Ownership of my Wrists

Unchaining My Wrists

TW: Rape,assault,cutting 

My wrists. they came up briefly in my a few of my Pride series posts and they have been a point of contention for me my entire life. This is an intense post one I've felt bubbling but have been struggling to write and talk about since I found this sketch and got the tattoo on my wrist. I haven't owned my wrists for years. How can I say that? They are part of your body, you own your entire body. First of all, to that, I'll say you have never lived in a disabled body before, but that's a topic for another post. Secondly, I'm pretty sure most people who have been through any type of assault, will tell you taking back ownership of your body is one of the hardest struggles long after the incident. 

The first time I felt like I didn't own my wrists I was probably three years old, having cerebral palsy meant I wore leg braces since I was two or three until 9th grade. I got these braces made, probably once a year and that required being casted as a mold for the braces. Which also meant as someone who is partly claustrophobic and hating to feel confined, but I was too young to explain how the process made me feel inside, I would just try to pull or push the casts off my legs, so the caster had my mom hold my wrists and lay me on my back. I think it took me two or three years of this process so by the time I was eight years old I knew to just lay on my back and wear my internal wrist chains. These chains laid dormant for years,or so I thought. But thinking back to when I started hurting myself I never touched my wrists, whether it was pinching, slapping, digging in nails, cutting, burning lightly. Many people assumed I wasn't hurting myself since they couldn't see the results. Especially since society has mostly decided the only place people assume self-harm cutting happens is on the wrists. I really never thought about that at that point in time but most of this self-understanding came sitting on my psychologist's couch many years later talking about tattoos. 

This lack of ownership of my wrists continued when I was assaulted by a healer when I was six, I had already learned just to be quiet and let my wrists chain themselves to the table. This continued when I dated a guy and was used to just being quiet so when I even bothered to say no it was easier to just be quiet, when he grasped my wrists, they weren't mine to ask back for anyway. 

Finally, I started taking my body back for myself, but even my first tattoo there was discussion about getting it done on my wrist but decided on the forearm instead, for a variety of reasons, but an unconscious one, was that I still didn't feel like I owned my wrists. It took years of therapy, coming out of the closet, and learning to own the rest of my body to realize I didn't feel like I owned my wrists. Giving an explanation of the internal turmoil that happened anytime someone grabbed my wrists, and sometimes even my hands. This tattoo thought process was faster than some others I had planned, but I think that also explains where I was emotionally and mentally processing some of the old moldy boxes in the recesses of my mind. This sketch of a cracked heart growing new flowers of life came up in a tattoo giveaway, I didn't win, but the sketch entered my brain and found a spot next to the semi-opened up box of pain, and the growth coming from it. The sketch nestled itself into the box and helped empty it out a bit more, and then sitting on the couch again, I realized that the perfect place for this was on my wrist. Taking back ownership of my wrists one step at a time. 

Musty boxes of my Mind

     I lock myself in the living room of my mind in the middle of the musty and rusted untouched boxes. The untouched boxes I don't want to touch but want to take them out to the curb. I then somehow still manage to ask myself why I am not able to dream about how I want the living room, forget the whole house of my mind to look like. Pen, paper, and words are tools the cleaner in my mind uses, and it creates a love-hate relationship, and when I run for too long from the pen with excuses it cracks the window to find the air. The air of letting go that comes from putting words on paper, I crave it but don't let myself indulge in opening up the boxes and letting go. Many of these boxes have labels. I have applied some of the labels and others have labeled some as well. These boxes are filled with kicking demons and muffled choking memories. I spend more time judging myself on having these boxes filling up the house, than giving myself the grace and space to unpack, process, and throw out the boxes. Holding myself back from opening up the room and letting light and growth into the room and turn my house into a home full of growth, dreaming, and achieving. I need to love myself and the dream house and world I want to create enough to sit through the painful process of emptying out the musty rotting boxes of pain. I notice this more when I turn away from letting myself write many times its because I'm struggling with processing old baggage that sometimes shows up in the same shabby box or gets a bit renovated for me, and instead of sitting an opening the box I try to just numb my mind and do mindless tasks. I'm trying to change this more so I can get to the place of visualizing, thinking and creating the home and world in my mind and in the world around me that I want.

Why do I hate the question why?

     This post came up listening to a podcast about personal branding, and growth of a business and one of the most important aspects of building your personal brand and business is "why". Why are you creating this? They described the "why" as such a normal question that didn't usually make people feel an urge to run away from the question "why". The first feeling I had was "well, I'm sure I can figure my business out without it, I know what I want." Sitting with the word "why" was so uncomfortable. Searching for my "why" made my skin crawl and made me want to use old unhealthy coping mechanisms to get rid of the feelings. So the blog post on "why" sat on a scrap of paper for a while until I felt like I was choking with emotion every time I saw the paper and finally had the strength to dive down this uncomfortable place and process while I write.
      I thought back to my time in the religious formal education system especially through middle school and high school, and the lack of ability to ask why. The automatic response was "that is the way it is, don't question the truth" the anger that was the automatic emotional response shared with at some point got engrained, and I tried to train myself to stop asking. This goes even further back to childhood especially with religious rituals the question of why wasn't appreciated as the answers weren't necessarily known or were to be shared, rather shut down as this is what we do. I had been trained for so long to never ask the question "why",I tried very hard to follow the training although, I never did a great job at keeping my mouth shut. The reactions varied depending on what I was questioning. As soon as I write this, of course, the thought that comes to mind, is well don't blame other people for your problems or your actions. And while this is true, actions, reactions, and specific instances do create imprints on me. It's then my job to process the emotions and actions, and this, of course, takes time in order to have the emotional capacity to go back and process. But yes each person's actions and reactions have an impact on someone else and that's normal to accept within boundaries.
      One story that stands in my mind specifically happened when I was in 12th grade. It was the beginning of the year and the class that was being given was called "Bayit Yehudi"-Jewish home. I'm not sure what we were meant to be learning but the first lesson the teacher started out by saying everyone needs to figure out what subject they want to learn to teach, in the teachers' seminary that was run and owned by the same people who owned my high school  (drama for another time). My immediate reaction was to blurt out that I have no interest in being a teacher and there are so many different jobs out there, and not everyone is meant to be a teacher, even the rabbi they claimed was their inspiration for the school specifically wrote about individual talents and using them in many of his writings. The continuation of the outburst included pointing out many of my friends in the class and how they had so many talents and career options more suited to them, at that point the teacher had really had enough, she had already told me to go to the principal's office, now told me I was not welcome back in this class for the rest of the year. Now the first emotion I thought I felt at that moment was elation, "great I get a free period every week for the entire year, chilling on the grass outside for an extra hour a week sounds great." That emotion subsided quickly as I slammed the front door on the school building and went to sit down on the grass outside, surpassing the useless visit with the principal who would have nothing to say that I felt was worth listening to. Sitting down with my back against a tree the next feeling that washed over was one of abandonment and feeling completely alone, none of my friends had backed me up in class, they all stayed silent as I ranted. Now logically this makes sense they were and most still are part of that community and talking back would be committing community suicide. Just thinking back on this memory brings back up so many feelings of anger and being suppressed into the cookie-cutter image of how I was supposed to behave and what the next steps in my life were supposed to be. It also brought up the feeling of how they used the religious icon of a very important rabbi, especially in their circle when they wanted to force us to come to school specifically the day before a big exam to pray even when legally the students are supposed to have the day off to study at home. Yet they refused to acknowledge what that same rabbi actually said about unique individual talents, the hypocrisy made me crazy, even though it was far from the first time this happened, this one hit especially deep. Evidence to that fact as these same emotions are actually bubbling up in me right now as I write this seven years later.
    There were a few people in my life who let me question why and I am forever indebted to those two for giving me the space to start re-learning to use the question of why. The crazy thing is I actually love questioning as to why things are, for a while I wanted to go into research about different things all of course based on things that I questioned, and then internally had already learned how to shut down my voice of why, almost automatically never questioning the reaction and action. So here's to learning to listen to myself say why, and follow the rabbit hole down a healthy path of self exploration.

Internal Expresssion Restrictions

Sometimes I dont notice how restricting I am of self-love, and giving myself the space to be. Especially in the creative areas of my being. Over my time in the eating disorder clinic, I learned many of my restriction habits and signals and worked on the regulation of those habits with food, but not with creativity and other ways I restrict myself for an illusion of control. This came to a head as these past few days have been some of the hardest in the past month of the pandemic and pretty much complete isolation. I was in such a funk that even after my two planned workouts, a shower and a good meal, I was still just so stuck, mentally with both feeling so much and feeling nothing at all (that specific mental space I will elaborate on another time). I knew this had to do with feeling like I had no way to export and process the mess that was just a pressure cooker inside my mind but didn't really know how to relieve the pressure in a healthy way. Luckily in all my mindless scrolling of Instagram, I happened upon a good friend (basically a sister) post discussing the creative block along with a coloring book mid color. This reminded me I actually had a coloring book and inspired me to take it off the shelf. Of course, I struggled with the classic thought I have "Don't waste the coloring book you dont have so many, and this one is special you bought it your last week in Florida." My thoughts seem to not be my friend most of the time, but I managed to walk myself out of that ditch with "Yea, its special so use it in a special time, and also you can buy more coloring books, they aren't exclusive to America, and also there is Amazon you know." Finally, I opened the book up to where I had last stashed the pencils and realized it was a very unfinished picture from the one night I stayed up as late as they let me in the psychiatric ward coloring. This brought a different wave of emotions-the first one was shame. "Am I in such a bad place like when I was in the psychiatric ward that I need to color?" My immediate response to that thought was "seriously? just because you colored when you were in a bad state in the hospital, it doesn't mean you are in the same place. You can be in different places and still color to relax and calm your mind." So after running a mental marathon with myself over a coloring book and some colored pencils, I opened it up to a new design and started. I put on some background music- classical cello has been my go-to for a while (it makes me miss my days of cello, but also puts me in a calm space, another post another time). I colored for a while and could just feel my mind release-I mean I haven't been able to write anything for weeks and have been actually trying, it's not perfect and my mind sent other thoughts, but I was able to just fall into the soothing rhythmic colors and lines and tried to relax into the experience. Funnily enough, I chose a picture of a bird to color in and the picture I started to color in the hospital was of fish, so probably another post to analyze another time.  For now, I am just going to try and hold space for myself and not overrun my mind with thoughts and when I get overrun, then let them out.