46 Self-Portrait in the Pause – Part III – Story & Suerza

The Parts/Voices are vast and consistent. Each Part/Voice is attached to a narrative that feels as true in its story.

There are some days when I feel disconnected from my self. Like my brain and its Forest of Change is hovering over me, denying me my self, my ability to be present, to embrace the lists, to do the doing, to feel, to trust, to love myself. There are some days when I have no motivation to do or feel anything. Except maybe, to dislike my self.

I don’t know what I will wake up to. Who…what parts, what voices will take the helm when I sit up, and swing my legs over the side of the bed. Some days my body hurts all over. Some days my spine feels like rubber. Most days, my tailbone feels like an angry, swollen stone (who says stones don’t have feelings?!) and it hurts when I sit. Most days, I can’t look in the mirror for too long. Or if I do, I have to focus on one thing, like my hair or my mouth. I can’t look at the entirety of me because…well, the Parts hate most of me.

My interior self does not look or feel like my exterior self. This is another distinction…and something that contributes to my dysmorphia of body and mind. It is a narrative/Part/Voice I was born with, I believe, and that was cultivated by witnessing the women around me who also ‘hated’ or wanted to change how their bodies looked. As well, I can see now that those ‘famous’ women who I watched (musicians/actresses/athletes) all had bodies that were thin and/or muscular. I love to see how media has shifted in this regard, how different bodies are in commercials and shows and films. I can see and appreciate the strides in inclusion and diversity…and it is helping me with my narratives about my own body. But I still find myself, my Parts, thinking – what does that woman really believe about her body? If she ‘loves’ her body in that shape and form, what does she hate? It’s like, one of the narratives that connects the other body narratives is that if a woman loves her body…what other part of herself does she despise? As if as women, (as humans?) there simply must be some part(s) of us that we struggle with. Is that an accurate narrative? I don’t know what it’s like to not wake up and immediately think about what I will eat, what my body will feel and look like, whether or not I will exercise, drink enough water or write. These Parts, these narratives, come with the sun, sing like birdsong…whip like wind.

But I’ve never been more aware of these narratives, and more..available/open to the possibility that I can (and am?) changing these narratives and/or deleting them. Imagine what it would be like to go through an entire day and NOT think about food (calories/fat/sugar) and exercise (what? when? how long? is my caloric intake less than calories burned exercise? Will I lose weight today?).

I’ve been trying something new…when I can remember to do it! I’ll be doing something…like maybe yard work or stretching, and I’ll look at my legs, say, or my hands…and I’ll say to myself: thank you for my functioning legs, thank you for my useful hands. The moments are fleeting…but it scoots out the other thoughts that speak to lack, pain, or hatred. I want to be everyday-aware and conscious and grateful for my body, but it’s proving to be a difficult task to add this narrative, this habit, this to-do to the symphony of other thoughts in my brain.

Why do I forget to have (to make?) these seemingly simple and helpful/kind thoughts? Why does my body forget how good they make me feel? And why do the nasty thoughts get quieter…or even disappear when these good thoughts are…thought-ing?

Currently, I’m in the backyard, sipping on Cherry Coke Zero and munching on Cool Ranch Doritos. I know both of these food items aren’t ‘good’ for me. But, I’m sharing the chips with my daughter (she’s studying for a math exam, I’m writing to you), and I chose the soda instead of an ice cream cone (which is more calories than the soda)…I don’t have the…what do I even call it? Self-control? To not eat the chips and drink the soda, but the context of the situation is such that the soda, the chips…the sharing of it and our amazing backyard space…these things are part of the shared experience. They’re part of the Story of Early Summer Backyard memory-making. They’re part of the Story of Comfort.

Did you know that Cool Ranch Doritos debuted in 1986? I was 8-years old. I remember so vividly when this wild new flavour burst into convenience stores and into my life. We included the Cool Ranch flavour into our summer afternoons, our Friday-night movie nights…This nostalgia is also part of the context of the The Story of Early Summer.

That 8-year old girl is so alive in me. So’s the 12-year old. She’s someone really special, who’s been an important guide in helping me understand my Animus and my reactions to things regarding my life. I’ve had several, very intense therapy sessions where I’m transported to spaces (bedroom, ironing room, basement, etc.), and I can remember everything from sounds to textures to others who are there (or not), and I can feel the 8-year old or the 12-year old in these spaces like I’m actually there. The memories are so damn vivid…and what I felt then I can still feel now. And the Parts that began then…I can definitely still feel now, except that then – many of the Parts were created as coping mechanisms and/or safety/protective actions so that I could survive what was happening.

