Visiting darkness, and exiting with ritual
The alarm hasn’t yet gone off, but I am awake. I’ve been so since about 5:30, like many mornings. The oblivion of sleep, its escape from reality, at least on the nights I have no nightmares, is over. While my regular blanket keeps me groggy and warm, the weight of the other blanket starts pressing me into the mattress. It is the heavy sensation of feeling scared, hopeless, and like I have done something wrong and will soon be in trouble. I neither want to stay in bed nor get up. I wish I could just sleep in oblivion all day. Getting up means facing another day of writing, struggling to live with the pain it releases, and holding the chaos I feel inside.
I get up anyway, because by now, in my 7th decade, I know that this is part of my life, my existence, at least for the time being. Even as I felt great last night, felt ready to take on the world, yet again, this morning, the black cloud was there to greet me when my eyes opened and consciousness returned. But life has taught me that, like the weather, everything eventually changes. You just have to wait long enough. So for now, I just focus on my “routine.”
The routine. It is something I had to create after I retired from teaching at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. When I was working, I didn’t have time to feel all of this. I had to get up, get moving, battle traffic, and then revel in the last job of my life — which was my total joy.
I considered myself lucky that I had that opportunity. Not everyone gets that chance. In almost 50 years of working, never have I loved going to work so much as to that job. Between my co-workers who were my soulmates, and my “mission” to touch the hearts of any and every visitor who came in, this was the only job I could call “play.” I took toys, craft materials, lab kits, and nature objects and used them all to hook people’s interest in science. They were my tool kit of magic, and based on who was in front of me, I would pull out the appropriate “talisman” to entice them to feel the awe of discovery and the joy of nature.
And then, there were the moments I could reach into the hearts of kids so starved for love, and put some there for them. Where else could you play with trilobite fossils, make brain models, teach about the science of invisible ink in the Revolutionary War, and save a kid, all in the same day? It was the joy of my life, a job that saved me as much as anyone I taught, and I tried to continue for as long as I possibly could keep going.
But eventually, my 7-decade-old body made it clear that long hours on my feet, and a 2-month recovery from the flu that left me unable to return full-time, sadly meant I was done with that part of life. While I was proud of the work I did for 15 years in hospital and research labs, and 16 years in pharmaceutical AIDS research and medical ethics, if I could have, I would have stayed a Museum educator forever. It was the kids, about the chance to save anyone I could, for as long as I could, because I knew the magic and power of even a single positive interaction for a kid who needs it, and that one of those moments could save a life. I had felt that myself in my teens. But, now, after 15 years, it was time to stop.
In spite of being sad to leave that behind, I do like retirement. It has given me the necessary time to focus on my writing, painting, bonding with friends…and on me. I’d spent a lifetime always being responsible for, helping, or protecting others. Now I was aware that the almost inaudible voices of ghosts from my past were demanding their due. After an entire life of surviving, growing, working, and thriving, it was finally time to finish facing “the rest of the story.”
It is a different sort of journey, though. There are, in both mythology and religion, references to the “descent into darkness,” or the “dark night of the soul.” And agreeing to finally “unseal that deep vault of past pain” is exactly an embrace of “darkness.” It has triggered mornings that are “emotional flashbacks” to that long-ago past.
It has been hard. Some mornings have been a real trudge through the mud. While I’ve been through enough rounds of struggles in the past and trust the process enough to know there is a gift on the other side of the journey, it is not without its moments. There is no going around, over, or under it. You just have to go “through.”
Without realizing it until recently, my past left me shattered into fragments. Out of the need for survival and to meet responsibilities, I had rigidly glued me back together, which allowed me to live as a super-efficient, high-functioning trauma survivor…well, abuse survivor. I wasn’t really aware of the word “trauma” as it applied to me personally until a couple of years ago. I was just that strong, always-pushing-forward person holding up the facade, while carrying that load from the past for a lifetime. Now, exhausted, and for the first time in my life fully realizing what that load was taking from me, it was time to face what was buried in that vault. But it is a descent into darkness for sure.
Right now, I have been living with emotional flashbacks every morning. For years, it was nightmares. But right now, it’s the emotional flashbacks. They are the same things I felt as a kid on Saturday mornings when Dad was home. I dreaded getting up because you just never knew what mood he would be in and what the day would bring.
So for a while now, each morning, as I relive that fear from my childhood, and each limb feels like it weighs a ton, I lay there for a moment and debate whether to just stay there or get up and start the routine. Again, I know from many rounds of this in my past that I can’t stay in bed and that if I get up and do the routine, this heaviness will finally pass. And I know not to delay, just throw off the covers and move. But it is all I can do to push back against the anxiety, dread, feeling like I am a “bad” person, self-hate, and the sense of, “What’s the point?”
