what to change in order to become yourself

As I relaxed into the embrace of the floor, I could feel myself there, the honey and tawny strands of the floorboards spreading out from underneath me, the sun spilling down on us through the windows. But I could also feel the past bubbling up to the surface, I considered the particles of memory floating like dust motes in my field of vision between me and the floor receiving the forces pouring through me. A shitty little house in Nowhere, Florida with almost no furniture and an empty fridge. The places where my brother and I slept were two couch cushions on the floor, shoved in opposite corners of the room, my body still small enough that I could curl myself onto it, as I watched the roaches skitter around in the dark. That house where my brother and I were mostly alone, I was too small to reach the sink in the bathroom or the countertops in the kitchen as we tried to feed ourselves, if I needed water, to clean myself. Once I reached up to the top of the electric stove in curiosity while my brother's back was turned, and seared a perfect spiral onto the flesh of my tiny hand, radiating out from the center all the way to the fingertips. I think he was just tall enough to boil some hotdogs for lunch. That was when my father still claimed joint custody of us, and those weekends still pop up in my emotional radar sometimes, collateral damage while my parents used us as pawns in a game I was helpless inside of.

The floor. Like reflections on a soap bubble, the past swirled around me as I watched. And it was the past, so I let it fall away to feel the coolness underneath my body that balanced out the heat on my skin from the window.

As I moved, considering the instructions from the teacher of what and how to explore, I found a familiar wall of panic when I reach a place where it feels like I am incapable of doing what I was being asked to do. Getting as still as possible and trying to slow my breathing, I knew I needed to stop moving before I triggered a full blown panic, but I could feel the painful contractions starting around where I imagine my vocal chords to be and instinctively pulled myself inwards, like a reverse unfurling of a fern. Like a switch was flipped, I was free, I could move past the paralysis at the beginning of a meltdown.

Once when I used to babysit the neighbor's triplet toddlers, I was around for a birthday party. The father was a problem, and not much long afterwards they went their separate ways (he took the older son, she took the triplet girls), and I don't remember what he said or did, but one of the girls started crying from a startle. I was in high school, just helping in every way I could because I saw the mom needed help, and I heard something I recognized in that little girl's cry - after the third one that sounded exactly the same, like a computer, a record caught on a loop, I knew I had to disrupt the repeating pattern and I gathered her in to me. While her parents snapped at each other in whispers, her cries multiplied and then subsided after a fractal shift. My mother has mentioned a few times her early experiences of being potty trained - my grandfather punished their accidents by making them wear their soiled panties on their heads, overlapping their face, their breathing pathways. Recently I've started to wonder about how being shamed about something you have no control over affects us as adults, maybe the thread of chronic constipation she has suffered her whole life is a story I am telling about her relationship to shame and her need to be in control even at the cost of our relationship. Her inappropriate sharing with me of her sexual escapades as I moved from prepubescence into sexual maturation also gives me the perspective of how her bowels turn to liquid when she is emotionally or sexually attuned to a man, and in her lack of control, we were often forgotten in her blind hunger for something only her interactions with these men could potentially fill. I wonder if her inability to let stuff out is intimately related to my inability to receive.

Manifesting is both a concrete and completely unpredictable thing. I wonder if noticing any of those potential connections might be a way for my mother to knit back together some damage, to be able to tell new stories about how she relates to others. I wonder why I have the distinct habit of relating everything I experience to a few early similar experiences, instead of being able to fully be inside of something new. My mother and I, why must we always be in control over everything? I can't even bring myself to what seems like a childish place of hoping for a return of adoration in a sexual partner, to let myself be so lost in something as unpredictable and defenseless and dangerous as being 'in love' whatever that silly fabricated idea arises out of.

This is not my father's floor and I am not that child on a couch cushion. How can i wade through these stories, untangle these threads enough to make a different choice and not succumb to the emotional bubbles trapped inside of them? Maybe I am exactly where I need to be, learning how to love the floor, how to receive its support, how to give it the fullness of my weight. To know it can't be taken from me, the it won't turn me down, that when I lay in its embrace, it is impossible to fall.

when meaning shifts, meaninglessness follows.

  

  

Combusting rage and sexual tension as a power source, blind to everything but conquering inefficiency, filled with steam, purpose. Equal parts fuel and intoxication.

'Do you even cry?' He asked at the bar later.

Feet pounding on pavement, my feet. Screaming at the muscular man that just got out of his graffiti covered box truck. Not one of ours. Blocking my trucks. In my way.

'He doesn't like a single thing about you.' He told me. I grinned my Cheshire grin, remained as still as possible and disappeared from the bar as soon as I could. Descend into the subway station, radiating the kind of stillness that signals a building storm. Silence on the train.

Handsome work partner, all silver hair and tanned skin sprawled out next to me on the forklift, melting under my hands as I pressed my fingertips into the sinew of his back, chasing the emotional tightness down his spine. Stories hang from his lip like his cigarette, wry, sometimes silly memories from being locked up mixed with ashes picked up by the wind. They swirl around us like snow, like lost time, remains of the fire as it dies down. Silver hair catching the afternoon light.

Some of them love me, and some of them hate me, but I can't bring myself to care, feet too busy pounding the pavement, barking at the truck drivers, using my body as a physical barrier to modulate traffic. My presence spills down the street like sunshine bursting from behind a cloud, as big as the buildings, it smells like fumes and tastes like ashes.

