An essay I’ve been working on and off for the past two months that I need to get rid of to finally move on from all of this.
Early last fall, I began taking a meditation class focusing on our chakras. Four years ago, Marion, my therapist, suggested I meditate to relieve the anxiety of my work day. She said I needed to let go. She said my mind was deceitful, manifesting in thought patterns that spiraled and spiraled into days.
Letting go is vital. Your present deserves you entirely. Your future too. But in the midst of the past, reality disintegrates. The present and future gripped me; reality was furious. I could not waffle in the recesses of the past. The here was too strong.
But the chance to meditate came back this year and I took it, intent on living with purpose. If I can give you advice it would be this: live with the intention of yourself. If you cannot, you will not.
Our class took place in the music room at Soho House. Each meditation aligned with a different focus chakra. And the room was full of people who had jobs I didn’t understand. It took them more than a sentence to describe their work, which made me think their work didn’t exist at all. I never felt comfortable calling myself a writer until I made money doing it. I don’t think they felt similarly about anything in their life. I crave that brazenness.
Other students leaned in to the meditations too, sitting on the floor and crossing their legs. They’d change into more comfortable clothes even though this wasn’t required and they’d make public intentions of what they wanted to accomplish and how they would accomplish it.
At the end of our sessions, we would discuss what we saw. What we saw? All I saw was blankness, maybe colors if I tried hard enough. Maybe white from the glare of the lights. Maybe purple because that is my favorite color. I could feel myself in other places, usually the desert (my idea of tranquility), but I couldn’t see a thing, only the memory of myself in that place. Most often I thought about the days ahead.
“As thoughts come to you, acknowledge them and let them go,” our instructor used to say. The longer I took the class, the less thoughts came to me, but they never truly went away. I thought about my work and my frustrations and my anger. I thought about my future and whether or not it would be as I wanted for myself at 16, at even 26. I thought about my family, my friends, my desire for completeness always and the lack that pulls at my everyday. I did not think of love. I did not think of him. I did not think of us.
But other people saw childlike versions of themselves taking them on long road trips through galaxies unlike our own. They saw colors that don’t exist. They had conversations with people they know and didn’t know, long ones, in-depth ones that covered everything from their early morning minutia to friend trouble to politics. They saw recreations of traumatic incidents from childhood played out with strangers. They floated above. They were witness to their own history. They went on a trip. I went nowhere.
One week in class, we circled back to the manipura (a secondary chakra located at the solar plexus). I couldn’t make it work. Instead, I felt a lump so thick in my throat, I could not breathe. It felt both real and like a closing.
Two years ago when I struggled like this, I felt it too: literally allergic but also spiritually crippled. My throat would close up every night after dinner with my ex-boyfriend. First the throat would swell shut, then my lips, then my eyes and nose until I was completely incapacitated. But most times, I could stop the swelling before it grew out of control. I ended that relationship, and yet I still needed three more months to understand what was happening. I kept that closing, that lump, that metaphorical hump I could not overcome.
I asked our instructor about it at the end of our meditation session and she told me this: that I am blocking my truth; that I have lost a part of myself; that I am not doing what I’ve always done to consider my problems (writing); that to deny reality is to let these things build in mental blockage and later, now, the physical too.
“I want you to go home and do nothing and go to sleep,” she said.
“I have insomnia,” I said.
“I want you to go home and do nothing and go to sleep,” she repeated. “And the next morning, I want you to wake up and write down everything that comes to you. I want you to do it until you can’t write anymore. I want you to not think about everything else and instead focus on what you’re forgetting. I need you to start,” she said.
A SECRET:
I feel so betrayed by my body. I hate it. Or not hate it, but I’m wrestling with what it all means. I can recognize that my depression manifests in my limbs more than in my mind. I can’t sleep. At night I ponder nothing, knowing quietly in the parts of my heart that are difficult to muster that this is happening because I can’t face myself. When you are unable to face yourself, you become unable to face the other normal parts of the self: sleep is out of reach. The work day is a new obstacle. My insomnia is a chance to face myself, but I can’t.
