Peer Work

I’m in love

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve had the most wonderful day. It’s been cool and rainy here in Newcastle, much more to my tastes. I am sleeping on the top bunk on the second floor, by a large open window with no screen or bars. There’s no bars on the bed either, nothing to stop me rolling out, falling through the window and down to the pavement below. Which gives me the shivers, but is also wonderfully like sleeping in a tree house, all breezy and up among the lovely tropical foliage. I lay in my bunk at night and watch the stars and city lights and rain and the trees dancing in the wind. Not far is the sea, just a brief walk, and I can smell it and feel the salt in the air. In the mornings it’s very warm and still, and I can’t sleep for the light coming in and the heat. But this morning it was perfect, cool, raining, breezy. I lay under my sheet, waking from nightmares to watch the rain falling through the trees, sleeping and waking and sleeping.

My beloved is napping now with her head in my lap as we rest in the lounge at the backpackers. Today we went again to visit her elderly relative for lunch, and it was sad for her. It’s always painful to see someone you love ill, or old, to be aware of time passing, of mortality, of the cruelty of distance and the inadequacy of words. There’s always so much to say and no words to say it. I’ve been here with my beloved grandma who died a few years ago. I can sit with this sadness, I know how to bear it, how to stay present with it. There’s so much beauty in it, joy within pain, love beneath sorrow. Such a simple thing it is, to be present.

Then we visited the Newcastle art gallery, and were lucky enough to stumble into an exhibition of Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose by Del Kathryn Barton. It was stunning. I spent an hour in front of the huge, intricately painted canvases, trying to shelter that tiny flame of inspiration that lit in me. I find it so hard to keep believing in myself, in art, in the value of my work, in the possibility of success. One of my greatest limitations as an artist is my lack of confidence. Strangely enough, the cause of this; poverty, hardship, is also one of my great strengths as an artist; I have experienced so much and have so much to say. I’m also painfully afraid of the times I shut down and can’t create art, and terribly impatient with myself.

This exhibition was an artists response to a work of writing, something I’ve often thought of doing. The size of the paintings was powerful, and the technique; combining inks, paint and watercolors, was appealing. I was very taken by it all, and found myself blossoming with hope, that if she can make such splendid works, I can also. I’m excited about my projects planned for this year. I so want to keep that tiny sense of hope alive, it dies so easily in me and then everything is such a struggle. I bought a beautiful big art book of the exhibition to take home and display, hoping to keep this feeling alive. Others have walked this road. It is possible.

Once the gallery closed, we sheltered under the eaves on the doorstep and picnicked on snacks and talked about life and cried a little and held each others hands. Then we walked until we found a lovely Vietnamese restaurant and ate prawns and red rice and soft shell crab. It rained and we wandered the streets in it, finding paths around puddles, water shining in our hair. Night fell as we walked.

Sometimes there were loud groups of drunk guys or someone hassling passerbys for money and we stopped holding hands and walked faster. My part who handles violence comes out, walks tall. ‘We won’t be easy victims, leave us be.’ Nothing happens. My girlfriend and I have a rule that either of us can stop holding hands (or anything else that clearly marks us as a gay couple) if we feel unsafe in public, no argument, no recriminations.

We find a store that’s open, and buy exotic icecream; filled with brownies and cookie dough. Back at the hostel, we lay about on a big couch in the lounge, legs tangled, reading Sabriel to each other, sharing the icecream and enjoying the freedom to be a couple in a public space and feel safe and accepted. We laugh and play and talk. It’s so sweet, sweet to be in love.

I’m off On a Holiday!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I’m writing to you tonight from the top bunk of my room in Newcastle. I’m thrilled. My girlfriend and I are on a trip to visit some of her people and have a break from the heat and illness that have taken up a lot of the start this year for us… So ironically enough, at around 2am this morning, I had a sudden flair up of an extremely painful mystery skin condition, when I needed to be on a 6am flight! The pain was terrible, and I wound up booking an appointment with a GP in Sydney this afternoon. My frustration was so great that at 3am I was sobbing into my girlfriends shoulder. But we actually pulled of a great day today anyway!

I coped really well with the flight, no phobic stress or troublesome switching, although I did become distressingly travel sick. Virgin airplane staff were super kind and helpful with ice and ginger beer which was lovely. The Sydney doc thinks I’ve developed another form of dermatitis that burns like acid on my skin and has prescribed a cream and anti inflammatories. I seem to be collecting unusual skin conditions, which I’m frankly furious about. I would like at some point to trade them all in for, say, a cat run.

I spent a wonderful afternoon trundling around Paddy’s Market and buying lovely little items to add to my personal grounding kit (search for this term in my blog if you’re not familiar with it) foodie nibbles, and gothy jewellery. It was wonderful. Then we caught the train over to Newcastle (here I am on it)
ate some instant pasta and lovely fruit we bought at the markets, showered, applied creams and bug spray liberally, and crashed out by the cool breeze coming in the open windows.

You know something I’m still getting used to, dating another woman for the first time, is the way you share space differently. Picture yourself out on a date. It’s going well, you’re feeling excited. You decide to duck off to the loo to toilet, fix your hair, check for food in your teeth, text your best friend, talk to yourself in the mirror, whatever, and as you excuse yourself and leave, your date says ‘that’s a good idea’ and follows you in. o.O It’s a little bit of a different dynamic! I still find it a bit surreal to be showering in the cubical next to my girlfriend on holidays and the like. Not bad, just different. Sometimes less convenient, and sometimes more intimate. You have to put care into creating thoughtful partner space because cultural gender segregation hangups won’t do it for you. It’s certainly been very interesting noticing things like this.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that gothic proclivities have prepared me well to cope with public stares, discomfort, and occasional rudeness when you’re obviously in a gay relationship. I’m used to those reactions when I’m done up goth, so it hasn’t hit as hard to be getting them for holding my girlfriend’s hand down at the local pool, or taking her out to dinner. A lot of the time I simply don’t notice. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it makes me feel sad for the other person and where they’re coming from. Sometimes it makes me angry. And sometimes it makes me laugh, especially when people seem to think that their disapproval is going to cower me! It can be funny, the power people think they have over you. 🙂 If they’re particularly obnoxious I amuse myself by irritating them by being particularly affectionate with her as they stare daggers, mutter, snort, or pretend not to notice. It certainly gives me something to do on long train trips ha haa!

Flour on my hands

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I’ve had a good day. Which is especially nice as my life has been rather up and down lately. I’m writing now in the peace and quiet of the early hours of the morning. I have a load of freshly washed laundry hanging about the house and smelling clean and wonderful. I’m showered and enjoying actually being able to wear my warm winter robe as the weather has been perfectly cool today. Sarsaparilla is being smoochy and trying to head rub my keyboard. I’ve washed all my dishes and my kitchen is clean. My dining table is clear, my bedroom is tidy, the study room has been sorted.

I cooked today. I’m so pleased, it’s been ages since I cooked. By which I mean something more complicated than toast. I made ham and zucchini pasta for dinner, and brownies for dessert.

It’s been an erratic start to the year for me. The past couple of months have been tiring and challenging. My fibro flares quickly at the moment so I’ve been in a fair amount of pain many days. I’ve also been anxious and stressed. A lot of my friends have been struggling with their mental or physical health, I’ve been rocky and getting overwhelmed. Some nights are pretty peaceful with decent sleep, others have been terrible. My girlfriend told me recently that sometimes when I’m having nightmares, I moan in my sleep, recoil if touched, and weep. That’s the saddest image in my mind, it seems so lonely to be crying in your sleep, sailed out in a world of dreams, beyond comfort.

