Epiphanies & baths

Apr 26, 2014Apr 26, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I started my day in the bath today. It was really nice. I’m still super tired and in a lot of pain, and today I’m working face painting at the local zoo again, in the cool weather which is hard on me. But I slept well, and actually woke a lot earlier than I needed to, with things bubbling over in my mind. If have liked the extra sleep, but it was nice to wake up feeling so hopeful.

I’ve had some really helpful conversations lately and things are crystallising in my mind. It’s about frameworks and how things are approached… Like baths. I like baths, they’re a place I feel safe, they help with my pain, and I like relaxing in them with candles and a good book. But often I find I don’t want to be in the bath, I feel blocked and frustrated. Sometimes I can figure out why, like I’m not feeling comfortable enough about being naked, or the harsh light in the bathroom is bothering me, but sometimes I just don’t want to… I think it’s my approach. You know how when you’re having a really bad, overwhelming day, someone can offer to make you a cup of tea in a way that feels gentle, respectful, caring, nurturing…. Or someone can offer the same cup of tea in a way that makes you feel patronised, dismissed, like they think you’re pathetic, over dramatic, useless. It’s not the cup of tea. It’s the relationship, and the way you approach it. It’s the implied attitude to you.

When I try to make myself have a bath as if I’m an impatient, frustrated patent with a whiny, irritating kid, it sucks. When I run a bath as a luxury, a treat for working hard, something love for myself, it’s not the same thing at all.

It’s a small thing, but it’s powerful. And it’s playing into my business stuff too. I’m constantly trying to prove myself, prove that I’m a hard worker, that I’m not lazy, that I do my best, a whole bunch of things that no one but me is in doubt of. I think of myself and my skills as resources to be consumed, I fit myself into whatever the client needs me to be. I give myself to my work and I’m burned up by it. I woke up this morning with the idea of my skills as something valuable to be protected. Like a gemstone that’s displayed to its best, put where it can shine, but looked after. I felt this sense that people around me care for me and see as having worth and don’t want me to be consumed by my work. They are trying to protect me.

Maybe it’s the difference between an open cut coal mine, and when the coal is gone, it’s all gone, and tending a herd of goats for milk. Or perhaps, not killing the goose that lays golden eggs…

Maybe it’s about having a sense of worth.

I’ve resolved to take better care of myself and stop selling myself as being really flexible and available, but move towards being more exclusive and working around various limitations. So I’ve been pressured to take work that starts in the mornings when this is really hard for me, my pain levels are always worst in the morning and late at night. But when I turn people down I feel bad, and anxious about my reputation, and that this is poor business practice. Today my resolve was tested when Rose and I had to reschedule a client as she’s still incredibly ill and unable to work. They were so cranky they refused to rebook. It was a rough way to end a morning that had felt so golden, but we do not need every bit of work that comes along, and we cannot do every bit of work that comes along, and no one who is as sick as Rose is should feel bad about not being able to work. We’re going to have to get tough about looking after each other and protecting ourselves from the unrealistic expectations of others.

I’ve been in start up mode for a long time, between the DI, face painting, and other plans. Start up mode is mad, you think about, breathe, dream, live your obsession all the time. There’s a constant drive to grow it, make it work better, fix problems, think of better ways to do things, it’s almost hysteria. Then there’s maintenance, when the framework is there and now you just rock along, doing what you do. Even if I can’t be self sufficient like I hope, I need to shift over to a maintenance mindset. I don’t have what it takes to stay in start up, especially not by myself. That doesn’t mean new things can’t happen, but the focus is different, gentle, less urgent. I get time off. I get help and support. I don’t use myself up. I don’t try and prove things. I find small teams for projects, so I’m not working alone.

I’m writing in the quiet moments of face painting, so I don’t feel that this is as coherent as I’d like, but somewhere in the ramble, there’s a sense of hope, even if joy, that work can be wonderful again, something I like and look forward to instead of something painful and exhausting that claims me and makes me feel like I’ve failed. I feel excited about changes and it’s wonderful to have other people be excited with me, concerned for me, looking out for me. I don’t feel so small and scared and inadequate. Something will work, even if it’s not what I first planned.

