My favorite times of the day are dawn and dusk. I feel gypped Author’s note: I’m a descendant of gypsies, therefore I can use this word without being labeled a racist. if I miss the chance to be out in nature to gobble up at least some of them. Shadows stretch and grow and shrink and disappear and the persistent inner soliloquy of my screamy bossy self gets quieter while the bird songs and the silence that holds this and the all that is everything gets louder. This liminal atmosphere seems to contain less static. Maybe it’s because at these times the majority of minds are winding down or not quite wound up yet, or maybe it’s simply because god said for this to be so. The in-between place when it’s not fully night and not fully day, or the hypnogogic state when I’m not quite sleeping yet not quite awake are fertile times for my psyche. The voice of my soul is more audible. I started writing this before dawn and I’ve no idea what it’s about, but I’m steeped in something insistent on staying right here. Fingers work slowly to hopefully say something true. Anything true will do.
Here’s something true:
I just wrote four incomplete paragraphs before getting to this place. I’m polishing my nails in-between sentences and my head is being lulled into an almost-sort-of-focus-by binaural beats designed to whittle my capacious consciousness down to a fine point to be directed wherever I wish -I’m trying to trick myself into staying put to see this post through. The polish is called snow-globe, it’s iridescent glitter floating in a sea of clear goop. My mind is a mash-up of so many tangles, but I promised myself I’d birth a linear semi-logical post this morning since it’s been almost three months since I last did and also I must have something to share or else I wouldn’t be attempting to share it. I’m four paragraphs in and I’m pretty sure I’ll kill the darlings that came before, and maybe even this one, but no matter, I’ll just sit here and type some shit, pausing only to create glittery constellations on my fingernails while my mind floats about in an auditory la-la land. Perhaps something will be loosed. Perhaps something revelatory will sneak up on me and smear itself like peanut butter all over the facade of my knowingness.
Six nails down; four to go.
You know, peanut butter is actually thick and sticky and upon deeper consideration, probably not a great conduit for inspiration. Pixie dust is better. Let’s try pixie dust. Perhaps something revelatory will sneak up on me and sprinkle itself like pixie dust all over the facade of my knowingness.
Better.
Maybe nothing will be revealed except more watery psychological gruel. Fine. You don’t have to eat my gruel. it’s just an offering. It’s what I currently have to share. Btw, my brain wave technology MP3 just switched from Pure Focus to Relieve Anxiety ~ Not just simply ocean waves being piped into my right and left hemispheres, I also hear a far off muffled voice just below the waves. I’m being fed subliminal messages. Don’t ask me what’s being planted in my fertile psychic soil, I don’t know, but I trust it’s relieving anxiety. Oh, and I just laid down the last coat of snow globe. Ten disco ball topped flesh darts dance across the keyboard as the sound of affirmation doused salt water scrubs my neurons to an anxiety-free-me.
I do believe a shift is taking place.
Transition here.
Last night I wasn’t able to sleep due to who knows what. I did go to see my Chinese doctor yesterday afternoon and treated myself to a scream session where he pushed and pulled and popped my body back into alignment after it slipped into some crooked and painful version of itself while I was sleeping. After Dr Xiao, ( Pronounced Chow ~ or Ow! ) yanked my neck straight and roughed up my meridians on the massage table, he stuck needles in my head and neck and shoulder and feet and left me alone for a full thirty minutes to contemplate my navel and to soak in my ego-stuff which had grown into a super-concentrated consistency after Dr Xiao, who has known me for over ten years guessed my age to be 9 years less than actual. I did not correct him, because that’s not my job. My job is to contemplate my navel while appearing incredibly vibrant and youthful, okay?
