Blaugust #2: How To slow down
I have around 3 pages full of blog post ideas in my personal journal (ironically, one of them is to post about my personal journal), and yet, before Blaugust at least, every time I sat down to blog I always found myself forgetting every single world in the English language, all twenty six alphabet soup letters, how to grasp the concept of communication in general. I found myself going through a sort of blogger's ego death where I tried to blog and instead became the world. I tried to blog and it all ran together and then out into the street, SLAM! and say goodbye to any comprehension of the people around you, how to connect to them, or how to integrate yourself into the world at all. I sort of forgot that I was there, that I am here. I just forget what it's like to have lived when I try to blog, that I am always here listening, in the background, to myself.
I can never really figure it out, but as I wrote in my last post, I am trying! I killed my own death and came back to life juuust learning how to talk again, and then as my first word I made a JavaScript random generator of all the blog post ideas in my journal. I asked my friend to pick a number between 1 and 10, and when they gave me a 6 I rolled the randomizer six times. I landed on how to slow down. I thought to myself: fucking hell.
I can't remember why I put that in there, but my first guess is it was to force myself to learn, well, How To Slow Down when I finally had time to write it. I've done that with other things before, like when I had to force myself to stay alive. Maybe I can see the future and I actually predicted this! That is likely, and possible, right? The more plausible explanation though is maybe that, at the time, I foolishly thought that I did know how to slow down. I'm never mature enough to understand myself until the present moment, and of course the present moment is inherently fleeting; there's always another moment. These moments happen in direct succession from one another and just ram their bodies violently into you and if you don't open your mouth to let them out, they crowd around your teeth and start pouring down your throat, and then you're back in the same damn situation I described in the opening paragraph of this post. My hypothesis here is that I thought I understood myself and I didn't. Hey, in other news, water is wet, the sky remains its thick blue, and I am (not) an abomination.
So, like, whatever. Whatever! So I don't know how to slow down; so what? I'm not the dog we had to put to sleep because it didn't know how to keep itself safe. I'm not elderly, even if I feel like it at all times, and you can teach me new tricks, I'll even throw in a rolling over and a handshake for a buck fifty extra if you look away from the fact that I'm rambling. I don't know how to slow down but I can learn. I will try to imagine slowing down. I imagine it; I spread Slowing Down out across the table like it is a deck of divination cards and I read Slowing Down like it is prophecy or farce (take your pick). I take Slowing Down on that table, lovingly and romantically and, yes, slowly. I kiss Slowing Down underneath the moonlight. I give Slowing Down the final rose. I wait for Slowing Down to set in, to become real for me, but it takes just a little bit too long, so I start imagining what Slowing Down would look like in a kinder world. You know, the kind of downslowing that does come easily to me---the kind that would count and matter to others in a universe where there are no bricks piled on my chest, where God loves me, where people just take a second to consider things from someone else's point of view.
I can slow down, I just cannot Slow Down. I try to pull my brain out of my head and yank my worries right out the cranium but something curls around the wet thing and pulls me back in with it? I try to pull myself out of myself but I only find more ego death. I come to the conclusion that slowing down is going to look different for me than it will for others and maybe that's OK, but no one will accept this conclusion, I know it and it's scratched into the wood of my chest. I don't really know what they're looking for, other than that they're looking for a uniform, rigid normalcy I am simply too large to even squeeze into, like how 00 jeans don't even fit around my calf. I wouldn't even know where to start.
There is no relaxation for me. I feel like I am expected to relax, or to have relaxing as a goal, but - and I'm not trying to be Mx. Deborah Downer when I say this - I just don't think relaxation is compatible with me. Not in its pure form, anyway. I'm a square void; it is a solid spinning sphere. I'm the dangling arm and it is the sososo hungry shark. I cannot blame sharks; they are just doing what nature directs them to. Similarly relaxation is simply doing what nature commands of it, which is to hide from me and reject me in my all. Well, you get the idea.
I think a lot of people expect too much of those who have been through unimaginable trauma. I cannot be expected to fully evaporate into my surroundings when it wasn't safe enough for me to do so until I was an age where fearing for my safety had already become a second sort of blood; I cannot be expected to relax in the way a non-traumatized person would relax. I failed the test that was being one whole child and instead fragmented into chalk powder, little bits of white you can use to form any picture desired. I am never going to be the same kind of human as you.
Other survivors can get there but I don't know. I'm aware of how depressing this sounds, but that is the opposite of this post's intent; what happened to me transformed me in ways I will never be able to describe, ways I may never have the insight to fully understand, and the thing I am now is not wrong as many claim it to be. I am not unhealed because I am still at baseline afraid of all things; I am healed when I am able to appropriately cope with those fears. Healing is indicated by an ability to "do it scared", for me, I think. I feel like my most desired future will come when I learn how to exist comfortably within my neurotic eccentricities, without despising myself for not being the non-trafficked person's idea of recovered. I just don't think the pain of being used as a commodity ever goes away, but you learn to work through it.
I am working through it. I am taking the pain I carry over my back, the pain that exists heavy and dragging within a sack strapped to each shoulder, and redistributing the contents of my pain into different pockets to make the weight of it more bearable. I am fucking getting there.