of experience. One of their points is that it needs to be processed rather than raw. I speak to that – that my experiences have often been raw rather than processed and that’s the tip of a complex conversation I don’t have time for in this rush rush rushing, that my stuff is often much more processed then others simply because our group mind works that way, and yes, that too raw can be too vulnerable, too full of rage or too under the thumb – telling the stories of the dominant culture back to the dominant culture in a self gratifying process (that those of us outside it often call with pity or frustration or a sense of shame that these are the people representing us -) “tame peer workers”…

I know, I see the problems with that. But I also see the value in this raw process. Something can be lost in the processing. If we don’t start with raw, dense, rich with complex detail, unprocessed as much as possible, honest stories, we lose so much. Maybe that’s why I’m an artist. Truth telling us important to me and my work, and in mental health it’s something I have to fight for because they prefer “tame artists” too.

I get the need for a relationship and not a screaming argument. I get the need for processing to make our stories bearable to hear and to tell. I understand that we need to speak in the language of the people we are trying to speak to, if we want to be heard. But… But…

I’m not talking to astrophysicists. How can you be telling me that mental health workers cannot hear me when I am speaking in the language of raw, unprocessed pain and truth? How can you be telling me that they cannot bear the intensity of honest and deeply wounded humans? I hear you and I believe you and you are only putting in words what I have already seen and felt but…

This is the problem!

It’s not just something to notice and work around, it’s the heart of everything that is wrong. If I can’t speak in the language of unprocessed pain and have a mental health worker hear me and understand me and be able to bear that language and rawness, what the hell are they doing in the field of mental health?

So my tribe, you are keeping me sane. You are holding me while I scream and dig the traps and lethal ideas out of my head, and then hold me while I bleed and sob and reassure me that, this too, is human and okay. It’s how people look when we are far from home. There’s nothing wrong with me. I am an ex-cult member back in the cult, trying to hold a space for my new tribe. Trying very badly, messily, crumbling. Not well able to use the ways this culture gives respect or signals importance or the things they require for a basic sense of dignity and inclusion. I’m not very good at it.

I’m sitting here, in the front row of a session at the moment, wearing a silver velvet dress and my strong boots. Trying to find a way to not be like them but be accepted by then, to tolerate the pain in me of being among them but not become so overwhelmed with pain that I can’t see them as human anymore either – that I give up on them and all their world, leave it to the pain soaked stereotypes of emptiness, not hear anymore each individual voice with all its richness and brilliance and loss but hear only the roar of the whole culture, see only the ways that they harm and none of the ways they heal, find no value in them but run home and say with agony and bewilderment and rage “they are not human, like us”. I think of the indigenous people seeing the first white people, seeing ghosts in the mists. It’s just as difficult for me to see them as human as it is for them to see me as human.

So, I sit at a mental health conference and think of all we have learned. The knowledge I am so passionate about, the neuro psychs, the brain biologists, the people learning how to help stroke victims heal, the social scientists unpicking power and the subtleties of abuse in our most intimate and most impersonal relationships. It’s all so important and so valuable. Every thing we know about the world and ourselves is so valuable, there’s not a single tiny piece of information we don’t need. Every bit of it is essential and relates to a complex whole.

But right back down at the coal face of one human to another, of how do we connect with people in pain, how do we hear when people speak with the language of agony and broken hearted rage, how do we be human with one another, see and be seen… All the wisdom of our brilliant, disconnected, scientific culture is totally useless if we don’t know how to love each other.

So, thanks for standing with me. I’m learning a great deal. You make this possible, you learn with me, I learn with you and from you. Language connects us, culture connects us. You help me bridge the gaps, help me stay human. I hope I do the same for you.

Nameste, gratitude, blessings, prayers, and love.

Stand with me, please

/ Sarah K Reece / 8 Comments

image

Well, I’m here at the conference. Well… In the vicinity of the conference anyway. I’m in the lobby trying to coax breakfast down me. It’s a very nice breakfast, but I feel particularly ill.

image

Cold water and porridge with stewed apples. Good slow burning carbs and not too rich. I’m doing my best to pay close attention to what my body needs on this trip. I’ve put myself under considerable physical pressure – very long drives, long hours of sitting, cold weather, and often missed meals, and very little sleep. That last one is a killer. Sleep deprivation and fibro do to me what an all weekend bender does to a 60 year old.

My hotel room was beautiful but I’ve only had a couple hours of sleep again – cold weather, many many hours of sitting, and then sudden flurries of rushing around are pretty much a recipe for disaster with fibromyalgia. By 2am the pain my knees and ankle was severe. I wound up spending a lot of the night in hot showers and doing stretches trying to open up the joints again.

This morning I feel badly hungover, with nausea, slight tremors, body aches, that cold sweat, especially on my face and lip, a bad headache, and really heavy head. The only hangover symptoms I don’t get are the thick saliva and fuzzy mouth because there’s no dehydration component to fibro. (unless I’ve also forgotten to drink, obviously)

So I’m moving very slowly. I’ve taken a couple of ibuprofen which is as strong as my pain relief can get due to my drug allergies, I’m sipping cool water and gently spooning mouthfuls of porridge into me as I feel I can keep it down. I’m resting but also walking around and slowly pacing when I can to ease the body pain. Massaging the trigger points above my eyes gently.

Pink Floyd comes on the radio “did you exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage?”. And then Neil Finn. Familiar music, my music. Something knotted eases a little inside me. So much of this weekend is about being in a different culture, the minority stress of being queer, multiple, alternative, a stranger, a long way from home. People are being kind, which helps. One new friend is indigenous and she gets it instinctively: like her  I’m a long way from home. I have no idea what is like to be her but we’re united by own experiences of constantly being the minority representative in a dominant culture that doesn’t understand, or particularly value a lot of what we do. The pervasive indefinable heart ache that comes with speaking in a different language too much, too long, being the alien. It’s a big Gap. I’m grateful and deeply moved by such acceptance – as Brene Brown puts it in her book, not fitting in but belonging. Different but accepted. There’s been a lot of love around this training, and I’m grateful I’ve been doing all that work on accepting and connecting because I’ve been able to hug and connect and let people be kind – to be genuinely reciprocal, which is beautiful.

