No Moral Here

Photo I took in 2017.

Did you know that overexplaining can be a symptom of trauma? When a person grows accustomed, over a long time, to being criticised and/or disregarded, they learn that if they just explain as much as they possibly can, perhaps, just perhaps, someone might at last listen. Truly listen. It doesn’t work though, instead people tune out if you talk too much.  

Did you know that oversharing can be a symptom of trauma? Profound loneliness breeds a need to be seen. Feeling monstrous creates a need to confess. It doesn’t work, though, because one day you realise you’ve exposed everything to everyone, not everyone should be trusted and your truth becomes weaponised. Then you become afraid of sharing anything at all.

Did you know that trauma is somatic? Even if you come to understand the why and how of something, as a dear friend once said to me “the body doesn’t speak English” and our nervous system is trained from childhood. Conventional wisdom says not to live in the past, mindfulness practices help us sit in the present, but what if the past planted something painful so deep inside you that sitting in the present can be a practice of sitting with a deep, aching and ancient feeling of loneliness?

Did you know that suicidal ideation can become a habit? If, for example, you’ve imagined ending your own life since the age of 11, these thoughts and desires create grooves in your brain so deep that you can’t imagine how it must feel to be a creature who only wants to live.

Did you know how pathetic it can feel to be climbing towards 40 and to still struggle with that sinking feeling that often makes going to bed a miserable affair and getting out of bed even more challenging?

Do you know how much work it takes to try to pep talk yourself into putting one foot in front of the other when the world is on fire? And as much as you try not to live in the future, this too is a habit so deep that you’re forever sitting at a point in time where everything hurts and everything ends.

Do you know how hard it feels to fit the shape of yourself into a world that rewards people with thick, callous skin? You watch all the ones you love struggle, you watch the world suffer and it seems as if the only ones who are able to pay their bills are the people eating others alive. How do the Jeff Bezos of the world live with themselves knowing they have the power to change the world for the better… but they don’t?

I want to leave this writing with something positive, something hopeful… but I don’t feel that today. As I age, I want to be wiser. As I age, I want to be stronger. But perhaps this isn’t how it works, perhaps we only build ourselves up for a time before we start to crumble. Perhaps the only thing we can do is practice self-compassion, communicate our suffering and offer each other empathy. The warmth of company as we grow, change and then start to fade like flowers, like stars, like the sun.

Perhaps the hopeful thing here is this: This evening, I saw a knife in the kitchen and flirted, for a moment, with the slightest penetration of my skin. Just a scratch. But. Instead of going further, I instead came here to write and you know what? Giving myself the space to express my emotions has actually calmed me down. I used to write in my old livejournal freely as a teenager and it helped keep me alive. Perhaps that’s a strategy that anyone of any age should be allowed, my inclination is to judge myself for being so angsty, maudlin and childish but the fact is that I felt utterly despairing when I sat down to write this and now I feel a little better and a little calmer.

Did you know that emotional dysregulation is a symptom of trauma? If in childhood, we did not have our emotions validated and were not taught how to process them, perhaps instead being told not to whinge or “dwell” on things, we may find ourselves as adults who are afraid and ashamed of our feelings. Feelings don’t respond well to judgement and shame, they need space for validation, compassion and healthy expression without the person feeling they are “wrong” for feeling what they feel. If, as an adult, we contain a wounded child who hurts as a child does, one of the most important strategies suggested by psychologists and Buddhists alike is to offer that wounded child authentic and heartfelt compassion.

So maybe there’s something positive to this writing after all: Life is full of misery and suffering, it’s ok to feel this, it’s ok to be affected by it and it’s ok to express it.

Then again, maybe I’m just looking for the positives because I feel as if I’m supposed to.

Fuck it. Morals are for fairy tales. I’m going to bed and, as with every night for the past 36 years, I shall not be killing myself. Not a bad track record, come to think of it.

No Feeling Is Final

There have been many times in my life when I have hovered on the edge of my own existence but the closest call I ever had was last year. I was in New York and in the depths of shame and despair, I was only seconds away from jumping in front of an incoming train. The only thing that held me back was the thought of my partner, Wes, having to spend all this money having my mangled body shipped home.

I spent several months after that navigating my way through the murk and though there were a multitude of things that helped me out of the darkness (community, compassion, Buddhism, books, medication, therapy) there were some words I would often scrawl on my hand, on my studio wall, above the toilet and so on…

“No feeling is final” was something I’d heard my friend Honor Eastly say and it became a mantra for me. It became a reminder that though everything felt completely bleak and hopeless, though I felt completely pathetic, defeated and helpless… I hadn’t always felt that way and that someday, the weather of my life would change and a new season would begin. This is the truth of reality, that everything is in constant flux, including our internal landscapes and our very selves. That reality can be horrifying, terrifying and devastating but it can also be liberating, beautiful and comforting.

“No feeling is final” was a perfect way to gently remind myself that nothing ever stays the same, not even the most profound pain, shame, heartbreak or grief. Those words were a part of what helped to save my life and now those words are the title of Honor’s new podcast on her personal experiences of suicidal ideation, mental health and existential agony. It is so profoundly moving, kind, generous and brave. I would like to implore everyone to listen to this beautiful, compassionate, lovely, important podcast because I genuinely believe that it is going to help save lives. Search your podcast player for “No Feeling is Final” or follow this link. I definitely recommend starting at the beginning of the series.

Right to Exist

“People may think you’re giving up, when in fact you are simply giving in to the reality of your new life” – Toni Berhard, How to Be Sick: A Buddhist Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers

When you have a disability and suffer from chronic pain, sometimes your achievements will be weaponised; “You could handle making a web series so you could handle having a job.” In fact, I can see how it must look from the outside, when I walk into social engagements bursting with energy, when my artistic output appears impressive to some, it can be hard to look at me and understand how small my life can be from the inside. In fact, I think I’ve tended to keep the smallness of my life hidden out of shame. Now that I have observed this about myself, it is my intention to attempt to shed this shame and open up about the realities of my existence.