I had such a rough day the other day, I worked out afterwards that I’d spent 7 (non-consecutive) hours in a 24 hour period crying. Some days everything is too much. I’m tired, tired in my aching bones, tired in my soul. There’s no strength left in my spirit, no hope left to light my lamps, no inspiration in my hands to paint or sculpt or tend. There’s yearning and grief and fear for my future.

So I cry. I hurt, weep, curl up in bed and hold my broken heart in my hands. My tears, they slowly dull the edges of the broken glass in my chest. I cry the despair out of me. I speak the black things that are gnawing on my bones, that have teeth sunken deep into my heart. Desperate to be hopeful, to be bright with joy, to be at peace in the dawn, I name my demons instead. I still my hands, I let the depression take me. It’s a blessing. It keeps me safe, the lethal lethargy eases me from frantic need. I seek no relief, blades do not tempt me, the sirens of death are far off. Here is just the frozen despair, the paralysing sense of inadequacy, the raw, overwhelming awareness of pain.

Then the tide goes out and the fire dies down, the pain ebbs. I get a day like today where I wake and my mind is quiet and clear. The rain falls softly on my face, washing away self-loathing, easing the grief. I walk without pain. There’s no burning in my skin, my eyes don’t throb, the knives that were in my muscles have fallen out overnight. I can dance. I can dream. There’s delight in simple things. I watch a favourite French movie (La tete en friche), I get flour on my hands, I let the rain scented air into my home. And it’s okay again, it’s okay, I remember life’s sweetness, I remember the songs of the little birds in the morning.

Poem – In The Paper Moat

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

In bed
I build
A little fort of books
To keep away
The bad dreams
And the memories.

My paper moat
Is filled with people of courage
Compassion
In the face of brutality
Wisdom,
Patient rage,
Love-
All the things that are monsters
To the monsters that hunt me.

Here I lay, naked
In the dark, and alone
But not without defence
My authors speak on my behalf
When I am lost with weeping
They shape the dark
Give it name
Whisper to me
The limits of its lies.

What bisexuality is, and 9 things it isn’t

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

What does it mean to be bisexual? I’ve been surprised by how many people have asked me what the word means. Wiki defines it as romantic or sexual attraction or behaviour towards males and females, which is a good start. It’s probably easiest to define if I disentangle it from some of the misconceptions:

1. Bisexual doesn’t mean wanting to have more than one partner at the same time. This preference is called polyamory, or poly. It’s been a bit startling to have people assume that I’m in an open relationship on the basis of my bisexual identity! Some poly people are also bisexual, others are straight, others are gay.

2. Bisexual doesn’t mean lots of sexual partners. Without judging anyone who enjoys casual sex, these are separate concepts. Some bi people do, some don’t. 🙂

3. Bisexual doesn’t mean that I can’t make up my mind about what gender I like. It doesn’t mean I’m really gay but not properly out of the closet. It doesn’t mean I’m really straight but want to experiment or get into the cool nightclubs. 🙂 Being with a partner does’t mean that I’ve gone straight or gone gay.

4. Bisexual doesn’t mean that I’m attracted to all men and all women, any more than being straight means being attracted to everyone of the other gender. One of the ways I explain what bisexuality means for me, particularly when kids ask, is that I am capable of falling in love with a very few men in this world, and a very few women.

5. Bisexual doesn’t mean being equally attracted to men and women. I’ve read bizarre reviews of openly bisexual celebrities’ lives where the number of months they’ve been in relationships with men and months with women were compared and used to assess that they were ‘really’ gay or straight unless they exactly matched. Let’s put sexual preferences on a scale for a moment – on one end we have entirely straight, on the other, entirely gay. Many people strongly identify with one or the other end of this spectrum. Some people are right in the middle. Some people are more up side than the other, perhaps they mostly date men but have fallen for one or two women. Because there is a political aspect to how we identify ourselves, some people are attracted to men and women but choose to identify with their strongest, primary focus – women who identify as lesbian but have the occasional fling with a guy for example. If being mostly into one gender means you’re more comfortable identifying yourself as straight or gay instead of bi that’s absolutely your right, and it’s an accurate description of your tastes most of the time, even if occasionally you surprise your friends.

However, you can be anywhere in this spectrum between totally straight and totally gay, and identify as bisexual. It’s not something you have to prove by having sex or lots of relationships. It’s not just a dead-centre third category between straight and gay. It’s all the ground between straight and gay, even if that means ‘mostly into guys and sometimes into girls’ or vice versa. You can live and express that any way that’s right for you.

6. Bisexual doesn’t mean sexual predator, paedophile, or sociopath. Enough said!

7. Bisexual doesn’t mean unfaithful. It doesn’t mean ‘pining’ for the gender your partner isn’t. It doesn’t mean being dissatisfied in any relationship. It doesn’t mean betraying and hurting people. Certainly there are bisexual people who do these things, but that is not a result of their orientation. There’s a deep distrust of bisexual women within the lesbian community where being hurt by partners – especially those who have been left for a male partner, has been ascribed to the orientation and led to a lot of distrust and discrimination.

Bisexuality can be difficult. There are some unique pressures, a lot of misunderstanding and hostility from the straight and gay communities. Social and family pressures can lead to poor decisions and hurtful behaviour where bisexual people walk out of same-sex relationships to find partners who’s gender won’t make them stand out for such strife.

8. Bisexual doesn’t mean binary gender. Gender is different from sexuality. Men can be bi. Women can be bi. Manly men can be bi. Femme men can be bi. Genderfluid people can be bi. Trans women can be bi. Androgynous people can be bi.

Bi people can also be attracted to other people who are non-binary. Non binary simply means anyone who doesn’t identify within the boundaries of ‘manly men’ and ‘femme women’. Some bi people are attracted to androgynous men and butch women, for example, or have a particular passion for high femme trans women as well as shy sweet gay guys.

Personally as a multiple, I find people most sexy when they are comfortable expressing a range of gender identities – and enjoy me doing the same. I vastly prefer people who can be masculine and feminine and androgynous and move between them as they want. People who stay with one gender expression all the time kind of bewilder me.

9. Bisexual doesn’t mean being attracted to “only two” genders. There’s a bit of an argument in the queer community that bisexual people are attracted to only two gender identities and pansexual people are attracted to all of them. I’ve been hanging out in the bi community for a few years now and I’ve learned that very, very few bi people are okay with that definition. Which is a surprise as that’s what I thought it meant too, when I came out!

For a great article about this, check out Bisexual vs Pansexual.

A better way to frame how most people use bi-sexual is being attracted to “more than one” gender. There’s so many gender expressions out there! Some of us are super specific about attraction, we have a really narrow band. Think – slender, white, redhead, femme women and men. Or you probably know someone who’s ex’s all look pretty alike. Others of us are attracted to a wider range of qualities – women, however they present, or all genderqueer people. Some of us find specific groups most attractive – eg. femme bi men, ‘bears‘, butch bi women, and androgynous men. Some people describe themselves as ‘gender-blind’, meaning their attraction isn’t geared around bodies or gender, but other qualities such as personality instead. Gender identity has different levels of importance to people when it comes to sparking attraction.

When you explore a little more in the marginalised communities of intersex people (those who have both male and female characteristics) transsexual people (those who have a gender identity different from their physical sex) and transvestites (people who dress in clothes of the other gender), you start to see gender differently. There’s a term for this – genderqueer. It’s a big umbrella term that basically means – anything outside of the gender binary of men born in male bodies  who dress like men and like ‘male’ things and likewise women. A common form of genderqueer you’ve probably come across is people who have an androgynous look.