Mentally I feel mazed. It’s hard to focus my eyes and I can’t take in what’s going on around me very well. I’m thankful I know so much about fibro and dissociation these days. I know what’s happening and I know what I need to do. How many years it’s taken me to be able to do this! And it’s still hard, days like today. And – all my friends with a disability will get this – there’s a slight reluctance to tell anyone how rough I am in case they think I can’t handle conferences and don’t invite me again, or try to exclude me and caretake in intrusive ways. So I’m doing what always do when I feel that pressure to keep quiet – I’m here, telling the world. You guys, and this platform, keep me sane. Keep me free from the lead role in the cage. Thankyou.

I’ve set up some artwork, our ‘healthy multiplicity’ poster for the DI, postcards for the DI and HVNSA, and a grounding kit for the conference attendees to try out. I’m here representing my tribe; artists, people with lived experience, peer workers, people who have been through trauma, freelancers, people who are poor, queer people, people with a disability, social entrepreneurs, multiples, counter culture people… I hope I’m doing right by each of these communities. I’m doing my best.

Most of us never get a voice at events like this, and everything I’m going through is why. It’s almost impossible. So I’m here, being present, holding a space, representing us. Unpaid, unelected, with all the usual risks: that my voice because a substitute for your voice, that I go native in the dominant culture, or that I burn out. Be with me, all of you. Help me do this. Help my message be – not just my voice but many voices, not my experience alone but the experiences of my tribes. Hold me, I’m so weak. Stand with me. I’m building friendships and powerful alliances that will enrich us and connect us and bridge those Gaps.

But I’m so vulnerable. Help me stay human. Witness me. Love me. I love you. I’m in the clinical mental health sector holding a space that love is the essential response to human suffering, and that dignity and freedom are fundamental human needs that services often accidentally destroy. You know how much we need that message in this culture! And I’m not the only one, I don’t mean to sound like a lone hero. There’s thousands of us trying to build a better culture. But we’re struggling to hear each other and understand each other, and people like me don’t often get a voice or a presence – and without people like me – the ones so often in need of services, those with good intentions but no intuitive understanding of my life will keep pouring out their hearts, our money, and their lifetimes of effort to still not speak my language or create a genuinely safe, mutual, dignified systemic response to human suffering. The gatekeepers don’t understand us and we need them to, because they have the power and the resources. They are dehumanised by these systems too, in subtle ways they can’t see but that threaten their humanity as much as – perhaps more than the threat to service users. No more, please. No more. All voices, all cultures present. All tribes heard.

image

image

image

image

image

Poem – Understanding the power of professional detachment

/ Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

In Day One of the Hearing Distressing Voices Workshop training, I had the awful but insightful experience of roll playing a professional mental health worker. It disturbed me deeply but also fascinated me, and I wrote this poem in my lunch break to try and capture as much as the experience as I could, so that I could reflect on it later.

The context of that role play is that the other workshop participants, those service providers and mental health staff who don’t have a personal experience of voice hearing, are trying to do tasks and engage with these pretend services, while wearing ear buds that are pouring ‘voices’ into their ears from an Mp3 player.

Myself and the voice hearers have been asked to pretend to be doctors and treat them as mentally ill patients – to be polite and respectful but filter everything they did through that framework and to maintain professional detachment in our manner. In some tasks we were actually delivering real psychological assessments (to determine their capacity and state of mind) that are used in residential and inpatient services today.

Role playing the doctor
I was nice
I made eye contact, smiled, shook their hand
Used their first name, didn’t touch without permission, didn’t sit behind a desk, didn’t ask questions about sex or trauma

But I also pushed then through,
Subtly dehumanised them
Didn’t give normal feedback signals
Respond to things they said
Treat them as intelligent adults.

And at the end I wanted to cry
I wanted to throw up
I wanted to run around the room and beg everyone for forgiveness and to know that wasn’t me
I wanted to be touched, to be hugged, to hear the voice of my loved ones
I wanted to be made human again.

My voice was screaming “I hate myself”
My hand was ticking violently in front of everyone
I was rocking
Swaying with nausea and exhaustion and intensity

The most terrifying aspect of it
The darkest part
The most triggering thing
Is that it was…

Easy.

So fucking easy to do.
I had a quota to get through
I had to reduce wait times
I had to get people through assessments as quickly as possible
I was totally secure in my knowledge that I was one of the good practitioners
I was one of the nice ones, I smiled and was polite and respectful
I was exasperated by how many of them there were
How unwilling they were to cooperate
How unwell they were
How slow at tasks
Easily confused
Constantly needing me to slow down, repeat myself
Everyone was filtered through a single paradigm –
Did they make my job easier or harder?

They disobeyed even simple instructions
They treated me as the enemy and the bad guy
They allied against me
They were unhelpful in directing their own recovery
Lacking insight
Bewildered
In need of guidance
Nothing like me or the other doctors.

They tested extremely poorly
The ones who tested better were often more aggressive and hostile
Clearly less unwell
Probably too high functioning for the program.

And I was totally outside of the drama
Above it
Detached
They got angry, frustrated, hurt, petty
But I was completely secure
Armoured in professionalism
Nothing they did could actually hurt me
They simply didn’t have that power
They could irritate me or trigger a little warmth
Share a moment of connection if they talked to me with the right mix of respectful gratitude and equality
But they were like children
I saw the whole picture and they knew nothing
Nothing about the service, nothing about themselves, nothing about mental health or treatment
I was the expert and I was here to try to make them do the things I knew would help them get better
They were mostly an impediment to this process
And they couldn’t make me feel anything, anymore than a 3 year old screaming “mummy I hate you!” had the power to devastate
They just couldn’t.

So they were in the muck
In crisis
Hopeless at caring for themselves
Full of needlessly intense feelings
No capacity to see the whole picture
To appreciate my role or how hard I work for them
It was a thankless job
And they were often degrading to me
But fortunately I’m very secure in the knowledge that I’m doing a good thing in the world
I don’t really need their validation
It’s gratifying when it happens but it’s not necessary
And I’m so glad I’m not like them
So glad I can look after myself, shower, dress well, cook, clean, hold down my job, my relationships
I’m very blessed and I know it
There but for the grace of god…
I’m glad that I make a difference in their lives
It’s good to be able to give back to those less fortunate.

