Places to rest

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

It’s 5am. I can’t sleep. I have terrible vertigo and hives all over my body. I’ve been reading blog posts by Jenny Lawson and Will Wheaton about depression and anxiety and I’m curled up in tears and feeling less crushing alone in my black pit than I have in days. I’m really, really tired. I’ve been trying so hard to find a way through this godawful smog in my head, looking for hope like a starving person, doing my best to counter the black rain of failure and despair, yearning with everything in me to be able to feel the kindness and love people are giving me. Sometimes I can, for an hour or two. Often I can’t. I want to so badly, I do everything I can to hear and receive and take in and believe, but I’m on the other side of a wall. I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to be. I promise I’m trying, but it’s bigger than me. All the want in the world isn’t making it go away.

Reading tears in rain by Will Wheaton, I felt a sense of relief. That feeling like a failure and being a failure are not the same thing. That people who have successful careers also feel the crushing insecurity I’m struggling with. I’ve collected my box of art prints for the walkathon on Sunday and I think they’re beautiful, and at the same time there’s a kind of violent rejection of them, bile in my throat, fury and exposure and loathing and a desire to destroy them, to burn down all the tiny dreams that are still breaking my heart, still leaving me vulnerable to this feeling of failure, this sense of not ever being good enough. Quivering with distress I step back from them and try to breathe.

Yesterday morning I had terrible vertigo, I was crying out and holding onto the bed because the room was flipping around me like a car being tumbled down a cliff. Rose got me a vomit bag and cold water to sip, then held me tight and sang to be until I went back to sleep.

Last night I filled her water bottle and got her a vomit bag when the flashbacks got bad, held her close and sang to her until she fell asleep. Nights are hardest for her, mornings for me. We’re limping along together. How much I love her.

Two days ago we took a friends kids to the show together and it was a beautiful day, all day. We spent the whole day on toddler time, moving gently, lots of rest, lots of snacks. We got stuck with a half hour wait for the train at the end of the night and each took a girl to sing her to sleep. Rose with the 7 year old cuddled up and dozing under her arm, me with the little one in a sling pacing slowly around them. Each of us looking at the other with stars in our eyes. A quiet place, in the night between trains. No panic attacks and hardly any flashbacks that day.

I can’t beat it from inside. I watch for the windows when it’s less and do what I can then, take in what I can. I’m so tired, and so tired of feeling guilty and responsible. It’s a bit of cruel joke to feel so awful and feel worse about failing to stop myself feeling so awful. I don’t think I’m going to make this better, just breathe inside it, don’t destroy anything, and wait to heal. I’ll bloom again.

It’s not my fault, right? I don’t think it’s my fault. I didn’t mean it. I’d stop if I could. I’d make it all better if I could. I’m trying. And trying to find places I can rest from all the trying.

Trying to find my bearings again

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

Rose and myself have been trying to gently turn things around on our little street. There’s such embedded hostility here, fights and stupid feuds and all kinds of heartache. One of our neighbours who’s been hard to live with in the past suffered a terrible loss a couple of months ago, when a guest of a neighbour ran over her cat. At the time I offered Sarsaparilla to her as he’d taken a shine to her. The relationship took and they’ve become close friends. He sleeps on her bed most nights, and she dotes on him. He’s sleek and happy. She’s arranged pet insurance for him and he never comes into our house any more. Sometimes when I’m in the front garden he comes over for a scratch under the chin. I miss him a little, but he’s happy, and she loves him.

The neighbour who stabbed another neighbour has not faced jail time. The victim of the crime is being blamed for being hard to live with and causing trouble. Her garden was kicked over and un-potted the other day. I waited to see her for a week and when she didn’t appear, went round there and straightened it up as best I could.

Another neighbour is struggling with arthritis in her hands so Rose and I have cleared some weeds for her and planted out some lilies and geraniums as low maintenance colour. Half the time we spent with any neighbour we are trying to gently discourage them from tearing each other down.

I’m glad my little black jellybean is going well. Today I managed to settle enough of my stress to write some thankyou cards I’ve been wanting to put together for a couple of months. I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of community that we give and receive with grace and gratitude. That it’s all part of a circle. I feel anxious and undeserving and confused.

People have been kind, which is exactly what I need right now. I’m not suicidal or feeling like self harming, I’m just in overwhelming stress. I’m struggling to think straight, follow writing like books or emails, remember what I was trying to do. I’m noticing my own trauma responses – I’m hypersensitive, startle easily, and feel anxious and insecure much of the time. A kind of cringe, a catch in my throat, total inability to look at my ‘to do’ list. The early morning waking is breaking my sleep – I woke Rose by crying out her name this morning when I startled from a dream in which she’d died. Poor love. All morning, everyone kept dying in my dreams and I’d wake in dread. At least I’ve stopped feeling like I am dying, that was especially hard.

A friend called today and told me my job tomorrow was to be daft and make 47 mistakes. I can do that! I said. Being patient with my incapacity. Remembering it will pass. My lovely sister trying to help me feel some sense of being an okay person, how I’ve helped her and that I haven’t wasted my life or failed or been useless, that accepting help from others is not manipulative or greedy or asking too much. I can remember feeling it, remember that glow of inner contentment.

I miss working for money and having a sense of dignity in my role and feeling that I was providing for my family, and the tangibility of all that compared to sitting up late with Rose through a flashback or waking her up early with my own dread and anxiety. I miss more than anything just feeling okay with myself instead of afraid all the time.

I’ve lost my bearings and I remember how much more fun life is with them! I can’t wait to get them back. There’s so many wonderful things waiting for me. So many wonderful people I can’t wait to see clearly again, to have them morph back from the scary, intimidating overlords who are disappointed in me, and back into my own daft, lovely, imperfect friends and colleagues. I can’t wait to feel like I can breathe again and that there isn’t a hole punched in my gut or a hand around my throat or a forest of dark violent trees with razor sharp limbs in my chest. I can smell it, almost. A place where my body rests when I lie down instead of lying rigid on the mattress, where sleep restores me instead of opening all the cages of my terrors and letting them out to destroy my inner world.

Poor lovely Rose and I, all jangled and afraid. I can see how we’ve needed others to soothe us. I felt so inadequate that I couldn’t stop her flashbacks or even make them bearable. I felt like a failure, like my work in trauma had been proved false and useless, that I was making claims about my ability and ideas that turned out to be hollow. Everything I thought I knew and every skill I thought I had being turned on its head. I have an image of a bird being startled from the cage of my chest and flying in panic about the ceiling. It’s not come home yet but I can feel it closer. What other people are doing to help isn’t something special I hadn’t thought of, it’s just that holding on, telling us things will be okay, that we’re okay, that we’ll make it, that we’re loved. I think maybe we both got a very big scare and it was just too much to make it through alone or even together – we’ve needed friends and therapists and books and mentors and our tribe. We’re not above it, not special, not better, not ‘recovered’ in all the wrong senses of that word. We’re human and vulnerable too, and thankfully not alone. We’re not independent of our tribe, not ministering to them from some lofty position of comfort and security, but living in the real world of light and shadow too, where the dark days are sometimes very dark, where sometimes you have to stop everything and just breathe again.