If you’d like to learn a little more about people who identify as genderqueer, I’d recommend the blog The Felt Fedora. For some more information about the differences between gender identity and gender expression, check out this great infographic, The Gingerbread Person.

Genderbread-Person-3.3

I hope that’s been helpful and cleared up a few myths. People who are bisexual can also be many other things obviously, but it’s helpful to pull apart what the word itself means and what it doesn’t.

It’s been a really interesting process for me since coming out and dealing with people’s reactions, and also learning more about the history of the bi movement and the challenges of being a part of a community that is often invisible. As I am with Rose, I am usually mis-identified as lesbian, which sometimes I don’t mind and other days really grates. Mono-sexualities (straight or gay) are more visible and both can demand that people fit in one of their boxes, or treat people as tourists – gay for the duration of this relationship, and now straight for that one. It’s rather bizarre how often the media labels as ‘gay’ people who have outed themselves as bi, and how often coming out stories are told as ‘then they went gay/lesbian’ when the story really is ‘then they realised they were bi’. So I’m finding myself with a sense of sympathy for a people group who are often struggling in both queer and straight communities to be seen as real and legitimate.

Personally I identify as bi/pan, and genderqueer. I care a lot less about how someone fits into boxes than I care about how they connect with the aspects of themselves that don’t fit. As a multiple, our system spans straight, bi, gay, lesbian, and asexual, as well as male, female, non-gendered, and genderqueer. We chose bi and genderqueer as our group identity because they contain the broadest range, but that’s not a perfect fit and sometimes there’s a need to express and be seen as individuals. Sometimes one is out who is a straight woman and doesn’t identify at all under the umbrella of queer. That’s okay, we can navigate that. 🙂

The comments refer to an earlier edition of this post where I mislabelled bi as being attracted to 2 genders. 

Dissociation and tricks of the brain

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Something happens when I rearrange the furniture. It’s like part of my brain that was sleeping, wakes up and realises that I’m living in my own home where I can do that now. For a few weeks I look at everything with fresh eyes and find myself stirring out of the numb dissociation and actually paying attention to the miracle that is stable housing. It doesn’t take a lot. I’ve recently moved my bed about 30cm away from the window, and stuck a cardboard box down the gap to act as a second side table. Suddenly my room is fresh and exciting. Today I secreted a few indoors friendly plants in small pots out of my garden and put them on the window sill. My inner house-people, the younger ones who love baking and having a beautiful home, prick up their ears. My goth starts dreaming of painting poems on the doorframes, of wall chandeliers full of candles. I start dreaming of peaceful sleep.

In the early hours of this morning, while it was cool and I could move about without feeling ill, I begun the task of rearranging my studio. This time the entire room is being moved around a single, critical need: that I have only one form of refrigerated air conditioning in my unit, and it is the freestanding kind that needs to be vented out a window. Previously one of my art desks blocked the window entirely. I have also had a lot of trouble with the curtains. The hooks that hold up the curtains constantly snag on the netting behind them when I try to open or close them. If I pull too vigorously, the curtain rod falls down. The netting is too long for the window so it gets caught under anything I put under the desk, and the dog and cat get tangled in it when they try to look out the window, also pulling the curtain down. With the wide desk in front of the window I simply can’t easily open or close them, so they either live open and I vacate the studio once it’s dark and keep the door shut, or they live closed and I vacate the studio during the day. I once lived in a horrible bachelor pad where the house stank of mould from the bathroom, off food in the fridge or from various half finished meals left in bowls around the house, the blinds were rarely opened and the floor stuck to your feet. I was desperately unhappy and constantly trying to clean it up but when your flatmates are trashing it daily it’s not a happy place to be. I now particularly hate having the curtains drawn during the day. I tolerate it during extremely hot weather, but the rest of the time, if I’m out of bed, the curtains are opened. I crave and love the light when it’s there, and open windows letting in fresh air and the sound of birds and traffic and the far off trains.

So I’ve changed things around, freeing up the entire window, removed the netting, and changed one of the curtains. I was going to change both because the original blue were also only just wide enough to cover the window which also made life tricky, but I love the effect of one of each. In theory, once I’ve cleared away the rest of the mess, I should be able to wheel my air conditioner in there, shut the door, and make art in the cool.

It’s not perfect, both tables/desks are awkward sizes, one very long and one very wide, but I think for now it will work. Hopefully it will help me get back in there and get my fingers dirty, seeing the space with fresh eyes and reclaiming my constantly dimming sense of ownership over it can only be a good thing. Either way, it still feels good to have done something.

Recovery from Trauma – Touch

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

This has been a huge area for me, one I’ve had to re-negotiate throughout my life so far to try and find something that works for me. A lot of us who come through interpersonal trauma – where other people hurt us, are left with major struggles about touch. For me, I found that I’ve suffered when I’m touched, and I’ve suffered from being touch-starved. If you imagine for a moment that in your mind and body, there are three basic types of touch that you register and react to. One is touch that makes you feel good – a little baby holding on to your finger or a kiss from your lover or a hug from a friend. The next is touch that makes you feel bad, such as being hurt or invaded. The last is neutral touch, that doesn’t make you feel good or bad, inconsequential things like sitting against someone on the bus or brushing hands with a checkout operator handing you your bags.

I found this last category of touch collapsed completely for me and has been by far the hardest to get back. When I’m really struggling good touch goes too, but a lot of days when I can still enjoy good touch I can’t cope with neutral touch. I’m very sensitive to touch and it’s like my brain can’t work out how to handle neutral touch and does a very basic ‘what kind of touch is this?’ assessment that goes

    1. ‘does this feel good?’ 
    2. ‘no’ 
    3. right then – ‘BAD TOUCH’

I’ve had to talk myself through re building a sense of neutral touch. It rests on feeling reasonably safe and calm, and for me at least, part of a community. Strangers don’t bother me if I am feeling content and like we’re all just people. Being able to cope with neutral touch is an important key for me to cope with medical and dental appointments, travelling on public transport and in lifts, accessing crowded places, using supermarkets – basic functioning in life.

Touch is actually a crucially important aspect of being human. Newborns need touch after being born. Untouched, they will simply die. Touch changes us on a physiological level, massages support immune function and health for example. Touch is crucial in attachment, in bonding, and in social connection. Touch communicates affection, loathing, power, or love.

As a child and teenager I was ostracised and bullied at school. Touch became a key issue. I struggled to define moral responses to abuse and contempt. I developed a basic set of parameters – that until another person touched me, I would manage the situation verbally. If they initiated contact physically, then I would defend myself physically. It became generally known in the school that I was not to be touched. This decision was to some extent effective in that it relieved me of the chronic anxiety and distress around how I was to respond to relentless bullying. However the unintended downside of this was that I struggled alone, untouched and without comfort. Following a major trauma I was diagnosed with PTSD and in that space – traumatised, alienated, chronically suicidal, and devoured by nightmares, my world without touch became surreal and terrifying. I craved touch, longed to be hugged, my self-made wall designed for protection left me free-falling, alone and outcast. I no longer felt part of the world or of humanity, without touch to connect me. With no anchors, I floated into surreal dissociative states, feeling unreal and chronically numb, punctuated by intense fury, distress, and self loathing.

A few years ago, I turned up to the Mental Illness Fellowship SA activity centre. My life had burned down and I was extremely isolated at the time. I sat on a couch, nervous in a room full of strangers. Someone sat down next to me and I concentrated on not flinching. As I sat there stiffly and awkward and silent, the whole side of my body next to the stranger began to warm. This yearning for contact came unbidden from deep inside me and I realised how solitary my world had become. The loneliness was profound.

