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.

Lady, weeping at the crossroads

The major headlines these past few weeks feel like being in a 20-year time warp back to 2001 with the war in Afghanistan, ISIS attacks, and a destructive hurricane causing havoc along the Gulf Coast. Now add to that a global pandemic, social and political unrest, and witnessing the decline of civilization in a post-fact world.

I’ve been learning a lot lately about the imprint trauma makes on our bodies, and how that manifests in everything from the way we physically hold ourselves to how we unconsciously respond to stimuli - be it sounds, smells, tastes, and things we touch and see. When our nervous systems get supercharged, they tend to stay in a constant state of flight, fight, or freeze. While my life has changed in so many ways over the last 20 years, not all of those changes have been for the better.

I wrote last week about being on a journey of healing this past year, and that some of that healing has come from talk therapy where I've been working to process past traumas and the effects they've have had on me, much like the havoc a destructive hurricane can cause. I've experienced a considerable amount of personal trauma, loss, and grief over the last two decades -- some of which I’ve been aware of and have talked about openly, and some which I’ve only just begun to process.

Without realizing it, my sense of self has splintered multiple times with each of these traumas, starting with 9/11. I have great capacity to compartmentalize, which can be a form of resilience but can also be damaging when we don't give ourselves the permission or space to eventually work through things. So in my effort to be resilient, I kept many of these traumas either half processed or not processed at all -- leaving part of me stuck back in all these really dark and lonely places waiting for the light to come, and part of me here in the present trying to give her that light.

I feel numb more days than not, and I often fake happiness, excitement, and tears when I know those are the socially appropriate emotions I’m supposed to be displaying in a given moment. That’s not to say I don’t ever feel anything, in fact when genuine emotions do rise to the surface they often feel like a threatening invader and I completely clam up and go blank or get filled with so much anxiety I unconsciously start stimming - usually by rocking, fidgeting, bouncing my legs, or tapping my feet depending on how strong the emotions are.

I wasn’t always like this, it's been a slow progression over the last 20 years. That said, it's been especially bad these past 5 years, which I think is partly due to the collective trauma we're all experiencing right now. When my therapist senses these physical responses during our sessions, she’ll ask me what I’m feeling and I get so frustrated because I'm rarely able to find the right words to explain it. As someone who works with language and communication for a living, to not have the ability to describe something happening inside of me is maddening. But I’ve come to understand that this is what being emotionally detached feels like -- fluctuating between numbness and unperceived physical responses.

I really want to be able to feel things again. To allow myself to be vulnerable and connect with the people in my life who I love and care about. To feel joy and sadness alike. Music, poetry, and writing have always been my outlets to tap into those feelings, but I stopped immersing myself in all of them about 7 years ago when my emotional tap ran dry after losing my mom. It was the final blow to a long string of unprocessed traumas.

As part of my therapy I’ve been reimmersing myself in these activities, and they’re slowly helping me to process and connect with my emotions. Being able to write not just one, but two blog posts within a week of each other is a testament to that! The title of this post is even inspired from a W.H. Auden poem that really hit home for me on multiple levels this week.

I know poetry isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, just like when I look at abstract art and don’t understand it. So here’s a few good analyses that aren't overly academic or laden with twenty-dollar words. One covers the metaphors of the poem and another it's structure and intended pacing. And if you aren’t into literary analysis, here’s the poem as a song adapted and performed by Carla Bruni.

The reason this poem resonated with me in particular this week, other than it's a narrative of a woman rediscovering her true self, is that it brings me back to 9/11 and full circle through all the traumas that have led me to this emotionally detached place.

When I escaped lower Manhattan that morning and finally had made it back to my neighborhood on the opposite end of the city, the juxtaposition of the setting was a shock to my system. When I stepped off the bus a few blocks from my apartment, the sun was shining bright and birds were chirping. Yet just a few hours earlier I had escaped complete scenes of horror where my life was spared by sheer minutes. When I came to, I was standing in the middle of an intersection with no sense of where I was.

I’ve written different posts and even a poem about that day, so I won’t go into those details here. Instead, I’ll end this post with the W.H. Auden poem that inspired it (just in case the links above ever break, as the internet is wont to do).

Lady, weeping at the crossroads,
Would you meet your love
In the twilight with his greyhounds,
And the hawk on his glove?

Bribe the birds then on the branches,
Bribe them to be dumb,
Stare the hot sun out of heaven
That the night may come.

Starless are the nights of travel,
Bleak the winter wind;
Run with terror all before you
And regret behind.

Run until you hear the ocean's
Everlasting cry;
Deep though it may be and bitter
You must drink it dry,

Wear out patience in the lowest
Dungeons of the sea,
Searching through the stranded shipwrecks
For the golden key,

Push on to the world's end, pay the
Dread guard with a kiss,
Cross the rotten bridge that totters
Over the abyss.

There stands the deserted castle
Ready to explore;
Enter, climb the marble staircase,
Open the locked door.

Cross the silent ballroom,
Doubt and danger past;
Blow the cobwebs from the mirror
See yourself at last.

Put your hand behind the wainscot,
You have done your part;
Find the penknife there and plunge it
Into your false heart.

one from thousands

eight forty-five am
the morning my life began i stepped outside the gym

BOOM!

papers falling high and trickling in the sky
a parade today we'll see?

no. No. NO!

specs of metal glittering in the sun
i should run, i need to run--are all those people gone?

A bomb? A bomb?!

showers of ash upon my head sped with confusion and fear
my office, to my office, they'll know there

It stings to see. It stings to breathe.

she asks, are you okay
what happened?
a plane, it was a plane
you mean a bomb

BOOM!

my building rumbles and through the windows it's the second tower

a woman screams and a the man on the radio says it's another plane
i gasp, i tremble--are we next?

they gather us to the center of the room and our safety is assured

five minutes later--"An upgrade in your safety has been issued. Please evacuate immediately."

Fourteen flights of stairs
round and down we go--goodbyes and laters as we flee

I'm okay. I'm okay.

but at the bottom there's flying debris
and as i squint to see my breaths become shorter, my panic longer

then a hand, placed in mine

our bodies numb, we run

---

I wrote this poem about month after surviving the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. My mind had been running at a fervent pace trying to put all the pieces together. This was my attempt to gather them in one place.

I meant for the piece to continue as I worked through all the emotions of post-traumatic stress, but until today I hadn't been able to revisit this piece since I wrote it. It's been seven years, and I'm finally finding it easier to process the events of that day. I've written a full article about those thoughts and where our country has come since then.

What do I say

I nibbled on the memory of you,
but the morsel grew stale.

Passion is the casualty of patience I suppose.

I proceeded with caution, but here I am again.

You, like the others,
put words into my head,
and thoughts into my voice.

Scaring yourself, perhaps out of fear.

I tried to un-squeak the rustiness of your heart,
but it only tightened the hinges on mine.