We’re still having windows of better times, sometimes even whole hours or longer. We’re both looking for those moments where all the impossible things feel a little more possible and doing them then – showering, eating, sleeping, sex, alone time, time with others, housework, admin. Just keeping things ticking along as best we can and staying as connected with others as we can, and enjoying the good moments and weathering the bad. I guess, like shock, if we can cushion it enough it will wear off. I’m stuck by how traumatising trauma reactions are, often far more so than the trauma itself. It will get better again, I will feel competent and like I have skin and a brain instead of raw flesh and a swamp that’s on fire. There will be time to write all the draft posts I have about topics that are more than updates, and my projects will call my name and sing to me and make my heart thrill again. I can’t wait.

Blossom

/ Sarah K Reece / 7 Comments

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Tamlorn’s peach tree bloomed today. We hung the crystal from a stand with a wind chime and in the afternoon, it casts rainbows through the garden and the kitchen.

Today has been hard, flashbacks and anxiety, but full of love from people around us, and animal cuddles. We’ll get through this.

My first gilded prints

/ Sarah K Reece / 8 Comments

The sun is out, the garden is in bloom. Birds are singing and someone is running a bench saw nearby. My lovely lady is rearranging the baby clothes collection. We’ve got up early and arranged for scans and prints of a number of my artworks to display and possibly even sell at the Pregnancy Loss Australia Walkathon next Sunday.

I’m currently working on creating certificates of authenticity for my two beautiful framed, hand embellished giclee print reproductions. I’ve gilded both with 23 karat gold and they look incredibly lovely. This one is going to a new home this month. I’m planning to open an Etsy store and link it to this blog in a few weeks.

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And my love and I are trying to conceive. Adenomyosis is making things very hard for me and will only get worse the longer I’m off hormones – it’s been 9 months now. If circumstances were different we might wait a few months for things to settle here, but they are what they are and we have closing windows of opportunity, and big broken hearts full of love. August is done and left behind us and may September smile more sweetly on us.

Jude Blooms

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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Jude, the rose that Rose and I bought on the day of our engagement, has bloomed. He’s so beautiful.

We’re still here. It’s been a long week. I think the downward spiral has arrested. We spent Wednesday night in the ER because Rose was suffering chest pain – almost certainly muscle strain because of her extremely painful flashbacks, but you can never be too careful with sudden chest pain so in we went and they kept us all night doing tests. She got the all clear at 7am. I slept for a couple of hours in the van out the front of the hospital while she napped in a dark corner of the ward.

We’re breaking the new, devastating patterns, with help. Rose has a new trauma therapist on board, I’ve been reading up on Focusing and holding onto my people’s belief in me as a decent person. There are still very hard hours in every day, but at no point in the past two days did I feel like I was dying. I managed a full day of college today, and started a new oil painting tonight, despite some pretty intense anxiety and stress. Art as business is not doing kind things to my head. Last night I went for a late night walk with Zoe and found the world shifted and poetry came back to me.

Dropping the ball like this means a juggling act to keep up with those responsibilities I haven’t dropped. I’ve got major preparation work to do for a stall in a week and I’m worried about it. I am still giving talks here and there – they’re stressful but also like small lifelines for me currently – feeling of use is the strongest antidote to feeling like I’m dying.

We’re limping on together. When she’s happy, she shines. I love her to bits.

Holding the Fort

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

Rose is rough, I am rough. I’m holding the fort, for myself and with her too. Just holding on.

We’re swimming in trauma reactions and broken bits of our hearts. Deep wounds and deep grief. PTSD is incredibly hard, very unfair. It exposes when we most need protecting, makes us tremble with fear when we most need comforting, turns the world dark when we most need the light.

I’m trying to find a way through the stories – that this is real but also that the fear it brings with it – that this is permanent, is not real. There’s such a tangled web of truths and lies and fears it’s hard to find a way through. I find myself falling with relief back into the stories where mental illness is compared with physical – for all the problems with those analogies they also fit and give some shape to the pain we’re in, some way to make room for the suffering and argue for understanding. My poor love is devastated with flashbacks and I find myself debating whether I’d say ptsd or epileptic fit if I needed to explain why we needed help in public to a stranger… It’s debilitating and I can’t navigate the complexities of what has happened to us any more, I’m back to needing the basics of something I can fit in a sentence, something I can scrape clear of the rot and find a place to stand on. Illness. Injury. Whatever. A real thing, a powerful thing, that wishing or trying hard does not make go away. We are dealing with a thing that is bigger than us, and unfair, and very hard, and we are doing it the best we can and each day hoping tomorrow may be better.

And yet, as I drove up the freeway today, looking for a way to pass an hour without the darkness obliterating us both, I felt that knot of pain in me, the thing in my throat I can’t breath around, the indefinable thing that is and is not pain or fear or grief or any thing I can put a word to… just some kind of deep hurt that I can only recoil from – something unbearable. Which is bizarre to me, because I’ve been through so much that was unbearable. So much worse than this! And alone, and in agony, without hope – I’ve been here before and yet this is a new hell, unfamiliar, and I’m without assurance that I’ll come through it. I can’t feel that.

I wondered for a moment what it would feel like if I stopped doing all this to try and ‘get better’ or feel better, if I stopped the self care, the patience, the determination, all the ways I was approaching this pain, and let it be instead. Instead, in fact, made it welcome. And the knot came undone, in my throat. I could breathe for a moment, I was in pain but it wasn’t beyond bearing any more. It just hurt. I didn’t have to run from it or bind it up or try to heal it. I could just be with it. Recovery never looks the way people talk about it. Tonight, I’m feeling the black rain falling under my skin. I’m patient and mostly I’m holding the fort. Some moments, I slip into the slime and under the water I can hear the sound of my dreams dying.

Some moments I read blog posts like Celebrating my blog from earlier this year, and come across lines like “I’m actually starting to take some positive feedback on board for the first time since I was a child. I can see clearly what I’ve been doing all these years with this work.” and the contrast is so great it’s almost unbearable. How did I lose this? How completely I have lost it. Only the memories haunt me.

I have spoken with a few close friends lately about all the losses I’ve faced in the past few months, particularly around my business. So many wonderful things have been cancelled or rescheduled or not come to pass, none of which I can really talk about. I thought I was ready, and to the sound of enthusiasm and support and a sense of community, I’ve jumped. I tried to fly and instead I’ve fallen. Each loss or dead end or deferred hope alone was manageable, but my world has been full of them lately, and I simply can’t buffer them, not in my situation. Everything has an impact in my world, financially, and on hope and energy. I rolled with the punches for the first few, but somewhere back 10 losses ago, I lost key things I need to keep going and didn’t realise yet until there was no more world beneath my feet and I was falling into a dark place.

I am trying to send cards or letters to anyone who has supported me and I have managed one so far, which I nearly threw up with stress to do. So vulnerable, nerves scraped raw and heart broken. I simply do not understand why anyone would support me in any way, let alone a stranger or near stranger send me money. I want to understand it but right now I simply can’t process that what I’ve done has helped anyone or that people might wish to be as madly generous to me as at times I’ve been to others. It’s a simple equation I know, but I can’t make it come out right in my mind. I hope it will again.

