Tag Archives: trust your struggle

when we’re not ok

graffiti, two people holding balloons, talking to each otherGood morning, good morning. I was up again in the middle of the night last night, and didn’t get back to sleep until probably 2:30 or so. So when my alarm went off at 4 o’clock, my body laughed quietly, hit snooze, and proceeded to sleep for another hour.

The last several days, I take a dance class in the afternoon – which consists of me watching videos created months ago.  I’ve been dancing along to a video that the instructors put together in honor of breast cancer awareness, and in the mix are two songs about okness, it’s ok not to be ok, and another one, the name of which I don’t know, but which always makes me cry: the singer is telling a friend or maybe even me, her listener, that I’m going to be ok, that I just need to keep going, keep on. (I look it up: Keep on, it’s called.) This song has been making me cry – fortunately, this song comes during the cool down part of the workout, so I’m not weeping through burpees or grapevines or something.

Something in me is grieving, is feeling a big loss. I wonder if it’s something that I’ve held in my body since 2012, when I qut my day job in order to focus my attention only on the workshops and writing, and proceeded immediately to have a huge back spasm that almost immobilized me for a month or more. Though the big pain eventually wore off, I’ve had a lingering tightness in my piriformis  or sacroiliac joint (or something) that created some numbness down my leg and into my foot. Nothing too alarming, at least for me – I could move, I could walk and run and exercise and dance, and the more I moved, the more the numbness would let up. I just figured I needed to keep working, and eventually that little remaining tightness would release. It wasn’t exactly ok, but it was all right.

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after a long silence

Stencil graffiti reading, "Slide the light off you may find some peace"Hello and hello and hello. It’s been such a very long time! It’s begun to snow again where I am this morning — how is the day beginning in your part of the now?

I am thinking this morning about long silences, about the way that silence can grab hold and not let go, about how silence can fill us up, bit by bit, day by day. And about how silence can be a healing timg sometimes, even when it has caused such damage at other times in our lives.

We talk a lot about breaking silences in the world of recovery, particularly around sexual violence and intimate partner violence. This is euphemism and metaphor, and it’s also language that’s quite factual – at times there are stories we don’t tell, things we are kept from speaking about, ways we hold our tongue so deep inside our bodies because we want to be safe or we want to be good, we want to do what’s right, what we have been trained to believe is right, even when what’s been done to us is wrong. these are silences that can be destructive, teaching us that our place is in back, under a box, our lips sewn shut and our bodies open and available.

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poems can blossom truth inside our hearts

Stencil of a woman in a dress, dancing, head thrown back, hair hanging down, next to the words

(Poetry is an extreme sport – Miss Tic)

Good morning, good morning.

Outside, it’s traffic and crickets. I’m waiting to hear whether the owl will be back this morning – she was here on Friday, and instead of writing a post I got distracted by her.

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trusting our creative rhythms

Good morning, good morning. It’s early still on a Monday (late for me, as the sun is well up already!) — how are the words finding you these days? Are you letting them in?

I’ve been writing a lot since the beginning of the year, but I’ve been doing most of it in my notebook, offline. I went on a writing retreat a week or so ago, a much-needed break from the hustle of workshops and the new year’s Let’s Get It Done! energy. Do you get that kind of buzzy exuberance at the beginning of the year? Suddenly, everything I’ve forgone for months or maybe years (maybe even decades) is gonna get done now. It’s a new year! Everything is possible! Let’s make a plan, and then another plan, and then create a new writing schedule, then make a vision board, then another vision board for the other projects, then make a giant to do list of every thing that needs doing for my 9 or 10 Very Important creative projects that all need attention now.

So the beginning of the year is charged and exciting – like a Monday morning on steroids, if you’re like me — another chance to get it right. And then I overdo it with the attempt to schedule my creativity into a rigorous, regimented set of boxes, and the parts of me that need to sing, need to wander, need to breathe without being scheduled to do so, the parts of my creative life that need open space around them in order to blossom begin to leak out the sides of me. I start to cheat on my own systems: the employee undermining the boss. I start to come in “late” to work. I oversleep.These are my forms of creative resistance. Gonna try and put me into a box? Ok, then, I’ll go limp. I get out of sync, creatively-speaking, and begin to get tight and frustrated. What happened to my flow?

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letting the feeling be a feeling

Good morning, writers. The sun has just pushed, a thick orange plum, over the lip of the Oakland hills. Maybe we’ll warm up a little now. How is the day where you are? What is your morning bringing you?

Today, I am caught on the line, deep in the struggle of trying to pull myself out of a depression. What do you do on the days when you are feeling bad about yourself? How do you treat yourself on the days when the triggers have overridden your coping mechanisms and you slip out of normal functioning for awhile? Do you allow yourself to fall apart a little (or a lot)? Or do you try to stuff everything into the shopping bags you carry around labelled Normal Functioning Adult! and pretend like everything’s fine?

On the days when I get caught in the difficult voices, when my skin feels too sensitive to everything, when all the noises are too loud and the tears live just at the surface of my throat, my initial instinct is always to try and figure it out. This is how the inside interrogation begins: What’s going on, Jen?  — never mind that the voice can sound remarkably like my stepfather’s; now I’m the one keeping me late from school or up without sleep, asking the questions. What’s going on with you? Why are you so upset? When are you going to pull yourself together? I go back through the previous days, recounting my actions and behaviors, trying to pinpoint the moment when everything came apart again, the moment when the clock turned over to 0 and my body broke open to depression again. It’s rare that I can find a single exchange or interaction or trigger point — but that doesn’t stop the inside interrogator from looking, and in trying to escape from the interrogation, I sink deeper and deeper into an inside cave.

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