The Whole of the Body: DRAFT: An Abridged Autopathographical Account
The Whole of the Body
I lurch from day to day
no grace
swerving like a drunk driver from one
moment of intention to another
slicing myself up
on the ragged corners
of this precarious life
i die and i die and i die. my heart rolls over and over. this is the first, the only time I've been to the brink of death and back. no. the hundredth, the thousandth time, but it's always the first, the only time. i'm swallowing fear in great gulps, pushing it down, past my heart, down into my stomach. i no longer know myself. time accelerates, slows down, accelerates. electric chill thrill amplifies, recedes, amplifies, recedes. at the great height of this vertiginous cliffhanger, which peaks over and over, there is just a hovering in empty air, and meaning departs from all things, like dye running out of cloth. there is just this room, these rooms, the strangeness of these rooms. are they rooms? what are all these things? it's hard to give shape to this shapeless nightmare through hieroglyphics–marks on paper.
living by the transient grace of a chemical reaction. prise open tombstone-heavy eyes on the day, the dread. swallow promise in a pill and wait for faux peace to descend, providing me with the slow and passing illusion of freedom from the horrors. when did I begin to mistake flat-lining for sweet relief? when did i begin to mistake anhedonia for an acceptable approach to existence? I have so many words for fear and so few for joy. anhedonia is such a feature of my dis/ease, and I do love the word ... it’s hard to give it up, this lexophilic pleasure.
Take ONE tablet TWICE a day.
pink and chalky, scored in quarters. swallowed with resignation and mostly without water. the acidic afterburn is familiar and unpleasant. sometimes I take that extra half. if the ride gets white-knuckled rough. if the world departs too rapidly, if I disappear from myself, towards the vanishing point. this is what you call a blessing and a curse. amelioration of symptoms through addiction. the anxiety industry makes hay while the sun don’t shine on the dis/eased.
i used to have suitcases full of empty pill bottles, years worth, each bottle an erstwhile container of magical poison. the names lilt like a litany of sedation, a chemical lullaby. clonazepam, lorazepam, temazepam and valium oh valium. antidepressant acronyms are a harmless jumble of letters. happy pills. it’s a jolly refrain, a circus jingle. the SSRI, the SNRI, the MOAI and the TCA. the medication becomes me. benzo junkie. lifer. in promising handcuffs. i imagined i’d make art with the hundreds of empties. you know, something about how “illicit” and “legal” were arbitrary notions. something about how i just happened to be pathologised instead of criminalised. picked up a prescription and a shitload of medical intervention instead of a needle. something like that. i imagined hundreds of bottles covering several large walls. the word IL[L]ICIT writ large next to a diagram of a syringe. a terumo. the kind i’d seen my lovers pick up from the needle exchange countless times. ill, illicit and licit creating a mess of meanings that made me no different from my junkie girlfriends. anyway. i never made the art. i lost the leather suitcases, lined in watermarked purple satin, worthy coffins for the little helpers, full of bottles i couldn’t part with. i lost those suitcases somewhere ... somewhere ... somewhere ...
most of my lovers and a lot of my friends fell into self-medication. the stainless steel fucked-into-oblivion kind. not that much difference between us. i guess. we all suffer a kind of existential malaise. a panic about being alive at all. a panic that we will be dead soon and we know it because we are sentient. a panic of knowing death, the unknowable incomprehensible. it rises like dirty water in a gutter. it’s at my ankles now. i’ll be swallowing the swill of fear soon enough.
i can't say when my battle with fear began or became debilitating. maybe the signs are there in my childhood photos, which my family point to as evidence of my difference and hence, difficulty. they laugh at me grimacing through the bars of the playpen, wailing. often i'm not really in the picture. i'm the corner of tartan skirt and buckle shoe leaving the frame. or being lifted out of frame, grizzling, by a pair of anonymous adult arms. i’m the little grey cloud that rains on your parade, every time, lingering on the edge of carefree childhood adventures, threatening to storm. what worries could possibly beset the unmarked child of a perfect family? i have the polaroid evidence ... of perfection and disaffection.
memory is mutable.
i know this: i was born. my dad loved me. There, see, in tiny black-and-white with scalloped corners and yellowing patches from adhesive photo tabs, is my dad, smiling under a shock of unruly hair, all hugely wrapped around a tiny bundle, me in a bunny rug. his joy is radiant. mum beatific beside. they are sitting on a low stone wall beside an old english cottage covered in climbing wild roses. my dad also loved stone walls. I know this.
this is what my mum said: darling happy baby never cried perfect life perfect baby the ship the nursery every disease infections unhappy from then on. well, she didn’t say exactly that, but you get the gist. I don’t remember this. but i will incorporate it into my body of knowing. perhaps it holds the key to everything.