Surrounding every achievement of mine is a lot of empty time where I wander about the house, perhaps doing a little bit of gentle housework, listening to music, taking naps with my cats, staring at the wall and crying. This time is my rest time, my recovery time, there is a lot of it and it has intersections with depression. In fact, there is evidence that chronic pain and depression access similar pathways in the brain and so when I am having a pain flare, it is likely to include depression. This lowers my cognitive capacities so that this time is not a productive time where, say, I am reading, learning, studying and resourcefully making the most of my situation by enriching my mind. It’s not like that, it is instead a time where days drift by in a haze of chronic pain and a constant contending with the grief of all the years in my life that have been lost in this limbo of non-achievement.

I have this aspect of myself that is incredibly ambitious, driven by a desire to explore every inch of existence, to travel the world, to make art with every breath, to create just as much as I consume. It is a fire, a passion, a drive and sometimes a mania and anxiety, a fear of missing out, a fear of ceasing to exist. That part of myself has forever been in battle with the realities of my limited capabilities. It is a simple fact that my body responds poorly to a great deal of activity, this is inclusive of stress which causes my muscles to seize and my neuropathic pain to burn and bubble. It is a simple truth that I must surround my achievements with more downtime than most inhabitants of Western cultures could perhaps conceive of.

For most of my life as a person with a disability, there has been no pleasure or joy in this downtime, laced as it has been with shame. What does this shame look like? It is a shame around being financially dependent on others, on not being a productive and contributing member of society, on not reaching my potential. Sprinkled amongst the shame has been fear, fear of missing out, of wasting my life, of how I could possibly survive without the assistance of others. Finally, there is an emotion below all that which is the most raw and painful and that emotion is grief, grief for all the days when I stare longingly at my paintbrushes and have to walk away, grief for the long gone days when I could hold a book up on a train, grief for the bed-ridden little girl I was who spent so much time staring at her ceiling, grief for every other person who has to sit and watch the rivers of life flowing past them.

But over the last year, I have adopted a sort of secular Buddhism that fits within my own life philosophies and values. Included within this Buddhism are meditative practices that I am slowly getting more skilled at as well as regularly engaging in concepts of self-compassion and loving kindness. Through these practices, I am learning to sit more gently and kindly with reality and learning to allow myself joy that shines through my suffering. It is not a joy that denies the difficult truths of things, it doesn’t negate my pain, nor minimise my struggles, however when I accept the reality of my life and am gentle with myself, it makes all these quiet days more bearable.

Often, when I wander the house with a burning body and a blank mind, I feel the tightening sensations of self-loathing and sorrow. Here I am, getting older, here I am with a life half spent in a sort of nonexistence, how pathetic I sometimes see myself as being. It is a cruelty of the constructions of our culture that we believe our only values are in how busy we are, how much money we make, how much we put out into the world and how attractive we remain while doing so. It is a cruel game, it is one I am simply unable to play and I’m tired of feeling as if I have to justify my life. I am allowed to just be. There is no law in the universe that requires proof of our right to exist, a flower, a tadpole, a pebble, a sunbeam, a teardrop… none of them ever worry about their worth.

I sit outside on my deck crying for the third time today until eventually the tears cease. I breathe. I watch clouds morph and merge in the springtime sky. I breathe. I sit with my pain with gentleness, putting less emotional energy into investing it with value judgements that are always so cruel. My cat chirps at me and jumps onto my lap, her fur is luxury to my fingertips. My heart swells with joy and love and gratitude.

I’ll cry again. These cycles will happen again. I breathe. I accept. It’s a relief to let myself be in exactly what I am. This isn’t giving up, this is letting go of the struggle against reality. Much of my life is lived very quiet and very small. That’s ok, there is so much beauty right here, right in the midst of the suffering.

First Feelings

Just around this time last year, my husband Wes whisked me away in an aeroplane for an emergency holiday in Bali. I say “emergency” because that is how it felt to him, digging deep into his tax return, he flew me to a place that was tropical and vibrant as a means of emotional resuscitation, a life-saving procedure. We were lucky to be in a privileged enough situation to be able to do so and I am lucky to be so loved.

Only a few months earlier, a different lover (Wes and I identify as polyamorous, that is to say we are in an open relationship where we both have multiple loves and yes thank you we’re very happy that way) let’s call him Pete, had flown me to holiday with him in New York where things between us had gone incredibly sour. Upon my return, I was diagnosed with a sort of post-traumatic syndrome and my therapist and my closest people were telling me that Pete was behaving in ways that were emotionally abusive. Combine that with the depression, chronic pain condition and suicidal ideation I had been struggling with for the last couple of years and you’ve got yourself a recipe for someone who doesn’t really want to exist anymore. Suicide was constantly on my mind, I had planned how and had come close one too many times. The light within me was flickering dangerously and Wes, who knew and loved me best, was terrified.

So he flew me to Bali and just as he had hoped, the change in the air and colour and the company of my beloved quickly had me waking up. I adore the tropics like no other place and the ugly beautiful intensity of Bali mirrored something within my own internal landscapes. I started to feel excitement again, particularly as we were to do a diving course which would have us realising one of my lifelong dreams of scuba-diving in coral reefs.

Except as I already knew too well, life doesn’t always go according to plan. On the first day of our diving instructions, an over-eager instructor gave us flawed lessons which caused us both to sustain inner-ear injuries which we only became aware of late in the day. That night, Wes and I sat in a restaurant overlooking palm trees, chickens and tourist resorts and realised we were not going to be able to complete our diving course.

Heart swamped by bitter disappointment, the vision of my green cocktail blurred with tears. I felt miserable and I felt stupid for feeling so miserable when here I was drinking a cocktail in the tropics, a vision of privilege and good fortune. I felt ashamed of myself for feeling so unhappy when our holiday had only just begun. Optimistically, Wes said “Hey, no need to be upset, we’ll still have a good holiday, you know?” and at those words, something inside me clicked and, emotionally, angrily I snapped “I know, ok? I know it’ll be a good holiday! I know we are lucky to be here and I know we will find other things to do but right now I’m really fucking disappointed because this is something I’ve always wanted to do and now it’s just another fucking broken dream, you know? Just another thing I can’t do to add to the giant list of things I can’t do! Can I just wallow in this misery for awhile? I’ll be okay but can I just fucking be upset for awhile?”