Touch is powerful, and for some of us, touch has been withheld and we have starved without it, or touch has been used to wound us and now we struggle to define our relationship with it. Touch often defines power in our relationships – I’ve felt trapped at times with people who refuse me the right to withdraw from touch I do not want. I’ve become more assertive these days as I’ve discovered that if I protect my right to control touch, then my relationship with touch becomes less ambivalent and stressed. My good friends know to check before hugs, and not to take it personally if I don’t want to be hugged that day. Likewise, I do this for them. Because of this, touch has more and more of a place in my life now, which delights me.

People who don’t get this and fight my right to choose who and when and how I am touched are usually excluded from my networks. Some of them are simply bullies. Some are too naturally dominating to consider someone else’s needs. Some are under the illusion that if they impose touch upon me, I will ‘realise’ that it is safe and my boundaries are silly and unnecessary. Some take a preference not to be touched as a personal insult to them. The occasional few are sadists who enjoy touching someone who clearly is uncomfortable with it but lacks the social power to tell them to stop. I have a strong commitment in my life now; that loneliness is better than torture. People who don’t respect me, don’t get close to me.

Developing that power and honouring that need to protect myself has given me a lot more freedom. If I trust myself to protect myself (and my system trusts me to protect them – no accepting hugs if they’re screaming inside me) then suddenly neutral touch isn’t such a big deal. I’m not small and powerless any more, I’m a member of the community. I have a voice and I can take care of myself, which means I can engage. I don’t have to hide, or run, or fight. I can be part of the world when I want to. I talk about the mental flip from seeing other people as inherently dangerous to just regular people in my article Using Public Transport. Here’s an example:

I was on the bus the other day and a man was standing in the aisle next to me when I noticed that he had a big mop of long fluffy white cat fur stuck to his nice dark pants! I suspect he has a lovely white persian cat at home that had been sleeping next to him on the couch. It suddenly flipped how I saw him – from being a threatening man standing too close to me, to just a regular guy with  a cat and not someone to be afraid of.

I crave this freedom. When the PTSD is too bad for me to handle crowds, strangers, confined spaces, being a passenger in someone else’s car, being out after dark, having other people in my home, being touched, new environments, loud environments, and so on, my world is very small, very painful, very lonely. I hate this place, it’s like being in a coffin.

There’s a thrill to being able to reclaim my place in the community. The more I protect myself and make myself feel safe, the more ‘risks’ I can take, like going to a concert I love. As I learn to reclaim touch it helps me manage experiences that typically are nightmares for me – like dental or medical appointments. It also frees me to have the ability to offer touch to someone else in need, to give a hug to a friend who is struggling or hold the hand of a psychiatric patient who is confused and distressed.

Touch is powerful. It can be my biggest trigger for anxiety and dissociation, such as when I get hugs following my talks at big conferences (see The Voices Vic Conference). It is also one of my strongest grounding techniques during anxiety attacks or major dissociative episodes. It’s a powerful way of communicating between people – acceptance, or rejection, affection or loathing, mutuality or domination. If touch is an area that has been damaged for you too, you can change how touch works in your life. You have the right to use it as a tool, to protect yourself from it, to seek out good touch, to be aware of the messages you send and accept through touch. There are more, and better, options than being touch starved or having to put up with touch that you find distressing and disempowering.

Relationships and trauma

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

One member of a relationship with a trauma background is a challenge. For the non-trauma partner, there is the hurdle of trying to understand and connect with experiences and reactions that are difficult to relate to. Applying the kind of personal wisdom that helps you get through less extreme situations, such as ‘just get on with it’ can cause a lot of stress for people who are struggling with severe after affects of major trauma. There’s two languages being spoken and a lot of work has to be done to get the translation working well and calm the anxieties of both parties. The person with the trauma background often feels ashamed, worried they are too much hard work, scared to trust, scared of being left, worried they’re making a big fuss about nothing, scared of turning their partner off, or of being pressured, that being vulnerable will engender disgust, or that being cared for will make them weak… The non-trauma partner often has anxieties such as wondering if their partner will ever come back from this world of trauma reactions, scared of saying or doing the wrong thing and triggering them, scared of not being strong enough to handle what they’re going through, scared of getting stuck having to care for them, anxious about their moodiness, unpredictability, mania, depression, or temper, anxious about leaning on them too much for day to day issues, and so on. Both partners can easily feel very alone, misunderstood, unsupported, under pressure, and afraid. It takes love, commitment, and skill to navigate complex trauma. I talk about this more in Supporting someone after Trauma.

Two of the biggest issues I observe about this kind of relationship is the difficulty communicating – eg. If I say to a friend who is a fellow trauma survivor or has a mental illness that I’ve had a rough week – they usually get what that means. We’re speaking the same language. Outside of that world, I find I have to spell things out much more strongly. To other friends I may have to directly explain that I’ve been in a self-harm crisis all week and haven’t left the house, or indeed, my bed. The other major issue I see a lot is the risk of the carer dynamic. Having a relationship polarise into the well one and the sick one, the strong/weak, the giver/receiver, the provider/needy can be very destructive for both people. That’s not to say that caring for a partner in distress is not a deeply beautiful and loving act. But rather that those dynamics come with risks that need to be navigated. I talk about this more in Caring for someone who’s suicidal.

Having said that, these relationships can be powerfully strong. The person with the trauma background learns to communicate about their needs and experiences, and has the experience of developing trust, being comforted, and having someone walk with them through their pain. The person without the trauma background learns the nuances of trauma language, how to be with someone in a very painful and vulnerable place, learns to connect more deeply in that very privileged space. These bonds can be strong, having worked hard to build language and connection and safety and fairness, powerful healing and hope can be created.

There’s another kind of relationship with different challenges, and that is where both members have a trauma background (or to a certain extent, a mental illness). Survivor/survivor pairings are not uncommon, and while some issues remain the same – such as feeling alone, others are quite different. I’ve been with my girlfriend for over three months now and it’s been an intensive time of sharing, learning, and finding ways through obstacles. We both have trauma histories. At times, those histories are in the far distant past. At other times, they are painfully present through flashbacks, nightmares, body memories, sensitivity to triggers, and so on. There are advantages in that there is a more common shared language. There’s less work to try and explain what these things are or what they feel like. There’s also more role swapping between who cares and who receives care depending on whose need is greatest at the time. But with this compatibility comes other risks – both are wounded people with needs and limitations. Sometimes the particular vulnerabilities create a painful feedback loop where nightmares in one trigger nightmares in the other, where dissociation in one feeds dissociation in the other and so on. Sometimes both parties are more comfortable giving than receiving care, or vice versa, and struggle to develop skills across both roles. Sometimes competitive comparisons of trauma lead to one person being invalidated and silenced because their experiences are not seen as significant. Sometimes the trauma bond is so intense two hurt people merge into one enmeshed person and neither keep growing back into whole separate people. Sometimes the needs brought into the relationship exceed the capabilities of the relationship. There’s risks.

