Pipe Dreams

I’ve been suffering a nasty respiratory infection, which is almost better. I’m used to having the terrible cough, but this one was especially bad, and when I finally went to the doctor, he could hear the Bad Thing right away. He gave me a heavy dose of antibiotics to kill the infection, and a bronchodilator syrup to open up my chest & stop my wheezing. That stuff is freakin’ amazing… it’s essentially a relaxant for your bronchial muscles, and boy, is it nice to be able to breathe again.

I was quite contagious too, so I was off work, but unfortunately too sick to actually do anything useful with my time off. Mostly I slept between my doses of mega-medicine, and dreamed quite a lot. But not just any old dreams… I was having those sharp, technicolour dreams – the kind you only get when you’re really sick. I don’t tend to have true recurring dreams, but I do have recurring locations, and sometimes I like to think they represent parts of myself, especially when the locations are so obviously metaphoric it tickles.

One place that recurs often is the Water Room. Sometimes a bathroom, or laundry room, or a pool/steam room, or sometimes a water utility/control room. These rooms don’t always look the same, but they have the same characteristics. They are deep within a Large Building, are very old and (usually) infrequently visited, but generally well kept. They have high ceilings and tiled floors in the old fashion: miniature hexagonal tiles, all white or occasionally with a black pattern. They almost always have exposed pipes, but remember it’s an old place, so they’ve been painted over many times, the same colour as the walls. The colours there are usually in the blue-greens, (often the 1950's hospital aqua) but occasionally there will be a sepia-tone if it’s a room that’s been vacant a long time. They have the hollow, water-drop-echo sound. I have frequently thought that the Water Room is womb related, but maybe this time it was my lungs.

In one of these dreams while I was sick this week, I found myself in a Large Building. The Large Building location varies, but frequently feels like a cross between the hospital I was born in and my elementary school, but is usually represented as something else. I went into a suite that I knew my mother had been staying in (but she wasn't there now), and I was looking at her things. It was quiet, and I was alone; the light was dim, bed made, lacy curtains drawn. I slowly made my way along the walls in the room, looking at all the little details. There were many shelves, cupboards and ornate little boxes, and there were beautiful little treasures all neatly tucked away and organized. Makeup, jewellery, trinkets, and also special supplies for very fancy sewing/craft projects. Rich purples and blues. Metallic threads, little coloured jewels, fine filigrees, and delicate embroidery, all perfectly labeled and orderly. It was very beautiful.
I went into her en suite bathroom, turned on the light, and was surprised by the mess. A stark contrast to the meticulous storage of her trinkets, this room was empty of personal items, completely uncontrolled and filthy. Plugged drains, stagnant water, and black sludge accumulating in the grooves between tiles. Stinky too. I immediately started to clean it up, but I surfaced into consciousness, coughing of course.

I suspect my Water Room dreams are somewhat informed by my memories of my elementary school, and all the old Montreal-style exposed pipe/clawfoot tub/old fashioned tile bathrooms in all the houses I lived in there.

My elementary school was an old, old building, and the bathrooms were large, hollow-sounding, and each had one of those old fashioned pedal sinks. Difficult to describe: big, cylindrical things. The sink part was a doughnut-shaped trough around a central pillar, and there was a foot-pedal rim below that would trigger an umbrella-fan of thin fountain streams from a top rim above.

There was also an underground utility passageway that run under one section of the school. It was a tight little hallway that led to the boiler room, and all that janitorial stuff. Dimly lit, with low hanging pipes, red exit signs and spooky noises. I believed the older kids who told me there were monsters, or ghosts or whatever in the passageway. It was usually locked, but sometimes if it was open, kids would play scary games, and howl. I went through once on a dare, and there were older kids hiding there, making noises and jumping out to scare me and any other kiddo they could sucker. I ran through, arms flailing, crying all the way. I went through again, on my own once after that, quiet as a mouse, when there was no one around. I still ran all the way through, listening to my heart pound in my ears, but I needed to do it, to try to squash my fear of it.