“You know what, you’re right. That’s fair. I’m upset too. This fucking sucks.” And so when we went back to our hostel, we wallowed. We ate junk food, drank beer and I cried in Wes’s arms. I cried giant, heaving sobs of bitter disappointment that were a little about the ear injury but much more about the broken dreams caused by my chronic pain condition and disability as well as the deep hurt I was feeling over the betrayal of trust and emotional violence enacted upon me within my relationship with Pete who I was still deeply in love with. I allowed myself to feel sorry for myself, really, truly sorry.

Wes held me and I bathed head to toe in the bitterness of my disappointment and misery and after only an hour or so of wallowing… I felt fine. Better than fine, I felt good. Better than good. And happily, we planned out the rest of our holiday, adjusting our plans, discussing possible new adventures. We then went on to have an incredible holiday, one that was full of exploring, eating, fucking, nature, beauty, art and healing. During that time, we read Buddhist books together and I discovered the philosophy which has helped me develop a deep compassion for myself and a capacity for coping with my struggles with greater equilibrium.

So I learnt something really important through that experience. I learnt to take my emotions seriously, to stop judging them and stifling them and instead to let myself feel them completely so that they might pass through me and shift and metamorphose into something else. My therapist spoke of that phenomena as the idea that we experience both primary emotions and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are the first emotions we have in response to the phenomena of our lives and those emotions are understandable, reasonable things to have. Secondary emotions, the emotions we have in response to our emotions, more often than not, those guys are cunts. In my experience, secondary emotions tend to be judgemental emotions, the guilt that says “I shouldn’t be feeling this, I’m stupid for feeling this.” Secondary emotions are perhaps useful in helping us keep some perspective on our emotional landscape. Maybe secondary emotions are like our conscience, but left unchecked, they’re the jerks that stop us from giving ourselves the compassion and mental space to actually process what we’re feeling.

Similar concepts are described in Buddhism. My friend, Chance, explains it well in her excellent writing here:

“There is a Buddhist parable (or koan) about “the second arrow”. In short, the parable says that if a person is shot with an arrow, there is no point shooting a second one. The teaching is that sometimes in life you will get hit with an arrow. But many of us then shoot one at ourselves in response.

Buddhist teacher Tara Brach uses this parable to explain the phenomenon of blame – the human tendency to react to painful events by blaming others, or blaming ourselves. I remember when I first heard this parable (not from Tara but another teacher, Gil Fronsdal), I was struck by the idea that we could separate feeling awful, burdened or weary from being angry with ourselves for feeling those things. Perhaps it would be easier if we could just feel them.

This is what often happens with depression: we feel like crap, and then feel ashamed of feeling like crap, partly because we see the impact of it on those who love us. Sometimes shame is useful, and there is room for looking for answers, but if you are already wounded, injuring yourself further doesn’t help. It makes it doubly hard to put the pieces back together.”

So when I experienced the disappointment of not being able to complete the diving course, my habitual pattern was to emotionally attack myself for feeling disappointed, to tell myself that emotion was self-indulgent. But this time, I allowed myself to indulge that emotion, I validated the reasons I was disappointed and gave myself the compassion and space to feel unhappy for awhile. Through the act of doing so, I was amazed to see how quickly the miserable feelings passed and how quickly I was able to go about the task of having an amazing holiday with my gorgeous husband.

When we returned home, I ended things with Pete via email because I realised that there was no reason I should have to endure another verbal sparring match with him, no reason I had to listen to another cruel word. It would still take me over six months to start taking seriously the depths of the hurt his emotional abuse had caused because of course his default position had always been that I was overreacting and playing victim. Gaslighting is like the externalisation of the second arrow – your abuser shoots you with the arrow of their initial violence and then the second arrow is their denial of their responsibility, their insistence that you, in fact, are the one to blame for their bad behaviour. Their stubborn belief that your recovery from their wounds is your responsibility alone. For a long time, I internalised that message and in fact I’ve only recently allowed myself to feel the deep rage and disgust I have towards him for his behaviour. That has been healing as for a long time, I denied myself my fury.

Several months after returning from Bali, I had my first surgery for my thoracic outlet syndrome, a scary prospect with no guarantees. After my surgery, the surgeon came to me and said that mine was the worst case that himself and his assistant surgeon had seen and, after thanking him for such incredibly validating news, I broke into tears while my mother and husband held me and cried with me. After many years of not being taken seriously by a great multitude of medical professionals who made me feel as if my struggles with my health were just me being a hysterical woman, or incompetent, or crazy or just overreacting to my pain, after so many years of essentially being gaslit by medical professionals, to discover tangible evidence of the reality of my experiences was profound. And healing.

I’ve always been an emotional person, as a child I was told by adults that I was too sensitive, and as an adult I have often been told the same thing. After the experience in Bali, after the experience with Pete and after the experience with my surgery, I resolved never to disregard or minimise my emotions again. Yes, it is true that I feel emotions with perhaps more intensity than many and it is important for me to regulate and manage my responses to them with self-awareness, however emotions are a type of intelligence and more often than not, a reasonable response to the circumstances of our lives. We do not have to be controlled by our emotions but nor do we have to deny them, our emotions are a fundamental aspect of our lived experience and they have a great deal of wisdom to impart to us.

From now on, I am determined to listen to my emotions. I am determined to sit with the truth and wisdom and beauty of them. I am determined to give myself the compassion I deserve when I struggle because life is goddamn hard sometimes. And I am determined to do the same for others. Contrary to the belief of some, becoming better acquainted with emotions does not weaken me, in fact I have never felt stronger, never felt more resilient.

Days Like Today

Days like today, days when my life feels so full and so ripe with possibility, days like today I am so fucking glad that I didn’t jump in front of that train.

At those darkest moments, when everything hurt and I felt so worthless, when it felt like the pain and shame was all I had, at those darkest moments I had no idea how much joy and hope and light was just a few steps ahead of me.