I was talking to someone kind the other day and when I listed all the losses, one beside the other, of the past few months, they were shocked. “Deep grief” they said to me. “Of course you are worn out, that’s such a lot to deal with, and such a shock when things seemed to be going so well!” Shock. Could that be the reason the sun seems dark? The reason that people telling me, over and over, that I’m okay, that I count, that I’m enough, and that I’ve done some good in the world simply doesn’t make sense to me? Is this how shock feels on the inside?

“Stop asking what’s wrong with you!” one friend has said to me – “of course you’re struggling, it’s been such a hard year! You can’t take hits like that and not need a break.” And I think of life cycles and cycles of energy and of day and night and life and death and needing to stop and retreat and weep sometimes to find that joy in life again. I think of going on without stopping through one loss and then the next and the one after, still smiling and still hoping and still wringing hope from my heart while the politeness became and mask that slipped and gouged into me and my heart choked.

“Deep grief” I’ve written on my wrist in permanent marker, to remind me – this is why it hurts so much. There’s a real reason, even if it doesn’t make sense in my head. I’m not just broken or crazy or doomed. It will heal. I will see the light again. And this thing that feels unbearable, I’ll find a way to live with, like I have all the others, right. Right?

For now, holding the fort.

Our own personal hells

/ Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

Dear lord. Sometimes life makes sense and feels manageable and there are plans and directions and a sense of hope. And sometimes life is just… white water rafting, when you thought you were going hiking. When you packed for a picnic after a bush walk up a hill. And brought your favourite collection of sharp, spiky implements, your best boots, and certainly no paddle.

Guess I’m still human after all, spiritual awakening and all. At the moment I wake up many times in the night, full of deep dread and horror about very small unimportant matters. The feelings are nebulous, intense, and difficult even to name. It’s taken me a week to begin to be able to discern each flavour independently – there’s guilt, there’s failure, there’s grief… Often it’s just pain, a kind of bleak anguish that’s unbearable. It can’t be sat with, can’t be visualised away, can’t be un-fused from. I took myself down the beach overnight, and instead of finding peace I sat alone in my van, arms flung wide, begging for help, for peace, for respite, before falling into brief exhausted sleep, only to wake in agony again. The sudden decent, the depth of it all caught me by surprise and left me reeling.

Each morning I wake feeling something I can’t really name. It’s not self destructive, I don’t feel the urge to self harm, I don’t feel suicidal, exactly. It’s unfamiliar and horrifying. The only way I can describe it is feeling like I’m dying. I have no sense of hope or a future at all. My throat is half closed and I can’t breathe easily. If I manage to meditate or focus or in any way create some room between myself and the feelings, I relax and immediately go back to sleep. Then I wake 20 minutes or so later, intensely distressed again. It’s demoralising and exhausting.

I’ve been reaching out to people. The only thing I’m finding helpful at the moment is the kindness of my tribe. I feel lost, and I can’t see myself clearly any more. Other people holding hope for me, telling me that I am not worthless, that I do contribute to the world or their world in some way, are holding a mirror in which I do not recognise myself but I can at least acknowledge that this might be me, even if I can’t feel any of it right now.

It’s a kind of hell. I’ve appreciated touching base with others I know go through hells like this. I’m finding that I come in and out of it. I can talk about it quite calmly now. Tomorrow morning is likely to be another world entirely. In it I feel stripped, vulnerable, defenceless, frightened.

Rose is in a hell of her own. Flashbacks can be devastating. Hers can be severe and completely overwhelming. We’re slowly finding what helps, but it’s all from scratch. Nothing that’s previously helped is working. So far company is better than being alone in them. Children or animals are deeply grounding and the best approach by far. I can hold her hand and sometimes talk her through it or sing to her. A wet cold cloth on her face and neck helps. Sometimes weight is grounding – I cuddle her or Zoe lies on her. Sometimes a dog lick will break her straight out of it. None of the other grounding techniques she usually finds helpful are working. It’s a slow trial and error kind of process.

One of the things I love about her so much is that even when she’s in hell, she’s kind. I was a wreck this morning and so was she. But she still got up with me, cut me up veggies for lunch, and dropped me at the tram. Our night was bookended by her flashbacks until 1.30am, and my unique brand of existential misery at 5am. There were still cuddles and gentleness, reading Harry Potter to each other, back rubs and sympathy. I’m lucky and I know I’m lucky. ❤

So, I’m trying to clear the decks as much as I can without actually destroying any of my projects. I’ve talked myself out of closing down my business and the networks for now. I’ve wrestled with the mess that thinking of my art as a business creates in my head. I’ve failed and fallen over and messed up most of my attempts to follow through with my goals over the past couple of weeks. I’ve failed to finish an essay and had to withdraw from another class at college. I’ve answered a few emails that I could open and read and still breathe while replying to. I’ve cried in the toilets at college when hearing about a couple of people with DID who killed themselves. I’ve reached out to people who are being kind, sending messages of support or telling me how they see me, see my work or believe that I have a place in the world, who recognise their own dark hours and don’t judge me or think less of me. I’ve been grabbing hold of anything that resonates, reading about focusing, coherence therapy, moving towards the pain, and just holding on, minute by minute, waiting for something to change.

I found a sentence that I loved recently – being in the land beyond the maps. I’ve felt like through so much of my life. Multiplicity, psychosis, my art, grieving Tamlorn and finding myself in an experience of profound awakening… If you walk the paths you will end up where all the others who walked those paths went. Paths are what we crave most when we feel lost. The certainty of hope. We’ll trade in almost anything for it, and bind ourselves into lives that don’t fit us at all. What’s much harder but much more likely to take us somewhere amazing is putting together the skills and tools and resources we need to make our own path and follow our own stars.

But hell, it’s not always easy. I guess one of the things I’ve been doing in all this pain is taking up my rightful place in my tribe. I’m not some kind of guru to follow. I’m not a shrink. Even the idea of ‘peer workers’ who have recovered and have some kind of wisdom to pass on doesn’t feel real comfortable. I don’t have the answers and I can’t take away anyone’s pain. Sometimes I help people and sometimes I need help, and that help is mostly in the form of simple kindness and connection. I’m as human and fallible and full of doubt and uncertainty as the next person. I know a lot about surviving hard times and sometimes that’s brilliant and sometimes it means almost nothing.

Thank you, those of you who have reached out. You who share your own hard times honestly. You who – for reasons I can’t really fathom at the moment – send money or support me in some way. Thanks so much for being part of my world and not hating me when I lose my way. You help me not hate me too. I’m glad to not be alone.

Breathe

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

This evening has been better. I don’t feel good exactly, but I don’t feel bad. I can breathe and I don’t want to cry. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world. I’m a little scared of going to sleep because the mornings have been hard. For about 3 weeks I wake straight into panic every morning. When I’ve tried focusing or mediation I go straight back to sleep only to wake in panic again a few minutes or half an hour later. It’s exhausting.

