Wet Laundry, Knives and Warmth

Have you ever taken laundry out of the wash before it’s gone through the spin cycle? when it’s all entangled, cold, sopping wet, and difficult to disengage. That’s what my heart felt like as I dove into a period where sorting this all out was my full time occupation. I had some stock saved up from my previous job and it allowed me to continue living my not-lavish-and-slightly-more-elegant-than-adequate lifestyle. I had my own apartment in lower Queen Anne, a car, good food, an internet connection, and Karla McLaren’s earlier, more new-age version of Language of Emotions (LoE wasn’t published until 2010, but the two books are close enough for my purposes). Having that book was like having a drying rack I could use to tease apart the mangled morass of a mess that was my heart, now conscious to trauma I’d experienced before I could roll over.

I’d been doing a lot of emotion work. Creating fiery crucibles to work in, burning contracts, working through tremendous rages, griefs, terrors, confusion, and ambivalence (I still love that this word exists!), so by this time I’d developed a fair amount of emotional agility.

One day I was slicing some vegetables in my kitchen, and I noticed my skin feeling eerily cold. Nearly simultaneously I had a moment of sensing a yearning to feel warmth, and how satisfying it would feel to slice my left wrist with the knife I was holding in my right hand and soak up warmth of my own blood on my skin. At last! a way to meet this deep yearning!

That lasted for sliiiiightly longer than I was comfortable with once my brain caught up to what was happening (fortunately only a couple heartbeats), and I immediately put down the knife with a thunk and moved quickly away from the cutting board. I knew something had to change. Something had to change. I didn’t know what or how but holy shit this was not cool.

Previously, my mind had wandered into other places to escape the unpleasantness I felt in this world, yet that is the closest I’ve come to actually having actually done something in the physical plane to manifest an escape. I had the tool in hand, a deep yearning, and a promise of better. I can’t blame anyone else for taking it. I sure as fuck didn’t want to stay there.

While I was growing up, my dad had many times where he was on the edge of suicide. Years of helping him through it got old, mostly because nothing changed, and while we carried him through the episode, the efforts his family put into supporting him didn’t appear to affect the root of the problem, and it kept recurring. He refused outside help. I haven’t had contact with him since I was 16, though as far as I know he’s still alive. Maybe living on his own took some of the pressure off.

For me, I started looking for resources. I had a conversation with a friend who was attending basically an AA group for sex addicts; it turns out they supported sexual anorexics as well, and that seemed to fit my experience at the time, so I started going. It was a place where, at the very least, I could talk about the collision between my trauma and my maddening inability to manifest touch intimacy off the dance floor. At first I found the group to be a wonderful relief valve, and being able to talk about my experience seems to have facilitated more breakthroughs. About six months into going there, I noticed that I was the only one or one of very few that was having breakthroughs. Enough of the other shares seemed… draining… static… that going seemed to be of questionable value. I decided this resource didn’t match my requirements anymore and left.

I don’t think I found any other groups to fill that support role at that time, but I did realize that living alone wasn’t a good thing for me, particularly after I moved into a group house, then back in with family for a while. I’d grown up in a large house with lots of people (I’m the oldest of 5) and I learned the value of this, and by and large group houses have been my preferred mode of living ever since. I did have a period of four years, 2006–2009, when I had four serial partnerships that lasted about a year each. I remain grateful to each of them for a very beautiful journey.

As I write this in October of 2016, I’ve just been through one of the most intense transformational periods I’ve seen in a long while, and I feel I’m just now entering the place I desire to be, where flow is happening more often with a lot less jagged edges waiting to jump out and cut me, and showing up in the world is no longer expected to be painful by default. It’s been a long journey, and I still remember vividly the yearning, the image and the feeling of relief and wanting to sink into that and let go of everything else, though it’s not nearly so emotionally charged now. That which must have changed has/is doing so, and this feels great!

Next up: Epic Badass Soul Alchemy in Action