4 Wheel Drive Adventure

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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Today was epically awesome. My sister booked into a 4 wheel drive training course and was allowed to bring an extra person along… So guess who got a fantastic day out??

Dave, the guy running it, was from Adventure 4 Wheel Drive and he was a pleasure to see in action. As someone developing my own small business in art and mental health, I soaked up a lot from a day in his company. He was incredibly knowledgeable, friendly, and personable. It was a joy to be in the company of someone so competent, who clearly loved his work. I learned a lot!

The driving itself was brilliant! Scary but so exhilarating! It was so much fun! We would walk these mad tracks first and see some mud pit or step incline or crazily eroded path and just gasp in horror at the notion of driving into it. Dave would drive it first and teach us how to decide on the best route, speed, gear etc. And then, heart in mouth, guided over a radio, we would DO it! The sense of triumph coming through this seemingly impossible terrain was fantastic.

Even better, while hanging around watching others try it, my heart would slow back down again and settle. Far too much of my life is spent on a kind of chronic low grade stress where the anxiety kicks in but never quite goes away. Getting a good jolt and then calming down again throughout the day was kind of brilliant, felt like it was kicking my system back into a normal rhythm.

Being out in the country all day was almost as good as going camping. I felt the same coming home from Murray Bridge after talking to carers about supporting people with psychosis too,  I just feel so much more at home out of the city. I feel so chilled out now. I love it. Best antidote to a stressful week isn’t always nurturing or comforting. Sometimes it’s gumboots, adrenaline, and enough mud to keep a few hundred hogs very happy indeed. Sometimes adventure is what makes it all worth it. 😀

Love

/ Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

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It’s been a long week. I’m very tired and feeling the bite of extra work from the move… and extra tiredness from all the emotional things going on. I’m feeling a bit run down, mouth ulcers and a headache. I’m hanging out in bed this morning with Zoe.

I keep trying to write blog posts but my mind isn’t quite clear enough to get them structured and polished and out in an hour the way I usually can. That’s okay. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week.

Last night we had the first meet of the people interested in being part of a community around homelessness in SA. I was excited about it, but got compressed with admin at the end of my day, then had several small emotional shocks, and by the time we’d made dinner and sat down to talk I was feeling very discouraged. So the catch up turned into something very different from what I had planned.

We talked about the challenges of trying to be part of something new, of the disillusionment, the old wounds from every other project we’ve been involved in that went bad, the anxiety that too much would be asked of us, the confusion about how to best meet needs, the need for bigger picture thinking to link our little concern back to huge human rights issues of poverty and so on, the sense of being overwhelmed by a crisis we can’t fix, of a deep discomfort with the usual way of doing these things – board meetings, roles, subcommittees. I cried. We laughed. We shared and connected as people. From the mess, confidence emerged, clarity emerged, a path forwards, a sense of equality and team and closeness. I reflected and captured the themes, the way I’ve just been taught to in the facilitator training, but not detached: with tears on my face. As one of them. My friends are so beautiful.

And I came away that night feeling deeply moved. Humbled. Part of me that observed the growth, the shift from hopelessness to calm hope, was looking at why it came together, as we always do. What are the principles, the values, that underpin it? Why did it work and how can I capture that for other people to learn and experience, for inclusion in my model about services with heart? For the first time I felt a sinking sense of futility. Maybe it’s simply not possible to capture such an experience in a manual or model. Being human is so… messy, unpredictable, beautiful, how can it be fitted or adequately described?

Then a sense of peace came over me, to let it be what it was and drink from it and rest in it and accept that I cannot count the stars. There will be tomorrow night for star gazing, and the night after, and after that. Right now to accept the gift of a group space that was human and safe and healing.

Something beautiful happened after they left. Our researcher part; brilliant, detached, driven, woke up. She sat trembling with Rose and said it was like having a heart put in her chest for the first time. She could feel our young ones inside her, could hear them as a kind of distant chatter. She inhabited the body and found emotions spilling over. She held hands with Rose, feeling every sensation and feeling the joy in it, to be able to feel touch, the yearning for the warmth of another. She has never lived in her body before, never eaten before, never felt a desire for human contact, never felt strong emotions, never been moved to poetry.

She felt like she had woken up. Every sensation was strong and clear but not raw or overwhelming. She felt like the tin man who had been given a heart, or found it rather, inexplicably alive and red and beating in her chest. Rose was a good midwife for what was being born, attentive and attuned. Rose suggested food to a part who never eats, no matter how many days she’s out for. She turned away from chocolate in disgust but accepted a mandarin.

Peeling the leathery skin and smelling the sweet pungent oils on her fingers was magic. It tasted sweet and mild and watery, bursting with juice in her mouth. She ate every segment, slowly, tasting everything. Then she lay her head on Rose’s breast and listened to her heart beating. Rose spoke with her gently.

She asked Rose if she was part of this family too, if this was her home, her body, if she’d done enough to deserve it.
And she listened to Rose’s heart beating, her head going gently up and down with the rhythm of Rose’s breathing. She thought to herself that Rose was a sea and she was a tiny boat bobbing with the waves, and felt delight in thinking this, in feeling a poem.

And then we slept, deeply. Today we’re going to move slowly, listen to soft music, work on our tax admin. Life is good when nothing turns out how you planned or expected, when you’re not in control and start to find that’s actually better, richer, stranger, deeper. There’s a lot of love in my little house, in my world, in my life. Something very beautiful is happening here.

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

Everything is New

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

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My beautiful, kind, lovely sister broke up with her partner this week and urgently needed somewhere to stay. Rose and I have welcomed her with us. My family rallied and gathered to pack and move her and we now have three people, four cats, and a dog living in our 2 bedroom semi detached unit! It’s a little cramped but it’s also rather wonderful to have the chance to live together again. We all get along well and Rose and I have put a lot of time into our family culture, it’s healthy and strong and flexible, and probably just what my sister needs to recuperate.

Yesterday we overhauled the sheds, dug out our washing machine, and shifted a lot of my art supplies into drawers in the new shed. We’ve also been doing lots of caring and calming things to settle the nerves, the raw emotional pain of a breakup, and the bad memories that get unsettled. Camp-fires, games nights, online gaming, good home cooked food, music. It’s been beautiful to see in action.

