I’m making headway on my backlog of business admin, at last. Here is the comfortable cat box, next to the window. Here is the box of paperwork I’m inputting and filing. Of course!
Author: Sarah K Reece
Dark & light
I’ve lost my voice again, the blog goes quiet. Funny how that happens sometimes. I’m grieving. I struggled awake this morning from a terrible dream about someone close to me dying. At the end, even as I started to realise it was a dream, I couldn’t help myself from reaching out, trying to hold on as it faded.
Depression comes and goes, a joyless, lethal lethargy with a bitter self hate.
There’s a pervasive sense of something being terribly wrong that’s hard to live with. I can’t tell if it’s the grief and sense of loss, or some other choice I’m making. I woke with it this morning as I wept into the sheets. Life is so fragile, what am I doing with it? What am I making of it? Suddenly I miss everyone, want to phone everyone, hold them all, tell them I love them. I restrain myself, I make tea and come back to bed. I let the animals touch me, I’ve disturbed them with the sobbing and they need to come near. It’s a beautiful impulse, the simplicity of the need for touch when someone cries out in pain.
I’m curled in bed, looking out at a white sky through the branches of my tree. This beautiful house. I won’t live here forever. There’s a sense of everything slipping away, of time stealing all. I try not to re evaluate my life, there’s been so much of that lately. I pat Tonks and think about a conversation with Rose last night, talking about how sick my dog Charli was, how I nursed him to the end but struggled to connect, how I bonded to the foster cat Abbie, but she died. Death and attachment. How strange it is that so much of what we want from life comes down to feelings. It’s not that we want success or career or to find love, it’s that we want to feel whole, content, connected, loved. I want those things. I think I’d how much work Rose and I have been doing lately and suddenly I want to run to her house, take her away, drive somewhere lost and lonely in the white sky, sit on the edge of an empty beach and fish. Sit by a fire and listen to the crackling, for hours and hours. Slow time down. More than anything I want to be able to feel the things around me, love and affection, grief, wonder. It’s the numbing detachment I fear. Living without being alive.
Rain glitters on the leaves of my tree. Rose is getting ready for work in her house down the road. Tonks is in the window, watching the birds flying black against the sky. There’s some kind of peace here. I still have a heart to break. I can still be moved by life, I know what I’m pursuing. Grief and terror rest alongside acceptance, a calm joy in the beauty of my world, my little home. The big searing questions of life and meaning and my life settle like tigers, resting behind me in the shadows, purposeful and waiting, but at rest. Rain falls silver. I lie by the window, between the dark and the light. My heart stops trembling and sleeps. Shadowed by pain and lit by joy. I’m still alive.
Gothic art shoes
Painted these up yesterday, looking for something a bit more minimalist than my usual. I love them.
Dark art – milk and opals
Dot paintings
This was a four part project in my painting class at college, each panel we were given specific instructions about tone/hue/method of application and so on. This piece was my favourite, which surprised me because the colours were all so muddy and ugly on my palette, but together they are such a subtle blend. I had to work with round shapes, for this one I used large dry brush round, and tiny paint dots. I like the dots, they spoke to me.
I’m relieved and a little sad to have handed in my final project and finished the class. Next week I’ll start photography which I’m sure will be interesting. Life is blurring by me at the moment, I’m taking off as much time as I can to rest before I get properly sick. I’m a little overwhelmed and dispirited. Nothing is simple with my business. Reminders of Leanne, my dead friend, are everywhere, like the way Amanda’s Facebook profile always shows up on my feed as a possible friend to invite to events even though she died last year. It doesn’t hurt as badly as it first did, but there’s a wrongness to her being dead that’s hard to reconcile myself to. I want her to be here so badly, to visit and laugh and tell me she loves me again. Life is fragile, and I’m sad.
Sophie eats an eclair
I’m exhausted. I can’t remember the last time I had a decent sleep. The last few weeks have been mad and I’m ready to collapse in a heap. Final projects are due at college today, I’ve finished late last night although I’m not very happy with them. Trying to do college and get a studio running in the aftermath of a house move and a funeral is just about finishing me off. My life feels very surreal and confused. I love it and its worth the mess. Just hanging in there until the roller coaster lets me off so I can curl up in a small ball and sleep for a month. Just this one more thing, and then the next, and the one after…
As a treat – here, have some photos of my gorgeous goddaughter Sophie. We had a lovely big dinner with friends recently and she was introduced to chocolate eclairs. They were greatly enjoyed!
Recovery & contradictions
I’ve found something I love now that this blog is nearly three years old. I’ve written enough to be able to take some of my earlier articles and write the shadow article, the contradictions. For me, a huge aspect of being multiple is that there is so often more than one reaction or opinion going on. I have to clarify my thoughts to be able to share them, here or in my work or relationships. Often this process over simplifies, it strips back complex concepts to a simple one. There’s huge value in this, especially for people who are in crisis or new to a field of information. They need somewhere to start, something that can be easily grasped hold of. But it gives me such a shiver of delight to be able to go back and contradict myself, to write in the shadows cast by all these ideas. Grounding techniques can be the most amazing tools for managing chronic dissociation and trauma issues. They can also be completely and utterly the wrong approach at times. Sometimes you do not need to be more grounded, more adult, more sane, more sensible and responsible, more a creature of the day. Sometimes the screaming and the madness are because the night is calling you and your spirit needs to fly. Sometimes it is not that you are too dissociated, but that you are not dissociated enough. Sometimes you need less safety and more adventure.
In the talk about recovery I give at Tafe, I usually point to a number of contradictions in my story, precisely because they are so commonly overlooked and reduced to a single, simpler story. I mention several in particular –
- My childhood was terrible/my childhood was wonderful
- Dissociation takes away from my life/dissociation protects my life
- I am vulnerable/I am resilient
- I need help/I can offer help to others
Each of these things is true, I say. And yet so often one obliterates the other. One story hides the other in its shadow. They are posited as ‘either/or’ facts when they are ‘and’. My childhood was both terrible and wonderful. So often when we talk about recovery, we hear a story arc that goes – Things got hard, I got sick, I found help, I recovered. Recovery is an endpoint where madness is no longer welcome. We do not talk any more about agony. There is a bizarre idea – totally at odds with my experience of life – that mentally healthy people do not suffer pain. Wildness is gone. The contradictions are all neatly ironed out, no more wrestling with doubt. Everything makes sense and all the loose ends are tied.