today i woke up and ran. i’ve been running for my life for as long as i can remember. along beaches, down country roads, across bridges, around ovals, along piers. i run to get my blood moving, not singing - i hope only for small things. symphonies will come in time, perhaps. today it’s about getting out the door. most days it’s about getting out the door, i guess. it’s a solitary practice, one that stitches me up for the day, or unravels me. rolling out of a warm bed, leaving sometimes a warm body, rolling into my shoes, my shorts, and taking to the earth with pounding feet. sometimes fear accompanies me. it is, after all, my most loyal companion, the one who never leaves. more than all my lovers, it is the anatomy of panic that i know best. existing in a space beyond language, in a realm of pure sensation and sound, it kisses me all over.
at one time in my life we lived out in the vastness of the bush. not the desert, but outback enough to, contemporarily, invoke wolf creek apocrypha. the marlboro strip. spotlighting piggers and roo shooters driving onto the property at night with guns and dogs. the pungent cat’s piss smell of the gidgee scrub before rain. loneliness. space. oh, space, that frightening neverendingness. dingos howling at dawn, enough to freeze a heart mid-beat. the eerie storm bird crying before the never-to-come-rain. the endless drought. in town, rednecks and quakers. town dogs, snapping at your car wheels. mum driving those roads one-handed with a car full of squalling kids, expertly applying revlon jelly roll pink with the other, no mirror needed. billowing dust thrown up by the vehicle seeping through every crack. cats. 23 cats.
the outback sunlight burned away my fears like mist, but night created a world of fear.
at about nine, out there in the vastness of everything i ran down the hallway, the house tilting and dipping, me trying to find even footing on the heaving earth. ran to my mother, terrified, unprepared for death. she sat, stable, in her regular chair, unperturbed by the end of the world. i guess i cried and went back to bed waiting for the real end of the world.
I remember myself yesterdaylastweeklastyear oh what a dis/position to find myself in the mire the muck outside of myself and then her her her head not quite right on her shoulders sitting like a beach ball full of air hands levitating above the steering wheel guts on the floor stop stop no breathe there’s the skate park there’s the bridge just over there is my home the brilliant blue knives of water slice sideways in my eyes oh cinema oh hyperreal hue oh ocean of my wildest nightmares ships of ghosts no dreams for me at night i just screw my eyes up tight and don’t let anyone in just a blank blankness of blanketed blackness in the deep dark quivering night of the night with shadows to bump into and energetic frequencies to feel but to wish the night away ah what a waste the screen flickers and dies...
once i sat in a chair for 3 months. this is what happened. in august, 2004, a medication i had been on for 7 years was banned in australia. this drug, serzone, was an antidepressant often prescribed for those suffering from panic and anxiety. the pharmacist told me that the drug had been banned when i went to fill my script. fuck! it’s one thing to submit to a drug, after a resistant battle. it’s a cynical joke to then be denied your regular supply. i called my doctor, furious at being left alone in the frightening world drugless. the receptionist told me i could have an appointment in a few days. so naturally i lost the plot, and yelled down the phone that i needed to see someone now! ok. 5 minutes, a whole lot of health professional indifference and $80 later i walked out with a “fuck you” and threw the sample box of antidepressants and my prescription for a new acronym in the bin. i just couldn’t do it. tired and anxious, and with a great deal of trepidation i decided to go cold turkey off the antidepressants. thus began 3 months of sitting in a chair, holding on for dear life. the drug did not leave my body gently. i was on hold, jobless, holed up, waiting for the world to stop rocking and rolling. it was then that the line between the medically-constructed notions of “dependence” and “addiction” disappeared.