A big part of the key of what seems to be working for us is being aware that there are a lot of ways our relationship could founder, and talking about them. We know that love is essential but also insufficient. There needs to be enough skills, mental health, and support also. We know that we cannot be ‘enough’ for each other, we need outside supports – friends, professional support. The brutal reality is that with trauma comes limitations. There are times we cannot be there for each other. We are going to let each other down. But there are also skills. People survive different kinds of trauma by developing different skills. Those of us who are more fortunate have a good match between our innate talents and the kinds of trauma we were subjected to. In my case, I’m sensitive in relationships. I read people well. I’m good at helping stressed people to feel safer. (this isn’t some kind of superpower and certainly doesn’t work with everyone) I’m a good communicator. The very history that leaves me with the limitations and vulnerabilities that make it more likely my close relationships will fail, also leaves with me the kinds of skills and capabilities that strengthen and support relationships. Survivor/survivor relationships can also work very well, with deep connections and strength and humility and respect.

We can’t know that our relationship will work out, we can only gently and lovingly build good foundations and try to create safe exits if things become dangerous or destructive. We talk of the future, about hopes and dreams together. We also talk about how to break up the least traumatically if we need to, how to ask for time apart, how to help during a bad night, what our biggest triggers are, who else we have permission to talk about each others past with, how to get through if we’re both in a bad space. It’s not a guarantee, but here and now it’s creating something beautiful and meaningful. There’s safety, awareness, freedom, and love. Trauma takes a lot away from all of us, but there’s still hope for our dreams and things we can do to make that hope stronger.

Poem – Mental Illness

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments
from a 2010 journal

Walking into the adult world
layers of illusions peeling away
and the emptiness beneath us all coming into view
the veneer of our security so thin
we are a lost race on a world
falling into space and our dreams
are a taste of death, first thing in the morning
and the last hour of night
in my minds eye 
everyone I love is gone
it falls away

No island so remote
as to be beyond the touch of tragedy
we destroy it all and it destroys us
we live on borrowed time and the pain
catches up in the end
we pay for all our sweet days
all the debts are collected

There is no peace.
There are moments of joy.
Touch on my skin
love in their eyes
dreams in my heart
but the dark always comes
and the light is so frail
all our hopes unwoven
our allotted happiness
spent like sand through glass
and what does it all mean?
I hold her hand
and I can feel her slipping
night has its teeth in her skin.

We live, we love, and we die.
Each moment is pulled like a cloth
over the emptiness beneath us
over the screaming terror and the helplessness
the hours that torture and the dreams that sustain
we fly a little, and then we fall.

Credibility in different worlds

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Working across different life areas the way I do is really interesting and somewhat head-bending. Peer work is already something I consider to have a ‘foot in both worlds’ of mental health ‘consumer’ and ‘staff’. The first time I sat down at a lunch table and heard staff members bitterly complaining about consumers with frustration because they wouldn’t attend a program they’d designed, I was shocked. The first time I sat with consumers who attacked not the practices but the character of all doctors, psychiatrists, staff, I felt my innards knot. Both consumers and staff often distrust me as having a primary loyalty to the other side. Sometimes having a foot in both worlds is painful and lonely, but I’m damn well determined to do it, because I see that as the heart of peer work, to unite what has been divided.

Then we add the creative world I also inhabit where I’m working with artists, poets, and writers. What a different world that is! It’s always funny to me how we build credibility in different areas.

As a peer worker, credibility is everything, it’s the platform on which I stand to have a voice. The usual way you establish credibility in the mental health world is through credentials. “Psychiatrist Gregory Brown says such-and-such.” I don’t have that (yet) so my credibility is based on lived experience, wide reading, and experience as a peer worker. I have to be conscious that my arty tendencies can play against me, that if I look like a hippy when talking to mainstream psychiatrists I quickly reduce my credibility. As a peer worker the message I have to give out to be accepted is that I’m normal, safe, trustworthy, reliable, and informed. Each audience I speak to is most comfortable with me if I appear to  be one of them, if I speak to them with respect, use their language, dress like them, understand their values. This is a world dominated by the tenants of psychiatry and social work, it is about systems and hierarchies, and about moderation and restraint. This is not a world comfortable with passion, excess, or madness.

The opposite applies in the art world. There is nothing so suspicious as someone who appears academic, mainstream, and normal. As an artist the message I have to give out to be accepted is that I’m brilliantly creative, unpredictable, talented, and utterly mad! It’s probably best if I haven’t slept in a fortnight and mainline cocaine. That’s what real artists do. It’s not just acceptable to have weird coloured hair, it’s concerning if you bother to brush it before leaving the house. Turning up on time or at all is problematic, being able to handle money or make any kind of sense in an interview might have your work dismissed as ‘too commercial’. Artists are supposed to be broke lunatics no one else understands.

Sometimes I wonder at the wisdom of trying to work in both of these areas. I have a sneaking suspicion that recognition in one actually plays against me in the other field. I’m trying to show the world of mental health that I’m sane and reliable, and the world of art that I’m mad and talented. Some days I feel like a magician with a sleight of hand trick going on – ‘don’t look here, look there!’ so no one notices this. It is also a source of endless amusement to me, particularly in busy weeks where art and mental health gigs pile on top of one another. I go from mad to sane and back again in the space of hours, like changing my shoes. I get to harangue one audience intellectually, connect deeply with the next, make the next laugh, or think, or see things differently…

This is where it all comes together. Everything I do is about mental health. I can’t help it, I can’t help but think, speak, write, and paint about life, about what it is to be alive, and that is about mental health. And everything I do is about art, about freedom, creativity, expression, connection, communication, about being one of the makers rather than one of the destroyers, about hope, voice, truth. They’re two sides of the same coin, two parts of a whole. I’m not happy in arts alone. I’m restless and discontent when I’m writing and painting alone. I crave the world of mental health, the intellectual stimulation of restructuring the DSM, researching the history of psychiatry, investigating alternative mental health movements. There’s also a passion in me to connect with hurting people, and my personal history has left me fragile, but it’s also left me with a lot of the skills to connect. I sit in my studio and the restlessness is like fire under my skin. I can feel the tides out there, the wave of humans in pain, in need, alone, and afraid, like I have been. I have to be on the front lines. I have to reach out. And I have to be an artist, a poet, a creator. It’s not what I do, it’s who I am, it’s my voice, my name, my identity, my way of speaking and listening, my joy. It’s what stitches my wounds.

I’m so sad sometimes at what straddling these worlds costs me. I doubt, I re-evaluate, I try to find a solution to the problem that I want to do, feel, learn, everything. My voracious appetite for life has only been enhanced by years of sickness and grief. Sometimes I come home from very hard days in mental health and I hate my job. I hate the pain I witness, the secrets I carry, the suffering and the lack of resources and grinding endlessness of it, the poverty and cruelty and savagery of the world. I hate it and I hate my choices, and I cry, and I think of all the books I could be writing, the canvases I could have painted, the films I could have worked on in that time. They are like unborn children. I could have gone entirely into a creative field, given myself up to huge passions and projects that are about life but do not wipe my face daily in the grit and filth of life. Some days I come home spent, empty, lost, burdened by people’s trust, by their pain, by finding in myself what it takes to really look at someone who is suffering, to sit with them. Some days I wish I could be just one thing or the other.

But then, that’s also what it is to be an artist. You are swept up in mad passions, you give yourself to them utterly, you are spent. You sleep, you hide, you grieve bewildered, and a new dream seeds in your heart. This is the nature of creativity and the cycle of life energy. You can hate it, fight it, deny it, but this is where the great work happens. The cost is high but so is the joy. Beneath doubt and frustration and impatience is passion and a profound certainty that I am following a path for myself that is right. I have found my calling. And however much it may confuse people at times, everything that makes me a good fit for the creative world is everything that makes me a good fit for the world of mental health, and vice versa. They just don’t always know it yet. 😉

Shattered

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

There’s a deep, miserable despair when you’ve been pushing yourself hard, finally get some time off to sleep, and find yourself snatching only hours before nightmares shake you awake. A psychological ambush (just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water) places that should be safe (bed, sleep, your own mind) turn out to be full of monsters. It’s exhausting. Here in the night you remember that you’re wounded too, and without the day, without the structures of the day,the frameworks and suggestions and strategies that belong to the daylight world, there is instead poetry and terror.