*More discussion in the comments

Homesick & triggered

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

Day one is done. I’m sitting in a hotel because I couldn’t bear the silence in the empty dorm where I’m staying. I’ve had a good crunchy salad for dinner and warmed myself by the soft fire of people’s voices. There’s a big group here, chatting, hugging as members peel away and go out into the rain to head home. Today was brilliant but really, really hard.

Last night I barely slept. I got away to sleep early, my whole system slow and aching for rest. But after an hour and a half I woke up and that was the end of sleep until 6am. It was a long night.

I’ve just done day one of four days of training to deliver workshops about hearing voices. It was intense. In one of the scenarios I was asked to role play a doctor – not a bad one, friendly and respectful, but with that professional detachment that subtly dehumanises. I did, and I was very, very good at it. The experience of doing this to people knowing full well how it feels left me shaken and wanting to vomit. I felt profoundly dehumanised and alienated from my self. I sat out some of the second half of the day to ground myself. By the time we finished group debriefing and went to lunch I was rocking, had a massive tic, and my voice was intensely looping “I hate myself”. That’s my trifecta of major warning signs!

They were kind. I was boiling with feeling, so triggered and full of fear and pain. Power is one of my deepest triggers, an old wound, and this has taken me to the edge of the pit. They were kind.

I went and got a very large chai latte. I couldn’t eat much but it got something warm into my gut to ease that sense of churning. The waitress made a star on it which made me smile.

image

I called Rose and her voice, the soft burr of it, her voice like velvet, like whisky, the husky heat of it in my ear- it breathed colour back into my face. I felt profoundly lost behind a terrifyingly easy mask to wear, desperate to get it off me, to see clearly and be seen, at whatever cost. She spoke soothingly down the phone.

She went back to her work and I went out into the sun, took off my shoes and lay face down on the grass, reaching my arms or wide to embrace it, to hold onto it and not fall off.

image

image

The sense of wanting to vomit would not pass. I had an image of having eaten something toxic. Black and heavy it sat in my gut. I could choke it down but that would be it; if I came back to it later it would be sealed over, disconnected, hardened off. Now was the time to reflect. Now was the time to regurgitate the poison and study it.

So I wrote a poem about the feeling of it, trying to pin into words the immense sense of power, the detachment, the imperviousness, the way I could subtly punish, could torture, turn the screws just shy of outright rebellion and never once do anything anyone could pin me for, do it all with a gentle smile, do it all secure in the knowledge I was one of the good guys….

And now, after more intense conversations wrapping up the day, I’ve come to a hotel to be near people. Rose and talked all evening on the phone, that slow gentle back and forth talk of two people who know each other very well, who trust and feel safe in sharing, who see and feel seen. Mulling over her day and mine, sharing ideas and affection back and forth between us, the comfortable weaving of a long term relationship. And I can breathe again, this is air, this is what I need. The rocking goes away, the triggers ease.

I feel very alone here, with no animals, no companions, no one I know. I know what I need to deal with today and at home I would get it – I need touch and laughter and frivolity, a card night, a game night, a friend night, a night on the couch with Firefly, the chance to cook up something nice, to organise a shelf or tend an animal… To switch to the home people.

I’m not home here, and I’ve no friends here. I feel like a kid at school, desperately trying to balance two impossible needs – to be seen as who I am, and not to alienate – to fit in. Funny how even at 30 some things don’t change. There’s a kind of relief in confessing to Rose – oh, I guess I want to be liked… is it that simple? I guess sometimes it’s that simple. Our inner children don’t sleep far below the surface.

I feel painfully colourful, painfully teary, painfully ‘lived experience’, painfully alternative, painfully queer,painfully broke, and painfully ‘out of town’. Gods I miss my friends!

9 days away to go. Tomorrow night we’re driving over to Pt Lincoln for the 2 day conference, then back to Whyalla for the rest of the training next week. I feel like I’m missing an arm, like I’ve left half of myself back home with Rose. I am surprised by this, I’ve lived alone and loved it for so long, but there’s no parallel – alone in my own home is not like being alone in a strange place. Rose has my heart and without her here I’m a ghost of myself, jangling with lots, looking for something I can’t find. The quality of the training has been amazing, exactly what I’m looking for, so important to my work, so valuable. But, oh, my heart!

Here in the hotel, Radiohead comes over the speakers – Karma police. And I laugh, thinking of the time I was speaking about consumer led service delivery at the inpatient unit in Glenside and Radiohead was on the radio, and I had to ask them to turn it off because it was triggering a part who couldn’t deliver the talk… (I didn’t mention why to them…) The experience has become an in joke between me and my supervisor, the challenges of being multiple in a non multiple world, of being lived experience in a professional world.

After Radiohead comes old U2 and then Lana Del Ray. I laugh. It’s a strange night here. I feel like I’m on the edge of a vast desert, empty even of shadows. Not a void, not an inhabited night, just a unbroken and enduring emptiness. And on other side of me, a city full of strangers, shut in their bright homes with their families. The streets empty and dark and limed with rain. I’m glad to be here and I want to go home. My heart beats the word over and over; home, home, home.

I’m finally, really awake

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I’ve arrived in Whyalla. I’m missing my love, I have a poem called The Voice by Hardy in my mind…

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me…

I’ll be gone for 10 days, the longest we’ve been apart since we first met. I packed a grounding kit to share with others as needed during the hearing voices training and mental health conference. It has items for taste (gummy bears. , salt and vinegar crackers), smell (perfumes, essential oils, hand cream, facial tonor), sight (colourful silicon balls, bracelets) , sound (shells that chime together, a bracelet of bells, a toy car that winds up), and many textures for touch, as well children’s toys, cuddly animals, puppets, fiddles, textured books, and colouring in pictures and crayons, pencils, and textas.

image

I’ve found my room in the student dorm, it’s stormy and solitary, just the way I like it. I’ve showered and eaten a little and made my bed.

image

I guess that’s the funny thing about having been homeless, it’s so easy for me to feel at home here. I need so little. I’m so proud of myself for making it here, alone and a long way from home. A few years ago I could not have managed this emotionally. Now look at me – so connected to such a big tribe, and so free.