The dark days are still there, pain is still a struggle but the shame is so much quieter, my heart feels so fucking full and so I feel strong and resilient. I feel so fucking rich, so gloriously fat on love, sex, connection and art.

At those darkest moments, I thought I knew what I was. At those darkest moments, I thought I knew what my future was. I did not. I could not. Days like today, I am so fucking glad that I didn’t jump in front of that train.

Suicide and Love

(Trigger warning for discussion of suicide and disability, this is actually a positive post but it’s still very intensely emotional stuff.)

Earlier this year, I stood on the edge of a train platform in New York City and nearly jumped. I had been struggling with suicidal ideation for the last two years, my chronic pain had pushed my brain into a clinical depression that was almost relentless and I had experienced several major mental breakdowns, the accumulation of which, coupled with a traumatic event, had left me feeling utterly useless and hopeless and so I stood on a train platform and contemplated jumping. In fact, the only thing that stopped me was the thought of Wes, one of my partners, having to pay a fortune to have my mangled body shipped back home. Sometimes I am still blindsided by the horror, the sickening realisation of what I nearly did.

Lately, my life is really incredible. My arm has been slowly improving and I’m getting back the things I thought I was losing forever, my ability to paint and write and drive and just… just live with some freedom of movement, without my body feeling like a cage that is shrinking smaller, smaller, smaller. I had lost all hope that I could ever be so lucky and so I feel my luck with an intense gratitude and a deep, heartbroken sadness and compassion for everyone who is currently lost, and scared, and hurting and may never be as lucky as I am.

I am also intensely aware that I don’t want anyone to think my life is only better now because my arm is getting better and frankly, that isn’t true. My life actually started getting better before the surgery, it started getting better on the night when, back from New York and in an abject, miserable, broken state, body trembling and eyes red from crying for days, I screamed at Wes to help me, to please help me, please why wouldn’t anyone help me.

He called suicide hotlines and they were not helpful (this is not a criticism of that resource, it’s just the advice that was offered was… ok it wasn’t useful so maybe this is a criticism?) and so instead he called my mother and with her advice and the help of some of my friends and lovers, Wes organised for me to go on suicide watch. For the next several weeks, I had somebody by my side every day and through that process, I realised how loved, how very loved I was. I realised how important love and community and kindness is and my life started getting better.

Then I started meditating, and reading books on shame and daring greatly and grief and finding Buddhism, and practising self-compassion and loving kindness and learning from the wisdom of an ancient philosophy that someone called “positive nihilism” which suits me well as it’s is all about love, connectedness and how to navigate the facts that suffering and change are unavoidable truths.

And I went on SNRI antidepressants as we came to realise that though my reasons for feeling unhappy were valid, nonetheless my health had pushed me into a clinical depression and my brain needed some assistance climbing out of that. And I was already getting therapy and that helped a little though not as much as the support of my friends and family because the mental health support system is overstretched and besides I was tired of the dehumanising process of being a problem to be fixed, that was in fact part of what was hurting me so badly.

And I went through loss, I had two important relationships fall apart at the exact same time and felt the ache and hurt and heartbreak and confusion that comes from conflict with those you love and then I practised self-compassion and honouring my heartbreak and sadness and letting myself move through all the stages of grief and anger and loss and letting go. I am still moving through those but the process of doing it with a great deal of compassion for myself is strengthening me further as heartbreak doesn’t have to harden me or destroy me, but instead can soften me to the pain of others. And as my compassion grew and therefore my sense of connectedness to others, my life started getting better.

And I started letting go of shame. I was shaming myself a little less for not earning money and struggling with mental health problems and I was valuing myself a little more for the contributions I was making in the world. And I realised my principals are entirely about kindness and that made me feel strengthened and driven. I decided I was going to be ferociously kind and I started to get more in touch with my anger (with unfortunate mishaps along the way because I’m still working through trauma and anger and it’s messy stuff) and I started to get more in touch with my pain. And my life started getting better.

Earlier this year, I stood on the edge of a train platform in New York City and nearly jumped. Sometimes I am still blindsided by the horror, the sickening realisation of what I nearly did. I saw oblivion and what I went through had the trauma of a near death experience. And now I look back, I can see that during that time, I felt utterly alone, utterly worthless and utterly helpless because I thought that my disability made me unworthy and meant I could not live a full life.

So though my life is definitely made -significantly- easier because of the surgery and the fact that I’m one of the lucky ones who might be able to get better, I want to reject the toxic notion that the only reason my life is better now is because I am starting to become more abled bodied, more “normal”. Yes, it’s true, I’m happier because I’m seeing that I can start to follow my biggest dreams again. Yes, I’m happier because life is fucking easier. This is true. But it’s not the only truth and not the only possibly positive outcome.

Because it may not have been the case. It was entirely possible that the surgery wouldn’t work and the thing I realised, before I went under the knife, was that even if my body didn’t improve, I could still live a good, full, rich life, it’s just I’d have to work a whole lot harder than most people and I would need to surround myself with gentle people who would not resent me for the things I could not do or be. In fact, I’m still disabled it’s just… less than I was.

So I really want to say this with as much emphasis as I possibly can… if you know someone who loudly complains about their pain, please think twice before you shame them for “whinging” because you don’t know what it feels like to be inside their skin. If you know someone who is engaging in acts of self-harm and suicidal ideation, please don’t dismiss them or get angry at them for the state they are in. It’s so hard to look straight at pain, it’s so hard to look at people who are suffering because the sheer existential horror of it scares us and so we’d rather look away in fear and disgust. But I need to say this with as much emphasis as I possibly can, the only reason that I am alive today is because of the people who didn’t walk away, didn’t angrily chastise me, who instead sat with me through my pain and reminded me that I could have joy. The only reason I am alive today is because of the people I gave love to and who loved me in return.

Let me say that again. The only reason that I am alive today is because of the people who didn’t walk away, didn’t angrily chastise me, who instead sat with me through my pain and reminded me that I could have joy. The only reason I am alive today is because of the people I gave love to and who loved me in return.

