Feeling deeply into pain

When my friend Simone moved to France, our friend group created a blog like this, to keep us together. But that was the time period when my life was falling to pieces, and that blog ended up documenting the dramatic dissolution of our friendship. I still feel sad about that.

But this is a different time and this blog feels healing! Like I can retrace that process in reverse, and find stronger ties and deeper communication through it. I feel excitement about revisiting the things about posting on the old blog that were so therapeutic, that gave me something to do when I felt lost, and a place to reach for connection when I felt so alone.

I've been struggling with feelings of deep depression. They feel connected to other times in my life, including the time of the blog (I just remembered...it was called "Doing Nothing On The Edge," a double entendre because of a character named Nothing from a book we'd all read and The Edge from U2). That was 2005/2006. Tendrils of despair enlaced in my psyche...pulling me down into recognitions of old ice floes, frozen over feelings I tried to forget...and it goes back, back through the times when Chris was terrorizing me, back to when we first moved to Port Townsend when I was two, and it was cold, and my dad wasn't there, and I started to slip away from life. I remember that, in my body, the feeling of not wanting to live. And I almost gave into it.

Last night, or the night before, when I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep...after I'd moved to the couch to try to coax the sleep back into my bones...I could feel that feeling so viscerally, as my two year old body tried to quietly slip away from life....and my mom so scared, taking me to the hospital, and helping them hold me down as they did tests...raping me with plastic tubes...I tried to fight, I tried to get away, and I couldn't, and so I froze. And that memory lives so deep in me. But as I tried to let myself feel it, as I lay there not sleeping, a sudden intense thought came from somewhere: "they were trying to help me". They were all trying to help me, as best they knew how, in this dense material form where there's so much forgetting, they were trying to find out what was wrong so they could save my life. And they probably did, though they bulldozed my boundaries in the process. And I could feel that anger and that pain, and that fear and that frozen dissociation, and I could also...for maybe the first time, really...feel compassion for what they did. Recognition for where they were coming from.

I think things are moving in deep places in me.

Today as I lay in the HBOT I was having the most intense experience of wanting to die. Maybe the most visceral one I've ever had, at least within memory. As I lay there I could feel my body, my beating heart, my breathing lungs, all my internal organs pumping away, keeping me alive...and I felt frustrated at the persistence of the life in my body. I felt angry at how hard it feels to just shuck myself out of this form. I felt trapped, constrained, imprisoned. I was feeling so identified with the parts of me that want OUT, that want it to be over, to try again, to get out of this suffering body and the weight of the trauma and the weight of the world.

It really scares me when I feel that way.

We went on a walk and I started to feel better, as Tessa talked to me about letting myself be where I am. Helped me realize that part of what is feeling so hard is the sense of expectations I feel from school, to process things intellectually while the world is in so much pain, while I'm in so much pain. And I can't. I have to be where I am. I have to come from a place of caring for these wounded parts of me, these sacred wounds, not trying to shunt them aside for the sake of some kind of mental primacy. That's false. That's not where I am. That's not who I am. And I started to feel better.

I notice how hard I am on myself, and these parts of me that are frozen. I hate myself sometimes, for not being able to DO things the way I think they should be done. Or for not being able to do things that matter so much to me...like sing, or play my guitar, or write, or...

I've been feeling so cut off from my hopeful self. So sinking into despair. Finding it so difficult to envision and believe in Altcorp, in the work that we're doing. Part of it is the framework of my school, where people are doing such good work but it's so material, and they can't see outside of that material lens....and I can't operate within it, at least not in the way they think people should. But then I feel so disheartened, like I can't do what needs to be done to make change in the world. This semester I've found myself feeling like I felt during my last semester at AADA, when they were educating us about what it takes to be a working actor in LA, and I sat through every one of those classes absolutely terrified, because I knew I couldn't do it that way. But there was no visible alternative, just a tentative vision, a dream in my head...and sometimes, these days, in the face of the intensity and chaos of the world, and the material solutions sought by changemakers, these immaterial visions in my heart and in my head don't feel real, and I fear that I'm fooling myself, that I'm going around in circles of magical thinking that has no resonance in the real world. I feel cut off, disconnected from both sides, from the mao side and the mundane side. It feels like I have no foothold in either world right now.

My mao came last night and told me to be with my despair, not to resist it or run from it. He said to recognize that it's not all there is. And he said to reach out and ask for help when I'm feeling overwhelmed by it. I'm trying. But it feels so hard to receive help from this place. I just keep wanting it to be different, wanting to feel better, and feeling despair when it doesn't happen.

He said we're doing good work, that I'm a conduit for many powerful currents to meet and merge and transform. He said they need us to be beacons of hope in these times, and that we are. I don't feel that way. But I'm trying. I want to believe. I feel the merging of currents in my being, but I feel like I'm just being swept away with it, drowning.

Somewhere, something in me knows better. Feels hope. I can feel that. It fluctuates. But I won't give up. It feels good to write about it. I feel the wild joy of my soul. They're here. I know they are. They know what they're doing, even if I don't. Just need to trust. To keep moving. To let myself GRIEVE, feel, heal. Let myself be. I'm trying.

<3 Alia