My thoughts on healing have changed so much since the time I began this newsletter and yet they have also pretty much stayed along the same lines. Sometimes I remember and acknowledge that I've come so far and this [healing] is getting better. Then one bad week, two terrible weeks, three so so weeks - throw me off so badly. It leads to my therapist making a confused face in a session where I asked "what is going on!!" And it dawns on me, slowly, much later, that I'm not suddenly gifted with a non-ptsd brain and a non-chronically-ill body. It's not magically all gone cause there were a few good days/weeks/months.
That moment in therapy sent me down a road of thinking about balance. By balance I mostly mean the balance between good and bad, healing and not, sick and well. What it takes to attain it and what it takes to maintain it? Especially for someone who lives with conditions that can deteriorate or at the very least fluctuate. Balance attained, any and all, for me has been mostly fragile and takes a lot of effort to maintain. And maybe the effort on some days is low and some days it's every single thing I do to stay afloat, keep myself from crying and screaming together, to get up and get out of bed.
When you've been working on yourself for so long [I mean me, but it feels easier to say you, I apologise], sometimes you take this hard attained balance for granted. It's just what you do as part of your routine, to maintain this balance, to be able to support your body-mind. But this balancing act can sometimes feel very invisible - even to myself. Logically, I know I do the work needed for my balance to be maintained. Yet, sometimes I can't see it. Though even if I can't see it, or hold it, or touch it to understand it, it doesn't make the work absent. It doesn't make the work "normal". When even I cannot see it, can I blame others who can't seem to see this effort either?
It exists within me and in my everyday. And in many ways can become a matter of habit.
That time in the morning where I stare outside my balcony. [Did it contribute to this balance?] The extra moments I spend lingering over tea brewing. [Was that part of my care routine?] The long deep breaths at my desk before sending out an email. [Oh that’s just anxiety.]
These got built into my rhythm and soon I forgot about why these were an important practice for me. A part of me doesn't want to remember this work of keeping the balance. Much of it is constantly imagining what working on myself looks like and a path to "be better". Did I take on one too many calls last week? Did I sit at my desk for one too many hours? Did I forget to take my medicines and breathe deeply? When this balance, a fragile and shaky one, is maintained with tasks I need to do each day, sometimes it becomes hard to distinguish when I am not doing them. Or when the balance shifts with too many things I can't or forgot to control. Like the weeks of stress or overwhelm or a whole week of unexpected new things. I frantically try putting all these practices back. And there are many.
One line of thought I had from this was the harsh reality of the fact that I didn't always know what my limit was/is. And planning around this limit was indeed harder for me. In Jessica Dore's book, "Tarot for Change" she writes (under the ten of wands):
A lot of us have grown up in environments where limits are not well understood, acknowledged or respected. It is not necessarily that the adults in our lives didn't care about our limits, they likely had trouble recognising their own and therefore weren't the best teachers of when to say when or of identifying where they ended and another began.
She goes on to ask questions around what makes boundary setting hard for us and how it is connected to our sense of self. She writes: “A murky self is the kind of self that can be difficult to look out for.”
As I read these lines, I began to wonder if my unease with balance also came from my own understanding of my limits. Maybe I wasn't firm about my boundaries? Or maybe I was scared to be firm about them?
Jessa Crispin too in her book, "The Creative Tarot" (also on the Ten of Wands) writes:
If we do not figure out how to ground ourselves, how to be practical rather than only passionate, we can sometimes run into trouble.
How to be practical rather than only passionate. Uff, so on point. I realise that the understanding of my own limits cannot come about overnight. These take perhaps a while of asserting and reasserting them. With dynamic, fluctuating and sometimes deteriorating conditions (like mine), I need to be more aware about my own boundaries or limits (or are they just my needs?). For a long time now I have been confused and always a bit hesitant to fully understand and then state them. Mostly cause these limits are often changing, shape shifting. I blamed my body-mind for not being more reliable; more balanced. It has since dawned on me that it just needs me to pay more attention. Maybe this takes time and effort to build in that awareness on an everyday. To know before the balance is fully off that I needed to do something else. Or not do something, I guess. To observe and act in favour of myself. To rely on myself rather.
What do you feel about balance in your life? What role do your limits or boundaries play? <3
Poetry for you (and me)
Nothing Is Lost
by Noel Coward
Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.
Cross that line
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?
A few lovely things
Does diagnosis help or harm? Or, why we name our demons by Tanmoy Goswami
Things I'm Bad At: Residencies by Carmen Maria Machado
Hiding behind language by Vijeta Kumar
Needing Each Other is Human by Jesse Meadows
Resisting Shame: Making Our Bodies Home by Eli Clare
Home cooked meal (A thread) by Sam Dylan Finch
Trying to Escape the Trap of Digital Productivity by Richa Kaul Padte
On Grief by Oh Truth