I hope tomorrow will be different. But even if it’s not, tonight was really nice. ❤

Holding hope

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Some days I give hope and some days I gratefully receive it.

Rose and I are having a tough time. Flashbacks, panic attacks and terrible depression are our normal right now. We spent an hour on the couch today weeping over Tamlorn’s ashes.

Kindness and care from our loved ones helps. When I can’t feel hope any more, they hold it for me.

Even on the days when it feels like we have so little to give each other, we are kind at least. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing. Even on a day as black as today, we have small victories to celebrate.

Etching – Even the cats have graves

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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I’ve been working on this in my print making class. The image is part of my series of works about miscarriage and grief. It’s linked to a poem, The Roar, I wrote about losing Tamlorn:
Even the cats have graves, even the little injured wild birds that die on the way to the vet.

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There’s been interest from a number of people I’ve reached out to about holding an exhibition of this series. There’s been a lot of things that haven’t gone my way lately, so this is particularly special to me. I’ll be glad to hold a space in the world, however briefly, where this isn’t a taboo.

Some days we build, some days we burn

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Rose and I are playing a new game called competitive depression… She’s got the jump on me in not showering but I’m pretty sure I’m beating her in not wearing trousers around the house. Plus I’ve eaten more chocolate biscuits.

Her flashbacks are impressive, granted, but I’ve a more glamorous style of self destruction. I’m looking at my life and playing dice with the pieces – what to burn down? Snake eyes wins the house.

Tired of feeling like a failure, even when I win.

“Now, Montag, you’re a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.”

“It was a pleasure to burn…”

-Fahrenheit 451

Courage

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

My beloved is having a rough time and it’s breaking my heart. She’s been home all week with terrible flashbacks. I’m juggling college and everything else around trying to help her feel safe and supported. And I’m sad. I’m terribly sad that I can’t stop them or make it better, that I can’t fix our money stress, that I’m half drowned in anxiety and dislocation myself. I’m sad because small business start-up means facing more disappointments than I feel I have in me, more opportunities lost than my heart can handle. I’m sad because my cycle is really out by an extra couple of weeks and the wait is interminable.

I’ve finished gilding my print, and I’m proud about that. She is truly beautiful. The rest of my week, my appointments, and my to do list scares me. College feels unmanageable. Even catch ups with friends scare me. I feel uneasy about almost everything, unsettled, like I might bite at a hand even if offered to comfort. My buffer between the world and a big well of vulnerability and doubt is very thin.

But I’m here for my Rose, however I can be, and I’m here in my home as best I can be. Today I spent all day in my pyjamas and I soaked up the sunlight in my backyard and watched the rainbows dance from the crystal hanging in Tam’s tree. I cut Rose and my sister’s hair, and sat peacefully dogsitting. I finished The Matrix trilogy and cried. And when Rose needed me to I sat with her and stroked her face and talked softly and got her a drink or a cold flannel for her face. And when I needed her she held my hand while I cried softly. If there’s not much courage or hope left in me for anything else, it was still well spent. Everything and everyone else can wait.

Art and cages

/ Sarah K Reece / 4 Comments

Catch 22. My week goes on and I find myself captured and ensnared by ideas that make me bleed anxiety. Failure is everywhere and I’m driven before it like a horse into a blizzard, numb with ice and hot with panic. I’m bound and can no longer run, I cannot fly, or swim, or even breathe. My mind is not my own anymore, full of cages so small my soul is squeezed between wires, it makes the sound of a violin screaming.

I find sometimes that I can name the cage and thus reduce its power. It becomes transparent or rather, I transcend it by no longer believing in it. It does not work if I try to force it or fake it.

‘Work’ is the name of one cage that’s killing me. I stumble into college through drizzle, so desperately afraid I can barely breathe, so overwhelmed with despair it is an effort to put each foot in front of the other, and think to myself – to feel this way about a day spent making art – something is deeply wrong with the way I’m looking at the world. And I named the trap – work, and asked myself how it would feel if, that day I did not work at art but instead, dreamed things into existence. And some small bird in me took flight.

I sat in class sketching designs about death and the lights were painfully bright and the students laughed around me and my heart was so heavy with sorrow I felt like I had a broken egg in my chest and all the yolk was oozing inside me. How can they make art in the daylight? I ask myself. How can they think death is here, invoked here under these lights? They laugh and they work studiously or lazily, they talk of faraway places. I’m sketching a hill in which little cats are buried and a woman holding her dead tiny unformed baby and my heart is breaking. And I find the name of the next cage, and it is ‘Art’.

Another student is kind to me and she talks of her studio back home where art was a kind of spiritual practice, not a product made to be assessed or sold, and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone making art the way I do and I feel less alone. We talk about how hard it is to sell works that are so much a part of us, and tells me of feeling physical pain when an artwork of hers was cut. I think of phantom limb pain and hysterical pregnancies and all the ways we map things into our own mind and body as part of us.

She tells me that my work reminds of her of the work of the female surrealist artists and I’m surprised that I didn’t even know there were any female surrealist artists and then I’m sad I didn’t know that. I look a few up on my phone and discover one had psychotic episodes, like me.

After the class, I go into the sculpture studio just to be there and smell it. I chat a little with my favourite tutor and the words lay in my mouth like huge, fat river stones: ‘does my art count as art? Why??’ but I don’t ask them, I carry them home in the bus with me, accepting that doubt and grief are part of this.

That evening my friend comes over and we play games and something that’s been shut up tight all week finally blooms and the fear lifts like fog in the sunlight and I can breathe again. I realise that we’re wearing the wrong clothes to college, that those clothes that are suitable to get ink stains on we usually wear camping and those parts are heartsick in buildings and lost in the city, far from home and a world that makes sense. I don’t have many other clothes that we can risk ruining, but we’ll try different shoes and see if that helps. Or we’ll try face paints. I’m afraid but determined to walk my own path.

One of my tutors hates the stories about mad artists, the mythology of genius disgusts her – and for good reason, it’s so often false, cynically manipulated, obscuring sad or banal truths, or creating edifices of snobbery… Not that snobbery isn’t everywhere in Art. But for some of us there’s some truth to the madness and the not fitting, some of us do not make our art in the daylight or about daylight matters. Consciousness is linked in a way I do not yet understand and I won’t have that link broken and destroyed by their endless rationality.

I stood in a street last week, feeling deeply sad and music played and spoke to me, it called me and I came and found the sound of the crowd and the sound of the fountain wove through it to create a unique symphony, a piece of theatre that would never be recaptured. Most walked past or through but some like me were snared as if on hooks, tugged to a stop and drawn in. We sat or stood in a half moon around the musician and listened with ears tuned to another world. It was no longer day but another place, no longer ordinary, but a moment beyond. So few of us stopped. Like dogs with ears tuned to a pitch their humans cannot hear, we could not go on without acknowledging the music, while so many others could not hear it.

I do not know what it means, only that the world is a strange place and at college is a strange place and I do not wish to become someone who cannot hear the music or someone who makes art in the day.