There is no betrayal yet I feel betrayed. That rest does not await me, that I do not sleep the sound sleep of the innocent, that there is more to ask of me yet and more to endure. But this is the place where I go to the underworld, and mine is stuffed with nightmares and horrors. This is the price to pay for the daylight hours.

Anxiety

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I have a rent inspection later today, not just any inspection but my end-of-the-first-probationary-year inspection and my anxiety levels have been sky high. My lawns are cut, my house is tidy, the clothes that have been living in my bath have been folded and put away, my floors are mopped. My backyard needs tidying from Zoe but there’s absolutely no point in doing that until about an hour before the inspection because she will un-tidy it again pretty quickly.

Since going through rounds of homelessness, even a small threat to my housing like this can send me sky high with anxiety. It will almost certainly be fine – but almost is not enough.

When my anxiety is high like this, I feel like I can’t swallow properly or catch my breath. I can’t bear anything touching my throat like a scarf or necklace. It’s very difficult to get or keep food down. I’m tired but can’t sleep, and as a result my fibro pain levels start to spike.

So I’ve had a pretty quiet weekend at home, distracting myself with movies and music, snatching moments of housework every time I feel up to it and crashing back to bed as I feel sick and overloaded again. It’s not a pretty system, but I have to say it’s worked well. My gorgeous girlfriend has kept me company and played rounds of Rummikub and made tempting sandwiches to eat. Sarsaparilla has managed to go a couple of days without maiming any birds, or at least, without bringing them in the house. Zoe tore up one of my couch cushions yesterday but has restrained herself today. My Mum mowed my lawns last week so they look halfway decent now. Impressive teamwork going on at my place!

Looking forward to Monday evening and being able to breathe again. In the meantime, to bed with a book. 

So it turns out I am a bat

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve been experimenting with my sleep patterns since I started the new job with Aceda 6 weeks ago. It has been a continual thorn in my side over the past 6 years that my sleep gears towards nocturnal. It started suddenly after the devastating break up of a long term relationship, I immediately went from being a very morning, waking up with the dawn to have a walk kind of person, to keeping company with the owls and bats.

Many things fed into this over the years, for a couple there I was totally nocturnal, unable to sleep at all until the dawn came and people started to wake up and go about their lives. I kept vigil all the long, lonely nights, baked scones, watched bizarre documentaries on SBS, wrote poetry, wept myself hoarse, and went for long walks when it rained and I figured I’d be the only mad one out on the streets.

When I was very sick with the chronic fatigue and fibro etc getting less than 9 hours would leave me trembling, vomiting, and massively dissociated. Insomnia cycles with nightmares were devastating physically and tipped me into psychosis. The usual treatments for sleep issues didn’t work at all, most sleeping meds do not work on me, the only one that does also leaves me dissociated and half out of my brain for days. Attempting to reset patterns by persistently getting out of bed in the morning and getting in the sun or taking melantonin only made me incredibly ill. I would crack long before any signs of sleep resetting would start.

So, I’ve been quite surprised to discover that I’ve been able to reset my patterns fairly easily over the past few weeks. I’m certainly physically far stronger than I have been, I can even handle one morning a week on a few hours sleep, and I’ve discovered recently there’s one part who seems to exist in a permanent hypo-manic state and doesn’t seem to notice even quite significant periods with little to no sleep. Slightly worrying but also incredibly useful when they’re around…

There’s been a downside I didn’t expect. My mental health isn’t coping with the change at all. Without my late night hours, there are a number of parts of my system who are not getting any time at all. We didn’t realise this. So many new realisations lately.

We are able to get by so much better than we used to in so many ways. One of the big things that has made a difference is the ability to contain distressed parts until we’re safe and alone. So often people say to me “I can’t believe you wrote that post about hating yourself, or painted that image about self harm, you don’t seem that way at all”. And I say back to them – “You haven’t met me at 3am”. How true that is. It’s such a constant surprise to me that people don’t pick that the confident, gracious person who steps onto the stage to read poems about savage pain cannot possibly have written them. When I was younger, triggers would floor me. Vulnerable parts would fall apart in public, switch out and hide in back rooms writing poetry in the journal we carried everywhere. Skinless and devastatingly sensitive we had no capacity to fit in, to conceal our difference or our pain. We’re still painfully raw at times, crying at work, missing the kinds of filters that adults seem to develop where you sit through movies untouched by the world within it. But we’re so much further along than we used to be, and it turns out a huge aspect of this is having hours at night, alone and uninterrupted by the rest of the world, to let out all of those suppressed feelings and those hidden parts.

How much of this is the difference between a child and an adult? How much of this is the distinction we draw between the crazy and the sane? The ‘sane’ still have the capacity to choke it down in public? Something left with which to conceal themselves? No sobbing on the bus, no poetry in the doctors office, mustn’t let them hear you scream…

I need my night hours to be mad. I crave my time in the sun, to be useful, to see friends, to study and work and live. But I need the night. It’s where I do my screaming, where I bleed ink, brew art, it’s the hours where the poems live and Narnia is close. It’s a difficult life to pull off, there’s too many mornings I can’t avoid being sleep deprived and up early, there’s the constant need for vigilence around things like driving and dissociation, cooking and dissociation – another nice burn on the inside of my arm from careless handling of a hot baking tray from a couple of days ago. There’s the risks of sleep deprivation which are serious. It’s a foot in two worlds kind of life, constantly frustrated by my inability to fit properly, to be entirely one thing or the other… It’s also a productive, fulfilling kind of life, sublime and mundane in their proper places, full of art, full of love, light and shadows, the dark and the bright of the moon.

It’s what I have to work with for now. So tonight, I’m a little tired, but I’m sitting up blogging again, past midnight where my thoughts suddenly become clear as snow melt and I feel at home. I belong here and I need this place.

The Dissociation Inc Is Official!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

We’re registered as a legal entity now, all official and legit. The paperwork arrived in the post today, to much rejoicing!!

Next year some new plans and resources will start to be put into action with enthusiasm. In the meantime, we’re all learning a lot and working hard. Our two face to face groups are going really well and continue to grow and develop every month, providing support for some amazing people struggling with some really tough issues. Our online groups are also going great, our open group now has over 100 members! We are supporting more people with trans and diverse gender needs which is wonderful as that is another under-resourced high stigma area. We’re building bigger networks around Australia and some international too. Ticking along, ticking along. 🙂

Feast Picnic

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Yesterday was the last day of the Feast Festival, a two week queer arts and music event here in Adelaide. It wraps up with a huge picnic and then an after party. I went to picnic with a great group of friends and my girlfriend. We didn’t stay for the after party, by evening most of the crowd has been drinking steadily all day and gets restless. We set off once a few scurmishes involved the police.

It’s been an amazing fortnight, I attended Feast for the first time rather clandestinely last year, when I was not yet out as Bi to most of my networks. This time I’ve got along to dancing, music, theatre, and film events with my gorgeous girlfriend. It’s been an interesting experience to notice what it feels like to kiss in a public place and feel accepted. To hold hands and not be watching the crowd for danger signs. To be surrounded by the incredible diversity within the Queer community and feel like I’m on the inside for once. It’s been powerful to hear and be part of art and stories about being queer. It’s also been surreal, trekking along in the Pride march wondering why people are cheering for us, with us, at us. Buying cute/kitchy little rainbow bracelets to mark the event and remind myself I was here, try to remind myself what it feels like to be at home.