The human experience is so complex and strange. I like the contradictions and I’m suspicious of stories that don’t have any. Within contradictions I find an honest reflection of life; of the magnificent beauty, the breath taking, heart rending love, the horror, anguish, and misery of what it is to be alive. To love vulnerable and flawed people, to have dreams and watch some of them die, to struggle and succeed and fail and find that life is complex and unexpected. This is what it is to be human. Recovery as an idea, if it is to have any worth, must embrace that complexity rather than shrink from it. It cannot be a whitewashed place of pretending that we no longer bleed when pricked. That is a trap in which peer workers, those who’s very jobs depend on their capacity to prove they have ‘recovered’, will starve.
So, we have the idea, and the shadow of the idea. To be able to pick it up, turn it over, look beneath it, scrape the soil from the underside and smell the cold night scent of it, this is what I love. I built theories and frameworks and ideas and I love to do this. It helps me, like navigating the night by the pattern of the stars. I love to take masses of complex, unrelated information, break them down, and put them next to each other to see what happens. I love building ideas. And I love knocking them over, not treating them as sacred, not being scared of the truths in the shadows. I believe with my whole heart in the work that I do, and I love it down to my bones. But it’s not a house of cards that a contrary wind can blow over. They are stones in the palm of my hand. They are boulders on which I can stand. They reveal a truth, and they conceal another truth. I make them and I love them and I love the shadow beneath them. Life is not meant to be a neat, comforting story. In the contradictions are the depth and beauty. People are not meant to be so recovered that they walk without touching the ground, with no shadow, no dark uncertainty, no hint of wild abandon. We should not abandon complexity and uncertainty to territory marked ‘sickness’, ‘madness’ or ‘here be dragons’. Contradictions are also part of health, freedom, and love, an essential part of what it is to be human and to be alive.
How to rebuild
I learn so much from books I love. I gave a talk again about Mental health and recovery to some students at Tafe the other day. Each time I do this I love it more. It’s such a treat to have the floor for a little while, to talk about freedom and loneliness and love – all the things we so rarely talk about in mental health, all those things so critical to our lives. I draw upon such a wide collection of information, psych textbooks, biographies, my own experiences and those of other people I’ve met or supported, and so often, fiction. Good writers understand life deeply and they write about it in ways that are just as useful in helping to answer questions about life and people.
I’ve just finished re-reading The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip, one of my favourite authors. There’s a beautiful passage in it that resonated with me. I’ve heard a few people lately struggling with how to rebuild lives that have been taken apart by grief or illness. This is a gentle place to start:
I do not know anymore… I cannot care. It seems I have heard a dream, except that – no dream could hurt so deeply or be so endless. Maelga, I am like weary earth after the killing, hardening winter… I do not know if anything green and living will grow from me again.
Be gentle with yourself…Come with me tomorrow through the forest; we will gather black mushrooms and herbs that, crushed against the fingers, give a magic smell. You will feel the sun on your hair and the rich earth beneath your feet, and the fresh winds scented with the spice of snow…Be patient, as you must always be patient with new pale seeds buried in the dark ground. When you are stronger, you can begin to think again. But now is the time to feel.
The fear of dying
Today was a triumphant day. Rose and I saw our first dreadlocks client in our new studio, and spent 5 & 1/2 hours getting them looking great again and putting in about 50 extensions. We’re both trashed but on a wonderful high.
Last night I dreamed that my friend Leanne, who died recently, was still alive. In my dream our long drive interstate for her funeral was actually to see her, in response to a plea for help. When we arrived she told us that she was terminally ill and wanted assistance to kill herself. In the dream I was outwardly calm as we took her to the doctor for assessment (euthanasia was legal in my dream) while inside I was screaming with a kind of terrified despair – please please don’t make me do this to you! A desperate clash between wanting to honour her needs and wanting to care for my own.
I woke distressed and confused, it took a little time to untangle dream from reality, it had been extremely vivid. It’s easy in some ways to turn my face from the grief and the reality of her death, to let it slip past my mind. That’s why I have a photo of her coffin in my phone, a piece of stone from the graveyard where she was laid to rest. Not to wound and torture myself, but to inoculate me against dissociation of the kind that takes away life. So I get out of bed and I do the things that make up my day, and I always try to do them wholeheartedly. Then in quiet moments I remember my bright, lovely friend, and I realise her passing, that though she remains in my heart her voice is now silent and we cannot have any new conversations except in the constructs of my mind.
It makes me miss her and it makes me fear dying young. I have so much love ahead of me, so many dreams and hopes and so much love. Years of torment and loneliness have passed, made way for hard won insight, for love and friendship, for some kind of peace, for joy and hope. It makes me feel the farthest from suicidal I think I’ve ever been, to clutch to life with desperate desire to live longer and dream deeper. When the guilt and the self loathing crank into life like a carousel spinning in my mind I think to myself – I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to waste on self hate, there is so much life to be loved, friends to love, so many dreams I’m hoping for. And it doesn’t feel dismissive, it feels like permission to stop torturing myself because I never get that time back. I feel a deep laugh, a joyful casting off of a heavy weight. I put it down and throw myself back into my strange, beautiful, tiring, complicated life, with joyful abandon. I am deeply blessed.
Ice cream & breakthroughs
There’s so much I want to write about and so little time to write! I’m so happy today. I got a big sleep in, a lovely morning with Rose having big conversations about our life and business plans and relationships… After weeks of rushing around with little down time and no space for reflecting, this was bliss. We’re off running errands for the studio again now, then going out for good ice creams as a treat.
The treat is because I’ve made a major breakthrough in my admin phobias! I am seriously behind for my business, I find recording everything just unbelievably confusing and stressful. Even writing invoices can give me panic attacks. I’ve been working on the issue a lot, and this week I had a big conversation about it all with my shrink. I’ve nailed down some important ideas.
