Health as Perception

Written by Kelsey Rideout

I am home in the suburbs of Ottawa, sitting in the parking lot of the Beaverbrook Public Library, listening on the radio to Shad’s soothing voice educate me about 2015’s coolest music. I look past the snowy hill in front of me and onto the dull, flat horizon of Glen Cairn Public High School. The place I went to full of longing and Mike’s Hard Lemonade on Friday Night Public School Dances. On such a night, I would select which pair of low-cut jeans matched best with which drastically-cut tank-top, revealing my stomach but elongating gracefully down my side. Inspired by my attire, I would successfully emerge as a genie from a bottle while dancing in circular form with my closest girlfriends, occasionally coordinating our hands, hips and impeccable lyrical memorization.

Although I pretended to be in an unshakable affair with the music alone, I mostly stumbled along a tottering current of desperation. My eyes would seek in frequent intervals outwards, hoping to find that I was being looked at.

After all, being unchosen and retreating to the wall while watching love pour out of young-perspiring-forehead-touching-other-young-perspiring-forehead during K-Ci & Jo Jo’s All My Life was to experience absolute sadness.

It is not that this experience alone is so unusual that makes it worth examining. It is that, upon reflecting on my distressed relationship to health, I can see that the particular paradox of needing to be seen and fearing being seen, typically by men, accumulated so intensely over my growing up, I lost the ability to maintain contact and connection to my own voice.

I became sick, for years, with the dissolve of my own perception.

Perception: the lens that allows you the ability to see, hear, or become aware of who you are through your senses.

When your attention fastens onto the exterior, as mine did, a basin within begins to collapse and all effects of humanity and the elements and the asteroids moving through and around planet Earth come to you as startled fear, rather than story.

We cannot create what we cannot hold.

*

Perhaps I started to lose my own perception before I was here. I’m not sure if my grandfather had a sense of who he was, as he struggled to live in and out of institutions, unsuccessfully attempting to drown himself in the high tide along the east coast edge of the Atlantic Ocean. I’m not sure if my father had a sense of who he was, as he wrestled with what has been described to me simply and infrequently as “dark moods.” I’m not sure if the English tongue of my Indian grandmother sat like a betrayal to what little she knew of her Armenian mother, or a fortune.

As a child, I lived mostly inside a mind engulfed by a circle of strategies. How to move, eat, sleep and speak in ways that won a successful daily performance in the ignorance of grief.

I trained committedly in these shallow waters of self-avoidance, suffering from intense habits of procrastination, while quietly scraping my feet against the floor. My eyes rewired to distract from my depth. My throat repeatedly threatened closure from holding mass excess of unused sound.

My father was dead from cancer. A man whose gaze unsettled me settled comfortably into our home. No one around me could talk about it.

Neither could I.

Instead, I effectively off-shored my self-approval to the eyes, arms and diverse anatomy of other. Perhaps I knew that if were to rely on my own self-approval, I would unequivocally not approve. I would become tears, snot, and public rage, and it is being seen in this state that I learned to fear most. Grief became a calculation allowed to multiply only when I was alone or with a boyfriend, but nowhere else.

*

When we are perpetually inspired to ignore our pain, feelings of danger soak into expression while feelings of safety tuck themselves into silence. We become suspect towards what is wild and true. We intensely seek control. We look away. My sensations became policed. My emotions, judged. My intuition, nearly gutted.

I thought I lost myself as a writer.

A thousand times, I thought I lost myself completely.

As eventually, the refusal to know yourself and your pain begins to eat you alive.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I’d be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” +Audre Lorde, black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet

And anxiety is a plant that does not bloom in isolation. I’ve known it to grow best with things like eating disorders, alcohol addictions, failed relationships, false idolizations, unfinished graduate degree(s) and consecutive boyfriends that begin in grade six and end when you are nearly twenty-six and dizzy with sleep-deprivation because you have never learned to fall asleep alone and unafraid.

You become so close to the edge of losing yourself forever that you have no choice but to look at the possibility of not losing. Of rebuilding. Of re-examining. Of washing the throat, the mind, the tongue, with a wet, electric, language of lineage.

You see that love exists in the expression of it.

You take small steps towards the wilderness. Towards wolf and fire and your wild sounds of wounding.

Towards foreign room of trust. Inside you will find a friend, a therapist, a mentor, a spiritual practice, art that needs you, words that want you, memories that wish for you to remember.

You slowly learn how to run back towards your recovery, instead of away.

You do stop, still, sometimes, for excessive amounts of alcohol and episodes of The Kardashians until you find yourself dreaming of being on a never-ending tour bus stuffed to the top with lip plump and whiny arguments between bandmates Kim and Kanye, but you cannot stay terrified in this fiction for too long, as you can no longer unknow the earth’s wider, kinder, more sane terrain.

In the darkness, I do the work.

I find my sight.

I find that now, my lens is no longer a lens of absolute sadness.

Of waiting along the side of a hard, pale wall for someone to ask me to dance to K-Ci & Jo-Jo’s All My Life, even though I don’t particularly like that song.

I find myself declaring that while I am alive, I do not want to be eaten alive. I would like my body to belong to starving insects only after I leave it.