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.

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.

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.