Firstly, I’m not bad at admin, which is what I’m telling myself and everyone else. For example, chasing people who owe you money is a horrible, stressful, and stupidly time consuming aspect of business, and many small business owners really struggle with it. I’m pretty good at that, I keep track of who hasn’t paid me and I stay in top of it with regular contact with them. That’s really quite big! I don’t like it, but I can do it and with a minimum of stress. I wrote and update my own website and manage social media just fine. So I’m selling myself short and adding a big mental block when I say I’m bad at admin.
I cannot use the admin income and expenses systems I’ve set up. I can’t think on them. I’m a visual thinker and I need to be able to see the paperwork. I wanted to save paper and keep everything online but I’m finding it impossible. Instead of feeling guilty and angry and trying to make myself do something in a way in finding impossible, I’ve completely restructured how I record things. I’m printing all receipts and keeping them in concertina files. I’ve split my income and expenses apart and now they’re on separate databases because this way there’s less visual clutter on each page and I find it easier to see what I’m doing and think clearly. Basically in adapting the system to the way I work instead of trying to force myself to function in a way I clearly don’t. It’s blindingly obvious when I put it like that.
It’s working! I’ve done months of record keeping in the past couple of days. I’m so relieved. I’m applying this principle in many other highly stressful aspects of the business and letting go of how I think I should do things and focusing instead on how I work and how to set up things that work for me without feeling guilty or angry with myself. And the stress is melting away and the excitement and sense of having a song in my heart bubbles up from beneath it.
Can’t write more today, we’ve reached the Copenhagen store 🙂 xx
Photos of the Studio and Dread Art!
Hard work is happening to get our studio ready in time for our first client booked in next week, and I’ve been asked to share photos. 🙂 I just delivered the chairs today, the paint work is almost finished now, we just need to add a final coat to the purple walls – it’s a very dark colour so inclined to look patchy unless we really stack on the coats of paint. I’m alternately really excited and inspired about it all, and overwhelmed with anxiety and dread. Working hard on dealing with that.
One unexpected upside has been that now that I know I have a studio to display my work, I’ve been so excited about art again and making lots of things in my studio! It’s by far the most effective technique I’ve ever tried in dealing with feeling blocked creatively. That’s such a wonderful bonus for all the stress of setting this up. 🙂
Our lovely display for beads – some of us love to decorate our dreads 🙂
Our new chair for clients! I’m in love with it. Can’t you just see yourself relaxing in this while henna or inks are done?
I told you I loved this chair. You can see our gorgeous purple walls here – one more coat to go hopefully!
Dreading chairs! Adjustable heights, as comfortable and friendly on backs and joints as we could find.
Dread Art! I stitched this little bead sleave last night, and I love it.
More dread art! These little wire dread coils are gorgeous! I made this myself, using copper wire, Swarovski crystals, and a beautiful paua shell button from New Zealand.
A second handmade dread coil I’ve created, this one is a bit finer for my little dreads. 🙂
I bought this beautiful tree on the drive back from my friend’s funeral. It’s going to hang on the studio wall and be a little reminder of her.
The studio room, coming along.
Close up of a couple of beads – I’m sourcing all of these extremely carefully. Did you know that eBay has a warning about ‘Tibetan Silver’ beads? I didn’t! The term is unregulated so it means any silver coloured alloy. Some have been tested and found to contain lead, or arsenic! Wow. So, only sterling silver/quality natural ingredient beads will be sold from this studio. These are hand carved wooden skull beads.
The body art chair and a lovely ergonomic stool, for the artist.
We’re very excited about this beautiful huge mirror and can’t wait to hang it!
We now have a big supply of synthetic hair for natural coloured extensions
And some really cool colours too.
Grieving
It’s been a hard week. I’m home again and exhausted. I slept for almost 12 hours last night, and spent all today feeling very ill on the couch. Whenever I wake up the reality of my friend Leanne’s death is like a heavy weight falling on me. I woke at 5am and sobbed my heart out into the bedsheets. It’s overwhelming. There’s such a sense of being torn from a future I thought I was working towards. When the grief comes over me the pain is physical, tendons in my shoulders scream, muscles ache in my calves, I can’t catch my breath. It’s hard to bear.
I talk to Rose about her, about the ways they’re similar, how much I think they would have got along, how delighted she would have been to meet our children. When guilt creeps in and self loathing eats at me, I say to myself “I don’t have time for that” and I think of how brief life can be, and how quickly it can be taken from us.
No one knows yet what killed my friend, she was only in her forties. She died in her sleep, at peace, no mess, no pain, no waking to feel heart failing or stroke crippling the brain. Her eyes still closed, her face resting in one hand. It’s an image that stays with me.
I want her back. But I’m determined to grieve her loss in a way that doesn’t harm me. She brought so much to my life. My world is so diminished by her death. But I won’t be less for knowing her. I won’t add to my pit of self hate. I won’t withdraw from Rose and my friends. I won’t just push through and ignore this, or pretend it’s not a tragedy. I’ll remember her wonderful humour and how important it is to get together with friends and laugh. To be surrounded by books and music and animals. To shut out the world when it’s overwhelming, and find the courage to get back into it when you need freedom again. I am different for having known her. I am better for having known her. I’m going to hurt and I’m going to heal. I’ll hold all my memories precious, and I’ll love those I still have here. I’ll do my best to make her proud.
The funeral is over
I’m sitting in the graveyard as they remove the trappings from the grave and prepare to bury my friend. It rained through the service but now the sky is clearing. It was a long drive here. We just finished the house move the day before. My Mum and I drove over together, and got stuck with no motor oil left, in a small town late at night. A pub owner was astonishingly generous and loaned us his very nice late model car to go find a 24hr service station and buy some. He thought a nearby town would have one but they were closed and unfriendly. We argued through the glass but a clerk refused to let us buy oil. So we wound up driving all the way to our destination then back to the van, left fuel money in the borrowed car and tossed the keys over the pub fence as instructed. We finally arrived at our caravan park at around 3am and went straight to bed. Mum slept, I only caught a few hours. We were lucky, it was quite a pilgrimage to get here.
The service this morning was beautiful. I knew very few people there except a few by name, people aged spoken of to me, sung their praises, told me how much she loved them. It was moving to be among so many people grieving, so many other people who loved her. I passed my contact details to a couple of them. They talked about grief and celebration. They talked about shock and loss and love. They talked about what an amazing, complex, vibrant, vulnerable, strong, generous woman she was.