Rose and I were talking about the sudden change in our circumstances and laughing that if we couldn’t deal with suddenly being a three person household we had no business trying to get pregnant, and that if we couldn’t handle sudden plan changes gracefully we were never going to cope with teenagers! 😉

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One of our new residents: this is my sister’s lovely cat. She is so sweet and relaxed and right at home already. Zoe is desperately excited, Tonks is chilled out, Bebe is sulking a bit, and Sarsaparilla hasn’t come far enough into the house to have met her yet. He loves sleeping in the lounge room by the heater in this weather. (it’s freezing in Adelaide)

Her name is Kaylee with an Irish spelling I wouldn’t attempt unless I had it written down! She’s adorable.

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We’re a family! We’re trying to get pregnant again the end of this month! And my business is blossoming! I have my first ever art prints back from the printer and they are so beautiful I cried! I have a buyer for one of my favourite paintings. I have mental health talks booking in. I have safe communities to nestle into – I’ve been getting to know the wonderful people in Community Health Onkaparinga, and I’ve just joined a trans and gender queer social activism group which was… Well it was like being in Bridges, the face to face group for people with dissociation and multiplicity I ran for a couple of years. It was magic, like being home, like being among my own kind, diverse as they are. I felt my heart open up and knew these are the places I need to be. This is where I put my energy.

College starts again today – a class on Installation Art that I’m so excited about I can hardly think straight!

I have overhauled my online home too, not as a finished product but to try and better reflect where I’m at and where things are going… Go and explore the menu, I’ve added new pages and rewritten old ones and nested a lot of my paid work information on this site with great care and caution and I’ll see how it goes. Tell me what you think?

I’m so bursting with excitement I got hardly any sleep last night. I feel like stars are burning so brightly in my chest that there’s almost no room for my heart. Someone wants to cry out with joy, loud! To weep with it. To pour it out of us like a river. My life is unbearably beautiful and I’m drunk on hope.

And someone else wants to be still. To sit and watch the bees in the basil. To sit under the cold winter sun and feel the wind on our skin. There’s children playing up the street, and the wind chimes outside our window singing softly. The breeze tugs a lace curtain into a kind of dance, puffs it up as if it’s a gown over a body so translucent I cannot see her, fae and trembling she stands by my window and drinks the breeze, and dances.

I love my sister very dearly and it’s hurt my heart to watch her struggle in a home where she was not well loved. I feel a fierce, deep joy to have her home, for a little while, to hold her close and cook for her and try to help her taste and feel again – this is what being loved feels like. So she can be nourished, so she has the sense of it alive in her, guiding her. It shouldn’t take such courage or cost such pain to pull back from places where we are not loved well. She, none of us, should have to be that strong. We should be well loved by those around us so the dance we must do around each others broken places is a movement from light to light, from home to home, from warmth to warmth, never fleeing into the night and the darkness, never broken by the cost. Always free. She’ll fly on again but we have a precious time where we’ll make our home together, where I can share the home I’ve been blessed with.

I’m not the only one sharing. I have been overwhelmed with donations the last month, often little amounts that I KNOW are costly to give, are, percentage of your income wise, very big indeed. I am buying resources for the networks, and paying for prints, and husbanding every dollar with care. A Blog reader contacted me recently to offer a regular gift of money over the next nine months. I took to bed and wept, Rose holding me gently. How overwhelming it is to receive such support, to feel such… Connection… Gratitude… Such belief in what I’m doing. You share my dreams! And like my art! And read my blog… And help with my networks.

I had a dream, back when I started this. To be useful in the world, and to express myself creatively. I have come through so much and learned so much in the pursuit of that dream. And Rose changed everything! Suddenly I’m dreaming of family and a baby too, my own tiny community within my much larger community. So I started dreaming a new dream, of being useful in the world, and expressing myself creatively, in an ethical and sustainable way. Transitioning my business and networks from a charity model to one of mutuality. I give and I receive, and together, we thrive, we dream, we bring more kindness and honesty and hope into the world.

Services with Heart: Mental Health System Reform

/ Sarah K Reece / 9 Comments

So, at the recent Service Integration Conference in Pt Lincoln, I was explaining what I do and finding that there was great enthusiasm for my networks. Someone asked me if I had written my model down yet. That night I woke after 2 hours sleep with a lot of the model in my head wanting to be written. About 8 hours of writing later I had the first draft. This is not exactly what I was expecting to come from the conference with! I’ve shown it to a few people and received a really warm, and also valuably critical response. I also have a friend and mentor on board who thinks ‘bigger picture’ like me and is keen to develop the model with me. So that’s becoming a new key project I’m working on. Here’s a little more about it:

Services with Heart

I’m developing a model of service design, delivery, and export, with a particular emphasis upon mental health system reform but broader applicability to business structures. The focus is on creating systems that are ethical, humane, and sustainable. It’s informed by various areas of learning including Systems Theory, Fundamental Human Needs, The Peter Principle/Pyramid, the WHO model of mental health service delivery, Human Rights, Healthy Multiplicity/Pluralism, and Culture as a primary means of idea transmission. It is intended to be scalable, adaptive, self-exporting, capable of being dismantled to smaller components, and testable. I’ve written the first draft which is Phase 1.

I’m currently in Phase 2: the research and development phase, gathering data on the value and issues with existing models, with a particular focus on causes of the common declines of useful and heartfelt services – we are good at starting valuable services but there’s a significant issue in the way they grow and key areas of common entropy that threaten the continued existence of the service, or their continued usefulness and quality of service. I use my existing networks as living organisms that both test and inform the model in practice. I’m currently gathering support for a stretch of Qualitative research through interviews with people who use or work (or have used or have worked) in services.

Phase 3

  • making sense of this data and building draft 2 of the written model.

Phase 4

  • constructing several pilot programs in different high needs areas to research and evaluate the model in action.

Phase 5

  • reflecting on this evaluation and using it to adapt the model.

Phase 6

  • developing at least two programs in consultation with independent, existing organisations, one in development and one at re-evaluation of the existing service.

Phase 7

  • researching and evaluating the model’s exporting capacity in these projects.

Phase 8

  • publication.

I expect this plan will also change and adapt through the model development! 🙂 I’m hoping the end result will be a useful way of creating systems and organisations that function as much healthier organisms with much more intelligent feedback structures, and far better cultures in which people can learn, work, and receive support.