Rose’s Birthday – the Lowlights

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

It’s been a full on week with so much going on I’ve been feeling stuck about sharing here… more than that, detached, disconnected from my online world which is so often my territory and my haven. Heartsick. I kept trying to write about Rose’s birthday party and finding myself feeling like I was writing spin when I only shared the good parts, or that I was omitting the bright things when I shared the tough parts. In the end, Rose suggested I write both as separate posts.

Her party was awesome, and it was tough. It was a super child-friendly space but I didn’t feel comfortable letting my kids come out because a lot of those who came were not multiplicity literate. I did out myself ‘casually’ at one point, heart beating hard. In a year or two they’ll be more ready. I can be patient, I’d rather grow something strong than tip over the boat. So I took refuge in adult roles, feeling how my own sense of agitation dissolved as I sank into something familiar and reassuring and… bounded. I didn’t have to know anything or answer any of the dilemmas that were doing my head in, I could just be, and I could be good at it. There’s something to that, I think. I don’t know what yet. Roles can be dehumanising, and yet the lack of them can be… a kind of exile. Skinless and formless and falling into space.

Rose and I were both busy and the week leading up to the party was stressful with money woes and welfare issues and a lot of work… and this was our first month of trying to get pregnant again since Tamlorn died. It’s been so hard! We both thought we would ride it out okay, we felt ready and excited and ready to pace ourselves and ride out the highs and lows… instead it’s been incredibly tough. It’s brought back the loss of Tamlorn keenly. We’re both having nightmares about babies, feeling grief and loneliness and both feeling that we shouldn’t be feeling much of anything, that we need to hide our sadness and fear. It’s not an easy place to be. My cycle hasn’t returned to normal since the miscarriage either, so we started our ovulation testing and got a ‘high fertility’ result a few days earlier than expected and started doing insems. Usually I get one or at most 2 high fertility days and then I ovulate. This month, I got 8 high fertility test results in a row, and we did 4 insems before giving up. About 2 weeks late, I finally ovulated over the party weekend and was in pretty bad pain on that side for about 20 hours. We’ve noticed that I seem to have a pattern of less reliable cycles and more painful ovulation on one side – good month, bad month, good month… which should mean next month is better. We both know this, yet there’s such sadness at the same time, a kind of quiet despair that sits alongside, or beneath all the other things, all the joys and silliness and hopes. One is not more true than the other, one is not a mask to the other. Both are real.

Many of our friends are vulnerable in some way, and the weekend has been triggering for some of us. Rose had a major flashback that’s left her reeling, vomiting with stress, having nightmares, and needing downtime – pj days to recover. We are pretty good at dealing with these now, and so we’ve been going to sleep clothed and reading Harry Potter to her. One friend became too overwhelmed to make it down, another came but was overloaded in the aftermath. I was doing great until the last night when one of the more distressed members of my system woke to the sounds of a storm and then woke Rose sobbing… we ended up out in the wild wind on the front lawn, wrapped in a blanket and watching the dawn come in because when we were outside we were calm and centred, but indoors we were hysterical and about to vomit. We settled outside, reaching a place of acceptance: that she felt completely out of sync with herself, Rose, and our body – and deeply distressed by that in comparison with how others of us have been feeling lately, our awakening sense of connection and security highlighting her sense of being profoundly lost and in despair.

Out in the wind the pain eased and that part was different, freer somehow, more powerful… recently I was exploring some archetype cards with a friend, and each card has the shadow and light characteristics of each archetype on it… I wondered if we have lost sight of her light qualities, if we only know her in shadow, in trauma and disconnection and pain.

Finding a sense of safety and helping each other feel safe… these are such valuable skills to develop. They are a key part of what Rose and I offer to each other on hard days, of how we try to treat our friends and what we ask from them. Making it okay to be human and okay to take risks and feel pain, to struggle at times, to be wounded and fallible. One of my lovely friends sends me texts when I’m struggling that say “It’s okay to not be okay.” It seems to me these qualities are so often linked to ones that it’s easier to value… those friends I know that are struggling with the darkest depressions have such kind hearts. It’s not easy to have a heart like that in a world like this. But we’re all so used to being treated badly when we’re vulnerable and being made responsible for it – this mad idea people seem to have that we can make ourselves feel other than we do, and that this would be a good thing – that we conceal our soft underbelly and our broken hearts and our bad days, and those who would be gentle or understanding never see that side of us, and we never get to see or feel their kindness.

Sharing is vulnerable but also powerful… seeing and being seen. Learning to create safety for humans, in our relationships, our families, our tribes, within our own minds and hearts. It’s such a challenge and we can’t do it entirely alone. We weave it back and forward between us, in our listening and our not hearing, in our seeing and our willingness to be seen. In the way we step outside of our roles and are human, flawed, and vulnerable and imperfect, full of brilliance and insight and deep feelings. This is what it is to love.

Scattered and lost

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

Projects all around me, that constant sense of guilt over each one left unattended too long, each email I still haven’t replied to. My work is unconstrained and spills over in all directions, leaving my desk awash in paperwork and my mind bewildered. I’m don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing or where to focus. I can’t tell if I’ve taken on too much or I’m simply not organising it well enough. The pressure to make income is like a great weight, bearing down on me. I think without that, I’d be feeling merely scattered. With it, I work and I achieve things with a background of constant despair and a sense of unending, quiet failure. Nothing I do is enough.

Today was madcap. The Cat Who Must Not Get Out has taken to hiding near the door and making runs for it. She made it outside twice today, each heart stopping and horrifying. The second time she was determined to escape and we chased her, Rose and I, nearly in tears, around the house and over fences and part the neighbours before catching her and locking her in a room.

I spent the morning washing dishes and cleaning, remembering that this is part of my life too, keeping house and caring for my family, making sure there’s food and enough clean space to think in. I’ve put all our nuts and seeds in jars for cooking and snacking, the grease from our kitchen has made them all sticky, reminding me we need to sort out our terrible extraction fan that blows rather than sucks grease.

I write back to some emails at random, double check dates and make sure my diary contains the things I’ve promised to show up at. If it’s not in my diary, I’m lost. I write the first of the thankyou notes back to those who have helped me over the past few months, put my last stamp on it knowing it will probably be a week or more before I remember to post it.

I pull all the files out of an old magazine folder and rename some – projects, networks, college, hoping to help me find paperwork I keep losing. I make a mental note to buy more files. My to do list drops by two items, four more are added. Some days I start adding things to my list as I do them, so I can cross them out. When I emerge dazed several hours later it helps to have a record of what I did and how the time was spent. My computer is in the coldest part of my home and I’ve noticed I’m frequently chilled and highly dissociative while working. A heater and hot water bottle haven’t much been helping, I need an electric lap blanket or better – to plug the windy gaps around the door. Something else on my list.

I have a master to do list and then an urgent one and then my daily one, and I have a calender to track my week which isn’t being used at the moment because there’s always something more urgent than getting it sorted… The mess compounds. Last week I sorted three boxes of paperwork and recycled half of it. I think spending a couple of days letting the urgent things go and just sorting the system itself – the files, the desk space, the storage, the calendar, will help pull things back together. It’s Wednesday already and I haven’t done any homework this week or bought my printmaking supplies for Friday. I can’t do that until I get paid on Thursday anyway.