Many people had the same story I had, that there had been distance and then a recent reconnection. Maybe, if she had known she going to die soon, maybe she wouldn’t have done it so differently. I could feel her so strongly, sitting next to me, embracing me, forgiving me, asking for forgiveness, making me laugh, telling me she loved me. She’s utterly irreplaceable. I loved her.
I wore the pendant I’d made in her memory, and a silver velvet dress she would have loved. I cried. There’s a big hole in my heart, in my future. She was so young. She will always be part of my family. I will remember us laughing together, raucous, raw with sadness and sharp with black wit. I’m not leaving her behind, here in this earth. I’m taking her with me.
And now, home.
Charcoal & apples
Products of drawing and painting classes so far. I’m falling behind with everything else that’s going on, and going to miss this week’s class as my friend’s funeral is interstate that day. I have been enjoying them, getting as much out of them as I can. The assignments here were to create landscapes using only marks, no lines, no drawing shapes, just alluding to natural patterns. I enjoyed that. The painting we were asked to paint monochrome and then a single colour (with tonal variation) of whatever or object of obsession is that we’ve chosen for the term. Mine is an apple.
I was a little heartbroken by this class, I’d been having such a wonderful time exploring colour but was told to stop that and focus on concept development. I don’t want to do concept development, I want to learn about paint! We already had a concept development class, which I hated, and now it’s being snuck into all the other foundational classes, which is much less like Tafe and much more like uni. If I wanted uni I’d be there. My art college is so special to me because it doesn’t have so much of that conceptual rubbish but teaches skills with which I can make any art I wish. Or it did. Everything changes, and is such a pain doing so few subjects at a time because it happens all around you.
But I’m going, and making things and using the time to listen inside me to those things that make art easy and the ones that make art hard, learning all the time how to be open to it and how to hear it and make it happen.
Mourning in clay
I sculpted this pendant today, in memory of my friend. She told me once that she’d had a vision of me holding a baby of my own. I tried to sculpt that vision, the gift of hope and dreams of a good tomorrow.
It’s still raw, I’m going to paint it yet. It’s made with polymer clay, a freshwater pearl, a piece of polished shell, and three swarovski crystals in the colour of black diamonds.
I’m heartbroken, and still too angry to hear people talking about peace. I took today off and stayed home. It’s a luxury to have time to grieve, I so rarely have had the chance in my life. I feel angry and empty and hurting and deeply depressed. I’ve watched episodes of Scrubs and the first Garden of Sinners episode which was strange and sad and fitting.
I’ve found out that her funeral is next week, interstate. I’m so relieved to not have missed it. That’s happened before and it left this terrible feeling. I’m making plans to drive over. Poor Rose is packing her house alone for the move. I’ve eaten and cried and showered and written and made art. It’s all I have at the moment. She’ll never read this. She’ll never read another word of this. Everything is wrong.
In movies, death is an ending of a story arc, a finale. Here, things are unfinished, there was no warning. We don’t even know how she died yet. It’s the most terrifying feeling, this awareness that we make sense of deaths like this only in the aftermath. That we edit and write into someone’s life some kind of ending. We view all the last years differently now we know they are the last. But you can’t see it coming. It could be me, or you, or anyone we love. And as much as I want to hope she made the choices she would have made of she had known, I don’t know. None of us can truly live as if we’re going to die tomorrow, we have to have one eye on the years, to be aware we might have to live with consequences for a whole lifetime. Trapped in that place, it seems to me, we’re so vulnerable to living out lives chosen for us by other people, lives that do not fit, that we do not want, that do not make us feel alive.
My friend struggled so much to find a life of passion and meaning. I think of us out to dinner, laughing so loud the whole restaurant would turn to look, our black humour perfectly matched. We should have had more time to laugh like that again. There’s so much I still wanted to say.
Death of a friend
I’ve just heard that a friend of mine has died. I have no details, only that she passed away in her sleep. She was one of my oldest friendships, but she herself was not old. I thought we had more time. She was in my plans. Her death is like another door closing, slamming shut, becoming part of a past that is full of closed doors. For someone like me, someone who had to run a long way to find some kind of peace, there’s already so many shut doors. She was not going to be part of my past, she was going to be part of my future!
I wanted her to meet Rose, to meet my children, the babies we used to write about in letters to each other, as she chose – ambivalently – to not have children, and as I grieved my own dreams of children due to sickness and ended relationships. She told me once she’d had a vision of me with a baby of my own in my arms. I wanted her to be here to see it happen! She was there through so much of the shit, our relationship suffered, we fought, there was distance and pain. We’d just started to reconnect, to let go, we’d just decided to make a new friendship.
I want to scream! There’s a howling rage in me. We suffered so much when the old world burned. I wanted her to know me now, in a place where my skin doesn’t burn anymore, where I’m not all teeth and shadows. I wanted to hug her again and tell her I loved her and never forgot her.
She’s not supposed to be dead.
I don’t want to be okay, I don’t want to move on, I don’t want to grieve, I want to burn the world down. This is not fair. This is wrong. We deserved better, we’d earned it. I’m screaming. I’ll scream as long as I need to.
Dreadlocks
Rose and I are in training all week, learning all about Dreadlocks. This is one of the new services we’ll be offering through our studio soon, so we’re currently reading, making, thinking, and even dreaming all things related to dreads. O.o It’s a little mind boggling.
We’re both in a twilight zone of sleep deprivation, decongestant meds, and lingering chest infections. The last day of training is Saturday, then we start the big house move. The studio has been built and needs painting and furnishing. I’m still behind on admin, which gets worse every day. And we have a new business with website, email, phone, signage, and marketing to sort out. Hitting the ground running. Sometimes just hitting it. Sometimes landing face first. It’s very much one hour at a time here.
But hopefully, we’re setting up something viable for us both to work in and make a living, that will fit our family and help us reach other goals like having children. 🙂
About Growing Up
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Some people with multiplicity point to key experiences such as wishing whatever was happening, was happening to someone else. I’ve never been able to relate to that. But the idea of not wanting to grow up? Oh yes. And what better way to achieve that then splitting off child parts and forming more parts when circumstances required new skills?