How you can help:

  • Support Me emotionally, practically, or via donations
  • Respond to Call-outs when I am looking for people to interview
  • Help me develop qualitative interview skills
  • Look for funding or study opportunities – this could be a Masters or PhD project in Public Health but I have few contacts in the academic world
  • Take on a role in any of my Networks to free up my time

Walking with the spirits

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I’ve been missing my friend Leanne lately. Not like I did at first, with the heaving sobs and sense of disbelief. But I wake up and find her name in my heart, like a large rounded river stone. I miss her and I feel like I’ve grown so much since we were friends, and wish she could have seen that. Wish we could have talked again. She’d be so excited about what was happening in my life…

I miss Terry Pratchett too. I’ve never met him, but I find myself reeling over the loss of him, his profound gifts to the world. A finished story now. No more new books. My heart hurts and aches. It spurs me to reach out to my people, reminds me they are all mortal and will not live forever. I must tell them I love them now, must show them they matter.

I miss Tamlorn. In a couple of weeks we’ll be trying again for a baby. I’m excited and almost… Numb. It’s hard to believe it’s happening. It seems unreal and detached. I miss the little one we already had and I’m scared we’ll lose another. I’ve only just dropped the last of the weight I put on with Tam, I fit into my shoes and bras again. It’s strange to be inviting a little living thing back into my body again. Beautiful, wonderful, amazing, but strange.

I was at a wonderful community dinner this week, and as part of the getting to know each other we played a game where we moved around a hall in different groups depending on our answers to different questions. Go up that side if you were born in Adelaide and this side if you were born elsewhere… On of the questions was how many children people had. I stubbornly stood in the group who answered ‘one’, and was relieved when they didn’t ask us any more about our children.

It’s never easy to do, but every time I acknowledge Tam as my child, I feel stronger, and the grief feels… Cleaner. Sweeter somehow. Cold and clear as snow melt. My family feels whole.

The world is a strange and contradictory place, and we are likewise, so full of possibility and confusion and dreams. There’s a whole universe inside every one of us. I find myself simply marvelling at it, wanting to stop and simply be filled with wonder by the people around me. How vulnerable, petty, brilliant, deluded, and beautiful people are. How we get so tangled in the world and lose heart when our dreams die. And yet how resilient we are too, our broken hearts that hope again, almost in spite of us, our tenacity to keep living and keep dreaming and keep learning even when the lessons hurt. I’m proud to be here, glad to be alive, glad to be among people again. Life and death, love and grief, come hand in hand together.

I’m walking down to the edge again, to the sharp place in the dark where a life may be given or taken, where a child may live or die within me. I don’t walk alone. I don’t walk alone in any sense ever, the spirits of my loved ones come with me.

Rose’s Great Adventures

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

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Rose is brilliant at adventures. She’s renowned locally for her ability to find fun, wonderful, cheap things to do with kids (and the young at heart). Her bus adventures around Adelaide are the stuff of legend. I got to hear a bunch of now grown up kids reminiscing about trips they’d taken once and it was beautiful.

Today I’ve done some admin and now we’re off with our neices for a cubby building afternoon at a national forest. It will be muddy and fun and wonderful. I can’t wait. This woman is amazing and I love her to bits!

In other news, we have a donor back on board and will be trying to get pregnant again this cycle. We are both incredibly excited about it! Our family is a wonderful place. 🙂

Dreaming Big

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

So much is happening…

That’s been the observation for weeks now, and nothing is letting up, gathering steam is a better analogy.

The trip away to Whyalla and Pt Lincoln was exhausting and amazing. I learned so much, so fast and scrambled to keep hold of it and keep my head together. I took a big risk going there, reaching beyond my reach and needing a lot of help.

And I got it. I understood so much more about how a tribe works. I feel so grateful and appreciative – to everyone who helped me. Thankyou deeply. It’s so important to me not to be swept away but to stop and acknowledge you all. You believe in me and what I’m doing and support me. Thank you! I will be saying thank you individually too – but thank you publicly! I can’t do this without you all, you are helping me to get a message of love into mental health, to speak out that people with multiplicity are real people, not stereotypes, and that art is essential for life.

I had experiences that I would call ‘psychotic’ except they were so beautiful and so peaceful and so lovely it would be like calling love making ‘rape’. I sat by the water and watched the dolphins and wept. I felt so alive and so connected it was onerwhelming. The sky was so beautiful I was falling into it. An inner eye opened and was so dazzled by the world I’ve had to let it partly close again. And a model of mental health reform turned up in my head. I’ve filled a notebook with it. I had the most amazing conversations, feeling like I was really out of my own mazed mind for the first time, able to see people clearly – not just other people like me, in the clarity of intensity and rawness, but all people. Every conversation left me feeling that I had been given profound gifts of insight – not me but everyone -, that everywhere people were throwing away the most incredible observations about the world and none of us listening to each other. I don’t have words for what I’m going through but the closest I can find is ‘spiritual awakening’, or would be if my system felt more universal towards any kind of spirituality. I feel… transformed.

I got home to chaos. Both inboxes overflowing, hundreds of urgent tasks needing doing, no structure or priorities, just an avalanche of information and opportunities and contacts. I threw myself into it and got swamped immediately. The first day I worked for 13 hours to just start listing all the things that needed doing. My mind fried, like an abuse victim near the abuser, all my thoughts tangled into knots. Feelings of deep shame and overwhelming anxiety welled up. My productivity crashed, it would take 3 hours to write and send an email that was coherent. Most of the things I had to do were ‘scary’ things, out of my experience or comfort zone. Things that took great courage, or needed me to change gears to sympathetically listen. I could tell I was so overwhelmed that even the simple things were becoming impossibly difficult.

The more inconceivable it is that you take time off, the more essential it is.

After two intense burn out days of doing my head in, I went back to the new plan and adapted myself to Rose’s work hours.

It was hard and I didn’t get it entirely right but after a couple of days working sensible hours my head was clearing and I was able to think better.

I was still bleeding out though, every hour taking me further away from feeling centred, grounded, calm, feet firmly planted. Rose could feel it too, that wildness and destabilising anxiety in me. I was losing the ability to be in sync with her longer than a couple of hours. I’d find a few hours of something different and connect, but each time I was coming back to a gradual slide down a steep hill. So we packed me up for a night at the beach.

At 3am, alone in the dark (isn’t life strange, I used to hate that and feel hurt by it and now I drive two hours into the night to find it – I’m reminded of a couple where one always complained about the other snoring and now they’re dead and gone, and the other partner can’t sleep without the sound of snoring, the quiet of the house too much to bear) I find the heart of my terror – a message from my anxiety that I’ve too many demands on my time and need to push some things back to next year. It’s a hard message to hear, but as soon as I accept it – not problem solve it, not resolve it, just listen and accept it, the whirling franticness calms and the ‘click’ I listen for when I’m out in the wild places, out under the stars, happens. Choosing between my passions and projects, for a multiple, is incredibly painful. But just recognising this message brings peace. I spend a day listening closely to my needs, tuning back in to the small voice of my soul.