A study in contrasts

Apr 25, 2014Apr 25, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

It’s been a mind bending week. A few nights ago, I was sleeping on a lovely bed with room service for breakfast and a private spa bath, last night I slept on the floor of the local ER with hospital cornflakes for breakfast and I can’t remember when I’ve last showered. There’s something about spending the night in the ER, no matter how freshly washed you might have been when you went in, you always feel grimy and smelly when you come out. I’m so exhausted and sleep deprived at the moment that everything feels upside down and inside out, days do not progress in an ordinary linear fashion and my sense of time has gone compressed and surreal. The short version of my week is this – I had a wonderful birthday and a party around a camp fire where I was thoroughly spoiled by friends. Rose then swept me away for a romantic surprise holiday in a fancy country club for a lot of luxury and pampering over three wonderful days. On the last day Rose started getting sick, I brought us home and since then we’ve been doing the rounds of locums and trips to the ER to manage 2 severe ear infections. Zoe is also sick with ear infections so I’ve taken her to the vet and she’s on drops and tablets. I’m near collapse with exhaustion and lot of bad fibro pain. I have managed to keep enough housework happening that we have clean socks to wear and clean bowls and spoons. I’m also supposed to be in the middle of a crazy 5 full days of work and study, but as I got about 3 hours sleep last night I cancelled today.

It’s been a really full on couple of months. We’ve done the house move with Rose, the sudden death of my friend Leanne, we’ve opened our studio and had our first dreads clients, then Rose has been suddenly offered a fantastic job on a nine month contract and accepted that, I found out that the government has ceased funding the Bachelor of Visual Arts degree I’ve been working on for the past several years, which leaves me with some difficult choices to make as I cannot complete the degree in the remaining time it will be offered, I’ve finally made sense of my paperwork and some major headway on my backlog, and a couple of dear friends are planning weddings and have invited me to be involved. I took my car to be serviced and discovered there is a huge crack in the firewall which will cost about $1,000 to fix, so in the meantime I’m borrowing vehicles to get around. There’s been so many ‘hurrah!’ and ‘oh crap’ moments that my head is about to fall off.

My business plans are in disarray, I’m physically exhausted and struggling with constant pain, and need to do a major overhaul of the plans for the next year in light of everything that’s happened. It’s not all bad news, a lot of it is very exciting and there’s some great opportunities happening. But I am confronted by the reality that what I am doing at the moment is not sustainable. There’s nothing like having a couple of days off to really notice how overwhelmed you have become. At the moment I’ve just got my head down to get through this week, then I’m going to start making some big decisions about what I’m doing and how. It will turn out okay! I believe that.

This was the scene of my lovely birthday. Rose organised it and friends helped with lights (we forgot about that), a beautiful cake, and cleaning and suchlike. It was lovely. It was also kind of embarrassing and a bit stressful being the focus of attention, and there were guests who didn’t know anyone else who I worried about and people I think I should have invited but didn’t think to at the time, and people I wanted to come but couldn’t get hold of (some of my friends are very much non-tech and don’t even keep a phone running consistently) and a lot of opportunities for guilt and stress along those lines. However, for all my faults, I had a very nice evening and although some aspects may have been a bit awkward I think most of the guests did too. There was also bunting, and what’s not to love about bunting? 🙂

We prepped a lot of food. We baked spuds on the fire and asked people to bring their own toppings as there were quite a few food allergies and special diets to cater for and I wanted to make sure everyone could eat something. I also baked up a big batch of apples with an oaty crumble filling that was delicious, and a quadruple dish of self saucing chocolate pudding. I ran out of phone battery so there’s no photos of these or the lovely cake.

I made the usual chilly evening hot drinks too, a big slow cooker of hot chocolate, and a rice cooker of mulled mead. These were the flavours I spiced the mead with:

I also got all creative and made up some little dread art in the form of tiny bird coils and silk sweet pea blossoms to wear. I really like getting to make things.