Disabled people and the chronically ill can have amazing lives, do amazing things, make the world richer, kinder, wiser. But so many of our struggles are invisible and so much greater than you may perhaps realise so please, as much as you can, strive to be patient and generous and kind and to realise that though someone might have more struggles than you, it doesn’t mean they can’t have brilliant, beautiful, valuable lives. Please, I implore you, behold the pain of others and of yourself with gentleness and kindness, not pity and anger.

My life started getting better when I started being kind to myself and surrounding myself in kindness. That was the thing that saved my life and made me want to stick around in this world for as long as I possibly can, love. Just love.

Heavy

Deciding to live is not the same as wanting to live. This depression is thick and heavy, I feel immobilised. I understand that there are still good things and that there is still hope but that only sits in the part of my brain that deals with concepts, nothing feels good and I guess feelings are the stuff of motivation.

I had a moment of feeling good the other day. The helplessness had become unbearable and so I worked on my website for an hour. It felt… good. Yeah. Good. Because there I was, there was the person that I love to be.  I am so capable of the things I love to do, the stuff of my art, the thinking with my arms. How do I explain that I think with my arms? How do I explain how much it breaks my heart, every single day, to struggle to simply hold them up?

I know I sound like a broken record. I know I am wallowing in self-pity, tortured by the person stuck inside my crippled body. I know there are people who get on with things, no matter what and I fear I am not one of those people. I’m trying. God, I’m trying. I diligently attend my therapy, I try to make myself do things that will be good for me but without my arms to think with, it all feels like a shitty substitute for the life I want and it’s hard to muster up the positivity to feel like there is a point to this. I’m supposed to accept, to adapt, to move forward… and maybe maybe maybe I could actually do that if I knew where I was going but I’m still waiting for the big unknown of surgery.

And it’s two days later and I am still paying for that thinking with my arms for an hour. My body doesn’t allow for much of that anymore. Yesterday, my battle for the entire day was just continuing to sit up because my head felt too heavy and my arms were enormous weights pulling on my neck, stretching what can’t be stretched because it is trapped in spaces that are too small. Nerve pain is like when you lower your body into a bath that is far too hot, you just want to get out get out get out get out get out get out get out but you can’t you can’t you can’t you can’t can’t. You can’t.

I went on holiday recently, two weeks in New York and my body demanded my attention the whole time. I understood then that there really is no escape from the prison of my flesh. It was devastating and lonely. Crying on trains in New York was good though because nobody even cares. Why can’t the world be more like that? Why can’t we just cry when we’re in pain? Why do I put so much effort into concealing how I feel so that people won’t reject me? Is pretending to be ok a prerequisite of love? Life is hard and hurts and why do I feel so much fucking shame for feeling so weakened?

Fuck.

I’ve not been okay for a while now but there have been good days among that. I’m not feeling those good days anymore. I’m just waiting. Waiting for a medical system that is slow, indifferent, expensive and has almost entirely failed me so far. Waiting for the day when I have muscles and bones cut from one side of me. Then the six months of healing. Then, best case scenario, I get muscles and bones removed from my other side and spend another six months healing. And a year later, if I’m really lucky, I might be a little better.

See this is all I can reasonably hope for, is that I might be a little less crippled, or at the very least, that I don’t keep getting worse. Best case scenario, I can be a little better. But I’ve already watched my life grow smaller over the last seven years and I’m so tired and so bitter. I hate watching people do what they love, I see their freedom and it makes me feel so sick with jealousy. And I hate them for not knowing how free they are. And I hate myself for becoming this. I feel like I’m getting old and ugly. I guess I should be in my life, I guess I should be using what I do have and being grateful.

But I’m just not. I’m trying so hard to be. But sometimes the battle just to remain sitting upright, or to not cry in pain when I’m socialising because I want people to still love me and not grow tired of the tedium of my existence… that just depletes me of my mental and emotional energy. I’m so low on motivation. I am afraid that the smaller my life becomes, the harder things become, the less I will have to offer. I feel distant and disconnected. I fear becoming unlovable.

Talking to other disabled people helps sometimes. They understand. They know what a battle just getting through a day is. But nothing seems to stick. Deciding to live is not the same as wanting to live. I’m not ok but I really don’t know what to do about that. I’m doing things, I’m getting therapy, I’m taking on projects but everything hurts and I’m struggling to see the point.

I’m trying. I’m living for him but struggling to want to for me. I guess I still feel some hope but I don’t have anything like faith. Inside my head I observe myself screaming “help” but what the fuck does that even mean.

Suicide

There have been a couple of times in my life where I have felt suicidal and though I’ve briefly mentioned it before, I don’t want to talk about it in detail so I am going to. When I was a teenager, I observed that my favourite artists were so often brutal, awkward and unattractive in their honesty which had the effect of making me feel more comfortable in my own skin and less alone, so I challenged myself to be the same. I still try to. Enough stalling, here goes.

I don’t know what it takes to be part of the Totes Legit Suicidal Club because I never swallowed any pills or jumped off any bridges. Though, at about the age of 12, I became very fascinated by the warning message on my aerosol deodorants “Intentional misuse by deliberate concentration and inhalation can be harmful or fatal.” I only tried to misuse my Vanilla Kisses body spray a handful of times and don’t remember much more than dizziness and once, a slightly uncomfortable headache. I remember the emotions though, I remember the shame.

The shame wasn’t about my flirtation with mortality, the shame was about my inability to commit to my demise. At that point, I had been chronically ill for some time and felt myself to be a burden on my family and to have no purpose or future. I felt that I was nothing but a shadow of a person, heavy and stagnant and the gesture of self-destruction felt like it would at least be… something.

And of course it would be an escape. Perhaps the worst thing about chronic illness, worse than the humiliation, the pain, the isolation… the worst thing I remember is the boredom. The days that melted into each other, stretching endless and tedious behind and in front. Sometimes I fish about in my head for memories of those years and only get feelings that make me uncomfortable and vague memories of bedsheets and shitty TV shows. I know that this wasn’t the entire truth of those times because as an adult, I see the privileges from my childhood but I believe that being ill for so long made me perceive everything through a very deep depression.