I come home deeply centred again.

Into the maelstrom! My inbox is overflowing my desk, the emails keep piling up, letters from welfare that require urgent attention, I still need to do my tax. And family in trouble needing help. Why bother with all that connectedness and calm, I asked myself, look how quickly I lose it! I gathered all my lists of things that need doing back into one list. Every time I find a new task I add it. It’s several pages long, over half are urgent or beyond urgent, seriously overdue. I tackle an hour of rapid housework and get down to it.

I take half the morning sorting out my enrolment to college. Half the information I’ve been given is, as usual, plain wrong. One of my term long classes turns out to be actually be a semester long class, and several hours more commitment each week than I’d been told as well, making my workload much higher for this year than I’d planned. But it’s a rare, special, elective subject about a topic I’m absolutely passionate about and as much as I’m overwhelmed about doing it, I’m desperately trying to hold onto it.

I gather 10 of the other most desperate admin from my master list and work on them in small doses over the day, adding in little notes and messages here and there to friends so I haven’t dropped out of conversations completely. There’s a great analogy about to do lists, how every list has at least one thing on it that you’d practically rather eat a frog than deal with, and that if you tackle this thing first, the rest of the list will be much clearer and easier. That’s my take on it anyway. My short list is entirely composed of frog. Everything on it is stressful and challenging and makes my heart race and me feel sick.

I get three done, run off and tell Rose – I’ve eaten another frog! Then go and cook food. When there’s crisis is important to have good food easily accessible. I make carrot and ginger soup with half the $2 bag of sweet baby carrots we bought from the market together. The house is clean – we are mastering how to use systems and routines together! I pick the list back up in places over the rest of my day, in between helping family pack and move. At 11pm, Rose is exhausted and wants to go to bed but is sitting near me in solidarity as I tremble and curse my way through a few more frogs. I ‘hear’ a sense of being able to engage with another box of frogs from my main list, which surprises me, so I set to it and tackle changing gears to genuinely respond to the DI email inbox from the website – a task almost unbearably daunting since I discovered I’d missed an email from May and felt so bad about that I’d almost rather set the computer on fire and leave the country than reply to it.

I eat a lot of frogs. Rose is very encouraging. After each frog she tries to celebrate but I still feel so sick and overwhelmed I can’t breathe. Late at night, I get the last, big frog off that list and everything transforms. I’m giddy with happiness. The rest of the list is suddenly manageable! My life is suddenly manageable. The family crisis is manageable. My projects are exciting again! I’m looking forward to my week! I can think straight, can make plans again. Rose and I plan a sleep in this morning, a lazy start to the day in pjs, and waffles for breakfast. Everything feels wonderful again.

So much is happening…

I’m reading a book called Wishcraft by Barbara Sher, recommended to me by the awesome artist behind Outspiral, and it’s so relevant and brilliant I cry in nearly every page. I have been doing a lot of looking and listening lately – who else is doing what I’m doing, in some way? How did they pull it off? This book was a wonderful suggestion.

The most wonderful part of it is the author normalising this roller coaster for me. It’s not me! It’s not me being ‘mentally ill’, easy as that assessment is to make. It’s a trauma history and a lot of years of being alone, up against me seeking my big dreams and finding my place in the world. It looks messy because these things are very hard to do – to dream something wonderful and pursue it is very scary and wonderful and you need a good support system more than you need personal attributes like confidence, she says. I love her. It makes sense and it’s all gelling in my mind. It’s possible! I’m excited.

If, ten years ago, some kind soul had given me hard information on how to turn my dreams into realities, instead of just assuring me blandly that it could be done, it would have saved me an incredible amount of time and anguish. As long as I kept trying to believe in myself and reform all my bad habits, I kept crashing – and blaming myself. It wasn’t until I gave up on every fixing me and tried to improvise a set of aids that would work for me anyway… that I stumbled on the real secret behind the scenes… it’s not superhero genes and a jaw of steel, like the myths say. It’s something much simpler. It’s know-how and support.

I’m going to keep reading it and if anyone else wants to read it too, we could discuss it together as a kind of book club. 😀

This is a good guide to help me find my way through all the possibilities and opportunities suddenly open to me. I’m putting a lot of thought into the kinds of support I need, and I’ve actually published a rough draft. It’s only a work in progress as I build a better framework around me, but it’s a start and I’ll keep working on it and clarifying it as I learn more. I’ve actually replaced my Donate page with a Support Me page because I’ve realised that there are many ways to support me and I don’t like to make it sound like money is the only thing, it’s helpful but it’s only one way. Check it out, I’d welcome any feedback. 🙂

Rose has kindly explained to me that people have no idea how to support me most of the time, and no idea what my big dreams are or where I’m heading, and that as I’m a bigger picture person which is not that common, and I also share a lot of my strong feelings through this process, which is likewise not common, there’s a lot of anxiety out there around what I’m trying to do. That makes sense to me. I’d noticed it in the general feel of things – the more I’ve been winding up and making bigger plans, there’s been this sense of an indrawn breath around me – what are you doing? Are you nuts? So I want to start to find ways to communicate more, and more clearly, what I’m doing and where this is going and how people can be involved if they want to – if they share the dream too.

Life is amazing. 🙂

Professionally wild

/ Sarah K Reece / 2 Comments

I’ve taken a key step in my life as an artist – I’ve found a local printer, Black and White Photographics who were happy to walk an anxious and print illiterate artist through the process of converting original works to quality prints. This is a project I have been wanting to get off the ground for a long time, but struggling to find resources and information. I visited many different local printers and none of them knew anything about art prints or could refer me. The urgency was rather increased as someone wants to buy one of my oil paintings and I can’t let go of the original unless I have a high quality digital image of it, and I also want to put it into a better frame. A friend referred me to these folks over Facebook, and Rose took me to see them yesterday morning. I asked a lot of questions and was given a lot of information I hadn’t known about how it all works and how to deal with the reproduction side of selling art.