It seems possible that my trip to Dr Xiao may have been to blame for my tossing and turning. All my blocked juju moving around and oh-so-sensitive me experiencing my juju moving around. I finally gave in to the words thrashing around my head wanting ventilation. I slowly pushed myself up in my bed, careful not to twist my still painful body back into a snarl of bigger pain. I reached over, turned on the light, found my notebook and pen on the side of my bed where it lives when an XY chromosomed human creature isn’t living there, and then commenced the scratching of pen across paper for ten ranting pages. Following this, I spilled some tears that had been stuck in my nervous system-the story irrelevant-the release glorious-and then this holy water face/soul cleanse eventually morphed into a trip to this here ratty old blog searching for the post I wrote several years ago about the time I was my former psychiatrist’s nurse. I thought I might build it into something worth sharing at a storytelling event. She was my headshrinker for ten years and then ten years later, I was her everything meant to make her well for a full twelve hours. It was surreal helping the woman who had once said to me the meant to help, but still untrue words, “You’ll always need anti-depressants.” into the shower. The whole day was illuminating, bizarre, and healing for both of us on many levels. It’s a fantastic story! At least I think so 🙂
****************************************************
Below are links to the posts if you’re interested, still in the original two part unedited form.
https://headfullofglitter.com/2010/03/09/adventures-in-therapy-part-one/
https://headfullofglitter.com/2010/03/11/adventures-in-therapy-part-two-2/
Wow, I feel so dropped in and relaxed now, after all those subliminal suggestions, but let’s move away from now and back to last night, shall we?
****************************************************
Continue last night:
I was lost in my former psychology for at least an hour. The thing that struck me was how fresh and wild and unapologetic my writing used to be. It was swirly-twirly-close-up-present and direct and knowing. In the seven or so years since I’ve been working at translating my thoughts into less messy versions of themselves, it seems something has been lost. My beginner’s mind is gone. I’m no longer inspired to write about my patients or my romantic delusions or even my eviscerated inner child. It’s all old news ~ I can’t get it up for those things anymore, they are for me a long great yawn.
I’m in some psychological, emotional, physical limbo. I’m in the liminal space, the in-between. I’m no longer the me I used to be, nor am I fully the me I am becoming. I’m mounds of fresh never been before experience transforming its way into…? I’m sitting in the great unknown. To wiggle out of this wobbly disorientation by rushing into defining myself with anything at all would be to miss out on the opportunity to be reborn into a Self I don’t yet know fully, but has still been me all along. Never have I not been me, but never as an adult have I been the fully fleshed out Self that’s being birthed into being.
It’s a process that I can’t fully talk about. Yet. I’m not even sure I ever will. Hell, I’m not even sure I’ll survive the transition even if I wanted to talk about it. It’s all unknown.
I move so much slower and am much more uncertain than the young woman who wrote the words I read last night. I miss that firecracker self who burned with so much anger and knowing. I’ve had to unknow so many things since those words that once felt so true shot like hot bullets from my mind to my fingers. I’ve had to sink down below the rage that protected me from the dark chasm of grief that I still sometimes get baptized in. Through this grief I have found a bottomless spring of fresh life that never fails to bring me closer to home.
For something new to be born, something old has to die. Night has to leave for the day to arrive. Winter comes and it seems as though the earth has forsaken us until spring slowly slides in as winter wanders away. Spring startles us awake with her green buds and warm breeze and we forget about the death that had to happen to make the wildflowers start wagging their brilliant and colorful tongues.
True wisdom is hard won and understands that death is a necessary transition, as is life, as is an inhale, as is an exhale. Some transitions last for half a moment and some can last for years. Some are predictable, like the seasons and our moon cycle and dusk turning to night and eventually to dawn and then to day. And others, like falling in love, or the time it takes for a woman to fully bloom completely, unapologetically, and unarguably into herself are not.
I read through a bunch of my old blog posts last night, letting my body swell with compassion and longing for a self I now only relate to as if she were a an old friend I still love and adore, but one I likely won’t see again, one who has been in the throes of a death rattle for a long time now. I’ve gotten used to the idea of her being gone.
I did eventually fall into what was a deeply restorative slumber after allowing all that wanted to move through me the space and time to do what it needed and I trust that’s what helped me to stay and to say here more than a few things that are very close to, if not completely true. In the end, that’s all I expect out of this writing, to bring forth into words the truth as translated by this mess of cells called me. Past me, liminal me, mysterious me. Whoever this true me turns out to fully be. All of me true gazing out at you, another me, making like you’re not me.
Head Full Of Glitter 