Bored and caged animals will pluck their feathers out or chew at their flesh. I have an intimate familiarity with that impulse and for some years I was the cliché of teenage angst, late at night when the frustration, self-loathing or tedium became unbearable, I would take to my arms and legs with a kitchen knife, slowly slicing shallow red lines into my flesh. It is not in accord with popular opinion for me to say this, but it truly felt as if that behaviour curbed my violent impulses and I recall the ringing in my ears and the nauseous calm I felt as I watched bloody lines appear. It was like white noise, it blocked things out and focused my attention. Cutting is seen as an unhealthy behaviour and certainly mine was a symptom of a great unhappiness, however I think that channelling the violent emotions I was feeling into something that had no long term negative effects on my physicality was actually… helpful. I am not necessarily defending the behaviour, though I do believe it kept me from something more drastic.

I haven’t cut myself in years, having learnt more “constructive” and “adult” ways of dealing with my emotions. However, in 2014, when I turned 30, I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to be dead. My (then undiagnosed) Thoracic Outlet Syndrome was at its worst, I was in constant pain, unable to sleep, dependent on my partner financially and unable to do any of the things that made me feel valuable, excited, alive. It had been over four years since I first had problems with my arms and it seemed to only be getting worse. My future and prospects felt bleak, once again I felt like a burden, once again I was the thing I had been working so hard not to be, once again I was nothing.

It felt like a Chinese finger trap, the harder I struggled, the tighter the grip it had around me. I was bored, frustrated and just so sick of trying. And now I had access to the Internet, I thought about how easy it might be to just research the most painless, simple methods of self-annihilation. I was an adult now, maybe this time I had the willpower to follow through and…

And I thought of Wes. And I knew how I might ruin his life if I did this. And so, though it was incredibly hard to do so, I told him how I was feeling and he implored me to keep trying, he promised he would help. In honesty, I half hated him for it at the time, half hated him for the way his love meant I had to keep trying when it felt so hard and I was so tired. So completely spent.

But I kept trying. In honesty it was for Wes at first and not for me, but slowly things started to improve during 2015. I found mindfulness meditation which has helped me be gentler with myself and better tolerate the things I hadn’t control over, I found my cat, I did some volunteer work, I started working on a web series, I started learning to sing. I got a diagnosis. I fell even more deeply in love with Wes and back in love with someone else who I never thought I’d see again.

So this year, 2016, has been kind of incredible so far. The diagnosis of TOS has transformed my self-perceptions and given me a sense that my future is no longer hopeless. I have an abundance of love. And for the first two weeks of this month, we were filming the web series that I first conceived of in 2014 when I was thinking about how I would like to be dead. Filming was the most scary, exhausting, stressful thing I have possibly ever done and I was so ecstatically happy. I rediscovered a self that in 2014, I thought I had permanently lost and I felt like the poster child for an “It Gets Better” type project. I am struggling to express what those two weeks meant to me but there were so many times when I was thinking to myself “Remember this. Remember that if you had given up, you would not have gotten to do this.” While feeling, truly feeling, that it was all going to be better from here.

Two days after we finished filming, my body seized up with pain from computer work and I was blindsided by the sudden onset of old, morbid thoughts. I was devastated, my body felt like a trap again and the joy I’d been feeling felt like a sick lie. For just a little while, I resented how amazing I had been feeling for how hard I was now crashing. But the people I love helped pull my head out of that ugly place and though I am now feeling a little shook up, vulnerable and prone to moments of sorrow, I do believe things are improving.

It’s just… it’s not a straight line pointing upwards for the rest of my life. My body will always cause issues, horrible things will inevitably happen and there will probably always be many things I am unable to do. I may always be taunted, in my vulnerable moments, by the self I could have been if only my body hasn’t failed me so many times and I’ve now had to face the unpleasant reality that suicidal thoughts may not be something a person can permanently escape. This might be something I have to battle again because that is what life has to do, life has to fight.

But if/when these morbid thoughts reawaken in my head, here is what I will tell myself: Despite how seductive it can be, suicide is not the opposite of stagnation. Fight and be proud of yourself for doing so because life fights. And remember, when you wanted to die, you could never have known how amazing you’d feel when you moved to Melbourne, produced and starred in a stupid musical theatre comedy that would receive rave reviews, married your best friend in a pantomime unicorn outfit, roamed the streets of Berlin with a wonderful lover, lay on the side of the planet and stared into the stars with a man who makes you feel alive, spent two weeks in a studio filming the most ambitious project you’ve worked on up to this point, danced all night, played with your cat, painted for an hour without pain, baked a cake, learned to rap, laughed with your idiot friends… the list of good things far outweighs the negative. These things, these moments of joy and triumph are always worth it.

Always.

On an almost daily basis, I struggle with the feeling that I am nothing and it’s true. I am. We all are. Ultimately, we will all be helpless in the face of our own mortality, it’s just that people who have their body fail when they are young have to face that reality earlier than some. In the smallest fraction of time, everything we know will cease to exist. In the interim, I am taking the resources I have and making some fucking spectacular moments with them, like fireworks exploding in the cold and dark night sky.

Chronic

An elderly woman boards the train carrying several bags of groceries and a middle-aged man carries a toddler on with ease. Many commuters are hunched over their phones, typing and swiping for the duration of their journey while one teenage girl is standing, one hand raised up to grip the pole behind her, the other holding her book.

I repress that familiar feeling of bitterness and envy and look down at my hands which sit placed on my lap, useable yet useless. My fingers are curled in the way that always happens when my muscles tighten and my nerves burn, I try to focus on my breathing, on mindfulness, on anything that might help my body ease up just the slightest and give me some microscopic moment of relief.

I swallow the bitterness but when it reaches my stomach it becomes sorrow and once again I find myself crying in public. I find my mind fixating on the thought of people who spend countless pain free hours on video games, who can mindlessly utilise their hands for pleasure. What I wouldn’t give to have just a few hours to paint free of pain. What I wouldn’t give to have back the freedom I took for granted until I lost it.