Then we got back into the van and I cried. It’s exciting but overwhelming! Even leaving my originals with the printer was stressful and strange. It’s so different from poetry and writing… with those, I can win an award or publish a work and I still have it! Usually I still even have the original handwritten version in my journals. But with art – you let it go. And my work is… well, it’s kind of pieces of my heart. Parts of my life story. They are incredibly precious to me. I’ve saved my art collection from several bouts of homelessness and other major crises, even from my own impulse to destroy them (most common when I’m feeling chronically suicidal). Holding onto them has been a kind of expression of… value. To me. That I think what I do has value. Even if I’m the only one. That we promise we won’t destroy each other’s work, even if we hate it or it scares us and we have to hide it from view. Creation has been part of our “those who don’t build must burn” approach to life, something integral that helps to keep us alive, keep our heart alive, document our story.

Other people’s reaction to my work is a whole different ball game. Selling it, different again! The printer told me my work was under priced and estimated a retail price at about double what I was asking. This is the work I was told several times was over priced and would sell easily if I would just drop it down. I stubbornly held onto it. I knew what it was worth to me, I caculated i’s value to me in paint – what would I be willing to bear parting with it for? Better paints, and enough for another few works… I’ve only let go of three original works (apart from those I’ve given as gifts, before I pulled my focus in tighter – more art, less craft, more personal, less generic) and in all cases I don’t have a copy or a quality photograph and it hurts. I stopped selling them and only made an exception for my best friend, knowing I’d be able to ask for it back to get a print done once I figured out how and where I could do that.  In my last solo exhibition 2 years ago, I was told the works would not be offered for sale, which suited me… On the opening night, three different people were keen to buy the same ink painting. I took their details and promised to get back to them and never did. How could I? I knew every detail of that painting, where I was when she was born in my mind, what dreams I was having, what was going on in my life, where I sat to paint her, how I mixed the inks, chose the paper. She’s part of me. So I’ve slid quietly away from every offer since. I put up works of ‘backup work’ not finals, for sale in another group exhibit for people with a disability, priced them modestly, sold a couple, and again was told – I’m pricing too high. People would buy much more if they didn’t have to pay $40 for an original. Again I resisted the devaluing, calculated their worth to me in a kind of trade – I want another bottle of ink ($30, with postage), I want to buy a better quality brush ($60), and I’d part with the Blue Rose for a brush I guess, and that dog for a bottle of ink, but not less.

A number of people have contacted me over the last week about buying prints of their favourite work once I’ve arranged that. A few want the originals once I’m ready to part with them. I have two art exhibitions in the works I need to find a gallery or exhibit space for. (and time to arrange!) Rose is helping take on some of this side of things for/with me because I’m out of time and out of my depth. I need to get hold of a website designer to help me set up a beautiful online gallery. Rose has believed I would have a professional art career since she first met me. I’m just able to see it now, as I’m learning about the incredible diversity of arts practice, as I’m finding words like Community Artist and Hybrid Artist that fit what I’m feeling my way into… as always for me – I do things, moved by instinct and guided by values. After I’ve done them, I stop and reflect – what was that? What am I doing? What does it mean? And I have to find something to reflect upon, a language to think about it. Sometimes that takes many years!

So yesterday, I sat in the van, crying, and so exhilarated I could hardly think straight. We went on a trip to Victor Harbour through the mad stormy weather. (Rose drove) I was so crazy silly in the petrol shop the cashier burst out laughing and thanked me for brightening her day. When it hailed on us I was so flooded with joy, the sheer childlike pleasure I was laughing and crying out and felt like my heart would explode. My paints are calling to me and the night is calling to me and the storm is calling to me and my beach is calling to me.

We had a great day and I didn’t explode. We spent it with friends, playing games, eating good food, talking about our lives and families and the futures. Talking about Tamlorn and donors and how sad this path can be, how hard it can be. All day I tugged on people’s shirts in quiet moments to say, in bewildered joy – ‘someone wants to buy my art’!

Driving home late that night, through the squalls and gusts of wind and I’m impossible. I feel like a great, wild creature in me that has been chained has suddenly been freed, and it’s gambolling in bursts in every direction and snapping teeth at everything, it’s feet, the stars, the wind, so fiercely joyful and unbounded and un-contained it’s impossible to be anywhere near… and Rose and I talk about our split desires, how deeply she loves home at the moment, sinking roots into a stable home, planting trees. And I talk about how free I felt in the van, how alive I feel when I sleep somewhere I can feel the night and hear the rain. I am sad and torn and full of wild dreams. I dream up a mad studio for my back yard – a four poster bed, covered in canvas to keep off the rain, with an easel that swings over it for painting or poetry writing and a covered candle lantern for light the wind can’t blow into a bed fire, and netting to keep away the bugs… I can see myself in it some nights, out the back under the moon, the bed like a boat on the night sea, my speckled dog with me, and the wildness in me runs free and howls through my veins, such splendid joy. All the wild things in me turn their faces to the stars and howl, a cacophony of sound, a deep solidarity, a yearning and a coming home. No more the shadows. No more the whip and the bridle. Unchanged and unbroken. Free to be as they are.

I cannot contain such joy. I cannot bear it or hold it in. I am swept along by it, by the intense self awareness – “all things pray by being themselves” – my life no longer devoted to the breaking in of my wilds, to the conforming of my madness. My day people are finally the stewards of my night people, finally unpicking the locks and letting the whips lie still. Even just for a night. I am so alive. We are so alive it is unbearable. I cannot know it, and be unchanged. Everything sings to me. The night calls me home.

Reforming the Mental Health System

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

I wrote this while away in Port Lincoln caravan park after a Mental Health conference on system reform and service integration.

White collar communities have a lot to learn about being human and connection and having networks. Blue collar communities and street families have a lot to teach us. Yes, they have issues of their own, particularly violence, but they do not have the same issues. They are, in a sense, complementary. We can learn from each other.

I’m here in a caravan park and there are children playing on bikes. Couples walk on the beach. People give each other directions. The woman at the roadhouse is bringing me some vegetables from her home so I can eat them for dinner. The lady in reception is collecting for a raffle for her injured friend. I don’t lock the van when I go to the amenities block. I don’t pack away the stove when I go to sleep. People look out for each other. I’m at much less risk of violence here than the social workers sitting by the door, with their panic button in case their angry, alienated clients lash out. No one has anyone trapped in a room.

We talk about bringing the Recovery Model to services and I think there’s merit to that idea. But if we’re going to be ethical and sincere about this, we need to preserve the power balance of the true model. That is, each service, each organisation, each individual service provider should be free to walk away. We cannot make them recovery, and nor should we. It does them the same violence they do to patients when they think they know best and try to force recovery on people.

The truth is, we are not so different. As blind as they have been to the abuses of patients/consumers, and as unthinking as they have been in wielding the vast power we see so clearly and they are so unaware of – they are a mirror to us.