My Water Room dreams don't have the taint of childhood fear that haunted my elementary school. It takes more than ghost stories and howling to scare me now, but there is a familiarity in the water-drop-echos of my dreaming that feels like those old places. A bit of nostalgia, and a bit of not-quite-alone feeling.

Sometimes I play Connect-The-Psychology-Dots with myself, and snicker.

What a great carrot.

Let's see... what's going on:

The energy that was stirred up at Recomp has officially run out. I think I've actually burnt out already, but my auto-pilot is so skilled that I haven't noticed yet.

I have not had a single uncommitted weekend since March 15. I went to visit a friend on the island for the May long weekend, which was very nice, and I would definitely call it a spot of downtime, but getting a single weekend of downtime in a six-month span is really, really not cool. Surgery recovery does not count. I'm not saying all 26 committed weekends were horrible; there was lots of great stuff in there. But it does suck to feel like I never, ever stop, and it's scary to look forward and see that I don't have an uncommitted weekend coming up until after Halloween.

Nearly a month ago, I had the dreaded surgery, which was physically and emotionally taxing. The most difficult part was actually the recovery, when I discovered just how incapable I am of sitting on my ass and "not doing". I have begun to suspect that my Must Sickness may be distraction tactic so that I don't accidentally take care of myself because I'm too busy taking care of everyone else. Shockingly, the whole care-giving vs. self-care realization exposed a whole bucket of triggers tied to my grandmother, which will be great fodder for my shrink.

I didn't have any emotional freak-outs like I expected. At first I thought this was a good thing and then I realized that all I really did was lock it down. Despite all the awesome SRT work I've done with my therapist, this was such a "big deal" for me that it's been too big to allow to flow through, and so it's corked, and waiting to blow.

I'd like to open and work through it, but it's a quaking mess down there. It takes more effort to allow it all to surface and flow to a place where I can sort, identify and deal with them than it takes to just ignore it all, get up and do something useful. I seem to have contained it well enough that I can go about my daily whatevers, but relaxing is actually impossible, and I honestly just don't have the time or the energy to address it.

Right after the surgery, I got a terrible cold, and had to take two additional days off of work, and so I got behind, and worked a crapload of overtime trying to catch up. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been able to just work a weekend, but all of my weekends have been over-committed, and so I've had to do my OT on weekdays... which makes for long days, and long weeks.

I'm in the deep, dark depths of "finaling" the project at work. That means the list of bugs is growing, but the time left to fix them in is shrinking. I am clocking a lot of overtime, and will continue to do so until October 31, which is my last day on the project. On November 1st, I will be flying to New Delhi, India. That's a pretty big carrot on a stick.

Frank and I will be spending the entire month of November in India. The big dots on the map (in destination order) will be Delhi, Agra, Varanasi, possibly Pondicherry, definitely Kerala, possibly Goa. Normally, I would say that a month on holiday would be a fantastic way to decompress, except that India is not an easy place to visit. Jet lag, culture shock, language barriers, transportation difficulty, touts, clean water, food allergies and the possibility of illness are all challenges that lie ahead. So I'm not kidding myself. It'll be hard work, but I suspect it will be worth it. To my advantage, Frank and I travel very well together, and we've been doing our homework.

I'm creeping up on a month post-surgery, and I haven't called the doctor back yet to make my follow up appointment. I accept that my procrastination on that is entirely due to anxiety and my disinclination towards medical intervention...er... I mean "assistance". Ironically, when we went to get our travel vaccinations, we were instructed to stop trying until we're back from India as anti-malaria drugs and pregnancy don't mix. I had to snicker to myself... if it's true that "it'll happen when you stop trying", then I'm doomed to getting pregnant while I'm on malaria meds, which would actually really suck.

All that aside, I really am hoping that India will be as wondrous and inspiring as I expect it will be, and that I will come home feeling refreshed and recharged.

