Leaving bad things
a What's Healing Me Lately poetic essay on relationships, survival and the body
It’s really hard to leave danger.
At least it is for me.
I’m like a fly to the light that later in life has realized its spell but am usually too late to fly away without any burn, any zing, any electrification of this body-mind-spirit thing I am and is me. My body.
In grad school a professor taught us to substitute the body part for me or I as an intervention in reconnecting ot the body and seeing ourselves a whole being rather than disparate parts.
For example,
“My foot is hurting”
changes to
I am hurting.
“My neck is killing me”
becomes
I am killing me.
or
I am being killed.
The body knows exactly what is happening at all times.
Sure. Its sometimes overzealous in its analysis.
Its sometimes or even often zoomed in on the details that say one thing, but miss the full pictured other. The bigger one thing that holds all the other parts up and together. This one other infinite other thing that helps your scared small hypervigilant inner emoji become wide eyed, deep breathing and calm, safe, expanding now - like at sea.
The place I went to first when I drove across the state line to vacationland. My family’s home. A place to land. The |Sea, She was there, this time of year in winter ice queen form with the powered presence of the Cailleach - the crone destroyer creator goddess of the Gaels I descend from. Her body like deep wide blue storms.
My body holds this - a deep blue wide storm.
I am a deep blue wide storm.
What are you?
A way to explore this is to paint or draw with your non-dominant hand and with no image in mind of what you’re creating. Just let your hand lead you. Don’ try to make it pretty. Don’t try to make it anything. Just allow the paint, the pen, the marker or crayon or pastels to appear by the strokes of your hand. Then sit back and look at what has emerged. Write down line by line what you see, like a deep blue wide storm. Then write “I am” before each line of observation. Like “I am a deep blue wide storm.”
This is an embodied creative practice helping the Self and all our other parts (sensations, emotions, thoughts) to be revealed. It’s a meditative check-in of sorts taught to me while in school.
Not by a professor, though she would have been a great one, but by the somatic psychotherapist I saw for a year during school. “Good schools” for soon-to-be-therapists require their students to complete a few hundred hours of personal therapy in order to graduate.
I think this makes a lot of sense. It would be quite unheard of for a dance teacher to never have taken a dance class before. If you’re seeing a therapist who has never been in therapy, you might want to consider switching if you have the option. Though yes, societal positionality impacted by race, gender and class makes this school requirement much more nuanced than what I am offering here, and deserves critical questioning still. Anything involving the education industrial complex is always important to keep questioning. This includes the private institute I attended for clinical training, even with its reputation for being the therapist equivalent of Hogwarts. Yet, I guess the institutional realities aren’t too surprising. J.K. Rowling is a TERF after all. One of the most intense groups upholding this social hierarchy while pleading victim. Its tricky dangerous territory. The place I often find myself in whether intended or created unconsciously. I am a magnet for certain forms of abuse. Many of us are, and many of our bodies still freeze when trying to leave.
Many of us especially folks assigned female, but those assigned male can’t get out of it too, this thing that’s so toxic. This thing that keeps us thinking we’re so small and we’re so not enough so we must keep whatever connection - whatever relationship, person place or thing, job or project or community because if we don’t make it work with that one, there will never be another one and we will be alone and we will die.
That’s how quick and old and real those instinctual parts of us are. We believe if we leave or are left we will die. That is how simple it is to our survival parts. So we stay. And so we try. So hard. So many times. We bend ourselves backwards and take on their cries, fill up with their shame, tie our minds into knots til they travel down to our feet and tie us to the fantasy that staying will bring us peace. But its the staying that keeps us tortured. And its the torture that’s driving us mad. And our madness is not something we’re giving up anymore.
Or at least you say this to yourself. This boundary that is so hard to enforce when our parts keep screaming to stay and make it work. To not go into the unknown of leaving the bad thing. You think this to yourself as you have your hand in the doorframe, your weight leaning into your hips, your mind drifting off into the future where you sit and you sit as the grips in your feet and the hooks in your heart keep you frozen in the bad thing. Staying far past the yellow and red flags and now darts, sometimes knives. Till one of them hits you right in your heart. Or maybe your throat or eye or brain. For me it’s always my chest. Somewhere at my scars or my ribcage, sternum or whole pectorals. Searing or squeezing or swirling painful panic. Or nothing at all numbed out from the cold. It’s these somatic sensation that keep you stuck in this hole of this person, place, belief that’s keeping you small. Keeping you down. Making you stay.
So we must shake it up. Shake our bones up and down. Let our hands flag big and loud. Let our stims fall out. Get the energy out. Push back on the bad vibe. Pull out of the pointed weapons that got stuck in your spine. And if you can’t reach them, get a friend to help you out. Yes you will need to ask for help when you leave. When you heal. When you say enough is enough. That’s a first healing step. Allowing someone to come in and support you as you pull the daggers out and press down on the bleeding wounds. We can each support each ones energy. We each hold healing power without a doubt. You do not need a special certificate for that. The key is reconnecting to this feeling of support. And practicing more and more to stand up and out. To have separation and boundary and protection. To trust ourselves to know it will work out. Meaning, the survival will happen in the way it is meant to and knows how. So focus on the sensations of thriving to combat worry and doubt. Fear and jealousy. Rage and despair. Let this experience move you to express it all out.
This is your contribution right now. How you take care by expressing full out. From not covering your yawns to writing a song, how you express yourself now will carry you out of that dark void-like place some call the doomscroll or the news. What comes up from what you consume can be the inspiration that moves you to let what’s coming up also come out. To the page, to the piano, to the trees that you hug. The point is to give yourself voice. This will help you leave the bad thing. This is a practice we must strengthen. This is a practice we must not lose. Sharing our voice. This is a grounding we come back to in times when our voice is told it doesn’t count. You must wait your turn. You must shut up and take it. You must sit still and conform.
So next time you are enraged. Next time you’re filled with sorrow. Each time you pray for change or try to leave the bad thing, express what you didn’t get to say in some form. Do this too if you’ve left and the remnants still pain you. Remember you’re in a safer place now or at least a quiet moment. This space you get to control. This space you get to fill up. This is the space we’re being asked to return to each day, each moment, to re-member what the next single step is. You don’t need to know the whole path. Just the next step leaving the bad thing is great.
Love Lucky
photo by Maya Leon Photography
Thank you for reading. If you’re inspired, please gift that to another by commenting your next single step below, clicking the like and subscribe button, or recommending it to a friend. Your support is deeply appreciated and allows me to stay off social media sites unaligned with my values and privacy needs.
psst…suggested reading this week:
