Writing From the Woods

Hi, I'm alive

Hi, green beans. Thanks for reading Healing Field Notes, a newsletter I send out twice a month. This newsletter will always be a free offering. However, consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support my writing.

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June kicked my ass so I decided to run away to the woods for a couple of days to go and feel my feelings. I also deleted Instagram off my phone for a couple of weeks (I think I’m gonna come back Wednesday) because it became impossible for me to scroll between GRWMs and tweets about Roe v. Wade and product reviews and news stories about another mass shooting. I don’t know if the human brain is supposed to scroll between dichotomies in that way so often. I need to recenter myself, so here I am– in my cabin– writing this newsletter and processing it all.

I’m also here for work because I’m partnering with the people who run these cabins, which also feels like a hard thing to hold because I am grateful I get to be here, and frustrated I am also having to pause to take videos and photos. Content creation is a double-edged sword of very cool opportunities and being pulled out of the present to capture something for the future. Another dichotomy I’m learning how to healthily sit in. 

If I’m honest, I think that’s the practice I’m returning to. What does it mean to sit in multiple emotions? Sit in dichotomies? Sit in the ‘yes, and.’ I have ‘yes, and’ tattooed on the back of my left arm, right above my elbow, and somedays, I wish I would have gotten it somewhere I could see it without looking in a mirror. Some days I need the physical reminder that many things, many truths, can exist at once. However, it’s a lot easier to know that in theory and actually hold conflicting feelings in the body.

I recently wrote an article about embodiment, something I’m really trying to practice. But I feel like a fraud when I read that article back because I am supremely apt at dissociating out of my body. I’m reading Who is Wellness For? (a necessary read for all, I think) and Fariha Rosin speaks of this as a survival tactic. I am supposed to start EMDR this week and, in many ways, I’m going to be facing my worst fears. My therapist says we are going to start with a “low-impact” event, but because I feel everything in my body so intensely, nothing feels low-impact. When I start to think of being in my body, I feel it most deeply in my shoulders, lower back, pelvis, and calves. These are the parts of my body that tense up, which basically means my entire body tenses up, I guess. 

One of the main reasons I’m starting EMDR is because I really want to learn how to exist in my body in a safe way, especially when I have a chronic pain flare. Rosin also speaks of how her chronic illness is linked to her trauma. My mother also has chronic pain. Her pain was the main character in my childhood. She would often tell me I wasn’t allowed to feel in pain or be sick because her sickness was probably worse. I wish I could tell my mom now, “Yes, you are in pain. And, so am I.” We were never allowed to feel pain at the same time, whether that be emotional or physical. I think that’s why every time I ended up having some kind of breakdown as a kid, she sent me to a psychiatric inpatient hospital because she just didn’t know how to handle my pain. I always felt disposable because of my pain, especially my emotional pain. 

This is something I’ve internalized, of course. Despite being the vulnerable person I am online, it is much harder for me to do so in person these days. Every feeling I have feels too hard to sit with, too hard to verbalize, so I usually just shove it down into my body, which creates more tension in my muscles, which leaves me feeling more sick – a vicious cycle I need to unlearn. 

I’ll be honest and say that sometimes I come to this newsletter ashamed that I don’t have a more polished essay or something more profound to say. All I really wanted to say today was that shit is really hard right now. And shit is probably really hard for you right now too and that’s okay. Truthfully, I don’t always know how to be a person working through personal trauma while also holding the trauma of the collective. Sitting in the ‘yes, and’ is the homework of my life and these days, I feel like I have one giant, flaming F on my report card.

But today I am in the woods and I am letting myself feel it all. Who is Wellness For? is giving me some more language and tools to figure out how to honor myself and the collective, I am looking into The Embody Lab’s offerings, and am really just trying to be in community instead of hiding away like I so often feel drawn to do… as I write from the woods… alone… OH WELL. WE ARE LEARNING TO SIT IN THE YES, AND!!! 

OCD Recovery Update (CW: in-depth description of compulsions/rituals):

The last time I was at one of these cabins, I was with DJ and was unmedicated. I brought every kind of disinfectant you could imagine. I couldn’t enter the cabin without disinfecting the doorknobs, and every surface inside, and kept the door open to air the place out. It’s been almost two years since then and a little over a year since I first started medication. I only brought hand sanitizer and have just done the normal amount of cleaning that a person does, which feels like a really big fucking win for my OCD recovery. I’m still not perfect, but it feels really good to be able to come back to a place and remember how far I’ve come.

image description: a photo college of 6 images. top left, an image of a black cat and my husband, DJ, sleeping on a bed with a green and cream blanket. bottom left, an image of a big, rectangle window looking out into the woods full of green trees with an unmade bed in the foreground. top middle, a crescent-shaped, dark green baggu bag with colorful stitching of horseshoes, a cowboy boot, a horse, and some cherries on the front of the bag. middle center, an image of the squirtle squad from pokemon which is blue and yellow turtle-looking things wearing black sunglasses. middle bottom, an image of a tweet that reads, “what if instead of stepping outside my comfort zone, i step into an even comfier zone. perhaps take a nap in a large fluffy dinner roll.” top right, an image of a sunset with a purple looking sky, orange clouds, and a small crescent moon behind the clouds.

I love this essay by Alicia Kennedy about beans.

This YouTube video.

This book is next on my reading list.

I wrote an article about COVID’s impact on the chronically ill and disabled LGBTQIA+ community and you can read it here, along with some other amazing pieces.

This subreddit about adult children estranged from their parents made me feel less alone.

This values exercise.

I’m taking a small break from Curiosity Container. I will return to it in August. You can still submit questions and I will resume in a couple of months!

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Love,