I give my love to myself, to my body, only at night. Alone, I am able to cradle my arms, feel the heft of my thighs as they rest one on top of the other. My hips dip deep into my bed, indenting slowly the deeply packed foam. Every couple of months, I move the mattress around, making sure the permanence of my weight is balanced. At night, I curl into myself, become small, almost child-like as my limbs come not to a place of rest, but to their only true home.
This time is precious even if it is not rare. I am thinking about those nights when I can’t sleep, when the insomnia grips me. It’s during the weeks before my flow, the moments when my body fails me with regularity. It’s when I cry, but it is a cry that takes me by surprise, at least until it doesn’t.
That insomnia, it’s when the day has been too long and not just long enough. A long day is inevitable. A long day stays long, stays going. It doesn’t give up. It keeps its bearings until the night breaks and then, it goes further. The insomnia plays with my limbs, turns them into heavy anchors to my mind. I feel them more in this space than anywhere else and I hate them for it.
It is not like the daytime as I wrangle for control of myself. No, it is something else entirely.
But that night I slept. It wasn’t long or thorough, but my eyes were closed and I was somewhere else. And when I woke, I wrote this:
Written on my body is the truth I was afraid to own of myself. I never knew I wanted a child of my own until the one I had was gone. Marion said that I am in a state of mourning not yet manifest. Shock. In medical terms, this means a sudden drop of blood flow through the body. Oxygen and nutrients can’t get to vital organs. Quickly, nothing works as it should.
In my life, it was the end of life and the end of the intangible thing that created that life (our relationship) and the end of the possibility of what would come after that life (stability). Faced with a difficult choice, I had none in the end.
He broke up with me, a shell of myself, as life bled out of me, literally. I knew it immediately. Reality manifests in my limbs. My body closes chapters in lost breaths and tears and stomach pains. The end of things is the end of good health. My body is swelling, is dripping, is moving.
I looked down. “So this is it?”
A month or so before, we sat together in his bed on my birthday after a large meal and he said, “All of your friends are very good looking.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean they’re all beautiful and all of the men dress well. I felt strange.”
There would be other little things like that afterward. Like when I got sick and he said I was stupid, reckless for not taking care of myself.
“It’s because you dress like that,” he told me. He meant with my breasts out, my legs bare, my skin breathing.
Or like when he got sick, and he wanted me to take care of him, to tuck him in, to still make love as if nothing had changed.
“I just don’t think you’re a good person,” he said.
Or like when we drove to the far South Side to stand atop the ruins of South Works, a former U.S. Steel factory and he said, “This is a ridiculous trip,” but then later said, “I’m so glad I drove us out here,” and then later said, “You just don’t appreciate what I’ve done for you. No one will do this for you.”
Misogyny is not the hatred of women. No, I think in reality it is the fear of women. We don’t fear the things we hate; we hate the things we fear.
The things I hate are plentiful, multiply and mutate over time, adapt to the machinations of my current mind. But I don’t fear them. They don’t grip me, immobilize my body, make me mute. Instead, they inspire a fire that burns constant, bubbling under the surface and intoxicating those who find home above its unstable ground. The things I hate are just there, existing in contrast to the things and people and places I love.
Misogyny is not just the hatred of women. It is the fear of what we can become and what we can do and how we think it is all of those things.
I wrote and wrote until my hands cramped, my wrists throbbed, my fingers drummed invisible piano keys. I wrote and then, for the first time, I really got out of bed and stretched my limbs. It was a long high stretch, the kind I perfected as a young dancer. The kind that alluded me as neck cramps from insomnia kept me immobile.
At meditation the following week, we controlled our breathing and we imagined colors and then we were someplace else. I was some place else. Finally that desert I felt but could not articulate was real. And across my line of site I could see the burnt red mountains that felt foreign to me at first glance. I felt like I could touch them in the way that vast things from a distance feel like they could rest in the palm of your hand. And down below I saw the dirt of the desert, the sand, the whatever, that covered my lungs but still I breathed cleaner and easier than anywhere else in the world for me. And up above the sky was dark, only littered with stars for as far as the eye could see. I wanted to count them. Finally, it seemed, I thought I could keep going.