I have bookings for talks coming out of my ears. Everything is taking off. I’ve brought the network postcards with to share – there are new newsletters full of information and links out for both of them now:

HVNSA
The DI

I’m meeting with brilliant, passionate, inspired people who are desperately interested in human rights and social activism and full of amazing information and contacts. My mind is so clear and so full of ideas I’ve given up trying to write them all down. I can’t even talk fast enough to keep up. I’m just trusting that’s is going into the memory somewhere, and that the interested bits will get triggered and brought to mind again as they need. My brain whirls, I’m just along for the ride.

Everything is connected, everything means something, every person fascinates me. The colours are richer, the sky, the sky, it’s like I’ve never seen it before in my life. It’s so utterly beautiful. For days now I find myself just marvelling at it when I drive. The colours! The depth! The brilliance of it, a kind of sublime majesty that takes my breath away… I’ve been asleep all my life, and I’ve known it. And now I’ve woken up. I’m awake. I’m alive, and I know it. I’m outside my culture. I’ve broken the programming. I’ve torn the fences out of my mind. I’m running free, breathing free air, seeing in colour again.

I have never valued my life so highly, been so careful. I am so aware of my vulnerability, how naked I feel on the road with the huge trucks passing me. This could all end today. But, oh, how blessed am I, to have reached this place! All my life I’ve been trying to wake up, fighting to reach the surface. And I would too, for a little hour here or there, at 3am. I didn’t even know it was possible to be awake like this in the daytime, to see the sky as it really is, all those colours to fall into, so utterly vast and uniquely arranged with cloud each day. I didn’t know life could be like this.

I’m awake. And I’m in danger of becoming insufferable. My mind soars and I miss the nuances of relationship I’m usually so attuned to. I struggle to show down my speech instead of interrupting. I dominate, without meaning to. I dazzle and overwhelm people so they walk away dazed, thrilled, but bewildered, their thoughts in disarray, no clear idea of anything I said. I’ve never in my life had to figure out how to be gentle with hurting people when I myself am not hurting. I’ve always been right alongside them in the pit. I’m fumbling. I’m alienating, accidentally.

Rose keeps my heart safe. She whispers my mortality. She’s developing signs for me – the gentle hand flutter that reminds me I’ve sped my pace of speech up so fast no one can follow me. Sometimes that makes me cry. I’ve so much passion is bursting out of me and I’m having to learn to hold it back most times. She coaxes and forgives and holds the string of my kite, keeping me linked to the earth.

All my friends do, with their grace for my bumbling enthusiasm, my awkward passion, my startling health. I’m giddy with flight and I can’t help but lift off at every opportunity, never mind that my wings don’t fit the room and I’m knocking everything over and beating them in their faces and about their ears. I’m blessed by such friends. I’d be insufferable without them. I’ve very much offended several lately, quite by accident, and I’m glad they’ve put up with my inexperience, explained their position, allowed me grace to undo my folly. These are the roots that hold me to the earth, that give me strength and feed me on black soil and cold water.

So this is what it is to be really alive. It’s worth everything I have ever experienced, every hour of suffering. Every night of screaming until my throat was hoarse. The hundred thousand billion tears I’ve wept. I’m finally awake.

Introducing Mary O’Hagan

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

Mary O’Hagan is a brilliant woman I’ve been fortunate to hear speak on several occasions now. She has had an incredible personal journey from her experiences of ‘madness’ as a young woman in a psych ward, through her to role as the New Zealand Mental Health Commissioner. Her insight into the Recovery Model and commitment to better services is inspiring. She’s also behind the fantastic Peer Zone project. You can learn more about her work here:

I wanted to share about her now because her book Madness Made Me: A Memoir has recently won an award! It placed Silver in the 2015 Independent Publisher Regional and Ebook Awards!

Mary O'Hagan

On this blog, I’m extremely careful to be aware of that intersection between my stories and other people’s stories. I own my own stories but I have to be very mindful of when telling mine starts to tell other peoples. So while this blog is all about me – my thoughts, my poems, my experiences – because that is what I know and own to share, it can create an odd kind of impression that I exist in isolation, without reference to others and their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have learned so much from so many other people in my life. It delights me when someone like Mary has her work recognised publicly like this, not only because that’s always a wonderful thing to celebrate, but because it gives me a public platform to share about them.

I first met Mary at a conference in Melbourne many years ago. She stood in front of the room and spoke openly about “being mad” with such honesty and simple acceptance I was deeply moved. She was the inspiration behind me standing up in front of rooms of people and making jokes that I might have multiple personalities, but don’t worry! Not a single one of them is an axe murderer! And the room would laugh with that relief that I could be so bold and comfortable, and that slight nervousness you often get when you use humour in mental health that means “are we allowed to laugh about that? Are you sure?” I borrowed that frankness from Mary.

Later on I was lucky to get into talks she gave locally. Local services have been very generous at times to broke peer workers. Her Recovery Approach to Risk workshop in particular was memorable. Workshopping creative and compassionate solutions for people caught between their own complex needs and the madness and limitations of the services here to support them, I could see another way of working in mental health. She put a lot of my thoughts and feelings into words, and that’s always a cherished experience. I know I do the same at times for some people and how appreciated that is.

Mary has been generous with her time. I’m often isolated and struggling to get projects off the ground here in SA. In fact I’m pretty certain my international reputation at conferences and such is very much informed by my tendency to cry at the back of the room in talks, partly because I’m so lonely and broke and struggling to bring my values into the mental health sector here, and partly because it’s so overwhelmingly moving to hear from so many other people – almost all more networked, older, wiser, more experienced, perhaps at times too a little more battered, world weary and disillusioned. The recent ISPS conference in Melbourne? Cried then too. Sat at the back, listening to a German psychiatrist discuss the critical importance of peer experience in their roll out of Open Dialogue, and the way they drew upon Systems Theory to inform their adaptation of the model and I l wept, because I’ve only recently heard of systems theory in art class and it immediately seemed totally relevant for mental health to me but it sounds crazy when I say that because I’m just a mad artist – and here was this psychiatrist saying that and showing how the team he was part of had implemented it…

And suddenly I’m not alone. I’m not the Greek prophet doomed to know the future but not be believed. I’m part of something great. An international community of people who are incredibly skilled, incredibly diverse, all reaching towards humanity, seeking to understand, alleviate suffering, bring hope. Even my most original ideas have probably been thought of by someone else and are being hard fought for to develop. I’m not alone, I’m not the only one, and I don’t bear the sole weight of responsibility for that hope.