We must be different.

We must support and liberate them, so they learn to support and liberate consumers. We must trust they are doing their best. We must listen and learn the causes of their pain and bizarre behaviour. We must learn to see the methods in their madness. We must love them deeply, and help them to see the possibilities for themselves they cannot see right now. We must hold hope for them when they lose it. We must let them be free to make mistakes, and be gracious when they do, and help them to learn from them.

It is not easy.

But, we are asking this from them – this courage, this fierce love, this walk into a strange, unknown, new world. How can we ask them for things we refuse to do ourselves? How can they give what they do not have? Model what they have not experienced? How can we demand freedom from those who are likewise yolked?

Love is the only answer.

Poem: The Dying Star

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

Written one night camped by the ocean at the recent conference in Pt Lincoln. It was an incredible time.

Out
in the bay
The ocean slaps at my feet
Far beyond the dark water
A single star falls
So bright,
So brief
Fading out before it reached the water
And I wept
On the far shore
I wept

Great projects & info

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

So much is happening at the moment!

Freebie:

  • I wanted to attend the GROW SA fundraiser later this month but I’m now booked on that night – Sat Aug 8th. They are inviting people to join them for a night at the Capri Theatre to see “Last Cab to Darwin”. I’m happy to pay for a ticket and if you’re short of cash and want a night out, you’re welcome to attend in my name. 🙂 First in, best dressed. Send me an email sarah@di.org
    All details on their Facebook event page.

Looking for Information:

I’m hoping to learn more about these topics – if you have some experience or knowledge, please get in touch and share it with me 🙂

  • Patreon as a funding model for someone like me – blogger, artist etc – upsides, potential pitfalls and so on
  • Social entrepreneurs and responsible business design/development/growth/resources
  • Voluntary Simplicity
  • Circles of Support

My Projects:

  • I’m developing a Charter of Rights which would apply equally to all in one of my networks, the Dissociative Initiative. I’ve started a small fb group for those who are interested in developing it to completion – so if you’re interested in giving feedback, working on wording the phrases, or looking for other Rights type documents eg human rights, child rights etc and linking them in so we can learn from them. Potentially this will lead to a charter for all my networks and resources – please join up! This will be a short term task force, once we’ve finished putting the charter together we’ll disband. You can also leave at any time.
    Charter of Rights
    Facebook Project Group
  • I’m also exploring models of formal support for people who are isolated or having a rough time. Again this is being done with the Dissociative Initiative so our first trials would probably be with people who experience multiplicity but the model we develop should hopefully be useful more broadly too. This will be a short term task force, once we’ve finished putting the charter together we’ll disband. You can also leave at any time.  Our facebook group is:
    Connections
  • I have also created a new Network – there’s been a call lately for a central database of resources around managing medications. I’ve linked information together to create Orange Bottles
    orangebottles.wordpress.com Please check it out, share it, and send any feedback or resources to add to me here, through my personal Facebook page (I’m happy to friend anyone), or via email sarah@di.org.au
  • The Homeless Care SA network is in the early stages of growth with people sharing links and ideas from elsewhere about what might be useful locally for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. If you’re interested or already involved in this field, please join up!
    Homeless Care SA website
    Homeless Care SA facebook group

Other Projects or Info:

  • Story City is coming to South Australia! Seeking Writers, Illustrators, Digital Artists, Musicians and Composers to bring an exciting new digital platform to Adelaide.
    http://www.storycity.com.au/story-city-adelaide-eoi/

  • Working with queer young people workshop
    “Queer young people often face unique relational and social challenges, with traditional understandings of gender, sexuality and identity often having marginalising effects on their lives and relationships. This workshop will examine professional and cultural discourses that influence our ideas about gender, sexuality and identity, and by linking conceptual resources with dialogical practice, Julie will help you put queer theory into therapeutic action.” Enquiries to Winny on (08) 8202 5272, or email: WinnyM@unitingcommunities.org
    This workshop is being held and co-hosted by Uniting Communities

Posted by Dulwich Centre Foundation on Wednesday, July 1, 2015

I don’t know better than you

/ Sarah K Reece / 1 Comment

I don’t know better than you how to live your life.

I don’t know better than people I sometimes care for when they’re unwell.

I don’t know better than the rest of my own system. I couldn’t be any of my other parts better than they are.

In fact, my conscious or rational mind doesn’t know better than the rest of my mind.

If I tried to take over your life, on the basis that I know better than you how to run it and that I’d do a better job, there are two predictable outcomes – you would fight me every step of the way, overtly or covertly, desperately trying to preserve your own freedom and dignity. You would fight me even if what I trying to make you do WAS good for you, or felt helpful or needed, or would actually make your life better. Because those needs are less important than the need to be in control of your own life. It is a fundamental human need to be autonomous. The freedom to choose, even if our choices are terribly flawed. This is part of the foundation of our sense of dignity. We will be incredibly, instinctively ‘self destructive’ in situations where people are trying to take over our lives, simply to try to restore a sense of control. Rebellion is a common human response to control.

The second predictable outcome to my control would be your submission. Obedience is another common human response to authority. The more authority I have, the more likely you are to obey me. The more other people obey me, the more likely you are to obey me. The more I get you to believe that you are very, very bad at running your own life, and I could do a much better job, the more likely you are to obey me.

People express these conflicting responses – rebellion and submission, in a variety of ways. Some people, usually a minority, will rebell whatever the cost to themselves. I will see this as proof that you are out of control and need my intervention.

Some people will flick between times of rebellion and times of submission, expressing deep ambivalence and conflict about their relationship to this person in authority. I will ethos as proof of your unstable nature and inability to be consistent, proving that you need my direction.

Some people will become highly manipulative and passive aggressive, submitting openly but covertly fighting. I will construe this as you having poor boundaries, behavioural issues, and an inability to engage in normal, warm human relationships, proving the need for my management.

Others will become highly compliant and withdrawn, obeying all control and hoping that submission will stop anything worse happening to them. I will construe this as your passive nature, that you are clearly unable to direct your own life and see it as proof you need ongoing parent type support.

The nature of how we think and process our own experiences makes it challenging for us to hold this conflict in our minds. If I have taken power away from you, but also met your needs at times, you may find it impossible to openly criticise me. If I have a very hostile response to criticism, very defensive, and a lot of power to punish you, you may learn to never criticise me.

