Following The Thread
Finding the bliss within the in-between states of unbecoming and rebecoming.
I’ve come to visualize trauma as a mess of thread. Balled up and coiled about. Embodied, embedded, somatically stitched. Edges frayed like tendrils searching for a source, plugged in and plunged deep, weaved along every avenue of life. A history tangled, thread lines as long as your ancestry and culture, knotted at all of the intersections.
A mess is not an easy thing to handle; it’s unwieldy, meandering, so integrated that it feels corporeal and earned.
In working through my own trauma, I’d explore along a thread line just until the moment I started to feel better. Then I’d leave it there, only for it to grow back from the roots in some new way at some unexpected and inconvenient time. Progress came in the form of following the thread to the ends, pulling at roots from beneath the soil, mycelium networks that extend far beyond what you could possibly have envisioned. And really, in making that commitment, you have to keep going, on and on and on, pulling up more and more and more, and then actually dealing with what you’ve unearthed. So much becomes raw and exposed; the process is jarring, exhausting, and loud.
I’ve been going to the sensory deprivation tank more often, to give my frayed CNS a bit of a rest. In the solo comfort of a steaming darkness, feeling the bliss that comes from having no external input, no social rules to figure out and follow, no cues done wrong, no outside opinions thrust upon my brain, just my warm solitude and silence and a smile. A fucking break.
While I am proud to have made a lot of progress in my own healing, I’m also weary of it. Healing as ritual, as a methodical and sometimes borderline obsessive practice of prescriptive repetition, curiosity and self-exploration; plus discomfort, unease, surrender - the usual terms. We are in a culture of constant self-improvement, with the expectations of being fully-healed-full-stop, emotionally-contained, and not a burden, not too much... when in reality, somatically, emotionally, you’ll run yourself ragged stretching like that for such an extended amount of time, under the weight of striving for a pristine and clean-healed, scrubbed-of-traumas self.
I’m in a space of continuing to heal, but at my own pace and discretion. Giving up that constant battle and just letting myself be a mess of thread. Viewing healing as liminality and the unfinished. Finding the bliss within the in-between states of unbecoming and rebecoming. Spending my time there, and enjoying my time there.
<3 Lyss