We also had marshmallows around the fire. It was a big, hot fire, we used as much wood as I usually go through in three or four camp-fires! You can just see some of the fairy lights over the camp fire:

The next day Rose took me away. It was a very watery weekend, I really love water. I swam in the ocean and had several spa baths a day. We were lying in bed at one point, feeling so clean and skin so soft and everything so lovely, and said to Rose how come this bed feels so clean? My bed never feels this clean even with fresh sheets. She said – your clean sheets are still covered with pet hair. It’s true! It was really nice to sleep on such clean sheets. This is one of my happy memories from the trip, I had a bath with a cocktail, some good chocolate, and a new book of poems we bought from a market that morning. All the hot spas really helped my pain levels too.

Another good memory. We did lots of tastings of cheeses and olives and local produce. We kind of spent two days pretending we weren’t poor, didn’t have lots of responsibilities or work to think about, and weren’t short of time. I didn’t touch my phone or get on the net or social media at all. I didn’t do any thinking or planning about business things, didn’t answer emails or return calls, it was just uninterrupted time off. I often work evenings and weekends, and many of my days off are full of housework and admin. Taking a whole day off has become extremely unusual, and I find that there is a very blurry line between work and the rest of my life.

For a few days, this wasn’t the case, and it was like turning back into myself. Without chronic pain and the constant demands of work I relaxed properly for the first time in months. I wasn’t irritable and overwhelmed, I didn’t feel that near permanent sense of not being able to catch my breath, that shrieking inner alarm that I cannot manage this that has been going off in my head since Rose got her job. I felt like Sarah again. I had fun, I relaxed, I enjoyed myself and could be present in the moment and breathe it all in. It is so difficult to be present when part of your brain is always managing admin, chewing on tough problems, trying to plan the next few months. It was nice. I want more of it. It doesn’t have to be about money or luxury, it’s a simple thing at the moment of accepting that I cannot do what I am trying to do the way I’m currently trying to do it. I want more capacity to enjoy the rest of my life and I want less time in really bad pain.

The very first thing we did on getting to the hotel – shift all the mini bar contents to a drawer, and close it!

I found this beautiful old clock at a market, my next door neighbour Aunty Marie used to have once just like it when I was a child. I’ve wanted one of my own for a long time to remember her by. It was so nice to be able to bring home some mementos of this wonderful trip!

Dinner brought to the room one night, we ate in bed. We lived very extravagantly, and there was a lot of cheese. 🙂

A memory to treasure – we found a lonely fire by the bistro one night and sat by it drinking strawberry and lime cider while I read Something Wicked this way Comes to Rose.

Lunch by the sea on the last day.

My beautiful Rose. She’s such a romantic, such a generous partner and fun companion. I’m blessed to be with her.

Exploring little towns and second hand shops, it was good to be away. I love travelling.

And last night in the ER. I made a striking figure in my pyjamas. It’s so hard to advocate for yourself when you’re in terrible pain (ear infections are agonising) and the one thing I’ve found consistently through all hospital stays – whether for physical or mental health reasons is that it’s a better trip if you have good company. Someone who knows you can soothe you, help the pain relief be more effective by reducing your anxiety, can advocate for you – get you another blanket or find a nurse or ask questions or remind you about an important detail you’ve forgotten. More than anything, a caring companion journeys with you, you don’t have to handle problems alone. You are seen as someone who is loved by someone else, a person who is important to someone, a person who probably isn’t always as overwhelmed or hard to connect with because clearly someone else thinks the world of you. It changes how you are treated, helps to humanise you however you are presenting. It makes a huge difference.

So for now, the plan is sleep, rest, reach out and connect to try and stop my head spinning so much, and get through the next few days before re-evaluating and new structure for the business. It’s going to be good, and I’m happy that it’s happening now, not after a major crash. I love Rose and my friends and family and my life and I want to spend more of my time able to enjoy what I have and connect with those I care about. 🙂

It’s my birthday!

