Beneath Words

Two mornings ago, at first glance at my iPhone, a banner was there, unbidden. My body went somewhere between activated and triggered. Perhaps poked, pinched or shaken by unseen hands. Not so much by the writer but by my own memories, the physicality of them.

First of all, I want to thank writer Katrina Anne Willis for her artful courage. When I saw the title of her upcoming book, Hurricane Lessons, I felt not just gratitude, but also anticipatory resonance. I can still feel the tenuousness of my own nervous system in remembering my first year of marital separation.

Here is what I am able to retrieve in words:

I remember how much the particular combination of revelatory ecstasy and bottomless grief were so much (too much) for my small body, how much it required to live in the very real and very surreal simultaneously. I remember how combinations like this led me to my first Major Depressive Episode. I remember how terrifying this was because for me, it involved bodily dissociation, where I saw pieces of my body floating in the space before me. I remember asking my therapist to hospitalize me. I remember my homegirls making the trip from LA to the Bay to help me through the crisis of lining the drawers and cupboards in my new apartment because I couldn’t figure out how to do so. I remember how blurry these friends looked to me, even though I knew they were lovingly there. I remember their voices sounded blurry too. I remember turning my new antidepressant medication bottle upside-down on the kitchen counter after taking a pill, to tell myself later on that I’d taken it. I remember the assumptive headwinds about fault for this separation. I remember running and running (I’m not a runner—medication ramp-up side effects), losing so much weight I found myself shopping for a belt. I believe it was brown. Or was it black?

I remember searching for books to help me through this first year where heartbreaking death and mysterious rebirth lived in insistent overlap. I remember not being able to find any. I remember realizing that very year alone could’ve been a book unto itself. Irrenconcilable Love. Or, The Holy Saturday that Would Not End.

Then there are the retrievals alongside and beneath words, five years into the experience.

This was not the beginning. This was not the end. But it was somewhere. My beloved mentors in creativity x spirituality, Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter (co-founders of InterPlay©) so wisely taught me that the practice I was inheriting from them was not about healing, but creating.

And sometimes along the way, things come into being that allow for healing to happen at the speed of the body (another one of their teachings I will always carry with me).

May your stories beneath words find the means to create. We need you and yours,

Coke