To counter this, I’ve developed a ritual, almost a militaristic discipline, and strange as it sounds, my emotions slowly respond. Emotions just are. They aren’t bad or wrong. But they are the carriers of all those past fears and emotional hits, still unreleased. What I’ve found is that if I just let them be and acknowledge them as I start my day, not deny their existence, just start moving “with them,” that they will shift. It’s that “movement,” of any kind, not even formal exercise yet, just moving across the room, that will start to shift things inside. Every time a muscle or tendon in my body stretches, another stored somatic wound opens and releases a bit of stored pain. Twenty-eight years of living in that house carries a lot of stored trauma, but I don’t think about that at that moment. If I did I’d never start. Instead, I just walk toward the bathroom.
I look at the shower stall and the day feels impossible. I can’t even imagine where I will find the energy to get in there, much less wash. It it Mt. Everest before me, and every fiber in me says, “Just don’t bother — give up.” That is immediately followed by that smug, all-knowing voice of self-loathing and disgust who says, “Well, of course. What do you expect? You’re lazy and a failure.” This ends with a round of anger directed inward at me, aka, depression.
Declaring that, “Enough is enough,” I tune out all the clamoring in my head with a couple games of Solitaire on my cell phone. It is a trick in a way. The negative part who wants reinforce I am useless, feels like it won because I am doing nothing but playing a worthless card game. The other part of me relaxes as I move the cards on the screen. This gives me a few moments to “reset and try again.” Then, with both sides satisfied, I grit my teeth and just turn on the shower.
But first, there is the scale. Now, sometimes that can boost my sense of achievement, or not, depending what it has to say about my work yesterday to drop medication-induced weight gains. However, like ignoring the messages in my head about not getting in the shower, I am also learning to ignore the scale and not associate success in life with what the scale says.
As the shower water warms, I swallow the morning antidepressant. And even though this happens every morning, and I am convinced it won’t change, I am always surprised to feel the anxiety and depression start to drop. As the water runs down my body, it seems to wash away the negativity that has been oozing out of me. The negative side still works to convince me to give up, but even it can’t resist the delight of the soothing warm water. And besides, that side of me is satisfied with the thought I am just continuing to be lazy by lounging in the shower. It tells me to stay in there all day.
Yet, I do wash, and even get back out of the shower, and by this time, a glimmer of hopefulness has arrived. I am almost to the top of my “Everest.” The hope continues to swell as I move through the tasks that are required for this now, high-maintenance body – drops and meds for my “dry-eye syndrome,” check my eyes on the chart to make sure the macular degeneration isn’t worsening, and brush my decades-old teeth that have crowns on some, but are still hanging in there. The mood continues to climb.
The next part is a real boost, texture and fragrance. It is my “reward to me” for making it this far. While I’ve never been one for makeup or jewelry, I do love the soft face cream I carefully rub into my skin and around my eyes. I don’t care about lines or aging. I just love the fragrance and how my skin feels with it. Then I coat me with a cloud-mist of Jean Nate after-bath spray, which I just love even as it’s “old-fashioned.” Then comes the crowning glory of sensory delights and my one expensive indulgence – perfume. Some mornings it’s one of the Estee Lauders, another day it’s Shalimar, and on special days, it’s the French perfume I discovered recently, with the long-lasting wafts of vanilla, amber, and patchouli. The fragrances are a powerful boost to my psyche, probably because the sense of smell is so intimately connected to the part of the brain that is related to emotions.
As I head into the closet to do breathing meditations, prayers, exercise, and dress, I am starting to believe the day may be possible after all. The last touches are to put on my personal mezuzah necklace and earrings, and then head outside to fill the bird bath. The gift of giving the birds a chance to splash and douse their feathers is another joy for me, and even on days that I may still be struggling at this point, the bulk of the heavy emotions have eased. By the time I’ve made breakfast and brewed freshly-ground coffee, I am ready to face the writing and painting.
While this process sounds “slow, meticulous, boring, or tiresome,” and, yes, it can be all of that, it is sacred, and I follow it every morning. I have come to see it as my “morning meditation,” — a kind of visceral and active “coming back to the breath.” As my wise therapist has said many times, you can’t always trust your feelings, but you can trust the process. And this one takes me from, “I can’t face the day,” to “I have another day of life and I GET to live it!” At that moment, make no mistake, my day is already a victory, and every task after that is “extra gravy for the feast.”
It is actually a relief to write this — to admit in black-and-white , what is going on, and to understand it. For so long I denied it, ignored it, got angry at it, and didn’t understand it. But now, it makes total sense and is the starting point for my writing journey. It will be interesting to see where I land by the end of the book.
And as to writing…well it’s a similar sort of process. I start out dreading what might come up. But like the mornings, I just start. Slowly, something lightens. A tiny bit of weight drops off. An ache hurts just a little less. And I change as I write. By keeping at it, I know that sooner or later those efforts will perform their magic and reveal hidden insights. As I write and paint, and “glue one shattered fragment of me at a time” to another one, a picture of the wholeness starts to emerge, along with the growing ability to hold both joy and pain simultaneously.
With that, on to the rest of the book.
Tags: abuse, abuse survivor, alchemy, anxiety, dark night of the soul, depression, descent into darkness, despair, emotional flashbacks, feeling like a bad person, flashbacks, heaviness, insights, life, meditation, memoir, mental-health, painting, process, ritual, routine, sexual abuse, trauma, writing
Soul Mosaic 
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