To hear these voices confidently share what I’ve thought or felt privately, to be able to talk to others who take as given assumptions I have to fight so hard for everywhere else (like the value of peer work), it’s a precious thing. And to have them give me a voice, respect my thoughts and experience too – well in mental health, that’s almost impossible for me usually.

Mary has made time for me, shared lunch with me, let me bounce my grand mad ideas off her. She’s played a small part, I don’t mean to suggest that we’re best mates, but she’s an important member of my community. I’ve learned a lot from her and been blessed by her acceptance of my knowledge and the value of what I’m trying to do too.

This is my tribe too – all these people moved by pain. Sharing deep truths of their own experience, or fighting for better quality research, or struggling to translate values into policies, or volunteering on a Monday to sit with frightened and lonely people in hospitals. I am part of a great whole, valuable but not, thankfully, essential. My knowledge is built on the back of a great history of those who have come before me, their legacy of successes and failures, their deeply personal experiences, their hopes and imperfections and own moments of being moved to tears. People like Mary are generous with their knowledge and their passion and experience, and because of that it lives on in me and in the next generation beyond me.

So, go read her book. Get to know her. Attend a talk if you get the chance. Learn from her, argue with her, honour the gift that honest telling of personal stories in public settings always is. Honour the value of it and the cost of it. She’s brilliant, go learn something.

Running away and coming back

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

image

I am so busy I hardly have time to sleep. So I ran away last night and slept in my van down the beach again. It was glorious. Rose is fantastic, she packs the van with me and makes me food and helps get me out the door… Once out my heart sings! It rained on and off, so beautiful. Rose and I found a mattress on the side of the road last week so I slept on that on the back seats all laid out, and it was so warm and cosy and wonderful… I’ve found my hospital at home, my respite, my sabbatical, my quiet place. I’m committed to visiting every month. Its the most wonderful thing.

I sat in the morning and listened to The Carpet People on audio book. I made an ink painting. I wrote a few thousand words about suffering and love and what it is to be human.

Home again, happy, exhausted. I need more rest. Gearing up for a week away at training and a conference in rural SA. Life is moving fast. Nights like last night it all gets very slow for a moment, thankfully. I’m learning.

image

The Power of Art

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Today I read a beautiful book called Hate that Cat by Sharon Creech. It made me weep, it was so beautiful.

We, the 30 or so of us who make up Sarah, do not share our personal names. Now, we’re pretty relaxed about the whole multiplicity thing. Open and out! But, we never give a fixed number for how many parts there are in my system, because I never assume that our system map is completely accurate and finished, and I’m comfortable with that.

We have never been happy about openly identifying as individuals – on many blogs by multiples there will be a page where you can read about their system members – and I’ve always admired that, but it makes me feel incredibly exposed. Because we are highly co-conscious and switch many times a day, there’s a degree of fluidity, of somewhat ‘integrated’ functioning. In arguments a whole bunch of us may switch through, speak our piece, finish each other’s sentences, drop back inside. There’s a sort of unconscious dance between us, a façade of unity, and a lot of largely unconscious and instinctive effort to prevent anyone from noticing switching or the differences between parts.

Some of us would love to identify ourselves openly and use our real names, but for others this is an unthinkable violation. The degree of exposure stress is intense – far worse than stripping in public, for some of us this is more akin to taking off clothes, then skin and bone, pulling out organs and uncurling brain matter for people to play with. It violates a deeply held need to pretend not to be multiple. Because multiplicity has worked brilliantly for us as a way of navigating horrible situations, but revealed it can actually make you more vulnerable rather than less. Every time someone not incredibly close to me has noticed or had their attention drawn to an obvious switch, very bad things have resulted. People are positively phobic about switching, and scared people do not react well.

For us, our names are also triggers that often cue a switch. Talking about a part and using their truename will frequently bring them out – or at least to the surface to hear what is being said about them!

Names and identifying ourselves individually are highly personal, private, intimate things. Only my lover, my very closest people, at this point are granted that information. I do not even permit my shrinks to know this or know me like this. This may change later, it may not.

Our feelings on this matter are almost certainly informed by our background in sci/fi and fantasy. Anyone who has loved works such as the Chronicles of Morgan, Prince of Hed, or the Earthsea cycle will recognise the idea that names have power, and that truenames are intimate. Does this mean I’ve imagined my multiplicity to fit with wild fantasy ideas? Snort. It means that my experience of my self and the world has been informed in many ways, by many people, and for me writers have often been better guides than shrinks. I’m grateful to have books like these in my life. I’m grateful to be a writer. And it’s not just writers – theatre, songwriters, painters – all the arts. They tell us so much about what it is so be human. They are so real and so raw and so essential to my life. Without Cave, or Bradbury, I would not be here. I would have broken, broken far beyond repair. I needed others who saw the world the way I saw it, who hurt, or hoped, or learned, and shared in such ways that I felt what they felt, lived their lives with them. I have written often about my love of the arts, how much they have given, how they are the foundation of my ‘mental health’.

Before language about multiplicity, there was just the noise inside. Just the kaleidoscope shifting as switching changed everything about the world. We wrote to each other. We wrote hate. We wrote terror. We wrote love poems. We wrote to see ourselves, and re-read what we had written, and slowly learned about ourselves.

Hate that Cat is a book in poems. It reminded me of that process – instinctive, inarticulate, confused, driven, full of pain and bewilderment. Not done as a ‘therapy’ as ‘obedience’ to some grant recovery plan. Done, in fact, in opposition to those who accused me of wallowing. But somehow my lifeline to my self, my mirror of the world. I understand understanding yourself and your world through poems. They are our first language, our first connection, our home. Other people have other first languages.

How blessed I have been in this. We who write ourselves into being at the edge of the night, how fortunate we are. There is so much richness in the works of those I love. They have been my friends, mentors, parents, companions, ghosts. They have held my heart when it was too broken to live in my body any more. They have kept alive a dream that one day I would have a place in the world, a tribe, a sense of connection. That one day there would be love, there would be intimacy, closeness, people who could hear my soul, those who knew how to listen. Or at least – that there had been others like me, even if they were now long dead. I might be the last of my species, ruined and broken and hopeless, but I had a species. Other people also had breakable hearts, had bled in poems. I might be alone but I was not alone through all time and space. Not the only one ever.