I’m trying to understand and prepare marketing resources, but it’s impossible to market myself when I can’t remember what I’m doing or why. So much of life as a multiple is trying to track more than one stream of information, and my life in particular with many things on the go at the one taxes me to my limit regularly. I wake up and everything I haven’t done yet hits me in the face like a rock. I know I’m losing track and that feeling, that sense of things slipping through my fingers, of chronic guilt and uncertainty, of my underbelly showing to the world, it’s so destructive.

Most multiples work so hard to look like we’re not, we conceal switching and hide amnesia and suppress all the clues to our identities… I recall how exposed I felt years ago merely in deciding to put all our DVDs on display… In my mind I’d imagine profilers visiting and diagnosing me on the spot. This is that again, the sense of vulnerability and exposure, the cringing while I wait for the blow, the sense of inadequacy and unworthiness, and that I’m letting down everyone who has ever had faith in me or supported me. That at the end, I’m going to disappoint, fail, not measure up, turn out to be shiny with wonderful ideas but empty and rotten on the inside. Imposter syndrome. Alone, we founder.

What am I doing? It’s a howl in my heart every day. When I wake to the sense of crushing pressure and remember I don’t have to do any of this, I’m not getting paid to, I could walk away from it all… When I remember I’ve chosen to run networks and a business and push myself, that I’ve built this edifice, this creation that is killing me is mine… I feel crazy and stupid and lost. When I sit in Art college, trying to remember if my art counts as art and why… I feel blasted by my own expectations. I had all the answers only yesterday…

I meet with good people for lunch. The time is worth it, I talk, rapidly, face burning, showing both my work and my bewilderment, trying to find somewhere in the world I fit… I feel like the world’s worst business person and entrepreneur, an artist who doesn’t sell art, a builder of networks who feels alone, a teller of stories of hope and direction who feels lost. They are kind and let me see not just their kindness but their sadness, and I remember the cost of wanting to make the world a better place, I remember the sense of loss that’s part of all our stories. Did we make a difference? Did we do enough? What am I doing? What the hell am I doing? There’s a cost. This is part of it, the shadow of the success, the cost of dreaming. This pain and bewilderment, this sense of being small and skinless. To dream of something better is a very vulnerable place to be.

I’m sitting in the mall and I should go home and get to work. The wind is cold and the sunlight is white gold and there’s a busker playing a sad song on an electric violin and I can’t see through my tears.

Rose turned 30 – the Highlights

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

Rose turned 30 this weekend past and we had a wonderful Harry Potter themed birthday party. I made her a Monster Book of Monsters cake, from banana cake and cream cheese buttercream (her favourite combo), with chocolate sprinkles and a minimum of fondant… Rose is a big fan of cakes that taste awesome. For such a massive cake we haven’t taken a lot home, which is always a good sign.

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I made that crazy mouth from fondant and strawberry roll-ups. 🙂

Friends and family gathered for games and movies and campfire and sleep overs in the holiday home we rented down on the beach. It was beautiful. Many of those who came didn’t know the others and it was really nice to mix some of the different groups together in a safe, fun place. Rose has been planning this for months and put up all kinds of awesome decorations and activities, including crafts and a Quidditch pitch out the back with three big hoops and Zoe as the enthusiastic keeper… 🙂

Moaning Myrtle and spider trails in the bathroom:

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A fire lantern on a string to stop it wandering… we also had little crackers that popped when thrown onto concrete.

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I went as Trelawny, complete with a grim painted into the teacup I wore on my wrist… I had to take my glasses off for most the night though, because I could hardly see at all wearing them and fell over once! Long dress plus thick glasses is an issue. This was our dessert buffet – it has a chocolate fountain with fruit and marshmallows to dip, my monster cake, an awesome gluten free chocolate cake made by a friend, a bowl of Bertie Botts every flavour beans, gold snitches, chocolate spiders, and Weasleys Wizard Wheezes. It went down pretty well. 😉

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The potions corner. 🙂

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The owlery…

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Our handmade wands – these were gifts for our guests. We made them from chopsticks!

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One of my gifts to Rose. 🙂 She loves Hagrid, as do I.

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It was a fantastic weekend. The weather was kind, we got to hang out with great people and have lots of hugs with younger nieces and cousins (and our huggier older friends) and play games and enjoy good food. Loads of people chipped in with time, food, organising, and helped pay for things. It was a really big tribe event and it felt good. It’s always a bit of a risk mixing lots of different crowds together and I think we did a good job of helping people feel comfortable. I did a fair amount of cooking and cleaning and keeping things running which felt very adult considering all the fun things we had around, but that was also good in a way, feeling like I could take on such a big project and help care for my peoples. I can see more big tribe nights like this in our lives, once we’ve finished recovering from this one, paying it off, and unpacking the van…

Rose has made it a long way, through a lot hard times. I’m so glad to know her and so grateful for all the people who loved her and cared about her and were there for her long before I came along. She is one of the kindest people I know and she touches so many lives. Her life isn’t easy, but it is full of love and silliness and small children, which is just the way she likes it. ❤ Happy birthday, love.

My Artbook: Mourning the Unborn

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I have completed the Artbook I created after my miscarriage earlier this year. Inviting you to send in things to be cremated with Tamlorn was a deeply moving experience for me. Afterwards, it felt to me like the most natural, connected, public artwork imaginable, for such a private and taboo experience. I wanted to capture some of the sense of ritual and connection for others to use as inspiration in mourning their own losses. I’ve been distressed to be part of support groups and hear how isolated and hurting so many people are.

So I wrote and painted this book, hand bound it using coptic stitching, covered it with silk, and illustrated and embroidered it with velvet, silk, and seed pearls. The binding alone took me 8 hours to hand sew. It’s very precious to myself and Rose. Here are a few images from the book:

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The peach silk cover, chosen because of the peach tree we planted to remember Tam by.

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First pages

 

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I’ve gilded the print on the right with gold leaf

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To the left are some of the names of other unborn children people sent to me. On the right, three seed pearls have been sewn to the watercolour vial to represent the glass vial of tears we sent with the box to the crematorium.

 

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On the right, a silk ribbon embroidered rose has been stitched into the book.

Now that we are trying to conceive again, the time feels right to share it. I am currently talking with local services about an exhibition of this book and my other art about pregnancy and grief to raise awareness and help start conversations. I am also reaching out to other communities such as those affected by partner violence to create exhibitions that speak to their experiences also. My next big task is to reproduce it in a colour photo book edition so that I can share it with you.

Update April 2016: I have now completed this project! View my beautiful photobook of this artbook in my Etsy store.

Going gently from miscarriage to trying to conceive

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve been sick and stressed. Going gently…

This means sleeping in. It means Rose taking a morning off work to hold me while I cry, and read me back to sleep, and coax little bits of toast and water into me while I try not to throw up. It means sobbing hysterically into my keyboard. It means my sister brings me cups of tea. It means nightmares about being homeless with a newborn baby. Blinding headaches, and body aches. Sitting on the bed with Rose and a perfectly laid out set of clothes for a 6 month old. Talking about Tam again, daily, feeling their loss keenly.