In this regard, I’m only just learning about the relationship between my central nervous system, my Animus, my vagus nerve, and my immune system. It is not surprising that I’ve had auto-immune disease(s) since I was a child. Fight, flight or freeze, that’s been huge Parts of me my entire life. That’s a lot work on the nervous system…on the guts…on the soul.

I can tell you that my 12-year old self was and continues to be The Holder of My Writing Life. She works great with my Animus. They were and continue to be fast friends! She knows she’s a Writer. She knows she’s a Reader. She knows the importance (the necessity) of reading and writing every day. She has long brown hair, wears pink cords and a cute t-shirt. Her body is a vessel alive for the purpose of reading and writing – the Demon Woman is not allowed near her. She is strong-willed yet easy-going. She doesn’t just dream, she knows, that her future includes published books, book tours, adapted books into films. She knows she will meet Tom Cruise, and maybe even convince him to be in one of her films. She lives in the bedroom I had when I was 12. On Mckay street on the west side…where the worst parts of my childhood were experienced. But she’s not afraid. In that room, with her books and her journals and her beautiful, confident, patient mind…she is also the best Part of my writing life. She is the Writer in Me.

I get emotional just thinking about her. I don’t know that I can do ‘me’ without having her so profoundly holding me in Purpose. And she is with me again in beautiful force, after retreating…hiding from what happened (what is now!) just over two years ago.

How does she co-exist with all the other Parts? How does she forbid the Demon Woman from penetrating? Honestly, I don’t really know, but I don’t really need to know. What matters is that she’s survived, she’s thrived for (…46 -12 = 34…yes, I totally used a calculator for this equation) thirty-four years now, and she’s still one of the major Parts in my mind/body/life. My relationship with my Parts is on-going…and I want her as a Leader in my mind. And she wants to be a leader – so long as I’m reading and writing. That’s her job, if you will. That’s her plot line…her driving force.

I feel my self as a collection of stories. Some stories have narrators who scare me, hate me, love me. Some narrators I was born with. Some narrators began when I was a kid. Narrators are coming and going. They are connected to things that happen around me (externally – people, places, things) and internally (illness, disease, emotions, hormones…). I logically understand that I am able to control and/or keep and/or change the stories inside me…I definitely cannot control people, places or things. And I think, the disconnect I was writing about earlier, is happening because I am becoming so aware of how the stories live and cultivate inside me. I also am aware that a major change is still happening, though I am on the, shall we say, third act, of some of them, I am still very much in change.

“…the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found…”

The Marginalian by Maria Popova

It is true. My experience as poet laureate began in a different body, in different stories than the ones I am in now. I curled into a rock bottom, suffering through a fear that I hadn’t felt since I was a child. My Parts (re)awakened in ways that I hadn’t experienced before. Some of the stories stood up like soldiers, pointing machines guns and telling me the bullets were coming – where did I want them?

I didn’t want to be in that situation, but I couldn’t not be in that situation. And even though I didn’t really ‘get’ it at the time, that ‘fertile despair’ catapulted me out of relationships that needed to change – internal and external. And as brutal as it was to choose to change, it was the only way to begin to heal the wounds – old and new. I have a voice in my head that, when I think about that time, repeats over and over: you were responsible for your choices, and these choices were made in your integrity and dignity – this matters. Because another voice, in equal volume and repetition, says: It’s your fault and people hate you for it.

I can feel the validity in the first voice, and I can feel the pain in the second.

And so, all of this (and more) in the core of the panic attack, in the core of the changes, in the core of the ‘pause’ that is peri-menopause.

What comes next?

Navigating these massive external life changes coupled with the massive internal life change that I am going through (peri-menopause), I can feel like a mess. It would be enough to witness my children (son and daughter) experiencing their own ‘inside and out’ changes, making and reaching goals. My son turning into a hairy man, my daughter turning into a woman; I’m attempting to hold all the feelings that I’m having about it in some kind of manageable way…but when I go through a pyramid of emotions from deep rage to hysterical laughing in a span of 47 seconds, over and over again…pausing to reflect on the realities of this time in my life is like…is like…living in a storm…and shit is flying and whooshing all around me…I’m getting picked up off the ground and tossed around…banging against old stories and getting yanked by new stories…missing old friends and embracing new…sometimes deep in a quietude and relieved…only to be whipped into some new big emotion…

Exhale.

In this moment, exactly, I am feeling suerza. It’s a noun: a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself. Spanish suerte, luck + fuerza, force. Pronounced “soo-wair-zuh. (From: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, gifted by my dear friend Barry. Thank you, Barry!)

I’d like to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU to all those who’ve offered comments, texts, phone calls, voice messages in love, love, love as I’m sharing these experiences. I hear you. I see you. I feel you. I’m grateful for you.