That was, and is, deeply precious to me. Isn’t this what we all need? Isn’t being human finding a way to sing the song I’ve sung to Tamlorn, and finding people who will sing it back to us? To be loved that deeply. What does that have to do with art? Everything. What does art have to do with pain, madness, grief, suffering, mental illness? Absolutely everything.

Gifts from my Tribe

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

So much is happening it’s hard to find time to write here at the moment. Life is wonderful. Everything is taking off. My mind is so clear and so full of ideas and connections. I’m having to be careful around overwork – being driven and destroying my new found health is a particular vulnerability of mine. So I’m matching my work week to Rose’s as much as I can. Working when she works, coming to bed when she does, getting up with her in the mornings. Not only is it helping to get us both back more in sync with each other, it’s forcing me to take much more time off than I would otherwise. This is making me very, very efficient when I do work, and thrillingly happy to be having time for fun, family, rest, reflection, and pour some of this energy back into my family, friends, home and garden. I’m so well at the moment, and so happy.

Two really wonderful highlights of the past weeks have been gifts. I was taken to see Cirque Du Soliel’s Totem as a Christmas gift by my best friend. It was stunning. What an experience! And the most perfect rejoiner to my visual artist lecturers who have imbibed the modern visual arts obsession with ambiguity – in their words, giving space for the audience to come to their own conclusions about a work and bring their own perspective to it. In the words of media tropes: “real art makes no sense”. This is a major point of difference between my own art and the kind that gets my lecturers excited, I am intending the clearly communicate meaning. I want my art to make sense to my audience. It’s challenging at times to love a kind of art that’s not wildly embraced where you study art. Totem was beautiful, clear, emotive, moving. Great art can be very clear indeed. It doesn’t have to be, but it certainly can be. That feels wonderful.

The other wonderful gift was a shed. Combined birthday and engagement present, this is absolutely wonderful. Just look at it!

image

image

We haven’t even really started to fill it yet, but already it feels like I’m living in a new house, there’s so much more space indoors. My two bedroom unit fits myself, my partner Rose, our three cats, our medium sized dog, our combined book and DVD libraries (which are considerable), all the paraphernalia for my face painting business (which has henna kits, glitter tattoo kits etc), all the belongings of each of my networks: the DI, the HVNSA, and Homeless Care SA, the library of books related to each of those networks that I loan out, and my art studio, and all our baby items including a fairly significant collection of baby clothes, baby carriers and wraps, a fantastic huge pram and bassinet, a change table (also really appreciated gifts!) etc etc etc. It’s rather a lot.

With this extra shed I have room to start breaking down the mess, compiling what isn’t needed in the house itself, sorting camping supplies, packing away tools, all sorts. I’m thrilled. I’m tackling the house but by bit and it’s wonderful. The kitchen functions. The floors are easy to clean with our new vacuum cleaner (another fantastic gift for my birthday). The lounge has heating and cooling. There’s a whole shelf of board games for our game nights. It’s the most wonderful home.

This is the tribe I’ve been talking about. I’ve been so lucky with such support. There are friends who listen and give me great advice on bad days, people who send me money so I can pay for fuel or plane trips to conferences, friends who pass on items they don’t need anymore like their beautiful pram, people who share their ideas and experiences, share my passion for the networks, include me in training, help me find the people I need to get my projects off the ground… This is much bigger than just me, now.

I gave my recovery story talk to the Tafe students again this week. It was wonderful. I told them about being so alone in the world that when my car broke down there was not a single soul to call for help and no money for the RAA or a taxi. I abandoned my car and walked home, sick and in terrible pain, alone in the dark and very afraid. And look at me now. I have a tribe. They are generous, loving, caring people, and we look out for each other. I’ve been there for them, some in little ways and some in big. I’ve looked past bad first impressions or things I thought were weird about them and they’ve treated me with the same grace. Some relationships are closer than others, some are easy and some more complicated. Together, we are so strong.

I could disappear, into work. Into study, busyness, into important things, important meetings, important people, the doing. And my heart would wither and my health would fade. There must be being also. There must be time to sit and laugh, or cry, or reflect. I’m not good at using health wisely, I’m very out of practice. I’ve so rarely had any! But I’m determined not to just work, not to miss out on my life, miss out on my people.

I found out the other day that a friend is in Intensive Care with kidney failure. I can’t visit, I haven’t heard anything back from her family. I don’t know if she is going to pull through. She’s in my thoughts every hour. She’s the most amazing person, her story is incredible, so much wisdom, so much patience and compassion. She’s very dear to me. I’ve always wanted to ghost write with her, to tell her story to a wider audience. I hope, deeply hope, that I one day get the chance. I miss her already.

This is my life, and I don’t want to miss any of it. It’s extraordinary.

Painting mandala stones

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Rose and I have started having craft nights some evenings, now that my intense work phase has eased up. We’re really enjoying it! Recently we’ve been painting stones, inspired by this YouTube video and this one too.

I brought these stoned home from the beach where I stayed overnight in my van on Mothers Day this year. It was a very liberating, very moving experience, and I wanted to bring tokens home. One we’ve kept for ourselves and put under Tamlorn’s tree in the backyard. The other has been given to my Mum, who would have been Tamlorn’s grandmother, to honour her grief and relationship. Each has a little gecko, which was our name for Tamlorn while they were trying to stay ‘sticky’ (alive).

For more amazing stone paintings, see here and this fantastic artist.

image

image

Sculpture: She’s a Mother on the Inside

/ Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

image

image

Mixed media sculpture: Pine, brass, silver, freshwater pearls, AB Swarovski crystals, bone colouredcotton, Noodler’s Tianamen ink, various glass beads.

Made in honor of my beautiful partner Rose, who with my miscarriage of Tamlorn recently, has now lost 7 babies unborn. As we have no living children yet, she is frequently overlooked on Mother’s Day and rarely considered to be a ‘real’ mother by friends or during events. Added to the cultural pressure not to tell anyone about early pregnancy and not to mourn such losses as ‘real’ children, she has grieved and suffered silently for most of her life.

The title is borrowed from the Whovian/Palmer phrase bigger on the inside, referring to the TARDIS and the human capacity. The doll mother closes completely and locks shut. Once opened, 7 stranded pearls tumble from her broken heart, red rich, precious, and painful. They must be untangled to fall neatly.