In the meantime, I will continue to fight the burnout, one day at a time.

Countdown

Fourteen hours from now, I will be out cold and hopefully dreaming of crows and shiny things while medical professionals take a look at my plumbing.

And sure, it's all for a good cause. Hopefully, after all this, they'll see why there's no miniature Crank & Flaires running around. If I'm extra lucky, they'll even see why I get such blinding cramps. So it's good. But the thing I dread the most is hearing them say "You're in perfect working order." I'd rather bad news than no news.

I've really done my best to prepare myself emotionally and psychologically for this, yet still, I feel like a three ring circus. Oh look... here's a coping mechanism, and here's a projection, and oh look over there, a pattern fulfillment. I tell myself that the fact that I'm even aware of that stuff is a miraculous achievement. I tell myself that even though this kind of thing is "no big deal" to a lot of people, it is a HUGE deal to me, and that it's normal, and ok to be a bit of a basketcase.

And, it's hard to tell which is the hardest part: Allowing my belly to be violated, or allowing people to help me cope with it.

Paradigm Shift

This month is shaping up to be chock full of epiphanies.
I had a great time telling my psychologist about my experience at Recomp. She was pretty excited about it too and described it as a "corrective emotional experience", and the fact that it occurred spontaneously in the "naturalistic environment" (ie, not in her office) was a significant plus. Since I got back, I've been really riding the high of it, and it's been an adventure to see the positive effects blooming and spreading.

For example: I found myself on an interesting train of thought a few mornings ago.
It started because I was thinking about my schedule, and how busy I am, and how much my focus is split between all the things I love to do. I was also peripherally thinking about a friend whose employment has become dodgy & is thinking of turning his attention to side-projects. It occurred to me that if for whatever reason I stopped doing what I do for a living, I'd like to really focus on my art, in all it's various disguises.

And for a moment I laughed at myself. The last time I was unemployed, I just ended up sitting around playing video games, mainly because I had too many hangups about being an "artist". More seriously though, I realized that I don't really have a lot of those hangups anymore, but there's some legacy baggage that could really stand to be thrown off the train.

Art served a very important purpose for me as a child. It wasn't just creative expression for me, it was refuge. Home, safety, sanity, but most importantly, identity. I believe this is the root of my over-attachment to my art. It's not just art. It's actually ME.

Many moons ago, I went to art school assuming that I could pursue art as a career, but that was a complete failure. I perceived the curriculum to be sucking out my soul, and I felt increasingly more oppressed, depressed, and incapable of creating until I dropped out. At the time, I thought it was just because I was stubborn about jumping through hoops. In retrospect, I see that it's because what they wanted to see was me stepping outside of my comfort zone, and I wasn't capable. For a child whose art is their identity, to reject the art is to reject the self.

The truth is that at the time that I was most obsessed with protecting and preserving my “identity” in my art, that identity was a total mess. It likely would have done me good to let go, take it different places, to learn and grow. But instead, I accepted that I wasn't ever going to be a "real" artist, always kept a day job, and hid my art in my house. I let my day-job suck out my soul, and saved my passion for evenings and weekends. What a surprise that I was perpetually dissatisfied and depressed. On occasion, I've submitted to controlled exposure... my Flickr art gallery, small "showings" at my home when I've created new works, a piece or two shown somewhere locally at the request of a friend - but never, ever for sale. Mine. ME. Go away!

It was scary as hell to start it, but choosing 3D art as a career path was the best decision I ever made. It keeps my creative urges satisfied, but is detached enough from the rawness of personal work that I can let it go when I need to. My art at work can't be "finished" without the support of an entire team of people, and that makes it "ours", not "mine". I think this tiny little distinction is what has made it possible for me to learn and grow creatively, commune with other artists, and still feel very safe. I think it’s what’s paved the way for this shift that I’m sensing is about to happen.

