The modern human story isn’t all about ripping things from our insides and forcing us to brave the world without them. It isn’t all about what’s pulled from us that leaves us as sedated spirit and rips apart our connections. Disconnecting us from our own hearts and the soil and the moss. It is also about what is left behind in the dark unspoken. When something is extracted, there is still something left behind – something not worth extracting, perhaps. Or perhaps it is something left for another time. Or, in the case of humans, it is something that cannot be sedated, something wild, something dangerous to come near.
I am a beast.
I was standing at the bottom of the stairs when he told me that Sibylle had committed suicide. I remember dropping down and sliding back. Hugging my knees and leaning against the wall. When I found Mia blue and cold in her bed, I ejected myself backwards from the room. I hit the wall across from her door and slid down. Hugging my knees and rocking back and forth. When they came to take Noah away, the woman lifted him from my lap, and I pulled my knees up. I remember when I heard that Dai had died in his sleep, for no reason at all. I sat on the edge of the bed and then slid off it, onto the floor. Hugging my knees and crying silently.
I guess that’s my pattern. I drop to the floor. I pull my knees in. I make myself into a ball, and I feel it wash over me, the thing left behind. It didn’t feel like that when my grandparents died. I wasn’t on the floor. There wasn’t an extraction of life, just the fading of one.
David Morris wrote in The evil hours:
“Normal, non-traumatic memories are owned and integrated into the self. These are, in a sense, like domesticated animals, amenable to control, tractable. In contrast, the traumatic memory stands apart like a feral dog, snarling, wild, and unpredictable.”
David Morris
When I get heavy migraines, the dogs come out. I am feral more often than not, and no one knows about it. It isn’t just my own experiences of personal loss. There is a deeper trauma. One that expands generations. Somewhere in our species’ history, we forgot that we are made of the same components as everything else. We predominantly disconnected from one another, as well as the water and the air. It is now “eccentric” if you do not wear shoes regularly. Skinny dipping is a naughty little secret.
My grief is not extracted, it is repressed in a society that refuses to teach me how to grieve. I am not allowed to grieve. Not for our planet, not for our species. I am not allowed to grieve for the loss I’ve endured. If I ignore the downward cast look of the world around me and show the feral beast that I am, others are afraid. When I see my brethren, lost and lolling on a train, broken on a bench, people who are just a small degree off center, I am ashamed of myself. The world has taught me to be ashamed for the people who have experienced the trauma and so I am ashamed at myself.
Grief. A deep and unwinding grief. Fills me at every turn and I’m supposed to keep on living like the world is going to be alright. I’m supposed to pretend like the darkness I feel doesn’t spread into the tips of my hair. I’m supposed to just not feel it, continue on, contribute to society as if it wasn’t society that has taken everything from me.
Or maybe this isn’t about grief at all. Maybe grief is just a spur for learning something about existence that only those who are grieving are open to? A special kind of awareness that shifts the way you see and hear and touch. It’s becoming aware of your eyelids and then journeying into a thirty minute spiral of nonexistent thought at the end of which everything seems brighter and the world bustles around you. It’s remembering something forgotten or learning something that everyone already knows but can’t articulate. Grief isn’t part of the story, it’s an undertone, an after thought.
Do you ever think that if it doesn’t hurt like hell, maybe you aren’t doing it right?
There’s an elderly gentleman eating a banana in the seat across from me. The train starts to move again. Train journeys always give me a sense of aloneness in the world. I feel pain more acutely on trains than on any other form of transportation. Today the sun is warm and the train is full of people who don’t seem to be as sad as I am. I think the man wants to talk to me, but he doesn’t know how to start a conversation with a person who is obviously suffering from a broken heart. He’s not sure what he would say, and I’m not sure how I would respond. I’m not sure I want anything to do with anyone – they’re all complicit. They’re participating in this social norm of disconnection.
Today I can’t bear to be different, to speak up. I can’t start this conversation, not this time. I feel fearful as if the everything is just looking to break me. Today I’m a little suicidal, it’s too much today.
I had an experience a few days ago that induced a descend into my placid lake, Depression. As I fell towards it, all the fear and anger and disgust I feel towards the world was turned inward. Tortured, I relented all inward emotional support and self-care and thought “You cannot break what’s already broken.” I thought “I deserve this,” when the pain was intense. And in that moment, I fell through the looking glass and realized that I am, at my core, empty, heartless and broken. It has all been extracted. Everything but the automatic.