To close her again, you have to touch the strands, to tuck them back into her heart. You must interact with and acknowledge them, and handle them carefully, or she will be ruined.

I love Rose deeply. She is still in profound, compounded, silenced, complicated grief. It is my passion and my joy to use my art to bring a voice to a topic so silenced, and so show her as I see her: however childless she appears on the outside, she is, like me, a mother on the inside.

image

image

Death Wish Repository Workshop

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

If you’re in SA, and a writer of any kind, you really need to check out the SA Writer’s Centre. They run wonderful workshops and have all kinds of fantastic resources. If you’re somewhere else in Australia, there’ll be a centre for you too.

Today I went off to sit in a cemetery and participate in something called a Death Wish Repository Workshop. It was wonderful. It was moving, confronting, gentle, personal. I was so glad to be part of it and I’m so excited about this kind of work – bringing people together, creating a space to talk about the unspeakable things. We each wrote in response to many prompts. One of them was all around the details of our own funeral! I have come home with deep food for thought. Just the depth and pace I needed after the mania of the past month.

Here’s something I wrote about, that I think you won’t find particularly confronting. It’s not about death directly, but rather, my thoughts when prompted to think about my very first experiences of mortality. For me, this is when I was around 3 and 4.

I am three. I have learned about death from many places; the rabbit babies stiff in their nest, the flies on the windowsill. I have learned about Heaven and Hell from Sunday School, and night after night I sob in your arms for the people in Hell. 

When I think of that story now, its not for the reasons we’ve told it before – not as an illustration of precociousness or an indictment of a spirituality, but is it of you I think: your hands, every night, turned the brown and orange pages of the little paper tract explaining God’s love. Your hair falling around your face as you bent over me, trying to fold your body around mine again, to protect me. Hands trying to soothe me as I wept, to pat me quiet again. All those parts of the world that tore me apart; learning of atrocities in China, the history of the martyrs, massacres and executions. And always, it was you in the late hours, in the dark. While violence and madness wracked me, you were there, trying to give me what answers you had. Against all the evidence, trying to help me believe in love. 

Joyous Contentment

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

My semester is finished! I have handed in everything and I am now on holidays. I am definitely able to confirm that being under pressure can keep you in crisis mode, living every day half in the now and half scanning tomorrow for impending disasters that must be foreseen and managed. This morning I slept in until nearly midday, then spent an hour in the bath re reading all my journals for the last year. This is what I need – time for quiet and stillness, time for reflection. My heart is singing.

I’ve put on one of my prettiest velvet dresses and then cleaned the kitchen, washed the dishes, scrubbed the stove top, folded all the clean laundry, and started listing all the most urgent tasks and admin that I’ve had to push away over the last couple of weeks. I spent a glorious evening last night with my love, watching ‘Wish I was here’, talking about the future, and eating freshly cooked waffles with banana, cream, and maple syrup in bed.

Our home is so beautiful. We are so broke but spent every spare cent this fortnight restocking our larder and washing all the dirty clothes. I have just enough silver coins to put a skerrick of fuel in the van and return the movie – hired on a $1 special and considerably less distressing than ‘The Imitation Game’ which I hired on the same deal as a reward after a rough day on Tuesday… Brilliant, but a terrible choice in hindsight which added fuel to an already building exhausted hysteria.

I am going to cook Arroz con Leche with the tin of sweetened condensed milk I have been saving for months, and try to clear out some of the hardware space on my primary drive before my computer goes into melt down. It’s a beautiful day! 🙂

I have a tribe

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

How fortunate I am to be part of a tribe – I give and receive, I love and am loved, we are imperfect together but honest and there’s grace. I love my big extended family, and I’m deeply grateful for all the support through this exciting but challenging time where I’m flat out busy and too broke to function. Great things are afoot – not least of which is that – with so much help and support and love behind me – I can risk going so far beyond my own limits and reach for things so great and wonderful that would be far out of my own reach. We all stand on each other’s backs, all help each other fly.

I’m so happy to not be alone in the world any more. You, my friends, my family, my lover, people who send me a kind word or leave flowers at my door on bad days, people who just stayed during the hard years, or those who have turned things around for me with big generous bursts of time and effort – you are my world and I love each of you. Thank you for being part of my life.

Looking for a donor – part 2.

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

20150602_235658_wm

We’re looking for a donor again. We’re ready to try again for a bub, but the donor who helped us get pregnant with Tamlorn has had a change in circumstances. We were very lucky to get pregnant very quickly with Tamlorn – in just three cycles (months) of trying. Unfortunately they died in utero at only 9 weeks.

My body has had some time to recover, as has our hearts, and we’re ready to try again and just need to find someone willing.

In our original ideas about donors (which has a lot more information about us and the process) we were keen for a known donor if possible – someone with an ongoing friendship with our family. We’re more open now to a range of preferences, really the most important to thing to us is that you are free of STI’s, major genetic issues, and can be honest and communicate clearly with us. Bringing a child into the world is a journey – sometimes an ordeal – and it can take you places you never expected emotionally.

Sex will not be involved under any circumstances, but apart from that we’re happy to talk with you about what would suit best – discussions ranging from totally anonymous through to very involved are welcome. Each family defines the donor relationship differently. We don’t mind what nationality, sexuality, or gender identity you are, but you do need to be between 25 and 40.

So, if you’ve ever thought about being a donor, or know someone who might be appropriate – please share this and get in touch.

skreece1@gmail.com or facebook: sarah.k.reece

Musings on culture and madness

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

If you wish to experience (not intellectually understand, but in your body, feel) a culture gone mad, go and watch Mad Max 4. Preferably alone, on a large screen, with the bass up high. Preferably when you will come out of the theatre afterwards into the night, with the feeling lingering, the recoiling horror.

All my life I’ve been haunted by a powerful sense that the world does not make sense. All my life I’ve sought to understand this, to find where the flaw was, to unpick and rebuild the reasoning that led to unsolvable equations, data errors. Mad Max was a final piece for me, not known but experienced – experience being the key way we are designed to learn – mind and body in a feedback system of what is felt not just what is known. Into this space; the understanding of people as creatures of prediction, comes art, comes imagination.