A cold rage takes over me towards the end. It followed me offsite, startling me and my work partner while grabbing coffee. 'It must be from the barbeque I had for lunch...' I tell him, thoughtful. This isn't my normal foghorn power, it's cold and nasty and reeks of low energy.

'Dumbass.' I said to someone I love dearly when they missed the corner of a box with the forklift. Shut myself down immediately in secret horror. No one else saw my mother come out of me in that moment, but the awareness filled me with the stone cold weight of shame. That was always her word. Not mine.

'See you never.' I told him as I left, since I never know when I will see him. He wrapped me in the deepest, sweetest embrace, and I was barely aware of my arms struggling to pull him into me.

Not mine.

Sitting at the bar letting the beer kill the burn in my belly, the one that could eat a man alive, no one would know since I radiate stillness, seem sturdy and dependable as a stone, but I'm starting to wonder if, instead of wielding it, it will eventually wield me.



"They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the future. Their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death."

siren                    

Meaning "device that makes a warning sound" (on an ambulance, etc.) first recorded 1879, in reference to steamboats, perhaps from similar use of the French word. Figurative sense of "one who sings sweetly and charms" is recorded from 1580s. The classical descriptions of them were mangled in medieval translations and glosses, resulting in odd notions of what they looked like.

 

noun

1. Classical Mythology. one of several sea nymphs, part woman and part bird, who lure mariners to destruction by their seductive singing.

2. a seductively beautiful or charming woman, especially one who beguiles men

3. an acoustical instrument for producing musical tones, consisting essentially of a disk pierced with holes arranged equidistantly in a circle, rotated over a jet or stream of compressed air, steam, or the like, so that the stream is alternately interrupted and allowed to pass. 4. an implement of this kind used as a whistle, fog signal, or warning device.

Hence the dark and light now arouse each other.

In my mystics class, the speaker was talking about opening ourselves up to explore the room and each other with our senses, to allow ourselves to perceive things on a deeper, less obvious level. One of us, another student, asked if he meant 'sense' as in the 5 senses, or as in feeling emotions.

"Same thing." he replied.

He talked for a little bit about the possibility that emotions are a behavioral response to what is being sensed, that it is intimately part of the experience of logging information and drawing conclusions from what is being perceived.

That same student had given a small presentation on the life and spiritual development of C. S. Lewis, and one of the quotes she talked about from him had a lot to do with our separation from nature, and our passionate, constant longing to be folded into it, apart, whole again. I think being so heavily conscious is both the token thing that makes us unique in our own minds, and also forces us to feel different, alone. It seems that we have developed keen abilities to intellectualize things, to freeze images, aspects, objects and our emotional reactions to them, to be able to ponder things from a safe, objective distance. So we have become too afraid to be inside of an experience, looking out, to fearlessly step into mental illness, into connection, into love, into our fears, into something potentially painful. We do not nourish the brave parts of self, we quantify and qualify, moralize and demoralize, at a remove that severs us from ever being fully immersed in an experience. Maybe, just like we are taught at a certain point in childhood that we aren't allowed to touch each other, that it becomes an invasion of space, rather than a continuation of exploration, maybe we are taught then that we are separate from nature, that we are some distant, intellectual other, that, like Adam, we must spend our lives naming things rather than tasting them. How do we go past this forced perception? Education systems have developed out of a dogma that pits emotion and reason against each other, and we learn at a very young age that messy non rational emotions are expected to be considered lightly, if not all together ignored, rather than a natural part of ourselves that can be crafted, honed and wielded just as powerfully as our thoughts. We are all partially crippled creatures, and our cut off from the rest of existence is self imposed. We force it on our children. We are ashamed, filled with shame, conquered by it. Catholic, Christian or not, it consumes our existence. Especially the scientists.

We are ashamed of having feelings. Of feeling them.

A lot of the Mystics talk about emotion as how we access the spiritual, or how we tap into nature, each other. Every time that comes up, I wonder about anger, how we all learned growing up in western culture that anger and Satan are one and the same. I have always been hugely ashamed of mine, I ignore it, I walk away and allow safe, controlled bursts for no one to witness my shame and loss of control, I have almost completely eradicated my ability to perceive it. It is a thing unexpressed. When I am filled with it, it immobilizes me, and I am too afraid to be in that black space alone, or that I won't be around people I trust.

But actively ignoring it doesn't mean it goes away. It darkens my past so all I can see are the things I couldn't shout at people who were not kind, or gentle with me when they should have been. When I was tender, when I was fresh. It has left all of my memories twisted with black, with helplessness. I have not learned to wield it with maturity, I hide it like a phantom special needs child that will probably just humiliate me. I am ashamed of it, and as a part of myself, that shame spreads out and attaches itself to other things. If any emotion is a potential to experience the world more deeply, to access the divine, I imagine that cutting off any emotion becomes part of the problem, a kink in the connection, a cut wire, an artfully intellectualized self sabotage against feeling my own feelings and knowing myself.

"...winter in the course of the year, and midnight in the course of the day, are the time of concentration."

Maybe this is where we developed the concept of Ice Queens in our fairy tales, maybe this is why I always felt trapped in semi darkness, maybe this winter was much longer than I realized. Maybe this is why I am so intense, why its almost impossible to find lightness of being. That for how much I want to burn with feeling, I may be actively shunning warmth/light/fire/sun because I am too afraid of what the light would show, that it might be something embarrassing and crippled.

That there are so many different ways to burn.