I started to get a clue that there was baggage back in January, when I had to put price tags on my paintings for the Sweet Nothings show. It felt like old programming, but I wasn’t really able to sort it at the time. For the most part I decided to either step up and have a deeper look before the next art show (which will be in June), or step down.

Oddly, I think the only stepping up that is required is a bit of internal realignment - realignment which is sitting on the edge of it's seat, waiting to happen. So many things have come into line for me to make these internal shifts. I need to spend a bit more time exploring this, comparing how I currently think and feel to the ghosts of childhood attachments, but I have a hunch that it’s going somewhere good. I think I have more to offer, and am more capable of expressing it than ever before. And I think doing a bit of internal housekeeping while I’m still riding the high of my “corrective emotional experience” is the best idea I’ve had all week.

Spontaneous Combustion

My weekend was combustive - literally and metaphorically.

I could bore you with the details of the unsavoury parts, but really - that's not important anymore.

In a nutshell, Recompression was a blast.
As expected, our Arabian Nights theme cabin was a screaming success, and was an inviting and comfortable home for us while enjoying the fresh air of the Sunshine Coast. I finished painting the backdrop for Frank's photobooth in time, and he took hundreds of spectacular photos of our friends and community. My belly dance workshop was incredibly well-received, and I've been asked to do another at a future event.

But the important part was the fire show, and what happened after.

There's not many folks around anymore that knew me "back in the day" - when I was Vancouver's only fire breathing belly dancer, when I was in the circus, when I was 135 lbs of muscle. Sure, others have heard the stories, but they weren't there. Twelve years later, I frequently find the spectre my former self a tough act to follow.

For years, I carried guilt and shame for my (warning: unpleasant photo) accident, and for not being careful about who I taught. These feelings drove me underground, and into deep hibernation. It was only at Recompression last year that I realized that I was the only person who felt these things were shameful. I tried to let it go, but I was still underground. I understood it in concept, but in reality, I was still finding excuses to stay out of the fire scene.

The biggest excuse was that the rules & tools have changed. In truth, the tools are better and safer, and the rules make accidents like mine nearly impossible, which is great. But quite honestly, I've been embarrassed to come out of my fire-closet and fearful of judgment. Not to mention the fact that in twelve years, the art has progressed and left my puny skills in the dust! Kazmira: A local legend? Pah. A HASBEEN!

(Terrible, terrible self-talk, I know.)

Regardless, the fire show happened, and I was feeling pretty good about it. I had a couple of jobs to do, and I had fun doing them, and felt I did them well. Everyone was great - fun to watch, and excellent to work with. Very likely the most enjoyable fire-show I've ever done. I did have a pang of inadequacy while watching some particularly good staff spinning, but it didn't stick. I was still having an awesome time.

Most of us retired to the Moose Lodge to dance our buns off, and at some unknown point, that pang of inadequacy began to transform into inspiration. It was as though I was growing in size, wings unfolding, a small fire beginning to smolder in the pit of my stomach, all with only the mildest of conscious awareness. I found myself deeply engaged in conversations with these fantastic performers, and it felt familiar, and welcoming, and good.

I asked that particularly good spinner if Frank could take our picture. I had been feeling a really strong connection, and wanted a memento. In the moment that the flash went off, we made eye contact, and all the good-vibes of the entire evening rushed in - in that fraction of a second, the smoldering in my core ignited. It was like a switch had been flipped, like the sun had risen, like the sky opened up and angels dropped their harps to bust out James Brown's music. Metaphorically, I was ablaze.

The rest of my evening was bliss. The connected feeling just got better and stronger, and it felt like home.

It's days later now, and I still feel like I'm on fire. I talked to an old friend about it last night, and she said that I sounded like an "old self". She's one of the few who were around back in the day, so I grinned and believed her.

Something woke up on Saturday night, and it's ready to BURN.