Culture is our first, last and most powerful religion. It defines our beliefs. Our response to it, our acceptance or rejection or critical engagement with it determine key aspects of our lives. Culture tells us what is ‘normal’, and normal is holy.

Madness is the (often involuntary and destructive) rejection of culture. Common when the culture prevents a fundamental need from being met. In madness lie the seeds of our greatest strength – to reject the culture and to define our own.

All things have a culture. Your time in the history of the world. Your nationality. Your race. Your religion. Your gender. Your home town. Your workplace. Your family of origin. Your home. Your lovers. The inside of your own mind.

In all these places, normal is defined, holy is defined, insanity is defined. In all these places we succeed or fail, we fit or don’t fit, we embrace or reject, we obey or are excluded. In all these places, we are in a world unto itself, and must transition to the slightly different, or radically different cultures of the other worlds. Each world brings out a different ‘self’ in us, if we are adaptive. Each transition, each culture in context of another culture, creates tensions. Our plurality is both essential and potentially lethal, becoming deceit, two-faced, double minded, double-think, compartmentalisation not only of action and belief but also values. Or a terrifying simplicity of one value – to obey the culture – if this world tells me to love I am loving, if that world tells me to kill, I kill without regret.

Obedience to culture destroys freedom. Rejection of culture isolates and alienates us. To perceive culture as artificial, a construct, built by fallible minds, by accidents, by use and misuse of power, by the most glorious dreams and horrifying nightmares of human capacity is to take the first step back from fusing with it. No culture is ‘natural’. No cultural claim to truth, beauty, normality, holiness, or sanity is above examination. To grasp the power to shape culture, to assimilate that which seeks to assimilate us, is the work of a lifetime. To digest culture, embrace what is valuable, reject what is degrading, and bring your own wisdom to the challenge knowing you are also fallible, and to accept the costs of doing so, is a kind of freedom, and a kind of bondage.

What is it to be human? Culture gives us answers, so surely and subtly we don’t recognise we imbibe them. Culture is Kant’s Guardians who brook no questioning. Freedom and power and great suffering and loneliness lie in seeking or being forced to seek our own answers to those questions.

Coming home

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

image

A conference is like a theatre production. A marathon. A community event. A childbirth. Moving house.

Rush and noise and excitement and energy and frustration and new people and hard work. Adrenaline and boredom and getting lost.

Stray dogs, gas leaks, brilliant observations, clasping hands with strangers, insomnia, homesickness. Sensory overload. The musky smell of strangers, the way his coat feels against my ear, the speckles in her eyes and how she hides her face in her hands in embarrassment when someone compliments her about them.

Writing brief descriptions of people on their business cards so I might remember who belongs to which when I get home. Worrying they might see them and feel hurt by being reduced to a brief reference “black hair, laughs a lot”,  “husband and wife team, he’s a sculptor”.

Facial blindness making it difficult to find the speaker in the crowd afterwards to say hello or thankyou or I liked this point or that idea. Anxiety that I’ll shake the wrong hand and launch into an idea from the talk leaving a trail of baffled non-speakers wondering who this strange person was and what they were taking about.

On the train home now. Bus, train, train, bus, flight, friend in a car. I yearn for home. I want to see my loves, smell familiar smells.

I’m tired. My eyes are hot and heavy, my voice husky. I feel content. A completed thing. It’s done and was worth all the effort. I’m bringing gifts home with me, new knowledge, new ideas, new connections. New friends, new opportunities, new networks. Ideas challenged, or deepened, or spoken of in a different language with its own nuances and perspective. Great richness for me, and great richness I hope for my networks, my family, my arts practice, my communities.

Thankyou for all those who have supported me to get here, and once I was here, and getting home again, with food, transport, donations towards the costs, conversation, hugs, kindness, and caring for Rose back home who had been extremely sick with bronchitis and asthma. Your kindness and faith in me is so appreciated. I hope I have represented you well. I am not alone but part of a tribe, many tribes.

Poem – At the end

/ Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

Day one of the ISPS conference on psychosis is over. I’ve wept, I’ve met many new people, I’ve made friends, shared ideas, had paradigms challenged, found support, listened, learned, talked, shone, and soaked up all within reach of me. I’m back in bed now, dazed, sleep deprived, and changing gear. Poetry is a good place to come back to when you’re feeling skinless, so:

We have blazed brightly and now
At the end, alone in the dim
Comes the haunting fragility – the nakedness
Away from the theatre, from the pagentry
The balloons deflate
Not because it is not real
But because life cannot always be the lights and noise,
The parade of new fascinating people,
The urgent connections, sudden introductions, immediate revelations…

Thankfully.

I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve told today that I’m sometimes psychotic or always multiple.
Or shared unfinished thoughts with, not polished and perfected but still forming
How many times I’ve stood tall in my boots, grasped firmly my right to be here, to have a voice, an opinion, an experience, a right also to hear, to be part of these precious conversations, to drink from the cup of privileged knowledge.
To be grateful and enlightened.

And now?
I’ve gorged on food too rich for my spirit.
At some point even the largest, most gluttonous python must go into a cave,
Sleep in the dark and digest.

Now my boots lie empty beside the bed. I’m alone and naked in the darkness
Shedding all the roles like skin
I’m no one again, and glad for it.
I leave the world to Atlas and go to bed.
Tomorrow the sun will rise without me
The world will be beautiful and horrific and I’ll play no part in either, for just a few hours.

Shivering in the cold,
My soul slowly wanders back into my body,
Tremulous and tender, silent and gentle
Like a small creature, I feel it curling round,
Patting down the ground of me with tiny paws,
Making a bed of me to sleep.
How blessed I am to have such a soul
To lie here trembling with it
Listening to its silent, bewildered language
Watching the dreams come in, like fog feeling its way blindly over the bay.

Flying to Melbourne

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

image

On the flight now, about to take off! Delivered my talk on psychosis this afternoon, feedback was excellent. So tired, so excited, somehow still on my feet. Life is fantastic.
8am tomorrow morning the ISPS psychosis conference begins. Can’t wait.

Need sleep, downtime, rest, hugs. I’ve brought Blood Moon by a favourite author Jackie French, a notebook for ideas if I need to get anything out of my head, and Hershey’s chocolate almond kisses courtesy of beloved Rose.