Pain is a demanding companion, constantly clamouring for my attention. For the last several weeks my pain has sat at about a 6 out of 10 and while that isn’t as bad as it can be, what tortures me is how little I can do about this, how it is exacerbated by any sort of use of my arms so that my only real option is to wait this out but that waiting it out only means waiting for a decrease in pain because I can’t remember the last time it went away completely.

I truly have forgotten what it feels like to be completely free of pain. Every day is a negotiation, if I decide to drive for more than an hour, I may not be able to do anything else for the day. If I decide to sit down and write an email or two, I might not be able to paint for a week; if I decide to draw for an hour, I might be in especial pain for the next three days; if I use my phone, it will hurt; if I vacuum, it will hurt; if I bake, or weed the garden, or handwrite anything, or simply sit still to read a book or watch a show, it will hurt. Writing this is definitely going to cost me, despite the fact that I am using voice dictation software to make the process easier.

I am a person who thrives on activity and creativity but doing so little now costs so much. The things I love to do the most cost so much. Very often these days, my body feels like a cage and I have to fight the irrational but powerful desire to attempt to gnaw off my own limbs.

I was chronically ill in my childhood, bedridden on and off for many years and I still feel affected by the spectre of that experience. I have memories of immense loneliness, crushing boredom and claustrophobia, the feeling of being a burden to my loved ones and the despair of not being able to imagine any sort of future for myself. I remember at about 13 years old, I started thinking regularly about suicide; the idea enticed me, it seemed as if it would be an incredible relief, especially if I could find a way to do it painlessly and quietly, but the thought of causing my family that sort of pain held me back. I’m glad that despite my self-esteem being devastated by my illness, I was still able to understand that I was loved.

The other thing I remember from that experience was how many people told me I was faking it. Kids at school, their parents, family friends, relatives. So many people told me I was faking it that to this day I somehow don’t quite know if I was sick for all those years or if it was perhaps some early manifestation of the anxiety and depression I experience as an adult but now have the self-awareness and coping mechanisms to be able to manage relatively well.

Children have few defences against the unkindness and scorn of others. I felt an incredible sense of shame and began to dread being seen by people, for fear they would turn to my parents saying “she doesn’t look sick at all!” As an adult my response might be along the lines of “but you’re sure as dumb as you look!” but as an 11 year old, I just felt judged. Ashamed. Grotesque somehow. I can’t articulate why exactly, but I felt like I was failing at being what I was supposed to be and this made me feel ugly.

If I’m honest, I often still feel that way now. When I was a child it was Glandular Fever left undiagnosed for too long that became many years of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome culminating in a deep and abiding depression that I only managed to pull myself out of when I dropped out of high school, where I was too far behind to ever catch up, put together a portfolio and went to art school. I then had seven of the best years of my life, four years of art school and three years of working and living in Melbourne. Then I got Repetitive Strain Injury in both my arms which only recently has been given the tentative (but I believe to be correct) diagnosis of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome.

I could write about going through almost 5 years of unsympathetic doctors, misdiagnosis, misinformation, and bad medical advice that exacerbated and worsened my injury. I could talk about the miserable attitudes of the places I worked. I could talk about the incredible amount of money spent desperately trying to find a solution. It might be cathartic to write about those things but it would also fill a novel and be incredibly boring for anybody who is not me.

Instead, I will simply say this: for the longest time I blamed myself for my RSI. I told myself that I worked too hard and had caused the injury and a few years into my RSI, I told myself it was my fault that I wasn’t better, I hadn’t worked hard enough at fixing it. Basically, I blamed myself for working too hard and then blamed myself for not working hard enough.

We get told two stories in our culture. The first story is that if you want to succeed, you have to work hard, long and passionately. When I did that, it hurt my body. The second story is that if you are sick or injured, you can overcome it through sheer force of will and possibly a montage involving drinking kale juice, running along a beach and pumping iron with the assistance of a hot personal trainer. I’ve tried to get better in so many different ways and I continue to do so. Sometimes I do come across things that help and improve my quality of life but I am yet to climb Mount Everest using nothing but my teeth.

And sometimes I give up in despair. In fact it is a regular occurrence. There have been times when I have said “FUCK IT” and painted for too long, spent too long on the computer or neglected to do my stretches and exercises because sometimes they feel futile and I am just so tired of trying. During those times that I give up, I feel overwhelmed by the enormity of my failure and the physical pain feels like punishment for my weakness of will.

There is another story we tell ourselves in our culture and that is regarding the omnipotence of our doctors. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been in conversation with someone who has repeated over and over again “Surely there is SOMETHING they can do! I can’t believe there is nothing they can do!” But the truth is bodies are complicated, medical science is still playing catch up and there is so much we are yet to understand. Until relatively recently, RSI was considered psychosomatic (an attitude I’ve seen still reflected by some of the doctors I have seen) and even now it is poorly understood. The surgeries are crude and have a poor rate of efficacy, in fact they can make the problem worse. I have tried a great multitude of treatments and the best results I have gotten is from deep tissue massage which only serves to relieve the pain temporarily, not fix the underlying cause.

But that attitude people have of doctors being all knowing, of medicine having a solution for everything – that is damaging. It hurt me when I followed poor advice and worsened the damage on my body. And it hurts me now when people don’t believe this has been as hard as I say it is. Effectively, I feel they are telling me that I haven’t tried hard enough.

I think I can understand this. I think that when we look at other people’s problems, we imagine that we would not get ourselves into such a situation. We like to believe we are smarter, stronger, better than the person who is struggling. It is perhaps comforting to think so.

I also believe that we have an almost animalistic reaction to those who are injured or ill, a fear of being infected by them, or of them holding back the herd. Whatever it is, weakness makes us incredibly uncomfortable and I can feel that when I talk about my injury or, as I am starting to think I should more aptly call it, my chronic condition. People don’t want to know, it is perhaps easier for them to view me as weak, whiny, overdramatic. Hell, for the longest time, I saw myself that way.