We’re trying to conceive again and my cycle is weird. Apparently this is common following a miscarriage. I thought we might bypass it – we’ve waited until all my levels are normal again, I’ve lost that little bit of weight on my tummy and feet, my body feels like a pre-pregnancy body. But no, things are still weird. I’m currently on day 8 of testing as being ‘high fertility’, when I’ve only ever had 2 days of that result, at most. I’m spotting, which is really unusual for me, and could mean anything from implanting, to not ovulating, to ovulating, to endo messing around with me. Having a weird cycle is kind of worse than having a normal cycle and just not getting pregnant. Today I’m going for a blood test for progesterone levels to see what they’re doing. It’s like being all geared up to turn a corner or fall over a cliff and having the trip extend just a little and then a little more so you stay in that tensed up state and the bottom doesn’t fall out of your world just yet.

On the plus side, we’re getting a lot better at doing insems quickly and easily. We’ve ditched our original syringe method and moved to the cup method, which is a lot more comfortable and portable.

Death is in the background constantly, again. My friend Leanne is in my mind a lot. I find myself sobbing for friends I know who are struggling, fearing they’ll kill themselves, feeling helpless in the face of loss. I find myself carrying Tamlorn’s name around with me like a scar, like a precious relic, like a secret. I remember you, love, I remember you. Some days it feels so close, the baby feels so near that all we have to do is keep the faith. Some days those dreams feel like mirages that recede as I think I’m nearing them, and all my hoping becomes an empty, gasping, darkness. I fall into it, and the world goes on brightly without me. People mouth platitudes at me and they become knives that fall from their lips and cut right through me. We can’t know anything, and anyone who pretends otherwise is turning their face from that brutal reality. Life is not fair and love is not enough and dreams are essential but often unrewarded. Those of us who choose not to know this walk on paths made of the bones of slaves.

Lastly, there is this peaceful place. Down in the bones of the world, where I can sit at the balance point between life and death. I accept my powerlessness and the risks and wounds of love. In that place I can let be. What will come, will come. I do not rule the world. I am old enough to know that dreams must be abundant, like sperm, like tiny sea turtles, like thistledown on the wind. Because most will die. This is the nature of the world, and it hurts, every time. Here, in this dark place, Rose and I sit and lay out the baby clothes. We weep and laugh and count our blessings and number our dead. We sleep and dream of children. We hold hands and we cry in our sleep. We hope, which makes our hearts and faces shine. We hope, which makes our hearts bleed. Going gently. Breathing in and out, the beauty and the nightmares. Faces pressed to the rich, rank earth, living deeply. Loving greatly and accepting the cost.

Happy Fourth Birthday, Blog!

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Wow. On August 1st in 2011, I posted “What am I up to at the moment?” sharing my artworks She Blooms in oil and New Growth in ink and talking about my plans. Funnily enough I’ve just started making prints of She Blooms and I’m working on gilding one for sale… Funny how life goes!

Four years on, and 1,151 posts later, here we are. Wow.

I’m really proud of this blog. Like nearly everything I do in life, I started it without having a clue what I was getting myself into, and felt my way along learning and adjusting as I went. Intuitive and process driven. It’s been an amazing experience! I now consider it a massive ongoing work of public art.

I’m often asked if it helps me to write a blog, or costs me to be so public. The answer is yes.

There’s a cost to it, like everything we choose to do in life. I’ve found myself feeling exposed, stretched, confronted, intruded upon, misunderstood, mocked, and way out of my depths at times. I’ve doubted myself and my work, accused myself of narcissism, hated my impulse to expose my vulnerability even when people are telling me to be more professional and only show my polished side. I’ve wrestled with the uncertainly of process driven art – feeling completely at sea at times – what am I doing and why?? I’ve had the occasional nasty comment, confronting discovery, challenging cross over of being out into a space I wasn’t out yet, and so on.

But I’ve also had some amazing experiences. I’ve made a lot of friends, many of whom write blogs I follow too. (I’ve just added a blogs I follow widget which will show up on a pc!) I’ve had people write to tell me something I wrote saved their life, or saved a relationship, or helped them handle something really hard or feel less suicidal, which makes me cry (every time).

I’ve had people I don’t know come up to me in public or at face painting gigs and tell me how much they love this blog, which is surreal but wonderful. A couple of years ago the lovely Amanda came up to me at Feast and said you don’t know me, but I love your blog, and took a photo of herself with me. I wish I had a copy of that photo. We became friends. When she killed herself a year later I was heartbroken. I’m so damn glad I got to meet her, she was amazing.

I’ve had people reach out across the cyberspace and be with me, in some of the hardest and darkest times. People sending me back the same message I send out – I’m here. You’re not alone. You’re not the only one. You’re okay.

I’ve had people send me money. Recently someone has contacted me to let me know they value my work and are funding me monthly for the next 9 months. I went to bed and cried hysterically for a couple of hours, Rose rubbing my back. I ran out of money for fuel at a mental health conference out rural and asked for help and people rallied around me and I was breathless and wordless with gratitude. People are helping me with marketing, mental health research, higher education options, information and emotional support. I give and my tribe gives back to me.

Since writing this blog, a tribe has formed around me. Not some homogeneous unit, but a huge, varied, organically grown network of people in diverse overlapping communities, affiliations, passions, identities. They range from the closest of friends to someone who sent me a tweet sometime, or answered my question as a friend of a friend on Facebook. They connect with me, teach me, support me, need me, love me, learn from me, argue with me, and witness my life. I have come from a place of bitter isolation and loss, running from a world that was killing me and burning all the bridges behind me. I’ve endured and everything is different now. This blog has been an essential part of that.

So yes, I benefit from blogging. I used this blog to out myself, in stages as I felt able to. About having a mental illness, about being multiple, being bisexual, being genderqueer, being psychotic, being pregnant and our baby dying in my womb. About being ‘high functioning’ but still having bad days. About having physical illnesses, gynaecological disorders, invisible disabilities. Being out and public helps my mental health. It connects me to communities, it helps people understand me better and treat me better. It helps me find people like me.

I use this blog as a place to reflect. I use it as a place to be relentlessly human. I use it as a place to help other people feel less intimidated by the polished versions of self we present to each other in our lives, the imitations of intimacy and chronic dishonesty that characterise so many of our interactions with other people – online and in real life, with the burden of constant ‘professionalism’ and chronically degrading ideas about what it is to grow up and be an adult, with the misery of loneliness in crowded places, feeling broken and unseen and unknown, like the only one of your species. I write here because I need these things too, because they kill me too, and in creating spaces that are more authentic and connected, I thrive too. In making the private public, with care and sensitivity and attention to how and why, I am able to see and be seen, to see myself, to be present woth less anxious disguise and less unthinking obedience to cultures of taboo that keep the complacent comfortable and silence the different and the suffering among us.

Happy Fourth Birthday, Holding my childhood to ransom. You’ve been special. I love you. Thankyou too, all those of you who read here, even if we never cross paths or talk. Hope it’s been good for you too.

