The making of a scar

I've been quiet on this blog since rekindling it a few months ago. I’ve been working through a pretty difficult time from my past that I’ve never shared publicly and it’s been hard to find the right words to talk about.

Due to an unexpected COVID-19 quarantine by myself, I’ve recently had the needed space to finally bring the processing of what happened to a state of mind where I feel comfortable enough to share. It’s involved revisiting a time when the trauma of 3 colliding incidents all happened within the span of a year -- a heartbreak, the death of a close friend, and a sexual assault. I’ve never talked openly about the assault, partly because it’s taken me almost a year in therapy now to unravel the pieces and understand what happened was indeed sexual assault by every definition of the law. That the shame and guilt caused by the trauma was a natural reaction and created a chaotic snarl of emotions. It wrapped all the grief of that time into a muddled layer on top of my still unprocessed trauma from 9/11, which had happened only 4 years earlier.

During the processing of all this, “I stood looking over the damage, trying to remember the sweetness of life on Earth." This line is a quote from Station 11, which I watched between the moments of processing in quarantine. This phrase repeated throughout the series hit home on multiple levels with the storyline itself being about the fallout of a pandemic and the processing of a pre-pandemic trauma.

At times I've felt selfish to take this very inward journey of my own past trauma during a time when we are all hurting. I don’t think we get to choose when the work needs to happen though. The moments find us, and we can either lean in and embrace them or retreat from them. I chose to lean in because I’ve been retreating for far too long.

I say retreating because part of this work has involved gaining a better understanding of my attachment style. I’m someone who retreats for emotional protection and shuts myself off from others. It’s most commonly known as avoidant attachment, and in the book Fierce Intimacy by psychotherapist Terry Real, he further classifies my particular attachment style as one of being walled-off and moving toward shame on his relationship grid.

What I’ve learned is that attachment styles are formed during our childhood and can change over the course of our lives. The avoidant attachment style has roots in learning from an early age that we must self-soothe ourselves during times of emotional distress. While I'm also revisiting the events of my childhood that influenced this attachment style, those reflections are a blog post for another day. I only bring it up because I think it’s important to acknowledge that while our attachment style may develop during childhood, there are other significant events in our life that can impact it.

What sparked this particular journey was a discussion with my therapist about Indigenous teachings on calling our spirit home when it’s lost. This teaching kept revealing itself to me in different ways over the last few months, and I’ve learned enough to know now that when this happens we need to pay attention to it. Joy Harjo describes this process in her poem For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet. Here's an excerpt:

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

My therapist isn’t Native, but understood the meaning of this teaching revealing itself to me and encouraged me to pursue the work in calling my spirit back. So I’ve been retracing the memories of that time through music and creating a playlist to safely release the emotions from then all the way until today to unlock what I’ve truly been feeling.

I mentioned in my last blog post that returning to music, poetry, and writing has been a big part of my therapy. Those artforms are helping me get back in touch with all the emotions I locked away in my walled-off retreat for the last 20 years. Lily Kershaw’s album Arcadia was the genesis of starting this process, and my Spotify top songs of 2021 are a clear indication of that.

I’ve also been revisiting some of my writing from this time in my life, including revising and unpublishing a few old blog posts now that I have a better understanding of myself and what happened. While some of the specific details of these memories still escape me, I know I have a much stronger clarity of truth.

I know that, because I had a new perspective looking at some old photos I found on the computer with the journaling I was reading through from this time. One photo in particular really got to me. It’s a picture of me standing by the shoreline of Puget Sound. I remember the day it was taken and how I felt so lost in darkness at the time despite my smiling face.

I think in many ways this playlist is a tender love letter through time to reach her 16 years ago by tracing “the making of a scar, from the end until the start.” This lyric from Lily Kershaw’s song Parallel Lives inspired both the playlist and the title of this blog post. I really like the metaphor, because a scar is a wound that has healed.

A special note to those who were closest to me during this time in my life and might be reading this, thank you. Your kindness and friendship kept me afloat during a time when I was adrift in darkness.

Reconnecting and healing

I got a lot of compliments on my hair today from strangers, friends, and coworkers alike. What started as a pandemic grow-out has turned into something much more meaningful for me. As I’ve worked to heal my physical self from the ravages of COVID-19 this past year, I’ve also been on a journey to heal my spiritual and mental health. Part of that has come from therapy, and another part has come from reconnecting with my Anishinaabe culture, it’s language, and teachings.

I recently learned the Ojibwe phrase Aanji-bimaadizi, which translates for me to the phrase, “She changes her life.” There’s an Ojibwe teaching of the 4 hills of life - infancy, childhood, adulthood, and old age - where very few make it to the fourth hill before they transition to the spirit world. In order to move from hill to hill, we must overcome obstacles that hurt us or hold us back. We do this by embracing the inevitable changes that come, and letting go of what was so we can find balance and peace in what will be.

In working on all these facets of myself this last year, I realized there was unprocessed trauma tugging at me and keeping me from moving forward. Every time I thought I’d gotten enough momentum to continue on, the ground beneath my feet would give way. Over time I stopped noticing my lack of movement forward, mistaking the churn of distractions as progress. But with this pandemic, the forced stillness has taken away a lot of those distractions and has caused things left unprocessed to rise to the surface. I think maybe that’s true for a lot of people.

I’m still working to process the things that are holding me back so I can continue my journey forward. And my hair is a part of that journey. Teachings about hair in Anishinaabe culture can vary between families, clans, and nations, but a continuous theme throughout is that our hair connects us to our identity. It’s a part of our spiritual well-being, and how we take care of our hair is a reflection on how we take care of ourselves. Andrea Landry, an Anisinaabe teacher, writer, and mother, refers to our hair as “our life force.”

So as I continue to find the solid footing needed to let go and embrace the changes ahead, I will look at my curls and the gray within them knowing this is the wisdom that will carry me forward.

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You might be wondering why I posted on a blog I shuttered a decade ago. This is roughly the time I stopped pursuing writing as an outlet for processing things. I stopped writing poetry because it made me feel too much, and I eventually stopped blogging for the most part. I took a micro-blogging interlude on Tumblr, but reading through it now I realize that blog was more a distraction, an illusion of processing (minus a few posts here and there within it). So I’m starting up Nessa’s Nook again as a creative outlet to reflect, process, and embrace the changes ahead.

"Be still"

"When you are in doubt, be still, and wait. When doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage. So long as mists envelop you, be still. Be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists, as it surely will. Then act with courage."

-Chief White Eagle of the Ponca (1800s - 1914)