I will criticise you however, particularly if you disobey me or manage to try something for yourself which goes badly. Many things you try for yourself will go badly because mistakes is how we learn and the longer I’ve been able to keep you from making mistakes the less chance you’ve had to learn. I may also shame you for criticising, requiring you to constantly express gratitude to me for the very hard work I’ve done in helping you. You’ve been a heavy burden and very hard work at times, trying my patience, terribly ungrateful, rude, passive, and hostile. You will be constantly how inadequate you are and how much you owe me. The biggest things you owe me are gratitude and silence about anything I don’t like to hear.

You may internalise my ideas about my competence to run your life and police and suppress even your own thoughts and feelings – fighting your natural instinct to rebell and hating yourself for feeling that way. Now you have turned against yourself. You distrust your own impulses. You fight to stay in control of your feelings and urges, feeling shame about them. They are the enemy, proof that you are weak, sick, and incompetent. Further proof that I am right to direct your life.

You are also exhibiting signs of chronic disempowerment or institutionalisation. You have trouble making decisions on your own. You feel very anxious when you can’t get clear feedback that I our other authority figures are happy with you. You are incredibly vulnerable to the slightest shift in mood or sign that you are out of favour. You lack motivation and energy. You lack creativity and spark. You feel out of control, depressed, and miserable.

If you have turned against yourself strongly and effectively, you are so dissociated from your own feelings and impulses you would swear you are not unhappy. Your life and health shows the signs of profound unhappiness but you yourself insist that you are fine and that I love you and have your best interests at heart. If you were an animal, we might describe you using words such as tame, docile, or domesticated. Something essential about you has been crushed. You are incredibly uncomfortable around people who are not crushed. You tend to have an authoritative, brutal, detached relationship with anyone you are in power over.

I am exhausted and frustrated by your constant neediness. I am angry about your occasional criticism or rebellion, and your passive aggressiveness infuriates me. I may be desperately looking forward to the day when you start to run your own life and not need me anymore, or I may be dependant upon your gratitude to cope with my sense of emptiness, my chronic emotional starvation from never being real and open and vulnerable and having my own needs met.

I may not have started this process. You may have become afraid or overwhelmed and collapsed in my arms, looking for someone to follow and investing me with both the power and responsibility to direct your life. I may look like the bad guy but actually be suffering terribly, exhausted and totally confused about how to hand control back to you without you just being dead by the end of the week. I may live in terror of your irrationality, your self destructiveness, your bizarre, violent impulsiveness, your lack of self compassion or patience. When I try to leave you may harm yourself, attempt suicide, stalk me, stop eating, or destroy my reputation. Roles act as hooks. If I take over, you are likely to collapse. Equally, if you collapse, I am likely to take over.

I may be your parent, your doctor, your best friend, your partner, your shrink, your kid, your minister, your small group leader, your boss, your carer.

I may be the dominant part in your system, doing my misguided best to help us all function. I may try to take over (or be dumped with) every other role, not sharing any power or responsibly with the rest of you. I am good at some things but very bad at others. I am deeply frustrated that other parts fight me, disobey me, even hate me. I think my good intentions are enough and I don’t understand that being so intrusive is always harmful even when I’m doing it from love. The more desperate and afraid I am, the more control I take away. The more control I take away, the more my system shows the signs of disempowerment and alienation.

I may be you rational mind. Treated by your culture, your family, your shrink as the only bit of your mind that is really ‘you’, the only bit that should be in charge at all times, the only bit that can do what you need to survive and live, put in charge of every other system and function, and called to account for unconscious dreams, fears, desires, for threat systems and triggers from old wounds and pleasures, for fragmented memory structures and hallucinatory sensory input.

I confabulate stories to fill the gaps from when I was not running the show. I deny all other aspects. I claim to be the only self, the only voice, the only reality. I delete other perspectives, fight with them, silence them, and try to take over their roles. I remove instances of loss of my control from our master narrative of self. I pretend I am always aware, always online, always in control and ignore all the times we cycle into other states of awareness.

Sanity, I am assured, rests in my total dominance. Health is me being in control. No more daydreaming. No more idiosyncrasies. No more irrational fears. So I take over instead of being part, and we become less. Silenced voices fight back in rage or wither in isolation. We become less than whole. Instinctive systems are dysregulated because of my intrusive micromanagement; slow to kick in when needed, randomly intruding when not needed. Emotions are frequently ignored as ‘irrational’, cutting me off from the vast knowledge in omy unconscious mind. I have almost no intuitive capacity to understand myself or other people. I am terrified of diversity, difference, altered states, lots of control, dreams, spirituality, mystery, and human vulnerability.

Or I can recognise that I am part of a whole and step back. I can be the reflective process that helps us to learn. I can regulate the empathy that leaves us vulnerable to exploitation. I can gently challenge the irrational and bizarre thoughts and impulses that would lead us down terrifying paths, while recognising they are the flip side of our sensitivity and capacity to look for patterns. I can channel input from the unconscious and give it equal, but not more, weight with what I already think I know.

I can acknowledge the wholeness of self that is more than just me, my illusion of singleness, my illusion of conscious control. I can learn to tune in, learn to listen well.

And we can breathe, can speak in many voices, can recognise each others expertise, can work together. The brain is an argument, says one of my favourite neuroscience books (Into the Silent Land). The brain can also be a conversation, can also be a song.

So can our systems. So can our relationships, our families, our culture.

Sorry about the thunder

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Most of the winter Rose and I have been cleaning our clothes at a local laundromat and using the dryers rather than hanging them out. It’s expensive and time consuming but as we don’t have a washing machine hooked up at home, necessary. Last night I went to try and set our washing machine up in our back yard, but it was completely buried under boxes in the shed – several more hours work than I had time for. So my Mum took our dirty laundry home to clean at her place. She would hang it out to dry and I’d pick it up today around 3pm.

Cue the first rain we’ve had in weeks, ha ha. Yup, clearly our fault! So it’s 4am and I’m sleeping on the couch because there’s thunder and Zoe panics. I tried music and a light on first, but apparently the only way we’re not all going to die is if she’s curled up on my legs. The mad black and white cat Sars has also decided he doesn’t want to sleep on the porch tonight anymore so he’s here too. Rose has a job interview tomorrow so she needs her sleep. I got up to make up the couch to sleep on and Rose murmers to me “you’ll make a good Mum”. Yeah, listening to and meeting the needs – good skills to have. I’m working on it. Sweet dreams all.

image

Kindness

/ Sarah K Reece / 3 Comments

It’s been a good day. I’ve cried a lot, washing out the emotional overwhelm from the past fortnight. I’ve come home to email inboxes totally out of hand, to do lists running into 5 pages, and so much coming in at me that I can’t process it. It’s hard for me to filter it or think clearly. My first couple of days back followed my usual impulse in such circumstances – work on it obsessively in a highly unbalanced way all day and night and become very dissociated from myself.