Learning the cycle

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

So I’m noticing a cycle. I soar into something wonderful – a new capacity or skill or realisation. Life is wonderful, almost ecstatic. Then I find myself grounding and trying to integrate the new experience with my life and ideas and past. It’s messy and complex. Then something glitches badly and I find myself way down in the swamp.

Messy turns to painful. I hurt and cry and become anxious and overwhelmed. No matter how many times I’ve gone into and come out of the swamp, a key feature is that at some stage I will lose hope, lose all sense of competence, lose any guiding light. In that place, where my vulnerability is total and the darkness around me absolute, I will discover the block. Forced into confronting it, I will find a name for it and begin to explore it, deeply afraid and very resentful.  Once I’ve found this block, I will be released from the swamp. In understanding the block I am freed from it and come soaring back into flight again.

It’s a cycle of learning: not an illness but an emotional circle, of learning and doubt and reflection that repeats and at each stage offers me an opportunity to confront something key and learn. With support and with time for honest reflection I am learning how to tune in and listen more quickly to myself, and my writing and journals and poems help me tremendously, become paper mirrors that help me see me. Focusing skills help too.

If I don’t listen or tune in and I don’t find the block, at a certain point I’m come out of the swamp anyway, but I’ll go back in shortly, over and over again in the most exhausting and demoralising spiral. If I find the block and come out of the swamp but then stop tuning in to myself, I’ll try and push myself through the block instead of negotiating it and I’ll make a mess of myself, driving myself to exhaustion. If I keep listening I’ll find out how to unpick the mess and go forward in a way that suits us and gives us freedom.

Adult learning. It’s a fascinating field! Emotionally, it’s painful and messy. But when I see it coming and get out of the way and understand that by tuning in it will move along faster, I can see how it works and why its needed, and how people can get stuck. Yesterday we figured out a block and settled. Today, I feel fantastic again. I’m glowing with health and enthusiasm and enjoying my work again. So maybe I need a note on the bedroom wall that says – “when you go down, listen well, and you will come up again. It will be okay, you have been here before and you will be back again.”

People don’t like cycles much, we tend to pathologise them. But cycles are intrinsic to nature, seasons, day and night, even our own cycles of sleep and wakefulness. Rhythms and tides are how living things work. And all cycles have their winter or their dark night in them. It doesn’t have to mean anything is wrong. Some knowledge we need in life is bright, beautiful, glowing and sitting on our lips like honey. Some is dark, painful, angry, wounded, and spilling from our mouth like blood. Some things we learn in ecstacy and some in anguish. Some things we dress in our finest clothes for and some things we must be naked to embrace. All of it can be life giving, can be part of a whole, deeply felt life.

Finding my calm

/ Sarah K Reece / 6 Comments

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Ah, well I’m right on track in that case.

It’s been a funny few days. Up and down and bumpy. I’m finding the mornings are very hard, my pain levels are high and I’m fragile and feeling stressed. By evening most days I’ve settled and feel more centred. But it’s not inevitable. If I can’t find some peace in what I’m wrestling with, the whole day is given over to anxiety and distress.

Tonight I feel very calm. It feels like I’ve been hijacked recently, drawn by deep forces and pressed into powerful roles, roles with deep roots in memory and history. I’ve fought them but that entangled me further. In accepting them I’ve found a way to embrace them and step outside of them. It feels like climbing out of the rapids after a short, fast tumble through the white water.

I find thoughts surfacing and going back under without needing to be said or acted upon. Feelings arise and are accepted as gifts without being favoured or hated. I re read my posts about crisis mode on this blog and find them helpful. Mentally, I wrote myself signs to remind me: ‘Check in with yourself – how do you feel?’ and ‘Get out of crisis mode’ and ‘being human is beautiful’. I walked away from the crazy making pressure I’d been putting myself under and found life was much better without it.

Grounding in the garden

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

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I woke up feeling sick and fragile but less swamped by anxiety than I have been. So I took the morning very gently and focused on grounding. I cleaned the bedroom, then the kitchen. Made breakfast, which I ate in the garden. Then gathered a pail of weeds.

I re read some of my own blog posts about crisis mode and recognised the past week in them, my sagging efforts to haul myself out of the deepening pit of misery, dissociation, anxiety, loss of a sense of competence or agency or hope. I stepped back from the crisis and felt the pressure ease. I tuned back in to myself and did admin tasks I most felt like doing and even found pleasure in them. Stepped out of roles and made time to personally connect. Felt like I could breathe.

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College was tough. I feel physically very ill, going hot and cold, getting moments of my heart racing. My face hurts, I think I have a sinus infection settling in. It took me forever to find a close park I could afford that would last the full duration of my class. I arrive late and flattered, only to find we were walking to the art gallery that week.

So I had to find and move my car closer to the gallery because I would not be able to walk all the way back to it in time. This took forever and cost me $11 in parking for one down the road from the gallery. I felt so sick it was hard to stay upright and I don’t think I took much in. I also felt that familiar sense of being heartsick that being around a lot of money and expensive things always gives me. I thought about how much I love art and my very favourite works by my favourite artists and I thought about whether I would save that work for the cost of a meal for a person and I knew I wouldn’t. I might go without for a couple of days, but I simply couldn’t starve someone else to hold onto it. I am often so uncomfortable in galleries. Maybe it’s not the art, so much as capitalism that’s stressing me.

Home again and much more content. My day has gradually improved. Rose is starting to feel better with strong antibiotics on board and we’re both excited to be trying to get pregnant again. We feel close and connected. Our little home is full of light and books and critters and people we love. It’s very lovely.

Lighting candles

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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My love Rose posted this today:

“We light a candle today in memory of our Tamlorn, and to mark the next part of our family’s journey.
Today we begin this month’s attempt at trying to concieve a little tribeling. If you feel so inspired, please light a candle for Sarah and I, for our angels or for the people you long to hold; be they far away, passed or yet to be. We live in hope.”

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Tonight we celebrated together with soft cheese and salami… hopefully soon I won’t be able to eat them again because I’ll be pregnant.

Everyone in my home is sick, Zoe needs another vet trip, and I’m a long way out of my comfort zone with my business. So things are great and not great at the same time, which is kind of doing my head in and making it hard to communicate! Lovely Rose, who is really very unwell with 2 middle ear infections with pus and drums at risk of bursting as well as tonsillitis and a chest infection came home early from work for a doctors appt and was flipping between feeling very miserable and wanting to curl up on the couch, and feeling like a bit of a fraud and not that ill at all – and guilty for not doing more housework! You are sick love, I told her, you’re just cheerful too because we’re trying to get pregnant again. It’s weird to be feeling such contradictory things together.

Same here. I’m struggling to write on this blog because the lows are intense, the highs are intense, there’s not a lot of sense stringing them together, and I don’t have much perspective. I feel like there’s no word in English for the everything is great, everything is awful mix I’m feeling. Everything feels messy and vulnerable and unfamiliar. Kind of like trying to get pregnant after having a miscarriage, I guess.