False walls and exit doors

Tags

Ayurveda, black thoughts, catch 22, Depression, eclipsed new moon, Health, injury, mayhem, PTSD, Sadness, sociopaths, surrendering, thyroid

This is a different post than the one I’d planned to share. But I’m having a hard time finding a point in a lot of my writing right now. I’m struggling. I know these feelings aren’t permanent but all of my darkest thoughts are out to play and I’ve gotta tell you folks, it’s mayhem in Svasti-land.

Tore a calf muscle earlier this week. As if my life doesn’t have enough crap in it, I was trying to run for the train and without obvious cause I could no longer walk properly. Just a twang inside my right leg and look Ma, I’m Hop-a-long Svasti In Considerably Unpleasant Pain.

Been working with an Ayurvedic practitioner in recent times to work on a more holistic approach to healing my thyroid. Ayurveda is Indian traditional medicine and it’s amazing and powerful. Apparently my due to the many imbalances in my body right now, it’s not surprising that there’s dryness in my soft tissues. Which means things like this can happen more easily.

Great. Frickin GREAT.

Friday brought the eclipsed new moon, which I felt very keenly. Its energy brought certain truths to light that I’ve been trying to ignore as best as I could: as much as I love working in the digital industry, the people I have to work with sometimes are just killing me.

People being assholes who are more interested in stroking their ego than they are in being professional, courteous, efficient and respectful. In corporate life, there are more people like this than not. I suspect half of them are sociopaths, while the others I think are just sad, lonely people who don’t know any better than to lash out at their work mates.

But it’s more than that. I’m in this catch 22 of needing the money I’m earning in order to reach my goal of being debt-free as quickly as I can. Not to mention that right now I have a lot of health-related expenses – doctors, meds, vitamins and herbs, alternative medicine consultations and now massages (for that cranky right calf of mine).

Essentially, I need to get out of this line of work but I can’t afford to just yet.

So add all of these things up – my health, a mystery injury and admitting the truth of my career situation to myself… and I’ve been feeling a little crappy this weekend.

Not that I haven’t tried to buck myself up.

Yesterday I got another massage ostensibly for my calf, but in truth my entire body aches. Not just from the strain of limping and hobbling my way through the week, but because I still carry my old shoulder injury and untold amounts of tension from PTSD.

As a yogi, I’m pretty darn bendy but regardless of that and no matter how much yoga I do, my body retains some powerful clenching abilities. So it hurts – something that should feel good and nourishing to my body, it bloody hurts.

Post-massage and before my haircut appointment (my first since the Great Hair Debacle which I haven’t written about here) I had a meal at a fabulous new cafe, only three weeks old. It has this eclectic menu including the Asian-style jook I ordered. It was great, but what really won me over was the super-large tea pot (above) that my lemongrass and ginger tea arrived in.

So I was doing what I could to make the weekend enjoyable despite my limp and those truthful truths yammering away. My new haircut made me feel so much better about looking in the mirror for the first time in ages. Which is good.

But it wasn’t enough. Black thoughts have been welling up. They smell suspiciously like depression and I’ve noticed too, how everything is a little less bright. Colours aren’t as vivid and even though I know the way out, I can’t stop myself from wandering in a little deeper. Not just yet.

Because these thoughts, they want to be heard. Even if they are the voice of depression and loss and therefore, rather unbalanced. They go a little something like this:

Life isn’t like a fairy tale. There are no prescribed, audience approved happily ever afters. Some people get lucky and others don’t. That’s just the way it is and it seems like I’m one of those people who isn’t gonna get lucky. My sister has three children now, three! My three best girlfriends are all happily married. One of them is pregnant with her second child, the other with her first and the third is in the process of trying to get pregnant. One of these women I’ve always thought of as a little sister and yet here she is, surpassing me while my own life STILL stands still. I desperately want to let other people in, to date, to have a boyfriend, but at the same time I aint letting anyone in anytime soon. I try and try and try to get past it all, to heal, to move on. But just when I think I’m getting somewhere… SURPRISE. Here, have a chronic health problem. Here, lose the ability to walk properly. And for good measure, let’s throw in a couple of egotistical assholes at my workplace, too.