It makes me want desperately to find a way to create events like this in mental health. To make my little campfires for my groups huge events, full of pride, full of sorrow, full of respect for diversity, love. I want to make lonely straight kids feel this kind of acceptance too. I want to see comedy and theatre and films about madness, about the oddballs and the misfits.

I had a fantastic picnic, but when I got home, my head crashed. That’s not uncommon for me. All the triggered things surface and the lonely parts come out to howl the kind of pain I can’t bring out in the daylight without the men in white coats coming. So here in the small hours, there is blogging, there is the journal, my inks, my bath… there is a fresh Terry Pratchett book to read and a promise to my girlfriend that I’ll call her if things get bad. It’s sad. I’m lying in bed with a fan running, wrapped in my new beautiful rainbow sarong, with my little netbook. The screaming in my head has gone quiet, but I know it’s still there, cut off behind a door that’s now closed. My broken toe is a dull ache and my eyes are dust dry. The night is warm and still and silent. Makes me think of a line from Something Wicked This Way Comes;

Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.

-Bradbury

Here’s to the nights you run.

Dining Table!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I have a stunning antique dining table! I unfortunately, no longer have a lounge room, but that’s a problem I’m working on. 😉 It’s absolutely beautiful and I adore it, belonged to parents of friends of mine. I need some chairs to go with it, and I’m paranoid about the possibility of Zoe gnawing on it, but just think of the wonderful dinner parties I’ll have now! 🙂 
Working in the area of Eating Disorders lately I’ve noticed that my food issues have taken a little bit of a dive under the extra pressure. Getting a dining table to serve myself meals and enjoy them is one of the things I’m doing to manage that. Whee hee! 🙂

Plans!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Next year is creeping up on me (don’t even think about mentioning Christmas) and I’m turning over in my mind what I want to do in it. I need a break, that much is clear. I’m thinking of taking January off, fixing up my car, and doing some travelling… It’s been forever since I’ve been out under the stars!

My Aceda contract wraps up at the end of this year, possibly a bit earlier depending on what happens with funding rounds etc. A job I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground about has just been advertised, it’s the women’s worker with Bfriend… an area very close to my heart! GLBTIQ supports are a passion of mine and I’d love to work in that field… on the other hand, working at Aceda, whilst WONDERFUL has pretty much put a complete stop to work on the DI, and that can’t go on.

On the other side of the coin, I have turned down about 5 face painting gigs since I started work at Aceda because I’m too short of time and energy to manage them… I love the facepainting. I have a gig this Saturday morning at the Christies Beach fair and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s fun and arty and I get to spend time with little kids and big kids and see fairs and hang out with some really cool people. It doesn’t wear me out the way mental health/community services work does, I still have some oomph left over to work on DI resources…

I have a website I was developing that ground to a halt, many requests for art prints I haven’t had time to fix up, requests to purchase original artwork I haven’t got back to yet… my arts practice has taken a bit of a back seat lately and I’m thinking it’s time to turn the tables.

Plus, there’s an awesome facepainting convention happening in Melbourne next year. And I have independent peer work gigs lined up for a couple of the big mental health conventions too. That’s going to be pretty hard to work in if my week is already packed with regular work and the art degree. I want some room to be able to attend interesting events and fit in extra work as it happens. I also want a less manic schedule, more time to chill with friends, have dinner parties, watch movies, go to the theatre…

My life has changed so much this year, it’s incredible. I’ve been very driven and working hard, I’m feeling it’s time for a change of pace, just for a little while. There’s some hard decisions to make, some challenging things (like the paperwork involved with being self-employed), some adjustments… but it’s so good to have options and choices. I want the space in my life to be able to drop things and make room for a sudden 3 week workshop on supporting trans people, or relationships with multiples, or sex after abuse, or… I want more weekends spent camping. I want to slow down and enjoy what I’ve got. I want to spend more time in my studio. I want to go on a trip around Australia and develop more DI resources for people with dissociation. I want a little more fun and a little less stress. Less tonsillitis would also be a bonus. At some point I want to take out 6 months and write a book.

Just thinking it all through. As a wise friend said to me recently, it doesn’t have to be a forever decision. I can try something out for 6 months or a year, see how it goes. Change my mind. Find a new opportunity…

But I went to the pride march recently with my face painted and got a massive response, heaps of people asking for a business card. It seems the queer community are perhaps short of facepainters? I hear my name being called… 🙂

New Journals

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Finishing a journal is always a slightly fraught time. I need another journal like I need air, the anxiety spikes until I have one. Choosing one is difficult for a multiple. We generally all write in the same journal, except for when writing at the computer, or out and about on buses etc when we write in an Evernote app on the phone. This means each journal needs to be acceptable to everyone in the system, else some will refuse to write in it. Sometimes journals get abandoned part way through for this reason. A single journal just makes tracking down a particular bit of writing so much easier than looking through 15 journals that each cover many years. Most of my journals cover a few months to a year depending on their size. I have over 30 now, as I’ve been writing since 14.

This time we decided to buy a bunch at once. Maybe they wont have to be so exact if there’s a collection of other types waiting to be used next.

The next thing then is to find some more time to write in them. I keep adding new things into my life and I’m watching the overflow spill out. Poetry cannot become one of those things that spills.

Feast Begins!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment


Here in South Australia, we have an annual GLBTIQ festival celebrating all things queer culture, and it’s just launched. I went for the first time ever last year, down to the hub on a quiet night. This year I walked in the Pride March wearing rainbow tear face paint, then danced and chatted and listened to music and roasted marshmallows on the fire and danced some more until getting home around 3am.

It was an incredible experience, I am buzzing and exhausted and desperate to tell you all about it once I’ve had some sleep… Which as I’m booked into see several shows this week will not be happening soon…

But I will, I promise! In the meantime, wow.

Just wow.

The Harmonic Project

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I went to an amazing concert the other day, something quite unlike anything else I’ve experienced.Picture yourself on a cushion on the floor of a big lovely church hall. Above you is a high roof with exposed beams, in front of you is a stage festooned with unusual instruments, candles, and fragrant roses…
The music was so beautiful and gentle, my girlfriend and I just lay down with everyone else around us, I held her hand and let it wash over me. I drifted in and out of sleep, I could feel the warmth of bodies all around me, hippy types resting peacefully, everyone breathing gently together, no fear, even the smell of strangers not jangling, only peace, only peace.
I don’t often know peace in church. (I’ve certainly never kissed a woman in one before.)
It was a special kind of night. The music was ambient ‘world’, made from many instruments with a history of being used in holy ceremonies. It was all improvised and rhythmic, like rain falling and softening and falling again, like breathing or the beating of a great, slow, gentle heart. 
They describe their work as Sound Meditation and I certainly found it to be that. The concert was launching their new CD, which I very much recommend, I’ve given my copy to my friend with the new baby as I think they need it more than I do at the moment. 🙂
If you’d like to know more, have a look atThe Harmonic ProjectHeather Frahn (she has a show coming up at the Feast Festival here in SA)Or listen to:Cosmic Tone Drum

Balance

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Balance in life is important, as they say in mental health. One of the things in my life I find important to balance is working in mental health. After hours, days, and weeks of dealing with highly stressed and distressed people, being very engaged and diplomatic, and having to fit into the community sector, I feel a deep need to come home and listen to Nine Inch Nails, swear constantly, and shoot zombies on my computer. Fortunately, I am not alone in this, so about once a week I get together with someone else who needs a similar kind of balance in their life, and we bitch about our week and shoot everything that moves in Left for Dead 2. (except of course, the witches. Which the NPC’s shoot instead.)
I’ve never seen this kind of coping strategy in a pamphlet or heard about it at a workshop. It’s not as in as meditation, although maybe if I worded it better I could pass it off – ‘regular debriefing with rapid left right eye movement for reducing traumatic memory laydown, and peer support to facilitate future planning and goal accomplishment’… 
But I think that would entirely undermine what actually works about it all. So here I am with Zoe, the bane of zombies everywhere (except for the ones that cluster in those stupid running sections where I am pretty much mincemeat on a platter. With mushrooms, mmmmm. I think perhaps I should not write blog posts before tea.)