Photo credit: Frank Roberts, 04/04/08

A Bit on the Importance of Narrative

Quoting from "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell, pg. 118:

The original Sesame Street was anti-narrative: it was, by design, an unconnected collection of sketches. “It wasn’t just the ads that influenced the early Sesame Street,” Anderson* says. “There was also a theoretical perspective at the time, based in part on [the influential child psychologist] Piaget, that a preschool child couldn’t follow an extended narrative.” Since the late 1960’s, however, this idea has been turned on its head. At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. “It’s the only way they have of organizing the world, of organizing experience,” Jerome Bruner, a psychologist at New York University, says. “They are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.”
(*Daniel Anderson: television researcher at UMass)

When I read this passage, I realized that this is why I am so obsessed with mythology as a way to help reconcile my experiences, my emotions, and place me in my world. In this psychological context, it makes perfect sense that even as an adult the narrative format could still serve so well as a tool for personal integration and understanding.

Very cool. :)

Cleaning Up The Basement

I work pretty hard, psychologically. I want to understand and improve myself, my life, my relationships, and not be held back by old, irrelevant news. It’s an ongoing project, but I can see how far I’ve come already, and I’m proud of my progress. One of the things that I still have trouble with is mind-body integration. I’m a bit dissociative when it comes to mind-body. I know a lot of people think dissociation is about denial, or the mind disconnecting from reality, but for me it’s a separation at the neck.

I have lived in my head most of my life. It’s been the thing that forces my body into action when I’m scared or hurt. It’s the thing that makes sense of the bad stuff, and lights the way forward. It’s the thing that has forced me (metaphorically) to get up and walk when both my legs are broken. I admit that I’m heavy handed in this. I cannot control my environment, but I can control myself. Feelings belong to the body, and if they didn’t fit with what the mind wanted, they got shoved down past the neck and invalidated. Mind over matter. Mind over emotions.

But I know that my mind and my body are a single thing, and that separating them has served as a defense mechanism, but is damaging in the long term. I’ve been focused on mind-health, and have become skilled at self-analysis, seeing the roots of things quickly, washing away the garbage, and moving on, despite my fears.

Getting involved in the Baby-Making-Project requires me to focus on body-health. I have to be aware of it and take care of it. My pet project has been to try to close the gap between my mind and body, and prepare it for this mythical baby. Become a balanced thing and create a healthy vessel.

But now that so much of the mind is tidied up, and I’ve been trying to reintegrate, I’m discovering that my body is totally freaked out, and has been all these years that I’ve been bullying it into action, and using it as a warehouse for inconvenient emotions. It’s all a mess down there. I feel like my mind is a sunny, organized attic, and my body is a dark, messy basement. I feel that I am really, honestly “ok” psychologically with most of the bad crap in my life. My body however, missed the memo. The wall between my mind and my body is so thick, that all my good “brain work” isn’t being relayed.

It’s like my body has been hiding in a bomb shelter, and doesn’t know the war is over.

Right when I’m learning how to be aware of and respect my body, my feelings, my fears… I discover that I must submit to precisely the things my body does not want. Before, I would have just trash talked myself into it: "WTF, Claire, since when are you a coward? Get your shit together and stop whining." Part of this is an exercise in listening to my body, and respecting it. Part of it is a lesson in how to be gentle with myself, and not control what I am or am not allowed to feel. I need to find a way to talk my body into what needs to happen without feeling bullied.

Luckily, I just happen to have an awesome shrink that specializes in trauma and SRT (self-regulation therapy). SRT is focused on the nervous system, and our responses to activation. Which is precisely what I need. Even before I started seeing a psychologist, I was able to trace things, and often devise solutions. But that’s not quite enough anymore, as my old coping mechanisms are failing in this scenario. Having a skilled, focused, objective sounding board is incredibly valuable. It speeds up the process, keeps it clean, and can provide me with even more resources and tools than I could have dreamed up on my own. I'm booking myself appointments with her on a weekly basis until I feel like I can cope with myself, and everything I'm supposed to be doing. Yay for good therapists, and yay to my friend who recommended her.