Still, I can’t find a permanent job and what’s worse, I don’t even want one. Not anymore. Not this line of work and having to deal with people who are less than honest and truthful with themselves and other people. This isn’t who I am but right now I don’t have a choice, do I? EVERY TIME I think I’m closer to my goals, the goalposts move. There is no end. No hope for me. No magical shift where suddenly my health is sorted and my metabolism starts working again, I drop that extra weight and finish paying off my debts. That’s an ending from one of those stupid chick flicks I hate so much and it’s just not real.

What’s real is what’s here. I try my best. I do service work. I do what I can for others and I take pleasure in the little things whenever I can. I do. But I don’t know what it’d feel like to be free anymore. As much as I love my nieces, I really wish I’d never moved back to Melbourne. But here I am, and I’m doing what I can to leave although sometimes it feels like I never will. Not ever.

Even though the saying goes you’re never given more than you can handle, I’m utterly sick to death of being given more to handle again and again while nothing seems to change.

I truthfully don’t know what to do next. If this was a war, I’d be surrendering to the other side right about now…

~Svasti

Low

Tags

Acceptance, champion, hero, hypothyroidism, PTSD, Sadness, Struggle, vitamin deficiencies

Tonight is not one of my better nights. Sparkly thoughts are lacking.

Devastation rules the playground and I’m sad. Angry, too. Times like these, I wonder just how much more I can take.

I’ve worked my ass off to get to this point and it feels like there’s always another slap in the face.

Another pothole to stick my foot in while flying a-over-t.

Y’know, I’m actually somewhat good at this whole acceptance thing. I’m like: hey, if this is just how it’s meant to be then I’m good with that. Bring it on!

And then I learn I have hypothyroidism (been scaring myself silly doing internet research), a major iron deficiency, and a couple of other vitamin deficiencies. As a direct result of fucking PTSD.

So I wonder out loud when the hell it’s my turn to not be the punching bag any more? What else to I have to lose in order to move forward? Do I even get to move forward any more or is this as good as it gets?

For five or so years now, I’ve really tried my very best. I have. I’ve mostly kept my chin up during the worst of it all. But there’s never, throughout any of this, been anyone for me to really turn to. To rely on for support. I’ve had to drag my sorry ass one foot in front of the other the whole freakin’ way. And I’m tired. Exhausted and dizzy even, but apparently that’s to do with both the lack of iron and the thyroid stuff.

Now that I’ve come this far, I try to be a good yoga teacher. I mean dang, I was surprised to find that I’d done my training! But now that I have, I constantly question whether I’m really recovered enough to be teaching at all. Regardless, I continue my studies and I’m keeping it super-real with myself and my students. I tell myself that everything I’ve been through is all useful for teaching. But sometimes, even that isn’t enough to keep me going.

At my kinesiology appointment earlier this week, I realised I’m in this place where for the life of me, I just don’t know what to do next. I’ve no idea how to keep things moving forward now that the more obvious signposts have been tackled. I’m just sorta treading water instead.

Today I started reading “Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga”. In the forword, Peter Levine calls healing from trauma a “hero’s journey of recovery and vibrancy”. A hero’s journey. Yes. With so many battles to be fought and won, that’s certainly how it could be described although I never really feel like a hero myself.

That said, a hero doesn’t always have to work alone.

So I’m just gonna put it out there to the Universe (even if I do feel a little silly about this):

What I’d really like right now is a flesh-and-blood-here-in-person Someone to support me. A Champion, if you will.

I don’t care who it is, whether they’re male or female. But I really, really need someone in my right-here-right-now environment who gets me (and I, them) and who can be here for me (and vice-versa). I’ve got plenty of great friends, but most of them don’t live where I do. Those that do are otherwise occupied with being newly married or having babies etc. They’re great, but they’re not available and available is what I need.