I’ve gone back now to the plan I was working before I left, where I work when Rose works and rest when she rests. It’s less than ideal from the point of view of those waiting to hear from me, but all I can do to look after myself. I can’t think very clearly or make sense of much of it yet.

But, this weekend has been lovely.

I’ve planted a lot of seeds and cuttings. Gardening is so grounding for me, I love getting my hands into soil.

image

Our lilies are blooming, and they are stunning.

image

Rose and I found this beauty in the side of the road for free. 🙂

image

The garden in winter is less spectacular than summer, but there are still treasures like this black pansy.

image

We have a healthy patch of nettles for teas, they are high in iron. Rose and I are enjoying a shared love of growing and tending.

image

Tamlorn’s peach tree was looking overgrown and unloved so we’ve weeded and laid down cardboard mats.

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We had a beautiful morning at the markets buying fruit and vegetables together. We’re working on reducing our food cost and increasing our unprocessed food intake. I feel very inspired to be more green. We currently compost our green waste via a council bin but I’m looking into my own composter or worm farm. I’ve made my own cleaner by soaking citrus peel in vinegar.

Staying in my van on the recent trip brought home to me how deeply I love to be connected to nature. I was unhappy about throwing away fruit peels and food scraps into the general bins and I think I’ll try and set up a bokashi style bucket for my next trip. I was also… Liberated. Living more simply calms my anxiety. I feel more at peace, in balance, in harmony. Remembering that I need so little to really meet my needs made me less afraid of loss, able to be bolder and braver. I drove to Port Lincoln without (as it turned out) enough money to pay for the fuel back, and my tribe – you guys, my friends and family and people I’ve never even met, and my new tribe out in the country, you guys supported me, repaid my courage, helped me to fly instead of fall. Brought me home again.

I feel… So humbled. So grateful. It’s hard to find words. I’m part of something. I want to say thankyou, in some way. Not to rush on into the busyness but to pause and really let it sink in, and to really see you.

I may not be able to repay, but I can pay it forwards. I got home to discover that my most difficult to live with neighbour had suffered the loss of her cat. Her deeply loved pet had been hit by a car. So I went over to say I was sorry to hear it. One of my cats, Sarsaparilla, has partly adopted her and often sleeps on her porch. I offered him to her, with all his papers and so on, if she wants to have him. She cried. She said she was sorry for being mean. I forgave her. I think we are slowly starting to rehabilitate our street – the one where near fatal stabbings, arson, vandalism, drug and alcohol issues, and cruelty are so common. We might not be enough to turn the tide, but at least we can acknowledge the deep woundedness beneath the violence. At least we can be kind.

Love. How simple, how difficult. We who have the biggest dreams, who want to change the world, who cry out in fear and pain – how? Well, this is how I’m doing it.

Facial Blindness

/ Sarah K Reece / 5 Comments

Siiiigh, so a great person introduced themselves to me the morning of the recent conference, tells me they know my partner, and really does it with such aplomb, I’m impressed. We have a brief chat about her work, my blog and so on. I’m looking forward to talking to her more.

That evening a great person sits down next to me, we start talking, I ask about her job, tell her about my partner, and so on. It’s not until she gives me an odd look and says yeah, your partner is great!… that I realise it’s the same person and I’ve just put them through the identical conversation.

Goddamn I hate doing that! Grr dissociation can be a pain!

It was many years before I came across the term facial blindness. I really notice it at conferences! If I want to thank or speak with a keynote speaker, I must be quick enough to get up the front and identity then from close up before they are enfolded by the crowd. This is because I cannot actually identify them by face. I live in fear of shaking the wrong hand and thanking a random audience member for their great presentation…

I have no idea who most of these people are and can’t identify them by sight unless several system members have spent time with them.

How can I be at a mental health conference and experiencing dissociation and still feel like no one would have a clue what that is or be comfortable with me talking about it?

Sigh.

Tony Hill, one of my favourite fictional characters, describes himself as ‘passing for human’. That exactly how my invisible disabilities and diversity makes me feel, like I’m pretending to be normal and getting caught out.

In this case, on my third interaction with the lovely person, I grasped the nettle and mentioned I had facial blindness and that I needed them to cue me about their identify for the first 10 or so times we meet. They took it really well and I felt less the freak. Sometimes we have to be brave to make the invisible, visible, and to speak the taboo.

Pregnancy Links

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

Follow my journey with Rose

Pre Conception Care 2014

Trying to Conceive 2014

Our first pregnancy together: Tamlorn 2015

Losing Tamlorn 2015

Trying to Conceive, again 2015

Our second pregnancy together: Little Frog, first trimester 2015

Little Frog, second trimester 2016

Little Frog, third trimester 2016

Disability and Chronic Illness Links

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I live with chronic illnesses that affect me in many ways, at various levels of intensity from year to year. I have at times needed a wheelchair or electric scooter for mobility, been house bound or bed bound, and experienced multiple food sensitivities. I manage chronic pain and have learned what I need to live well.

This list provides links to my most popular posts about disability. If you find it helpful, please consider supporting me. Thanks!

My Inspiration

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I don’t work in a vacuum! I’m a passionate reader as well as a good listener – I’ve learned a lot from others.

This list provides links to my most popular posts about my inspiration. If you find it helpful, please consider supporting me. Thanks!

Mental Health Links

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This list provides links to my most popular posts about mental health. If you find it helpful, please consider supporting me. Thanks!

Sexual Health Links

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This list provides links to my most popular posts about sexual health. If you find it helpful, please consider supporting me. Thanks!

Recovering from Trauma Links

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This list provides links to my most popular posts about recovering from trauma. If you find it helpful, please consider supporting me. Thanks!

Dissociation Links

/ Sarah K Reece / Leave a comment

I used to live with severe dissociation, learning what it was and how to work with it took many years. I suffered a great deal during that time, which is heartbreaking, because dissociation can be so positive, such a blessing, and so responsive to the right approaches!

I also run a worldwide network called the Dissociative Initiative, visit that website for more information, links, and free resources: www.di.org.au

This list provides links to my most popular posts about dissociation. If you find it helpful, please consider supporting me. Thanks!