And the anger.
They say that one of the keys to happiness is practicing gratitude. There’s some science on this. The well-being industry is doing a nice job of making everything we might feel a commodity. The positive emotions get journals and Pintrest boards, the negative get self improvement lists and productivity advice.
I try to be grateful and productive, but then I get angry. Angry that nothing is ever enough. Angry that people don’t try. That they take so much. Angry that despite what I’ve given, what’s been taken, I am still not enough. I am sick and cold and dark inside. I am angry at myself for wasting my time, for being so afraid of expulsion that I can’t quit participating in this social construct that I do not believe in.
After the anger comes what I call the Triangle of Shite – fear, guilt, and shame. Surely someone might have given this a proper name by now, but cultural anthropological theories around a spectrum of cultures haven’t given me a short form for these three emotions. I wanted to name them the Dark Triad, but that title is taken by machevillian, narcissistic psychopaths.
The fear, the guilt and the shame, you’ve probably felt these leftovers as well. Fear and guilt and shame are not extracted. They too are left behind. We are told relentlessly that we are not enough, but also that it’s dangerous to be something more. Unless of course that something more is the dandelion, happy homogeny of socially accepted betterment. I feel guilty and shameful that I just can’t seem to find that balance they are writing Medium posts about. I am always teetering on the edge of the deep, dark surface mine that’s inside of me.
Today it’s just a little bit too much. I hold the canvas bag closer to my chest, I close my eyes and think of the little tomatoes, peppers and kohlrabi growing in my entryway. They’re getting so tall, but the weather is still too raw for them to go outside. They need to be protected. I turn the classical music in my headphones up as I walk from the train station towards my home. I keep my head down as I pass by the people who are out there in the world. I can’t today, it’s been a long time since I could.
You would think that morality and truth are the answer to the devastation we humans feel inside, but wherever I look the truth is too painful and the moral course of action feels impossible. I try to walk that path, I do. I breathe against my decades of established neuro-pathways trying to change my brain from what I think I need to what I actually need. I see the other feral beasts, and I give to them. I take care of the little plants. I share with the people who are trying. I model my behaviour. I praise Gaia. Or whomever. The golden light higher consciousness thing.
It’s not enough. It’s just not enough.
I spend so much time giving, working, fighting for that better world. I want to give more, but I’ve got nothing left to give. This is the sadness again. The grief.
Leaving you, dear reader, with something other than the darkness is my deepest wish. How do I build a bridge for you now? How do I write all of the things I’ve written here, molded and massaged into a piece that is about something dark and build a bridge back to lightness? How do I remind us of hope or of joy?
I am worried that maybe I took something from you now. I want to remind you of that feeling when a warm breeze rustles your hair and you actually feel your hair lift up piece by piece. Or when you step barefoot onto a slightly less firm piece of ground. Do you remember what that feels like, the extra little squish?
Perhaps I do not need to sedate the wild beast inside me. Perhaps it is the wild thing that helps me get out of bed every morning, even though I have long had every excuse not to. Perhaps, if we turn toward the existential discomfort of loss, we can more readily find comfort.
We only see the simple things when our internal world has collapsed around us. The mess inside needs a quiet and still hand. You cannot tame the feral dog inside, but you can give it understanding and love. It needs some of our focus. Ignoring it only makes it rage harder.
Collectively, we have repressed the grief we should feel about what we’ve done to the planet. We have ignored, for too long, the reality of what we have wrought. We have ignored it because it is terrifying. We have ignored it because it is too late anyway. We have ignored it because we cannot imagine that what’s left behind is not nothing.
We cannot go on like this. We cannot pretend like the darkness and the light aren’t both part of us. We have got to see that the anger and the grief are telling us something about what we’ve lost, yes, but they’re also telling us something about who we are. If we can recognize that there is no hope without despair, perhaps we can turn our despair into something practical and aspirational. Perhaps the excavation hole is fertile ground for something new, something different.
We can choose to see what’s left behind as useful. Something to learn from. Something that makes us marvel. What gets left behind can help us see what we are all made of. What we do with what’s left behind can show the world what we’re capable of.
We, those of us who have the feral dogs inside of us, we are proof.