Don’t get me wrong, my blog friends – all of you – are awesome.

And Miss Cleo the Kitteh has been brilliant, too.

Really, it’s just that I need a hand. A flesh-and-blood and very literal one.

So dear Universe, please hear my call coz I’m feeling mighty low right about now…

~Svasti

Involuntary actions – part 4

Tags

bachelor party, cash for flesh, defiled, Denial, drinking games, Embarrassment, Fear, foreboding sense of doom, French knickers, humiliation, naivety, Night of Monumental Bad Choices, pregnant, regret, Sadness, Shame

This post may be too much information for some. If you don’t wanna know, maybe skip this one?

[Read part 1, part 2 & part 3 first]

I didn’t like to think about it, not even in my most private moments. Except that I did. Couldn’t help it really.

Such a fuzzy combination of nothingness blended with images, loud thoughts and soft, a strange procession of ideas and most pressingly, regret. It didn’t come straight away but with more time to reflect it was glaringly obvious that I’d made a foolish, foolish mistake.

I can tell you what I think, what I remember, what I suspect, but I can’t tell you what really happened. I’ll never understand everything, clouded as it was in alcohol and crowded out by my ridiculous adversity to taking care of myself.

Belief was my downfall. Always a belief in the best of people until proven otherwise.

But people not doing their best is not always evil, is it? It’s not always bad or wrong. Or maybe that just depends entirely on your point of view. In any case, I can’t tell you what happened, if I had sex with anyone that night and if I did, how many.

I suspect I did though. Like, really suspect. I’m almost sure that I did but there’s no way for me to prove it. Not then, and certainly not in retrospect.

And there’s no doubt that I was entirely at fault for being there in the first place.

It was a Night of Monumental Bad Choices. Not my last or first. But certainly a rather memorable one.

I got the call. Others had already turned the job down because of the distance. But the money was tempting, even though I didn’t have a car and it was a really, really long way to go. A bunch of guys for a bachelor party wanting a semi-naked lingerie-clad female to entertain them for the night.

M wasn’t sure about the gig and wanted me to use her driver – have him come and pick me up late in the evening.

We organised to meet at the Portsea Pub because the beach house they were staying at wasn’t easy to get to. They’d drive me there and M’s driver would pick me up later. That’d been the plan anyway.

They were a nice looking bunch of guys – preppy-ish but down to earth and clearly money wasn’t an issue. Conveniently since we were at a pub, they asked what I’d be drinking that night. It was beer for them and Baileys for me.

Off the beaten track and surrounded by trees. It was a pretty weatherboard split level house. Already there were many cars in the drive. I was shown into a room to change and came out in French knickers, suspenders and heels.

The boys decided we’d play drinking games and here’s where I forgot (rather crucially) that I wasn’t among friends, but employers of my flesh. I drank with bravado and really didn’t think it through. Sure I can keep up with the boys no problems! [Are you shaking your head yet?] By the time M’s driver called I was pleasantly wasted and easily persuaded to stay the night, with the offer of a lift home the next day.

What did we do in those hours? I can’t say. There were flirtations and craziness. Games, silliness. The groom fell drunkenly on a glass table, swiftly dispatched to hospital for stitching. Then he was back and still partying of course. It was his party, after all! I ended up in the back of a station wagon with one I thought was cute… but I think it didn’t go anywhere in the end. I think…

There’s hours I don’t recall. Then, the unpleasantly creepy surprise of waking up in the groom’s bedroom with him standing over me, somewhere deep into the middle of the night. He must’ve carried me there and I wondered how he’d done it given the stitches he’d just earned. And I remember leaving the room and finding a bunk to pass out in.

It all seemed harmless enough until I ended up pregnant and unsure of the father. Because I could no longer avoid those burning but muted and pressing questions.

That I didn’t know caused me shame. Embarrassment. Sadness. Fear.

What happened that night? How many? How often? Sure they were nice guys (sorta) but did they intend to get me drunk? (I suspect now that was definitely the case).

