hex_m_hell

“Notice the sensations in your body. Do any of them have an emotional charge?”

I went to a meditation group this evening that focused on emotion. It
was a group for men, put together by a men's group focused on
dismantling patriarchy. Suppressing and disconnecting from emotions is
deeply connected to oppression. The emotional burden of oppressing
others is easier to bear when you feel nothing, as is the shame and
anger of being oppressed.

Feeling people don't make decisions to ruin people's lives, poison the
land, steal the future from their own children. Feeling people can't
tolerate others doing the same. Numbness is the bedrock of
authoritarianism.

“Put your hand where you feel the sensation.”

It's hard for me to notice emotions most of the time.

My dad was happy or angry, sometimes disappointed, or asleep. I saw
him cry once, when his dad died. I love my dad, but there's also a
distance. I don't really see him or talk to him much. I didn't talk to
him for like 5 years.

I recently watched a video that resonated with me pretty intensely. My
mom completely failed to prepare me for life, but my dad pushed me
hard to be independent. I respect and appreciate him for it, even when
I have some issues with it.

It took a while to find it, but eventually I did.

Anxiety.

I touch a scar on the left side of my belly. There was a tube there
draining some fluid or other. It was the second one they pulled out,
some days after the one in my right lung.

There's not really a way to describe that feeling. The tube was up
against my intestines. It slid against them and hit them as it came
out. There was a bit of pain, like the lingering ache after being hit
in the stomach, but perhaps a bit less. The real feeling was
anxiety… overwhelming anxiety.

Somewhere, somehow, deep in our animal brain, the feeling of even the
slightest intestinal trauma is intimately connected with death. Any
human, or almost any animal, who felt something like I had felt, any
longer than, say, 100 years ago, would have died a slow and
excruciatingly painful death. Somehow, even knowing consciously that I
am safe, my body knows and can't help but bring this to my
consciousness.

In the book “To The American Indian: Reminisces of a Yurok Woman,”
there were a few passages about Yurok beliefs (as she held them) on
death. The part that's stuck with me is roughly this. When a person
dies, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they're not good people,
the dogs will eat them and if they're good people the dogs will let
them past. But sometimes, the soul runs instead. If it escapes, the
person can come back to life. But even though they escape, for the
rest of their life they will be pursued by dogs. Eventually the dogs
will catch and kill them.

It's a pretty spot on description of the experience of PTSD.

Trauma tunes people to spot threats, to see danger. Under normal
conditions, they see danger where there isn't any. But under extreme
conditions, we see danger that other people are too complacent to see.

“Give the feeling space. Ask it what it needs.”

I'm afraid. I'm afraid and sad. My youngest is 6 now. She's growing up
so fast, and I push her hard to grow up faster. I feel like I'm
missing out on her being young, like I”m trying to race through it,
and I know it's vanishing quickly. I feel guilt for pushing so hard.

A staple in my intestines came out. Before I came out of the bathroom,
I hit the emergency button. I walked a couple of steps and then
crumbled to the floor. I lay on the floor unable to move, trying to
yell with all my might but barely making any sound. No one came as I
struggled to whisper “help.” When they finally came, they picked me up
off the floor and rushed me to emergency surgery.

The blood they put in me was cold. My arm was freezing as they put bag
after bag of blood in to my body, and I bled it out almost as
fast. When I was first shot, I didn't think I would die. I thought it
was possible, I prepared myself for it, but I knew there was a good
chance I would make it. I knew that if I did die there, I would be
proud of it. It would be a good death. I could die peacefully, if I
needed to, but I was going to fight because people needed me. When I
was bleeding out in the emergency room, I knew I was going to die and
I was terrified. It was a completely different experience.

I was shitting gallons of blood. I thought of the Don Hertzfeldt “My
spoon is too big” animation. I thought of the part where the character
says “my anus is bleeding” as the room fills with blood. It was
slightly funny, but mostly an unimaginably horrible way to die. And I
was sure I was going to die.

The anxiety never went away.

I push my oldest hard to be I can't know how long I can be there for
her. They saved my life, but it's not that simple. The x-rays, the
surgeries, the things they put in my body, all of it shortens my
life. I won't live as long as my dad, and I don't even have a guess
how long he'll live.

My dad was abandoned as a baby. He was left at a bakery where my
paternal grandmother worked. A lot of their kids were adopted.

My dad went through some pretty crazy things. I can count the number
of times I've almost died, a couple before getting shot and few in the
hospital. He served in Vietnam, but even before that his mother was
schizophrenic and deeply religious. There were a few stories of her
trying to kill him because she thought he was possessed or
something. She also saved his life once, or so the story is told, when
she killed a rattlesnake, cut off it's head, and threw it in a
creek. (Apparently the loggers in the camp wouldn't go near the creek
anymore because they were afraid of the snake head or some such
superstition.)

I realized later that it's not just that I don't know how long I'll
have with her. I see how things are. I know there could come a time
when she has to leave me behind, when she has to save herself. I will
keep getting older. I don't want her to get stuck trying to save me
and miss an opportunity to save herself.

My dad couldn't leave the US. The Empire broke him to prevent the
threat of a good example. Now he survives off the crumbs they let fall
to vets like him. As they dismantle everything, how long will that
last? The US will be a death sentence for a lot of people.

Sadness. Grief, loss, sadness.

There will come a time when I'm too old to move, to leave, to support
myself, to save myself, as the polycrisis continues to evolve. I want
my oldest, no matter how much she loves me, to be able to leave me
behind. I want her to be able leave me behind because I love her. I
want her to be able to leave me behind like I left my dad.