There was not a single adult in my world I envied. No one whose life I wanted to have. What I saw around me was a lot of pain and loneliness. Often they didn’t even seen to be aware how unhappy they were, but for me it was painfully visible. I could smell it on the air, feel it in my chest. An empathic child, I felt the cast off emotions and denied anguish of everyone around me. I felt stuck, in a body growing older, when there was nowhere I wanted to grow to. Perceptiveness can be lethal. I saw, and understood, far more than I could emotionally process. I was constantly caught between the dark and the light, between the way everything seemed to be on the surface, and the underworld. A good loving family, and the constant threat of violence. An upright private school, and the casualty list of victims too underprivileged to be worth protecting from the bullies.
Adults close to me had their own issues with the adult world. One told me that the process of growing up kills your spirit. Adults don’t play anymore, don’t climb trees on the way to work. They’re numb. I promised myself I wouldn’t turn into an adult. Another told me how children are innocent but adults lose this. In Sunday School we were told stories about children who could ask the challenging questions of hurt and angry adults, and be heard, where another adult would have been shut out. Many used me as a secret keeper. I heard horror stories that many had shared with no other person. I became tasked with this impossible goal, of not growing up, by adults who were mourning their own lost inner children. I tried very hard to comply. I kept the secrets of my peers also, even those who bullied me. I was steeped in the knowledge of unspoken pain.
“Adults are the corpses of children.”
Oddly enough, I was expected to function at an adult level at a very young age. For an oldest child in a family under massive stress, this isn’t an unusual story. Not all of that was a bad thing. But some of it hurt. Some of it was lying in the dark at night, afraid of the shadows, because I was now too big a kid to have a light on. Some of it was lonely and overwhelming, heavy burdens of expectations and responsibly.
I grew up surrounded by the myth of the Golden Age of Childhood. Constantly being told these were the best years of your life. I swore to myself never to rewrite my history and pretend this had been the case for me. I lived in this surreal world where everyone was locked away with their private pain, where everyone pretended there was no war and no dead bodies. It was like being able to see blood all over the walls and no one else acknowledging it was there.
A boy stalked me when I was 14. He was profoundly distressed, suicidal, and self harming. When I sought help for him from the head of our school department, I encountered endemic denial. The boy had started coming to school with extensive fresh injuries on his arms from cutting. I begged the head teacher to intervene. He asked the boy how he received the injuries. He reported back to me that they were ‘from falling into a rose bush’. I cried and said you know that’s not true! The teacher said well there’s nothing else we can do, with the relief of an adult out of their depth who has been allowed to keep running with the easier cover story. You could scream for help very, very loudly in my world without anyone hearing.
My peers were not the same. They yearned for adulthood. They craved power, freedom, and sex. Impatient with childhood, they raced towards an adult world that contained everything they desired and were denied. This difference became a rapidly widening gulf between us, bigger every year.
My sexual development was screwed up by weird attitudes, secrets, teachings, and abuse. I feared my own desires. I feared power and corruption. I had no illusions about the freedoms of adulthood. The only freedom I craved and lived for was to leave school. Responsibility and failure weighed heavily upon me.
I’m 30 now, undeniably an adult, at least physically. I have child parts, and sometimes I think they are the best of us. We have on some levels, admirably succeeded in our attempts to not grow up. It has been a painful mess. Sometimes I think that child in an adult body is one of the loneliest creatures in existence. My little 5 year old would sometimes just switch out and sit alone on the couch, waiting. She was hungry and wanted ice cream, but kids aren’t allowed to open the freezer so she would just wait for a grown up to come and help her. I live alone, no one was coming. I feel them yearning in me when we pass children at the park. When I read about a multiple giving a box of crayons as a gift to another newly diagnosed, a great desire leaped in my heart. It was another year before I was brave enough to buy crayons for us.
So here I am, painfully suspended between the worlds of child and adult. There’s so many ideas to untangle. That adults live in the ‘real world’. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fit myself to that real world – the world of admin and responsibility and success and bills that need paying. I also keep rebelling against my own goals, switching in the rain, running away from my own life. I’m starting to develop new ideas. I’m starting to think that perhaps the task of all adults – multiples and otherwise – is to love and look after their own inner children. I’m starting to think that there is no ‘real world’, that the real world is just as much a dream as any other. When I live in a caravan, what am I ‘really’? White trash or a gypsy dreamer? Adults get together and dream up their version of what reality is, of what love is, and what success is. I think my idea of the real world is a nightmare. A bad dream, dreamed by a lot of hurting adults with very lost and lonely inner children. It’s not even about success, when I look at some of the ‘successful’ people I admire – like Amanda Palmer – she doesn’t live in the real world! Oh, she does admin and pays her bills, but only as a means to ends, not as a goal in themselves. They are the poles that keep up the tent in which the magic happens. The magic is the real world, the creating and adventuring and connecting and being uniquely oneself.
I’m starting to dream new dreams of adulthood that don’t scare me so much. Some days I have the most glorious glimpse of life as a mother who is very imperfect, who is sick and strange and full of dark art. And I see her painting the kids to be dinosaurs and chasing them round the yard. There’s joy and freedom and silliness. There’s a different world, that has nothing to do with the real, nothing to do with adults who are dead on the inside.
Rose and I have both been so sick this week, and yet, when I let go of the idea of what we should be doing and how I expect this to play out, something magic happens. The day becomes infinity. I’m captured by the fall of the light through the curtains, by the colour of the skirts of leaves, by the warmth of her skin, the feel of ice water in my mouth, watching the kitten chew the dog’s foot and laying back to laugh. What was a wasted day, a sick day, a day in which nothing good would happen, a day to be endured as I wait to get back to the real world, becomes the most beautiful day of my week. I read lovely books and slip in and out pain and sleep and let go of the driving and the haunting sense of failure and I am given back the most beautiful day.
Maybe crisis was the best thing that could have happened
Sometimes when I’m working with other multiples who are in crisis and feeling overwhelmed by their internal chaos and frightened and frustrated by their parts, I think to myself that discovering I have parts and then going through a few years of crisis might have been the best thing that could have happened to me. It’s a weird thought, because if I could take back years of homelessness, isolation, confusion, and pain, I would in a heartbeat. And yet, it provided an odd protection for me. I rallied, or rather, we rallied. To survive. And the thing we protected ourselves from, most of all, was a story about what it means to be multiple that would have crippled us.