They drove me home the next day as promised. It was almost as if the lingerie-clad me and the fully clothed me were separate people – one was a service provided by the other. I even gave them my phone number when asked.

Because I occupied a hollow little world of denial. A vacuum where self-esteem had no foothold, and even knowing that I’d probably done things I wish I hadn’t… I still didn’t tell them “no thanks”.

But somewhere in there, what I did remember was roasting on a slow burn. Eventually, combined with the abortion, that night must’ve formed part of the foreboding sense of doom I felt. The one that caused me to retire from the world of cash for flesh. It seemed that out of nowhere, I felt panicked by the idea of doing any more gigs and I quit.

Later, I was living back at my parents’ place. I’d moved on from stripping to working as an actor in children’s theatre. Highly ironic, I know. The phone rang one day and it was one of them, the bachelor party boys. M must’ve given them my new number. No, I’m sorry. I’m not in that line of work any more… Another cringe of fear, because now I WAS feeling defiled. Just what did they think my services entailed exactly??!

Ah… so interesting how the subconscious harbours those things the conscious mind wishes to ignore. That’s why denial never really works and why we can terrorise ourselves and become our own worst enemy: in the end we can’t escape our own truths, no matter what.

And so it was that the writing of this series helped me to see. Oh! FUCK! Those terrorising dreams where I thought I’d been molested? Well yeah, maybe that did happen but in a different setting… [heart thudding].

Once thunk, that thought rang long and loud in the hall of truth and I have to admit that’s quite possibly how things played out.

There were at least four of them… and I swear that’s all I really know.

[Epilogue]

~Svasti

A short run

Tags

bothering, endings, final act, final bows, glitter, Greasepaint, Heartbreak, Loss, Poem, Poetry, Sadness, sonnets, unwritten scenes

‘Scuse my silence, I’m just

Over here dealin’

With a little heartbreak

Nothing that’ll kill me

But enough to knock

The words from my mouth

And the sonnets from my sight

Keep writing what I think

Happened, knowing it wasn’t

Like that, not entirely

Got a lot to say but

Nowhere to put it; the

Ninth act deleted

Before it began

Curtains drawn, no

Final bows allowed

I fear now, all along my

Interpretation was off

Making more plot than

The playwright conceived

My performance gaudy

Overdrawn and naught

But bothersome to

Other players, time wasting

And over-sharing barging

Through unwritten scenes

Now sitting in the wings, the

Show’s over, the run’s complete

Time to repaint the backdrops

And move on then, is it?

Hard to forget, don’t really want to

Greasepaint and glitter stubbornly

Linger, a constant reminder

Ever fainter, of shows past

Perhaps never to play again

~ Svasti

Reprieve

Tags

Adrift, Fear, Heart pain, Inertia, Lethargy, Love, Outlet, Poetry, Sadness

Another day lost
Hovering, undressed, unsure
No reason not to see the day
No reason to be anywhere but here
Started out numb enough
Lethargy and Inertia
My wingmen

Love is everywhere, though
Intruding on this exile
My gorgeous daily touchstone
(I adore you!)
Emails and calls from people who
Don’t know I’m adrift

Day passing and pulse speeding
Open heart agony arrives
Pain doesn’t knock first
And yet…
Reminders of love and care
Keep interrupting this debacle
Saying… hang in there

Tho it’s not bad and I’m not scared…
My bubble of terror, I think
Has sprung a leak
~Svasti

Cravings

Tags

Cravings, Fear, Journey, Poem, Poetry, Sadness, Spiritual

It makes no sense that I can tell
Handed tools of absolute wisdom
I crave the depths of such truth
Beyond words or mindfulness
And yet a sorrowful seed exists
What of this place, this imperfect
Insane & beautiful plane?
Its real, I know this much
It is not separate, absolutely
Is my sorrow only fear disguised?
Why does it have a hold on me
When pure lands are ahead and not behind?
And why does this path feel so lonely at times?

~ Svasti
3rd December 2007