Apr 19, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

I often struggle around my birthday, but fortunately Rose is very good at celebrations so I’m getting spoiled. We usually get badly depressed this time of year, but with some extra loving and being the other side of 30, it hasn’t been intense this year. Plus my life has gone through so many changes over the past month that my head is still spinning, a birthday hasn’t really had a look in. I’ve finished my working week, which was painting at the Zoo again, good work but painful. Last night was dinner and cards and chocolates with friends, a good laugh as always and just what I needed after a hard week.

Today is presents and breakfast in bed, a trip to the plaster fun house for my kidlets, and a campfire with friends around tonight. There will be baked potatoes and chocolate pudding and hot spiced mead and bunting in the trees. We’re a bit excited! We might be going out dancing at the local goth club tonight too. One or two of us who just freak out have had some time to write in the middle of the night and hide out. Birthdays can be complex when you’re multiple!

Tomorrow Rose is whisking us away on a surprise holiday to I don’t know where. I love trips and I love surprises so this is pretty special. People are looking after my animals while we’re gone. I used to be so lonely and miserable on my birthdays, a hang over from years without friends. Now my world is taking good care of me, and I’m very lucky.

Zoe turned 2

Apr 15, 2014Apr 16, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

April is a month of birthdays at my home – mine, Tonks, and Zoe’s all come around in this month. Zoe kicks things off, she turned 2 years old this year. What a ride! She’s hardly recognisable from the crazy puppy who drove me to despair. While she’s still bright and bouncy and loves people, she’s happy to chill on the couch while you work and sleeps inside in her crate at night with a minimum of fuss. No more chewed furniture! She’s pretty cruisy and easy going.

I was reading a book about shamanism recently which suggested that animals teach us things about life. I thought about what I’d learned from having Zoe in my life. It’s been a tough run at times. I was so overwhelmed by her and how much exercise she needed (I live in a unit) that twice I made concerted efforts to find a different good home for her. At one stage I was a mess of guilt and frustration, constantly yelling at a dog who was shredding my house, stressing my guests, and on one occasion, raced over my foot and broke my toe! I got in a behavioural consultant for help, which was a huge, huge support, Rose and I knuckled down and spent Saturday mornings at dog training, and we put a lot of effort into environmental enrichment and a better relationship. I was thinking that the thing I guess I’ve had to learn with Zoe is how to see the Zoe who is in front of me. When I took home a gorgeous little pup from the shelter I was single and lonely, looking for protection at home, looking for companionship, and after nursing Charlie for months, looking for a really healthy, strong dog. I got that dog, for sure. But as she grew up a little and my life circumstances changed with a new job and a new relationship meaning I was away from home a lot more than I had been, I found myself with a bored and lonely half puppy in full destruction mode. It was a big shift! She destroyed 2 couches, a lot of clothes and sheets, stole items from around the house (books, nail polish, socks) and buried them in the backyard, chased my cats… Some days I hated her. As she’s grown older and I’ve learned a lot and changed a lot of what I was doing, a different Zoe again has emerged. This Zoe is still not absolutely content, she’s a bit lonely and wishes she had more walks and more room to play. But she’s boisterous rather than destructive, very affectionate and protective. Sometimes it’s hard to see this Zoe because the memories of the crazy, overwhelming puppy get in the way. But she’s right here in front of me, cuddling on the couch, nudging me to let me know she needs to go to the toilet, playing with Tonks, or watching the garden through the window. It’s a valuable lesson, to see what’s in front of me.

So, for Zoe’s birthday, she got a new chew toy which she adores, a lot of cuddles and love, and some food treats. She had a pretty good day. I love her to bits! 🙂

Free Event Tonight – Join us to Celebrate Regeneration

Apr 15, 2014Apr 15, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

We’re having a celebration tonight and it would be wonderful if you could join us! Regeneration is a short film about community and recovery I was involved in making, and we were really excited to hear that it won an award in a Canadian Film Festival and went on tour over there! Obviously we couldn’t turn up in person so we thought we’d host a little screening and celebration here. It’s free to come along, it won’t take up much of your evening (the screening of the film plus some other little performances or treats by each of the artists involved) and we’re providing nibbles.

5 – 6pm
Today, 15 April
The Box Factory
59 Regent St Adelaide

Here’s a Map

If you’re on Facebook, here’s a link to the event.