I recall, back when I was working with a MH PHaMs worker, her sending around emails trying to find me a psychiatrist to work with. At my request she was asking for someone willing with to work with a person with DID without trying to integrate them at this stage. At the time I was homeless, caring for someone who was suicidal and often in hospital, highly vulnerable and under horrific stress. I was well aware that having parts was greatly helping me. While some parts were burning out, others would step up and take on our very complicated and painful life. We were running a complex relay where infighting and conflicts gradually made way for a deep mutual respect.
Like a platoon of soldiers in an appalling conflict, we started to bond. We started to realise how deeply we relied on each other, that we were all in this together, even the ‘crazy’ ones you would never have befriended back home, even the ‘useless’ ones you would never have chosen to have by your side in a war. You fought for them, you protected them, you demanded their respect, simply because they were your platoon. We might hate each other, we might not understand each other at all, we might be very, very different from each other, but we’re fighting the same war. We’re mates. So you don’t steal each other’s rations. You don’t play mind games with each other. You might yell sometimes. You might hold your hand over the mouth of the one who won’t stop crying, just until the enemy pass by. You might hit them when they bite you. But then you say sorry and you tussle their hair and when you find a box of pencils you save them for them.
Maybe over time you find they’re not as crazy as you thought. Maybe you find that when you’re kind to them they don’t cry so much and don’t screw things up so much. Maybe you get to the point where you can let them sleep next to you and when they can’t sleep for the nightmares, you sing a little to them. Maybe someday an old story comes out about them, about how they were in the war long before you, back in the early days. About how brave they were and how broken they were, and you realise that really, they were protecting you, all along. They look like crazy kids because they were young and they got hurt early and being brave wasn’t enough, and their army wasn’t big enough to win. So you hate them a little less and you make sure they get a bowl of soup when there’s soup to be had. It’s hard to be disgusted by someone, however weird, when you find out they’ve saved your life. Things change, they have to.
I was lucky because the war was still going on, so I didn’t see my parts as the enemy. They weren’t destroying my life, outside forces were still doing that. They were still trying to keep us alive. So the story never really fit me – this ‘once having parts was helping you but now it’s messing everything up’ story. I know it fits other people, but it didn’t fit us. We couldn’t afford to have our most useful way of managing crises removed from us while we were still in crisis. And we really couldn’t afford to abdicate responsibility to a shrink. So the ‘you must have weekly therapy for years to manage DID’ story didn’t fit well either. Most people couldn’t manage what I was managing, and most shrinks were rapidly out of their depth too. Some just denied the DID or laid the chaos at my feet – your life is a mess, you must be borderline. Which is a lovely cop out for the brutal reality that life can be extremely bloody hard at times, and sometimes that’s just bad luck. Some laid the mess at the feet of the DID – you will always be lonely and chaotic while you have it, you need to integrate as rapidly as possible. But I was watching friends and family burn out and fall away, where I could keep going. I was doing the impossible, every day. I could switch instead of freeze and face down the most violent and frightening person in my life – someone I had never seen anyone stand up to, someone who scared even the therapist. And I could do this because we were parts, separate, because we could switch to whoever had the most useful approach. I simply couldn’t deny the reality that having parts was currently keeping me alive.
So I had to build different stories. And the more I looked, the more I realised how narrow the old stories are. There are so many people they don’t fit. There are so many people who get lost in this idea that someone else – a shrink – is the best person to lead their lives, because they are broken and damaged. There are so many people trying to figure out their parts and fit them into frameworks of ANP’s or ISP’s or Protectors, and in such fear and pain when they don’t fit. When the stories fit they can be so liberating – someone else knows what I’m going through! But even then, they obscure. There is such uniqueness to each person. I have heard hundreds of stories of multiplicity and YES of course I tell people ‘such and such is common!’ when they feel crazy and scared, but I also constantly want to honour the diversity. Each story is so unique. And I’m so sad at the long, painful, tortured road so many people seem to have to take through years of treatment to get to a place that crises got me to so quickly – I’m blessed.
Even my most dysfunctional parts are trying to help us survive. That love is the best way to engage a system. That I’m not crazy or broken, or at least, no more so than anyone else. I can’t helping thinking how much quicker and less painful this road is if you don’t start with stories about sickness, brokenness, needing other people to help you survive. Maybe this is what happens, all over the world, in places where they’ve never heard of psychiatry. Maybe this is what happens to thousands of people who don’t quite meet the criteria for DID and never get that diagnosis, as they come out the other side of crisis and take stock. There are so many stories about multiplicity we never hear.
I’m not anti-integration! One of my favourite lines is from The Flock, saying that perhaps it will happen when and if it is supposed to. I have personally approached it, initially with great enthusiasm, and now with caution. I don’t see it as my goal. If it happens as a by-product of my living and healing, how wonderful! If it does not, how wonderful! Life is a strange and amazing thing. There is no one road, we all walk our own. But certainly, sometimes, when I’m listening to people taking on the standard stories about multiplicity, framing it as an illness, seeing their parts as the problem instead of their inexperience, self hate, or trauma as the problem, I’m so sad! It seems I was lucky that life gave me another kick in the teeth just after I was working this out, because it sure has helped us work together. It’s an odd thing to wish for someone else, especially someone already struggling, and it’s not really true. I don’t wish crises or suffering on others, but I do wish they have the chance to write new stories.
Most of all, I want people to be free from other people telling their stories for them! I want people to be free not to fit themselves into other people’s frameworks, but to find their own. I want them to have the chance to greet the possibility they have parts with courage and love and joy, instead of stories of terror, loss, and suffering. It all rather reminds me of a strange old prayer:
A Franciscan Benediction
May God bless you with discomfort,
At easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships,
So that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger,
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless you with tears,
To shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection,
Starvation and war.
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
And turn their pain to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness,
To believe that you may make a difference in this world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen
Rose has signed a lease
I’m still sick and exhausted, endometriosis is kicking me in the teeth, but my attempt to restart on the pill this month had to be abandoned due to immediate, severe depression. I can’t be sure it was related, but as I went through the same thing when I stopped taking it last year and that took 2 months to get over, I stopped it straight away. I’ll try it again in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, my pain levels are very high, and I feel like hell.