there’s a tingle in my left hand, along the fingers of the left hand, a signal of something, part of the symptomatic repretoire of the anxiety. swallow, swallow, try to give little attention to the foreboding that comes in waves, try to minimise the chatter in my head, the fragments that collide in a crazy cacophony of non/sense. drive, just drive, don’t attach to thoughts of safety or catastrophe. there are no safe spaces. safety is inside. i take it with me when i leave the house, it’s with me in the supermarket, and out at university. and my anxiety, it’s there with me too, sitting pretty next to safety, with me, inside me. i take it everywhere too. past the turnoff and onto the highway, ok, ok. onto goonellebah, still with the anxiety, doing some random musing interrupted by what if’s and but’s. suddenly out on the highway there’s that feeling in my gut, the electric one, and in my heart, the one like a skittish horse. anxiety making its presence felt, coming to life, causing some chaos inside the biocehmical factory that is my brain. so, breathe in, 1, breathe out, 1, breathe in, 2, breathe out, 2, breathe in 3, breathe out, 3, breathe in, 4, breathe out, 4… feel the substance of myself, don’t go up into the head, stay in the meat because my thoughts are so numerous and so light that they fly away out and up and my head flies away out and up with them. damn that tingling hand. i must be overbreathing. electricity amps up. count again. ignore the feeling that i don’t even own this body that’s driving this car. look at it, look at the hand on the steering wheel. that’s my hand. i know it’s my hand because it has that incredibly gnarly look like my mother’s hand, with that odd protuberance of bone that is familiar and comforting. like my mother’s hand. breathe in, 1, breathe out, 1, breathe in, 2, breathe out, 2, breathe in, 3, breathe out, 3… drive down towards the skate park, turn right at the roundabout, stop at the roadworks, turn right into my home.
exhale. the whole of the body. the whole of the body. the whole of the body.
i don’t know what it was that day, whether in that moment i had the perfect therapeutic dose of medication in my blood, or whether the afternoon had infected me somehow with its beauty but i felt, anyway, a respite from anxiety, a liberation and a joy that i wanted to eat, such was the pleasure i found in it. i was suffused with a sense of connectedness to the green valleys, to the sun poking its fingers through the green leaves of the trees and twinkling them. a sense of grace, perhaps. a gratefulness to my friend who was driving me through the countryside.
i was overwhelmed by an excess of green, a green the hue of rich and thick blood flooding my vision, getting under my skin, filling me with the color of nurture and magic healing.
i said: it is so fucking beautiful here. un-fucking believable.
it’s very hard to connect with the beauty, make a heart connection, when you’re dissociated.
i said: it’s like looking at a picture of something lovely. like something you are outside of rather than in.
i thought to myself that i found that sad. but then on the way home i began to feel something, a lifting of the veil of anxiety that is like an obstacle between me and my experience of the world, and i felt space for connectedness and i sang along with fleetwood mac in the car and felt the valleys and the forests and the pastures and the lushness and i laughed in a genuine way. i wanted it to last forever. anyway, i don’t have the feeling today, but maybe it will return, and i have the memory of it.
note to self:
hold onto this moment. try to record it for playback later when you doubt you ever felt this way.
exhale. the whole of the body. the whole of the body. the whole of the body.
I lurch from day to day
no grace
swerving like a drunk driver from one
moment of intention to another
slicing myself up
on the ragged corners
of this precarious life
i die and i die and i die. my heart rolls over and over. this is the first, the only time I've been to the brink of death and back. no. the hundredth, the thousandth time, but it's always the first, the only time. i'm swallowing fear in great gulps, pushing it down, past my heart, down into my stomach. i no longer know myself. time accelerates, slows down, accelerates. electric chill thrill amplifies, recedes, amplifies, recedes. at the great height of this vertiginous cliffhanger, which peaks over and over, there is just a hovering in empty air, and meaning departs from all things, like dye running out of cloth. there is just this room, these rooms, the strangeness of these rooms. are they rooms? what are all these things? it's hard to give shape to this shapeless nightmare through hieroglyphics–marks on paper.
living by the transient grace of a chemical reaction. prise open tombstone-heavy eyes on the day, the dread. swallow promise in a pill and wait for faux peace to descend, providing me with the slow and passing illusion of freedom from the horrors. when did I begin to mistake flat-lining for sweet relief? when did i begin to mistake anhedonia for an acceptable approach to existence? I have so many words for fear and so few for joy. anhedonia is such a feature of my dis/ease, and I do love the word ... it’s hard to give it up, this lexophilic pleasure.
Take ONE tablet TWICE a day.
pink and chalky, scored in quarters. swallowed with resignation and mostly without water. the acidic afterburn is familiar and unpleasant. sometimes I take that extra half. if the ride gets white-knuckled rough. if the world departs too rapidly, if I disappear from myself, towards the vanishing point. this is what you call a blessing and a curse. amelioration of symptoms through addiction. the anxiety industry makes hay while the sun don’t shine on the dis/eased.