A Rather Long Day

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
Yesterday was one of those days that only starts to pick up a little once you realise it isn’t going to work at all and write it off completely. I spent most of it in bed with a major headache and a painfully sore throat. It came on the night before but an evening of nursing it and chilling in front of DVD’s didn’t do the trick. I seem to be prone to tonsillitis now some of mine have grown back. 😦

So I cancelled my day, even though I’d been really looking forward to everything booked in, started a big fight with a friend (which was smart, well timed, relevant, and helped out with my headache. Sigh) finally dragged myself out of bed around midday to sit at my computer crying and eating lollies, wearing a towel. This didn’t help much. 
It’s a bit of a learning curve, working in the area of eating disorders. I’m pretty good these days with my own food/body issues, but they’re not completely behind me. Some days I feel like a fraud in my job. Particularly when the stress is getting to me and either I can’t eat or I’m eating constantly to cope with it. 
So as the guilt/shame/self hate spiral kicked in with a vengeance I found someone kind to talk to, managed to eat breakfast, and finally had a shower and got dressed. I felt slightly more human and decided to head off to the sculpture studio where I feel at least slightly competent. I also have my project due on Monday, no extensions possible, and the lab isn’t open over the weekend so it was weighing on my mind. 
The evening improved a bit from there. I bought extra chux and string on the way, found a free park, cried for a bit longer, limped into the studio, and set to work. I actually finished the project before we were asked to leave at 8.30pm, it was fun and good and I felt pleased with myself. The tutor was friendly and told those of us working late not to get nervous around him, that he has unconditional positive regard for all of us unless we start being mean to each other. He said that was essential for creativity. I said that was essential for life and worked on not crying again. I was also in a lot of pain because of all the bending to work on the bamboo cot, this project has been really hard for that. But it takes all the pressure off Friday and my weekend to have it done. 
Then I came home and gamed for a couple of hours, shooting zombies with a friend. Mindless and fun, like taking a holiday from my head for a while. I feel kind of fuzzy around the edges but I’m out of the pit. Zoe contributed to the evening by chasing Sarsaparilla under the furniture and chewing my aerial cable into about 40 small pieces. I managed two meals yesterday and my brain doesn’t feel like someone has deep-fried it anymore. Maybe after another decent sleep things will be looking up. 

New Group Blue Skies

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment
I’m starting a new group with Aceda, with co-facilitator Ellie! It will run weekly on Wednesday evenings for the next few weeks while we wait to hear about ongoing funding with Aceda. There’s a lovely flyer below, which you can download or print from here. If you have food or body images issues and you’d like some support, please contact me on (08) 8297 4011, or sarah@aceda.org.au

I’m very excited about it, there’s been a lot of requests for a new group to start and I’m glad we’ve been able to get something up and running so quickly. 🙂 Sing out if you’d like to be on the mailing list for ED resources too.

Multiplicity – Rapid switching

/ Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

‘Cascade switching’ is a term I coined after watching someone with multiplicity do an incredibly rapid series of switches over the course of a conversation. I’ve experienced it only a few times myself and I really hate it. Multiples are very different from each other when it comes to things like switching. Some switch frequently, some very infrequently. For some multiples switching a few times in a week would be highly unusual. For others switching a few times an hour is quite normal. I lean more towards the latter. It’s quite normal (hah) for me to switch all through my day, even if one is mostly out over a week, others will tend to peek out here and there, even if it’s just a young one noticing the jar of cookies in the cupboard or being distracted by little kids running around on tv.

Cascade switching is something else. It’s switching so fast and so frequently that it feels and looks something like shuffling through a deck of cards face up, almost too quickly to register what’s on each card. I’ve noticed that it seems to have been triggered in the cases I’ve seen by huge news that impacts everyone in the system (eg news of a death in the family), by encountering a situation that no one in the system can handle, so the switching just speeds up and becomes chaotic, or, as in my case, by the start of a new relationship. I’ve also done this when I’ve been under threat in dangerous therapeutic relationships.

It’s deeply unsettling, I’m switching from one sentence to the next, or even part way through sentences. My ability to track information is overtaxed by the chaos, and breaks down. We can’t tell who is out anymore, what we were doing, who we are with, even what year it is. The dissociation becomes overwhelming and I feel like I’m drowning blind and can’t even tell what way to swim to get to air.

For some multiples this is a common occurance. Their systems are highly fluid, parts constantly changing, disappearing, new ones being formed. Their experience of life is so chaotic and dangerous that their system doesn’t settle into a stable pattern but stays in a state of turbulence. Stability hasn’t served them for survival so they gear towards flux instead. These people are often not diagnosed as multiples because the DSM concept of DID presumes stability.

I’m settling down finally which is great. It’s been a few weeks of cascade switching with the occasional stable day or evening around my girlfriend, but that’s settling more into my usual patterns of at least having someone out for an hour or so. Not to mention that’s making it a bit easier for her to work out what’s going on or have some capacity to predict how I’ll react to her. I’ve been trying to unpick what’s driving it for me and I’ve been able to pin down a few things. One is that most of my system are keen to meet her. Another is anxiety about forming a ‘one-part bond’. Most of my friendships used to be this kind of bond, a few still are – where the connection is only to one part and no one else in my system thinks of that person as a friend, or even recognises them. (this makes life awkward when you run into people unexpectedly, that blank confusion that always makes me feel broken and ashamed) This is not what I want, because we are all parts rather than entirely separate people, we are all missing information about our life, and also missing skill sets. We are vulnerable to bad dynamics and painful relationships when only one part is involved and making decisions. We make much better decisions as a team. For a really important relationship like a romance, it’s even more crucial that everyone in my system is aware, involved, and has a voice in what’s happening. That doesn’t mean that the kind of relationship is the same with all the parts, but that there is a relationship of some kind being developed. So I think anxiety about that has been pushing up the switching – whenever one part is out for a while and things are stable, the anxiety spikes and the switching amps up. The downside is that cascade switching is so stressful and confusing that it’s very difficult to navigate a relationship with someone in the grip of it.

Pacing seems to be helping me get out of it. The obsessive focus you feel in a new relationship is delicious – you want not just to be with them all the time, but to climb under their skin, into their mind, investigate and submerge yourself… But the dating, the meet and part and meet again cycle is helping me settle back into my own cycles. Making the effort to keep the same part around for an hour or the whole night – then making the effort to have another part who wants to connect or communicate be present next time, we’re slowing down and things are becoming clearer. Trying to find a middle ground between adapting to another person where switches are triggered by how they are and what they need, and the kind of switching we do alone where they are entirely generated by our own needs… that’s a huge challenge! I can do one or the other, but trying to meld something between is a complex ask. A whole new kind of dance.

For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.