Rose has a virus that has developed into a chest infection, so she feels like someone ran her over a few times then stuffed her lungs with cotton wool. I feel like my bones have been drilled, fitted with bolts, and then clamped in a vice. We’re an awesome pair at the moment.
But – she’s signed a lease. Rose, my sister, and my friend and his daughter Sophie (my goddaughter) are all moving in together in a fortnight, to a house on my street. They’ll be only 10 houses away from me. 🙂 I’m staying put for now and will move in sometime later. This staged approach keeps the pressure off and the stress as low as possible for both Rose and myself. It gives us a home base for the move that doesn’t change, and staggers the introduction of our pets. It also puts off the nasty reduction in welfare that happens when you move in with a partner, until my work is successful enough that we can afford it. It’s actually happening! Some of the people I most love in the world will be a short walk away. I feel so blessed. Stressed out of my tiny mind and in horrible pain, but very blessed. There will be vastly more excitement when I’ve got through work tomorrow and recovered. I am so so sick of being sick. I have a studio to paint! 😦
Everyone was thrilled about signing the lease. And then immediately started getting panicky or depressed about various logistical problems with the move itself. I was reminded of how quickly this approach wears people out. I see it all the time in mental health work. You must take time to celebrate each victory, to enjoy it, before moving on to the next problem. You have to give yourself a break from the chronic stress and problem solving, have to make room for the peaceful feelings and the celebrations. It’s such an important part of resilience. Savouring the moment. Rose has signed a lease!
Living with Rage
If you love someone who has been hurt, you have to learn how to live with rage.
I’m used to living with my own pain and anger these days. I know where it hurts, I know what to do on those days when it’s going to drown me, when I need to burn it all down.
Rose has been badly hurt at times. When I hold her, when I hear her stories, I swallow back my own feelings. I’m just present. She hurts, or is afraid, or hates herself. I hold on, I hold onto her, onto hope, onto grief, onto love.
Underneath this is rage. Touch her again and I will kill you. Make her cry and I’ll scream your world apart. Tell her again how worthless she is and you’ll inherit a firestorm. She’s not alone anymore. She’s no longer the only one, a place you can leave your frustration with the world, your own inadequacy and impotence, without consequence.
It builds, over time, I find.
I’ve been in relationships where friend or partner insisted that I do not get involved when they are harmed. Once someone had my boyfriend against a wall by their throat and he still would not allow me to intervene. I locked myself in the toilet and cried. I was 16.
I once inherited everyone in the world of my partner. They had access to me. People I would never have shared time with, never have let close, never have trusted, had access to me.
I once turned into a single entity with my partner. We had to operate as a unit in all things. What they submitted to I must submit to. What they hated and walked away from, I had to leave behind.
Then, I stood alone in a caravan, after all the years of trying so hard to be loveable and to make people feel safe around me, and I realised that I was in less pain now. It hurt less to be alone than to be the least important and valued member of a group that kicks downwards. I paid high prices for the illusion of belonging. I promised myself that I’d never let people treat me like that again. I’d rather be alone. I’d rather self destruct than let someone else do it to me.
Here I am, and this time I don’t inherit anyone. Respect is met with respect. Only those who love me get close to me. I don’t become a unit. I make my own choices about what I will suffer and why. I stand my own ground. And sometimes, I have to find ways to express rage, because I love her, because she deserves so much better.
And she deserves better than me too.
But how can you hate yourself when that’s hating someone she loves?
Sometimes I get angry with Rose. I thought I was hiding it well, discharging little bits in dark comments, sniping with tone or look. She called me out on it and the relief was huge. I’m not the only one watching to make sure things are fair and okay. It’s so much easier when we both watch. I’ve less power, less responsibility. I’m an equal. I saw a vision of myself as an abusive spouse, of where this could take us, and I cried bitterly. There was only one way out – painful honesty. Being real about the times we drive each other crazy. Being real about our limits. This was many months ago now, and I haven’t slipped since. Love and humility are a good match.
But I am finding that I’m losing my capacity to swallow my rage when she cries into my arms about something someone else has done. I know what it’s like to take it because you love someone. I know what it’s like to be forced to stand by. I don’t want to get into places I don’t belong. I don’t want to overshadow her choices. I don’t want to be someone else to manage. But I want everyone to know that she’s not alone. Those vile ones who took so much because once she was small and alone, watch where you leer. I loathe you more than you can understand. I restrain my violent impulses. I wake from nightmares and think of your faces, distorted with narcissistic self pity. Rage burns like fire in my bones.
Now, the wounds inflicted by those who lash out unthinkingly, who act out their petty frustrations and choose someone close to hand, someone they’re pretty sure will take it and won’t leave, how then do I hate those she loves? Where she forgives, I want to down the façade of unity. This time she has somewhere safe to run. This time there’s someone there to say ‘don’t hate yourself, you’re beautiful’. A place where your lies get washed away. I may not be there, I may not have my hand on your throat, but I’m watching. When she sobs into my lap about the names you call her, I’m listening. When you roll your eyes, raise your voice, curl your lip with that sneer, I’m clocking your contempt. When she swallows down an insult or doesn’t hear another assumption about how she’s just not trying hard enough and has it pretty easy I’m sharpening my teeth in the shadows. Don’t think things aren’t changing. Try that on me? Try that with her when I’m there? She has my heart, she carries it in her chest. I pay no allegiances beyond love, and I protect my heart.
It’s the simplest of things, to love those who love her, those who see what I see in her. To hate those who hurt her, her make her feel that she is somehow less, who use her as a place to ease the ache of their bones. And the rest – those of us who love but let her down? I’m watching you, just like I watch me. Make all the excuses in the world, but you had better mean it when you bow your head.
And me? I find it helps to have someone who doesn’t mind if you spit fire. The kinds of friends who just say ‘that’s messed up’ and don’t try to calm you down. A car is almost sound proof if you need somewhere to scream, or better yet, to scream along to music up loud. Break a few rules that won’t kill you. Direct the rage into making you look clearly at things you’d rather avoid. Clean up your act, clear out your own stressors. It’s okay to love, it’s okay to want to protect those you love. You can’t stop the fire but you can direct where it goes. Handle it with respect, with integrity. I read dark books and breathe turpentine. It passes, it eases. The scream fades in the air and a silence comes over, a space made for a different song.