Now I’m going to talk about my belly. That’s where everything is warehoused.

I don’t believe I was born broken, so that’s a good start.
But when I was a baby, my bellybutton got infected when the umbilicus came off. It had to be cared for daily with alcohol and Q-tips. I have been told that I wailed.

I had a greasy, childish, dimwitted and uninteresting step father. He had a very painful abdominal tickling technique that would reduce me to convulsions and prevent me from speaking or even breathing. This also served as a cover-up for inappropriate touching.
For most of my life, I've had recurring dreams where people I love and trust walk up to me, jam their fingers into my ribs, and I can’t breathe. In these dreams, I try to step back, but I can’t, I get sweaty, and my head gets full and tight from not being able to breathe, and I always think: “If I could just say ‘stop’, they’d stop.” But I can’t breathe, and I can’t speak, so they don’t stop. I wake up gasping, my stomach in knots.

When my belly button is touched, it feels like the sensation echoes into the core of my torso, like an organ has just been touched.
Writing that sentence makes me stop to cover it with my hand to protect it.

When I was a kid, my family told me (jokingly) that the umbilicus, which is attached to the outside of her fetus’ bellybutton, connects to the inside of her own bellybutton. Of course, this is not true, the umbilicus is attached to the uterus. But I believed it, because I was small and knew nothing about the inside of my body, and, it totally creeped me out.
They also told me that if my bellybutton was like a cork, and if it ever came out, all the air would escape, and I’d fly around the room like a balloon. They thought it was funny, and of course it’s not true. But the idea terrified me.

I don’t like it when people touch my belly without asking. Sometimes, depending on the day, even when they ask, I can’t let them. Sometimes, even Frank can’t touch my belly. Sometimes, if we’re sitting together, and his elbow innocently brushes my ribs, I twitch, and shrink away. Sometimes, my body can’t relax enough to go back to the way I was sitting. This is old news, not just since the reintegration efforts… I’ve been that way for years, and years, and years.
When I am out at public events, I often unconsciously put my hand on my belly, usually covering my bellybutton. I know it’s a protective gesture, so that it doesn’t get accidentally touched. But on top of being overweight, a gesture like that makes people ask me if I’m pregnant. Which I’m not, and that’s an entirely other emotionally charged issue. Sometimes wonder if I have been denied pregnancy because my body is so inhospitable.

I used to be very thin. Now I’m overweight. But I don’t hate my belly.
I have food sensitivities. The foods that gave me comfort as a child are now foods that make me sick.
I get debilitating cramps. I’ve had cryosurgery for pre-cancerous cervical cell removal. I might have endometriosis, or fibroids. Testing is imminent.

If I were to look at this from a chakra point of view… all of these issues are in or around the bottom few wheels. All of them have to do with instinct, survival, safety, reproduction and creativity. A friend of mine did a series of chakra paintings… I may do something similar as part of my “whole-body” awareness exercise.

And yes, I’m a belly dancer. But no, I do not believe that I chose to be a belly dancer because subconsciously I was trying to work out my belly issues. Or because despite my over-protectiveness of my belly, I feel compelled to “put it out there” or to seek reenactment of my trauma. I was awed by a belly dancer on TV when I was about seven years old, and prior to most of my belly’s “trauma” experiences. Though my interest started when I was little, I was only able to start dancing when I was eighteen, after I moved out on my own.

I know that dancing is therapy for me. It's been the only harmonious relationship that my mind & body have had. I use dancing to express, discharge, and re-balance.
When I am dancing, I don’t feel self conscious, or protective of my belly. I feel whole, real, free, connected and undamaged. I need to find a way to dance more, but not in a looming, committed way. But it's so hard to find the time and energy to do it, especially with all the other crap that's going on.

Ugh, I know I kinda trickled out there, but I'm tired of writing.