Time Out

What exactly am I trying to say here?

Housekeeping: These posts may appear to be about my childhood, but they’re really about what’s going on right now…

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Midjourney return for “Time out.” I want to see this bunny’s forearm tattoos.

So I’m going to stop right here and leave my nine year old self with a gash on her foot in a mangrove swamp full of anaerobic bacteria (it’s OK sweetie, you’re going to be fine), because I want to talk about why I’m writing this story up at all.

Let’s rewind to last Monday, where I find myself lying on a table as the good Dr. Jed is stabbing about 25 needles into my left hip and butt cheek, and about that same number into my right shoulder. He’s going to hook some of these needles up to an electrical stimulation machine and leave me for about ten minutes to marinate.

When I get off the table feeling…I’ll admit it, pretty wonky…I will be overwhelmed by the sensations of this mangrove-swamp memory that appear to be being potentiated by the electrical undoing of these chronically knotted butt-muscles that have been plaguing me with sciatica for years now.

The body is funny like that.

Yeah I was a resilient little kid. I got through a lot of really dark, really weird shit. I’m a half century old and not just still alive, but also having a reasonably awesome time. But there’s a bunch of unpacking still to do. My point here, if I have one, isn’t the darkness I went through, it’s the agency I’ve gained to move into the light.

I realized years ago that I could wallow in my trauma and use it as an excuse for all the things I wasn’t doing, or I could take it, frame it up, use it as a foundation…but first I had to drain the emotion out of it. Make it so that no part of me was left behind still enduring it. This is not an easy thing to do, but it CAN be done. I’ve done it. Don’t ever read these stories and think I’m sad or stuck in anxiety. That’s not the case, and not why I write them.

And so I’m lying on a table, stuck full of needles, feeling a bit like this famous piece of land art:

…And my mind is drifting back to that swamp.

I suspect that the gash on my foot (successfully healed—spoilers: I didn’t get gas gangrene) threw off my gait for quite a while. I remember it as being incredibly painful, and I was limping around. I went barefoot or wore flip flops because it was too swollen and painful to put into an enclosed shoe. So, 41 years later…perhaps this is where the sciatica originated…

*BRRRR* time’s up!

Playlist roulette—this one has been coming up a bunch: