Prickly

Yesterday I went to my friend F’s birthday party. Honestly? I was a bit anxious about it because I’m eyeballs deep in trauma work right now and it is really exhausting. F and this particular social group is BAD ASS and profoundly self-aware and intelligent. When I’m with them, we’re sure to talk about: neurodiverence, metacognition, social inequity, and religious trauma. Cool thing is, I know that about my body right now. I need to take breaks. So I told myself I’d just be there two hours and follow my gut in terms of how much of my shit did I want to share with the group. There were many things I noticed inside of me during the party, but I want to share specifically about one interaction I had.

After I’d been there for about 30 minutes, another guest arrives. I was sitting on a couch, facing away from the front door. So when I heard the door open and my friends greet the visitor, I turned around and recognized a face. That face belonged to a body that was standing up and scanning the room from the eye-level, not looking down at me, sitting on the couch, with my back to them. But I saw them!

It was my former coworker and back-burner friend. Why backburner? I dunno, I just made up that term. I think that means that the energies of the moment didn’t keep us actively engaging as friends, but I never really felt like we weren’t friends. I’m learning that’s natural and not a rejection. Anyways. I hadn’t seen her in quite a while. I’m not entirely sure how long, but we last worked together in November 2013. She, to me, was a guide and a light when I was going through my first big nervous breakdown and had to enter partial hospitalization for suicidal ideation. She will forever be remembered and valued by me in a very warm way due to how generous she was with her support and understanding during that incredibly raw period of my life. The wounded parts of me wondered if we weren’t actively friends anymore because she found me to be too broken and needy. Oh, keep reading…

Once I recognized her and realized that she wasn’t identifying me yet, I said to her, “Hey, look down at my face” (classic Marie language). She looked down and was shocked! I don’t remember what she said, but we had an excited moment of delight and surprise at seeing each other at this little gathering. I think I said something to the effect of, “I’m 100% not surprised that you are a part of this social group”.

The group was getting bigger and for the most part the communication dynamic was manifesting as one person as a time taking a turn talking. Side rant: who the fuck says we need group therapy? This birthday party was better group therapy than anything else I’ve ever been to. We can do this. ANYWAYS. So my friend R and I didn’t really get a chance at that moment to catch up and so we both merged into the group flow but my hypervigilant mind was incredibly aware and curious about her presence and how the hell she was doing!

Over the next couple of hours, I became aware through group sharing that she is going through her own shit. This isn’t her blog, so I won’t share anything about her details, but suffice it to say, I gathered that she was psychologically and somatically experiencing something akin to the darkest and earliest parts of my reckoning with my unprocessed trauma. My heart fell deep into my stomach like a weight and I really wanted to connect with her. But also I didn’t want to come off too strong and I also wanted to be really cautious about projecting my own story onto her life or accidentally embodying the guru kind of persona that I’ve been developing to cope in this world. I reminded myself she is my equal and she has her own wisdom and knows her path and her experience the best.

Luckily, when I stepped away to the kitchen, she happened to also be going to the kitchen. My heart lately has been incredibly open and love has been flowing out of my mouth and so I said to her, “R, I am so glad to see you here!” and we began to connect 1:1 away from the group. With obvious discomfort and something that looks like fear of judgment, she began to open up about what she’s been experiencing. My heart absolutely broke.

I bubbled over with compassion. I didn’t want to assume to know her internal state, so I reflected back to her what I was being reminded of regarding my own path when interpreting what she was sharing with me. Inside me, my brain was feeding me images/memories/impressions of myself when I knew less about what was going on with me after that first shrooms trip in 2020. I was so, so, so scared and it only got worse over the next couple of years. Only recently have I gained enough mental clarity to not feel like I’m going insane every second. It’s still a living hell, but I have a mild amount of confidence in what I’ve gathered about the situation. But before I reached that point, it was so so so so so lonely and scary. I was burned out on the mental health system. Every system, to be honest. Every person in my life was scary. Everything was an emotional flashback. And I knew it was happening, too. And couldn’t stop it. I felt insane. Very very very much did not want to be alive and experiencing. I just felt washed over by those memories of profound despair and agony.

I tried to be as thoughtful as possible and keep my mind in check, reminding myself to prioritize her perspective and owning my own through how I shared my experiences. In this moment, I am not even really sure I remember much of what I exactly said to her other than knowing I wanted to be as open of a book as possible in case I, in fact, am valid and that when we do share our experiences honestly, those who are also engaging in self-awareness and recovery can see their own truth through our stories. And I sensed that was kind of what happened. I’m not positive, but it felt like by being so open about being a traumatized mess cobbling their way into restructuring their reality, that my friend R might have gained some kind of hope or sense that she’s not crazy.

One of her concerns generally speaking was in sharing about what she’s going through with her community. She perceives of her own process as something burdensome to others as she can’t put together her own thoughts and ideas of what’s going on. Oh, man, do I get that. She even said that she feels like a “prickly cactus” to others. Oh, I just had to address that. I said, R, I get it. I need you to know, for me, your being a cactus is not offensive or burdensome to me. It is life-giving to me to engage with people fresh on their trauma recovery paths or further down the path, whatever. I’m looking for truth, rawness, honesty, and sincerity. I reassured her that I couldn’t be offended by her being a cactus since I am also a cactus. When I said that, my brain gave me this image:

I haven’t felt like making art for the last month or two so the fact that my brain gave me an image that I also emotionally felt open to creating felt really good. And then the fact that I woke up this morning and was still thinking about this image and still felt ready and willing to make it, made it the first thing I did this morning while waiting for the rest of my family to wake up.

Moral of the story? Well, first of all, the idea of morality is oppressive. But beyond that, my takeaways or truths of this story are: emotional rawness paired with compassionate acceptance (whether internally or interpersonally) is magic to the traumatized bodymind.