i used to have suitcases full of empty pill bottles, years worth, each bottle an erstwhile container of magical poison. the names lilt like a litany of sedation, a chemical lullaby. clonazepam, lorazepam, temazepam and valium oh valium. antidepressant acronyms are a harmless jumble of letters. happy pills. it’s a jolly refrain, a circus jingle. the SSRI, the SNRI, the MOAI and the TCA. the medication becomes me. benzo junkie. lifer. in promising handcuffs. i imagined i’d make art with the hundreds of empties. you know, something about how “illicit” and “legal” were arbitrary notions. something about how i just happened to be pathologised instead of criminalised. picked up a prescription and a shitload of medical intervention instead of a needle. something like that. i imagined hundreds of bottles covering several large walls. the word IL[L]ICIT writ large next to a diagram of a syringe. a terumo. the kind i’d seen my lovers pick up from the needle exchange countless times. ill, illicit and licit creating a mess of meanings that made me no different from my junkie girlfriends. anyway. i never made the art. i lost the leather suitcases, lined in watermarked purple satin, worthy coffins for the little helpers, full of bottles i couldn’t part with. i lost those suitcases somewhere ... somewhere ... somewhere ...
most of my lovers and a lot of my friends fell into self-medication. the stainless steel fucked-into-oblivion kind. not that much difference between us. i guess. we all suffer a kind of existential malaise. a panic about being alive at all. a panic that we will be dead soon and we know it because we are sentient. a panic of knowing death, the unknowable incomprehensible. it rises like dirty water in a gutter. it’s at my ankles now. i’ll be swallowing the swill of fear soon enough.
i can't say when my battle with fear began or became debilitating. maybe the signs are there in my childhood photos, which my family point to as evidence of my difference and hence, difficulty. they laugh at me grimacing through the bars of the playpen, wailing. often i'm not really in the picture. i'm the corner of tartan skirt and buckle shoe leaving the frame. or being lifted out of frame, grizzling, by a pair of anonymous adult arms. i’m the little grey cloud that rains on your parade, every time, lingering on the edge of carefree childhood adventures, threatening to storm. what worries could possibly beset the unmarked child of a perfect family? i have the polaroid evidence ... of perfection and disaffection.
memory is mutable.
i know this: i was born. my dad loved me. There, see, in tiny black-and-white with scalloped corners and yellowing patches from adhesive photo tabs, is my dad, smiling under a shock of unruly hair, all hugely wrapped around a tiny bundle, me in a bunny rug. his joy is radiant. mum beatific beside. they are sitting on a low stone wall beside an old english cottage covered in climbing wild roses. my dad also loved stone walls. I know this.
this is what my mum said: darling happy baby never cried perfect life perfect baby the ship the nursery every disease infections unhappy from then on. well, she didn’t say exactly that, but you get the gist. I don’t remember this. but i will incorporate it into my body of knowing. perhaps it holds the key to everything.
today i woke up and ran. i’ve been running for my life for as long as i can remember. along beaches, down country roads, across bridges, around ovals, along piers. i run to get my blood moving, not singing - i hope only for small things. symphonies will come in time, perhaps. today it’s about getting out the door. most days it’s about getting out the door, i guess. it’s a solitary practice, one that stitches me up for the day, or unravels me. rolling out of a warm bed, leaving sometimes a warm body, rolling into my shoes, my shorts, and taking to the earth with pounding feet. sometimes fear accompanies me. it is, after all, my most loyal companion, the one who never leaves. more than all my lovers, it is the anatomy of panic that i know best. existing in a space beyond language, in a realm of pure sensation and sound, it kisses me all over.
at one time in my life we lived out in the vastness of the bush. not the desert, but outback enough to, contemporarily, invoke wolf creek apocrypha. the marlboro strip. spotlighting piggers and roo shooters driving onto the property at night with guns and dogs. the pungent cat’s piss smell of the gidgee scrub before rain. loneliness. space. oh, space, that frightening neverendingness. dingos howling at dawn, enough to freeze a heart mid-beat. the eerie storm bird crying before the never-to-come-rain. the endless drought. in town, rednecks and quakers. town dogs, snapping at your car wheels. mum driving those roads one-handed with a car full of squalling kids, expertly applying revlon jelly roll pink with the other, no mirror needed. billowing dust thrown up by the vehicle seeping through every crack. cats. 23 cats.
the outback sunlight burned away my fears like mist, but night created a world of fear.
at about nine, out there in the vastness of everything i ran down the hallway, the house tilting and dipping, me trying to find even footing on the heaving earth. ran to my mother, terrified, unprepared for death. she sat, stable, in her regular chair, unperturbed by the end of the world. i guess i cried and went back to bed waiting for the real end of the world.