She’s free, and I’m free, and we share pain and fury and grief and longing and fear back and forth between us like a complex knitting. She shares pain and I give her back rage. We are free and we are not free. We share terrible truths in the night. We see ourselves in each other’s hearts like dark mirrors. Love transforms these offerings, they are transmuted, purified by the process. An alchemy of broken hearts. At the end we are wounded, we are divine, we are human. We try to bring light. We try to bring peace. We lay down sword and tear and wing. We are restored to love.
Riding the avalanche
What a week.
Rose is sick, probably tonsillitis or a flu. I’ve done a huge fibro flare after work this weekend and been in more severe pain than I’ve experienced in a long time. I’ve also been wildly depressed and wound up meeting with a friend and crying on their shoulder for about 3 hours at a local pub. We’re running out of time for Rose to sign a lease before she winds up stranded with her current one expired. She, my sister, and my friend and his daughter, my goddaughter Sophie, are all putting in applications together for places near me. I wont be moving anywhere yet. Rose and I are both stressed out of our brains, sleeping badly and having nightmares. Rose keeps running into conflicts in her life with people who yell at her. I’m finding that my ability to be a patient support in the background is being severely tested. Yesterday between pain and illness and someone having a go at her while I wasn’t around again I really started to feel like I was losing my mind.
I went and visited nice people who fed me dinner and let me rant. I was pissed off on facebook. Then I came home with chocolate, milk, and the darkest book I could get my hands on at short notice (The Death of Bunny Munroe, by Nick Cave) and took myself to bed. This morning I checked in with Rose (still sick) and called Centrelink in the faint hopes I had miscalculated when figuring out that if we move in together we will need to add to our income (or subtract from our expenses) an additional $246 a fortnight, to be as broke as we are currently. Fantastic.
We’re waiting to hear back about another application. It’s sounding promising so far, and if this one comes through then things should be sweet with no one stuck between houses.
It’s good to wake up this morning feeling like I can breathe. Yesterday I woke out of nightmares into asthma and intense pain which is one of my least fun ways to wake up. Just taking things minute by minute at the moment, which is helping a lot. Letting myself off the hook. Trying to get a few dishes done. Breathing. Trying not to explode. One foot, then the other, then breathe. Losing my mind a bit here and there seems to be helping. Don’t try to stop the avalanche, just ride it down and try not to f*&% too much up on the way.
Ink Painting – Reza Barati
Australia has been moving back into harsh ‘detention centre’ policies for many years now. We have used these options many times in our short history. They are horrific, destructive places where people are completely disempowered and suffer a great deal. I once did a research project on our creation of an internment camp on Torrens Island, in which Australians of German origin suddenly found that their new home feared and hated them. There was no trial or right of appeal. Conditions started off reasonably but became brutal over time and under cruel leadership. I read letters the men sent, week after week, to local authorities pleading for better conditions and right of trial. It was painful to witness our brutality, and how readily we forget the shameful chapters of our past while holding other cultures accountable for theirs.
I’m heartbroken by the way we change the rules when things become ‘political’. People who are otherwise for kindness, for generosity, people who decry bullying and abuse, who try to lead decent lives, people who are angry when children are hurt by adults, somehow step back and start talking about the bigger picture, about deterrents and legality. Individual pain becomes irrelevant. Individual responsibility is diffused. The simplicity of the Golden Rule is left behind.
Reza Barati died recently in one of the Australian off-shore camps, at Manus Island. He was a person. He had a life ahead of him, people to love, a world of wisdom and mistakes and joy that has been taken from him.
I didn’t vote for this. I don’t want this. This is not being done in my name. I’m sorry.
Ink Painting – From the stars
I sat up late last night in my studio, painting with inks again.
I’m sad and tired and can’t seem to shake it. World weary and weighed down. I thought painting might help. All my images were of grief. It did and it didn’t. It didn’t and it did. I re-read Greylands by Isobel Carmody. I’ve looked for furniture for my studio at local second hand stores. I’ve discovered that the name we were going to use for it is already being used. I’ve looked up new names, none of which quite fit.
My basil plant is huge and fragrant and full of bees. My sage is dying, despite all love. Life is strange and sad and my heart is full of broken glass.
I’ve painted this dead woman and her howling dog, she’s hanging from the moon and stars, tangled in the dreams she was weaving.
Nightmares & changes
It’s been nightmare central around here lately. There’s changes and upheaval everywhere! The first step of the big move is happening, Rose is packing to move in with my sister, my close friend, and his daughter (my goddaughter Sophie)! This is heart stoppingly exciting, and very stressful for her. Like me, she’s been homeless more than once and is really afraid of making stupid decisions that might make that happen again. She’s also job hunting now that her ankle has mostly healed as she’s not being given shifts at her current casual job. So there’s plenty of fodder for rough nights there. As usual, some friends get it, some don’t. We’re both stressed and I’m doing my best to be supportive.
I did something a bit risky the other night when I came home shattered from a day at college and just zoned out on the net all evening… I read my way through a blog post about movies the writer had found really hard to watch or finish watching. I was gratified to see them list se7en, which I watched at 16 when my then partner stupidly or sadistically persuaded me it didn’t live up to the R18 rating and I’d enjoy it. I remember crawling into an empty room afterwards, huddling into a corner, pressing my face against the wall, and sobbing my heart out. I was a bit cautious about the article as movies easily set off nightmares for me, but as many of them were ones I’d heard of and which lose most of their disturbing impact in the description, such as Clockwork Orange, I read it anyway. Whoops.
The last several nights have been horrific. I’ve latched onto the idea of sadism and torture and murder and had a really rough time as my imagination has played out what I’ve read and added from my own bank of bad memories. It’s been really, really stressful. Hopefully I’ll let it go soon. What it has brought to my mind though, is that this used to be every day life for me. It’s astonishing that this has become something I deal with sometimes, not every night. Bit by bit, things change, wounds heal over. The hard work pays off. You can recover from PTSD.
Things are difficult at the moment. But it’s not death pangs, it’s the birthing of a new life. It’s a price I can pay. There’s moments I’m one breath away from a panic attack. There’s moments I’m so content, in such peace.
Sarah K Reece 