Another thing I have noticed is how often RSI, particularly carpal tunnel, is the butt of jokes in popular media. It is the imaginary affliction of hypochondriacs, drama queens and airheads. It is hard to conceive of an invisible, poorly understood affliction as being life altering. Perhaps this is the other reason I feel shame. Perhaps this is the other reason I ramble awkwardly and feel self-conscious when I speak to people about my experience; able-bodied people cannot imagine what it is like to have to pay the price of pain should you choose to do anything pleasurable, productive or necessary.

The other problem is that every second person has had RSI. Well, they’ve had pain from typing too much but it eased off quickly when they stopped typing or had a session or two of dry needling. That experience of RSI is very different to mine, just as mine is different to the people who have had it for 15 years, who have had permanent nerve damage, botched surgeries and who cannot even use a can opener. Because RSI is a blanket term, people struggle to understand that the temporary ache they have experienced in their hands is different to this thing that I fear might leave me unable to work for the rest of my life, the thing that makes me jealous of people who get to complain about the hard day they had at work.

Last year I was about to turn 30 years old and not long after that would mark the 4th anniversary of when I first noticed that tell-tale tingling in my right hand while I was video editing. I was unemployed, often in pain so relentless that I would wake in tears, unable to hug my partner in bed because of the discomfort and I felt completely worn out. I was tired of fighting and for the first time since I was a young teenager, I started to think about suicide.

That time was too recent for me to comfortably talk about in detail. Suffice to say, it was a dark, miserable period and Wes says it was terrifying for him. And Wes probably kept me alive.

Wes who has supported me financially for all these years and never makes me feel guilty about it, knowing how unhappy I already feel to once again be a burden on someone, though I know he doesn’t see it that way. Wes who massages my trigger points every morning and every night so that I can sleep without my hands going numb. Wes who has held me countless times while I cried for an hour. Wes who, simply for being in my life, reminds me to be grateful.

Here is what I am grateful for. I am grateful to have a partner who is consistently and unwaveringly supportive and loving. I am grateful that though it stretches our finances to the limit, we can afford my weekly myotherapy sessions that have decreased my pain somewhat and allowed me back into the studio just a little. I am grateful for the financial support my parents offer when they are able. I am grateful for having legs that can take me on long walks when I am in too much pain to sit still or do anything much else at all. I am grateful for Netflix documentaries that keep my mind stimulated when I feel starved and allow me to travel when I feel claustrophobic. I am grateful for audiobooks; where sitting still and reading for long periods of time has become difficult and painful, audiobooks have brought reading, of a sort, back into my life and currently I am devouring everything by Octavia Butler with relish. I am grateful for the incredible comedy group I am a part of, it has given me the sense of direction I lost, the creative outlet I craved and the sense of identity I needed. I am grateful for the incredible network of people I know who fill my life with colour, creativity and support. I am grateful for the stray cat, Dicey, who followed us home and now follows me about the house, keeping me company when I am broke, sore and sad and giving me a sense of having a future. I may never be rid of this pain, and maybe, Atheist’s God forbid, it may even get worse as the years go by, but for perhaps the next 16 years I’ll have a cat with a tummy that is soft, furry and made of joy.

It’s hard to talk about how my RSI makes me feel, how emotionally challenging this has been because I have felt so ashamed for how much this wears me down. But here it is, the truth is this injury has changed my life dramatically. In many ways, my life is worse, everything is harder and my future feels shaky and uncertain. Often, I feel vulnerable, lonely and unhappy. Sometimes I feel bitter, petty and jealous. Sometimes I feel grief for the self I was briefly able to be, the incredibly capable self who earned her own money, painted all day when she had the time, read in her spare time without pain, wrote constantly in her blog and looked towards her future with excitement. Sometimes I feel irreparably broken, indescribably weak.

But recently there have been some minor changes to that mindset. Recently I have stopped blaming myself so viciously for my injury, I refocused that anger on the doctors who told me there was nothing wrong, the work colleagues I had to battle simply to get basic ergonomic equipment and the society we have created that values ambition over compassion, competitiveness over kindness. This has been healthy for me. I am slowly coming to understand that this is not my fault and that I have tried hard. Really damn hard.

With that understanding comes a new sort of self-esteem, the sort where I can look at myself sometimes and admire my strength, my fighting spirit and my passion that keeps me being an artist despite how goddamn hard that is now. I’ve also learned to be more patient, to sit still and enjoy watching a tiny winged insect crawl across my hand even as my body throbs and burns and I now observe people who barrel through their lives doing a million incredible things, taking for granted a million different privileges but who can’t slow down long enough to enjoy any of it. I deeply believe that the struggles I have had over my life give me a compassion that I see sorely lacking in some others who have never been ill for a day in their lives, and the perspective to value, truly value, the gifts that life does happen to throw my way. Though the price I’ve had to pay for it can feel unreasonable and unfair, I treasure that compassion and those moments of wisdom. Lately, despite the continuation of the pain, the fear, the misery… I am finding ways to be happy again. Truly happy.

This is not to say I am happy with the way the dice has rolled for me but I know that it could be worse, so much worse and so I remind myself that in a universe indifferent to us, we are simply lucky to exist. On the days when my pain calms down and I can paint for an hour, I am so grateful and so happy that for a while everything else flows into the periphery of my vision. Joy is so precious to me that when I have it, I feel the ever-loving fuck out of it.

And of course I will never give up. Acceptance is different to defeat. Maybe I will never get better but I will never stop trying. The alternative choice is unacceptable to me.

Yesterday I found out that Invisible Illness Week had just passed. I missed it because I haven’t been online much recently due to a spike in my pain levels. It motivated me to write about my experience and I have endeavoured to be as honest as I possibly can. It feels uncomfortable to speak quite this openly about my experience but reading about other people’s struggles has helped me to feel less isolated and to find new reservoirs of strength within myself. I’m hoping perhaps my truth will resonate with someone else, perhaps even help someone.

I’m going to post this now before I chicken out. If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading. I think that most anyone who has ever hurt will agree that being listened to is all we really want from you.

Soft, furry and made of joy.