I remember myself yesterdaylastweeklastyear oh what a dis/position to find myself in the mire the muck outside of myself and then her her her head not quite right on her shoulders sitting like a beach ball full of air hands levitating above the steering wheel guts on the floor stop stop no breathe there’s the skate park there’s the bridge just over there is my home the brilliant blue knives of water slice sideways in my eyes oh cinema oh hyperreal hue oh ocean of my wildest nightmares ships of ghosts no dreams for me at night i just screw my eyes up tight and don’t let anyone in just a blank blankness of blanketed blackness in the deep dark quivering night of the night with shadows to bump into and energetic frequencies to feel but to wish the night away ah what a waste the screen flickers and dies...
once i sat in a chair for 3 months. this is what happened. in august, 2004, a medication i had been on for 7 years was banned in australia. this drug, serzone, was an antidepressant often prescribed for those suffering from panic and anxiety. the pharmacist told me that the drug had been banned when i went to fill my script. fuck! it’s one thing to submit to a drug, after a resistant battle. it’s a cynical joke to then be denied your regular supply. i called my doctor, furious at being left alone in the frightening world drugless. the receptionist told me i could have an appointment in a few days. so naturally i lost the plot, and yelled down the phone that i needed to see someone now! ok. 5 minutes, a whole lot of health professional indifference and $80 later i walked out with a “fuck you” and threw the sample box of antidepressants and my prescription for a new acronym in the bin. i just couldn’t do it. tired and anxious, and with a great deal of trepidation i decided to go cold turkey off the antidepressants. thus began 3 months of sitting in a chair, holding on for dear life. the drug did not leave my body gently. i was on hold, jobless, holed up, waiting for the world to stop rocking and rolling. it was then that the line between the medically-constructed notions of “dependence” and “addiction” disappeared.
there’s a tingle in my left hand, along the fingers of the left hand, a signal of something, part of the symptomatic repretoire of the anxiety. swallow, swallow, try to give little attention to the foreboding that comes in waves, try to minimise the chatter in my head, the fragments that collide in a crazy cacophony of non/sense. drive, just drive, don’t attach to thoughts of safety or catastrophe. there are no safe spaces. safety is inside. i take it with me when i leave the house, it’s with me in the supermarket, and out at university. and my anxiety, it’s there with me too, sitting pretty next to safety, with me, inside me. i take it everywhere too. past the turnoff and onto the highway, ok, ok. onto goonellebah, still with the anxiety, doing some random musing interrupted by what if’s and but’s. suddenly out on the highway there’s that feeling in my gut, the electric one, and in my heart, the one like a skittish horse. anxiety making its presence felt, coming to life, causing some chaos inside the biocehmical factory that is my brain. so, breathe in, 1, breathe out, 1, breathe in, 2, breathe out, 2, breathe in 3, breathe out, 3, breathe in, 4, breathe out, 4… feel the substance of myself, don’t go up into the head, stay in the meat because my thoughts are so numerous and so light that they fly away out and up and my head flies away out and up with them. damn that tingling hand. i must be overbreathing. electricity amps up. count again. ignore the feeling that i don’t even own this body that’s driving this car. look at it, look at the hand on the steering wheel. that’s my hand. i know it’s my hand because it has that incredibly gnarly look like my mother’s hand, with that odd protuberance of bone that is familiar and comforting. like my mother’s hand. breathe in, 1, breathe out, 1, breathe in, 2, breathe out, 2, breathe in, 3, breathe out, 3… drive down towards the skate park, turn right at the roundabout, stop at the roadworks, turn right into my home.
exhale. the whole of the body. the whole of the body. the whole of the body.
i don’t know what it was that day, whether in that moment i had the perfect therapeutic dose of medication in my blood, or whether the afternoon had infected me somehow with its beauty but i felt, anyway, a respite from anxiety, a liberation and a joy that i wanted to eat, such was the pleasure i found in it. i was suffused with a sense of connectedness to the green valleys, to the sun poking its fingers through the green leaves of the trees and twinkling them. a sense of grace, perhaps. a gratefulness to my friend who was driving me through the countryside.
i was overwhelmed by an excess of green, a green the hue of rich and thick blood flooding my vision, getting under my skin, filling me with the color of nurture and magic healing.
i said: it is so fucking beautiful here. un-fucking believable.
it’s very hard to connect with the beauty, make a heart connection, when you’re dissociated.
i said: it’s like looking at a picture of something lovely. like something you are outside of rather than in.
i thought to myself that i found that sad. but then on the way home i began to feel something, a lifting of the veil of anxiety that is like an obstacle between me and my experience of the world, and i felt space for connectedness and i sang along with fleetwood mac in the car and felt the valleys and the forests and the pastures and the lushness and i laughed in a genuine way. i wanted it to last forever. anyway, i don’t have the feeling today, but maybe it will return, and i have the memory of it.
note to self:
hold onto this moment. try to record it for playback later when you doubt you ever felt this way.
exhale. the whole of the body. the whole of the body. the whole of the body.