If you’d like an invitation to print out, here it is.

“Bare feet on grass was the foundation for this beautiful silent film about recovering from mental illness. Written, filmed, and performed by people with lived experience – Helen Keene, Steve Clark, Suzanne Reece, and Sarah K Reece, with support from filmmaker Victoria Cox. Despite having no previous experience with the medium of film, we have been honoured by Regeneration being selected as the winning film for a drama under 10 minutes by Picture This Film Festival and toured around Canada. Come and celebrate with us, meet the artists, and get an insight into our passions and wider body of work.”

RSVP to mindshare@mhcsa.org.au
Enquiries to (08) 8394 2559

Paperwork

Apr 12, 2014Apr 12, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve had a quiet week, turned down work opportunities, stayed home, and put in some major hours to make sense of my paperwork backlog. (about 3 years of business records) I haven’t been keeping proper records about my business income and expenses and it’s a big job sorting them all out. There’s a few reasons for this, one is that I’ve really struggled with phobias about money and admin that have left me very overwhelmed and muddle headed. Another is that it’s taken me this long, several courses, (including a cert 3 in home businesses), and help from an accountant before I’ve been able to set up a simple system for record keeping that suits my business. Most of the systems or advice I’ve been offered have been needlessly complex, full of terms I barely understand, and I’ve been utterly confused. I now have a physical folder in which income and expenses are printed and filed for that financial year. It’s less environmentally
friendly, which I hate, but it works visually, which is how I work. It’s easy for me to see what’s happening and check on things filed. I am using an app called invoice2go which generates my invoices, concerts them to pdf, and emails them for me much quicker than I’ve been doing manually using an excel document, and all from my phone if I wish. I have a simple sheet for income, and a different simple sheet for expenses. Generating profit and loss forms from these is child’s play. So I’m finally making progress.

I’ve been scouring the house for all those pockets of paperwork, random collections of receipts stuffed into tins, boxes, drawers, envelopes, and other ‘safe’ hidey holes. Even worse, I’ve been finding, printing, and cross referencing every previous attempt to input this data using much more complex forms. At some point I’ve scanned a couple of months worth of receipts and collated them, then lost both the original and scanned versions of the receipts. That’s giving me a headache. I’m looking forward to all this being over and moving on to running my new studio with a simple, relevant, accurate method of data collection in place. It’s going to be a huge weight off me! I have learned a hell of a lot!

So it’s happening. This is one of my biggest bogey men, a thing that has been hanging over my head for years, stressing me constantly and filing me with a chronic sense of guilt, frustration, inadequacy, and dread. I jumped into a business with enthusiastic support from people around me, but far before I was ready for this side of things, and it’s been a burden since then. I’m so glad to be finally sorting it out, facing the debts, and moving on. It’s a good feeling!

Tonks has been loving sleeping in my boxes of paper, so I accommodated and began using her box to store paper I no longer needed. This seems to be like cat nip, she migrated back to her box shortly afterwards.

Good music and good company, sure helps when doing paperwork!

Admin & Tonks

Apr 10, 2014Apr 10, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

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!

Dark & light

Apr 9, 2014Apr 9, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

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

Apr 5, 2014Apr 5, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Painted these up yesterday, looking for something a bit more minimalist than my usual. I love them.

Dark art – milk and opals

Apr 4, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Dot paintings

Apr 2, 2014Apr 2, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

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

Mar 31, 2014Mar 31, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

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

Mar 28, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

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

Mar 27, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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

Mar 26, 2014Mar 26, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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

Mar 22, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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!

Mar 20, 2014Mar 20, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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

Mar 18, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

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

Mar 17, 2014Mar 17, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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

Mar 14, 2014Mar 14, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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

Mar 10, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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

Mar 9, 2014Mar 9, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

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

Mar 7, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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

Mar 3, 2014Mar 2, 2014 / Sarah K Reece / 8 Comments

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

Mar 2, 2014Jan 2, 2017 / Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

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

Sarah K Reece

Diversity and Inclusion

Author: Sarah K Reece