hex_m_hell

“Notice the sensations in your body. Do any of them have an emotional charge?”

I went to a meditation group this evening that focused on emotion. It was a group for men, put together by a men's group focused on dismantling patriarchy. Suppressing and disconnecting from emotions is deeply connected to oppression. The emotional burden of oppressing others is easier to bear when you feel nothing, as is the shame and anger of being oppressed.

Feeling people don't make decisions to ruin people's lives, poison the land, steal the future from their own children. Feeling people can't tolerate others doing the same. Numbness is the bedrock of authoritarianism.

“Put your hand where you feel the sensation.”

It's hard for me to notice emotions most of the time.

My dad was happy or angry, sometimes disappointed, or asleep. I saw him cry once, when his dad died. I love my dad, but there's also a distance. I don't really see him or talk to him much. I didn't talk to him for like 5 years.

I recently watched a video that resonated with me pretty intensely. My mom completely failed to prepare me for life, but my dad pushed me hard to be independent. I respect and appreciate him for it, even when I have some issues with it.

It took a while to find it, but eventually I did.

Anxiety.

I touch a scar on the left side of my belly. There was a tube there draining some fluid or other. It was the second one they pulled out, some days after the one in my right lung.

There's not really a way to describe that feeling. The tube was up against my intestines. It slid against them and hit them as it came out. There was a bit of pain, like the lingering ache after being hit in the stomach, but perhaps a bit less. The real feeling was anxiety… overwhelming anxiety.

Somewhere, somehow, deep in our animal brain, the feeling of even the slightest intestinal trauma is intimately connected with death. Any human, or almost any animal, who felt something like I had felt, any longer than, say, 100 years ago, would have died a slow and excruciatingly painful death. Somehow, even knowing consciously that I am safe, my body knows and can't help but bring this to my consciousness.

In the book “To The American Indian: Reminisces of a Yurok Woman,” there were a few passages about Yurok beliefs (as she held them) on death. The part that's stuck with me is roughly this. When a person dies, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they're not good people, the dogs will eat them and if they're good people the dogs will let them past. But sometimes, the soul runs instead. If it escapes, the person can come back to life. But even though they escape, for the rest of their life they will be pursued by dogs. Eventually the dogs will catch and kill them.

It's a pretty spot on description of the experience of PTSD.

Trauma tunes people to spot threats, to see danger. Under normal conditions, they see danger where there isn't any. But under extreme conditions, we see danger that other people are too complacent to see.

“Give the feeling space. Ask it what it needs.”

I'm afraid. I'm afraid and sad. My youngest is 6 now. She's growing up so fast, and I push her hard to grow up faster. I feel like I'm missing out on her being young, like I”m trying to race through it, and I know it's vanishing quickly. I feel guilt for pushing so hard.

A staple in my intestines came out. Before I came out of the bathroom, I hit the emergency button. I walked a couple of steps and then crumbled to the floor. I lay on the floor unable to move, trying to yell with all my might but barely making any sound. No one came as I struggled to whisper “help.” When they finally came, they picked me up off the floor and rushed me to emergency surgery.

The blood they put in me was cold. My arm was freezing as they put bag after bag of blood in to my body, and I bled it out almost as fast. When I was first shot, I didn't think I would die. I thought it was possible, I prepared myself for it, but I knew there was a good chance I would make it. I knew that if I did die there, I would be proud of it. It would be a good death. I could die peacefully, if I needed to, but I was going to fight because people needed me. When I was bleeding out in the emergency room, I knew I was going to die and I was terrified. It was a completely different experience.

I was shitting gallons of blood. I thought of the Don Hertzfeldt “My spoon is too big” animation. I thought of the part where the character says “my anus is bleeding” as the room fills with blood. It was slightly funny, but mostly an unimaginably horrible way to die. And I was sure I was going to die.

The anxiety never went away.

I push my oldest hard to be I can't know how long I can be there for her. They saved my life, but it's not that simple. The x-rays, the surgeries, the things they put in my body, all of it shortens my life. I won't live as long as my dad, and I don't even have a guess how long he'll live.

My dad was abandoned as a baby. He was left at a bakery where my paternal grandmother worked. A lot of their kids were adopted.

My dad went through some pretty crazy things. I can count the number of times I've almost died, a couple before getting shot and few in the hospital. He served in Vietnam, but even before that his mother was schizophrenic and deeply religious. There were a few stories of her trying to kill him because she thought he was possessed or something. She also saved his life once, or so the story is told, when she killed a rattlesnake, cut off it's head, and threw it in a creek. (Apparently the loggers in the camp wouldn't go near the creek anymore because they were afraid of the snake head or some such superstition.)

I realized later that it's not just that I don't know how long I'll have with her. I see how things are. I know there could come a time when she has to leave me behind, when she has to save herself. I will keep getting older. I don't want her to get stuck trying to save me and miss an opportunity to save herself.

My dad couldn't leave the US. The Empire broke him to prevent the threat of a good example. Now he survives off the crumbs they let fall to vets like him. As they dismantle everything, how long will that last? The US will be a death sentence for a lot of people.

Sadness. Grief, loss, sadness.

There will come a time when I'm too old to move, to leave, to support myself, to save myself, as the polycrisis continues to evolve. I want my oldest, no matter how much she loves me, to be able to leave me behind. I want her to be able leave me behind because I love her. I want her to be able to leave me behind like I left my dad.