Tag: Trauma

“Until then, you have to live with yourself”

The line above is from ‘Hell is round the corner’ a Tricky song from 1995. It popped into my mind today, an ear worm, the warning bell that the remainder of my September is going to be…well…hell.

I didn’t think I’d have to write about this again. The month in 2012 when my skull was drilled into and my brain was drained and my Self was drained and my energy was drained. But Tricky blasting on repeat on my internal jukebox and the fact I’m crying at the birds singing or at me dropping stuff on the floor or the adverts being too long on the tv means I’m currently in the territory of anniversary effect.

I used to write about this on an old blog I had, which focused on my recovery from near death and brain injury and really thought that this year I’d gotten away with it.

Not likely, the body remembers, the brain remembers, the essence remembers. Being an old hand at this makes it slightly easier, I’m aware of what is going on and know I have to buckle in and ride out the storm but that doesn’t stop it being painful and sad and exhausting.

This time of year is double edged for me, I love the early Autumn, the heavy, lazy sunshine, the slowing down yet aliveness of everything as it dies ready to lie fallow for the Winter to come. This metaphor is not lost on me, the Autumn also represents my heaviness and my time to die. I spent some of Autumn 2012 in a coma, in hospital – a liminal state you could say. This was also whilst I was moving countries, moving lives and starting again – a self imposed liminal state.

To wake up in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes with no idea of how you got there, whilst worried loved ones pace around is a surreal experience. To think about what I endured whilst unconscious is also a surreal experience. A film that played out, that starred me but I have no knowledge of what transpired during it.

September, a time of delicacy, being made of gossamer, feeling so sensitive to my own pain and everyone else’s. A time to move slowly, to honour my feelings and to become part of the earth once more. The Shadow beckons, the dark goddess, an old friend but one who will hold my toes to the fire once more.

I will emerge eventually, hair askew, face pale, forever changed, in ways I yet still don’t fully grasp but as sure as the leaves will wither and drop, I too become compost for the new growth to come.

The cave calls the hermit again and it’s time to enter.

The view of a ridged cave ceiling. It is solid rock and dark apart from the beam of torchlight that lights up the section on the photograph. There is a thick ridge running running along the centre of the ceiling that is almost pointed where it meets.


The Road to nowhere

When accident and trauma reduced the space I could exist in, it took something from me, something that I took for granted when I was abled and brave. The freedom to move, to trek and to wander. I could just get up in the morning and decide that I was going to lose myself somewhere and I didn’t have to think twice, now everything is done with careful measures of how much I have got in my battery, what I may need that energy for, how much I can spare? and how long will this keep me out of action if I do it? Is it worth the drain I will experience? It keeps my sphere of exploration very contained and very carefully managed – it is what it is, I can’t change it so I live with it but my word, it’s so annoying.

I recently sat down and did a little bit of brain dumping about my relationship to my body and nature since my accident and it made me really examine those thoughts and feelings that I honestly thought I’d mastered. I realised that the trust I lost in my body after my accident hasn’t really returned. I relied on my body to keep me moving, to be strong and fit and then it broke and I never really trusted it anymore. This affects how I move in the world and how much (or little) I physically push myself. I stopped appreciating my physicality, how powerful I can be even though I’m only small. I noted how little I look in the mirror since my accident, how I lost touch with my body and my outer shell because I felt that it was irrelevant and pointless in my smaller bubble where I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to see a person I no longer knew looking back at me.

I looked at my relationship to nature and how that has evolved. Don’t get me wrong, I love nature, I love being outside with the trees and the plants and the mountains but where nature had been a source of joy and adventure, especially when I was young, it was now ‘therapy’, a place I went to feel better and get a bit of exercise. How sterile this has made my friend. I appreciate everything nature contributed to my recovery but I have lost that abandon I used to feel in nature. The woods were a place to hide and climb and discover lost worlds, now they are a sensible stroll through and then back home before I get too tired. This is not how I want to exist in the outdoors, not at all.

I also find being outside confronts me, it reminds me what I lost, what I lack, so I don’t take the time to be ‘in’ it. How heartbreaking this is for me, for the child within who would wile away the hours wandering through pathways and along hedgerows, talking to birds and jumping across streams. It made me realise I need to find my magic again.

Whilst sitting wall staring through recovery I would often get notions, notions that were far beyond my capabilities. Notions were a blessing and a curse, they were a nod to hope, to rising again, but also a frustrating smack in the chops of my reality and how it was tying me down. I had a notion last year to do a pilgrimage, I wanted to just walk to some undefined location and see if I could find bits of me that I had lost along the way. The idea of setting off (like The Fool) with my rucksack, some sturdy boots and a map was one that enthralled me. Reality told me, I couldn’t just go for days and hope for the best, it had to be carefully planned, with lots of rest and time. There were lots of St Patrick walks around here but these hold no interest for me, I am not concerned with the cultural colonisation that St Patrick brought (why Ireland celebrate this terrible man I have no idea, but this is a whole other post for another time). I just couldn’t find what I was looking for, things were either too long, too far or too remote.

So that itch remained unscratched until I read ‘Listen to the land speak’ by Manchán Magan. In this book he has a chapter on Oweynagat where he talks about his yearning to undergo a rite of passage, a journey of inner discovery and he travelled as far as the Himalayas to find it, little knowing that on his own doorstep in Ireland there was such a place. I’ve known about Uaimh na gCat (Cave of the cats) for a while, the famed home of the mighty Morrigan, a place of spiritual and emotional transmutation and this is where I got excited, I’m going on holiday in June to Sligo and will be a mere half an hour away from Rathcrogan where the cave sits. So this will be my pilgrimage this year, I will be entering the cave to shed skin, to look into the abyss, to lose and find myself. I’m no longer afraid of the dark, it’s time to find the mirror and stare myself in the face again.

A black and white image of a the inside of a small cave

The Transition is not smooth

I’m 45, not old but not young. A weird in-between place made even weirder by trauma and near death. I’ve spent the past 10 years since my accident, pulling the threads of myself and trying to weave them into some sort of coherent cloth. A cloth that serves to honour who I am now but also allows me to be ‘out there’ in the world.

Have I been successful? Well that depends on when you ask me. I may have found myself and learnt to love and respect myself but the bit about functioning in the world is not something I think I’ve figured out yet. Or maybe I have and most others are doing it wrong?

Just when I’d righted the ship and learnt to have balance in amongst the turmoil of heavy grief and post traumatic stress I am once again being thrown into the initiation of change with Perimenopause.

I’m suddenly lost in the woods again.

The feelings that are getting unearthed are a throwback to those early days of trauma, a mixture of feeling aimless, hopeless and alone. I’m not sure I’m ready for another rite of passage through the fire. The last one was so hard and so hollowing. Am I full enough to be emptied again?

There are moments of clarity where I know that this is another transition from one state to another, an induction to my elderhood and like all initiations it will not be easy. I would like to walk this path without treating it like a disease to be medicated and bypassed, instead letting it power through me and take me to those corners of myself that still need revealing.

Things feel so full of paradox right now, I find I’m craving community, to talk with wiser souls than mine about what is to come but I’m also longing for solitude, for the cave walls to shut me in and free me when I’m ready to unfold. I know myself yet so unsure of who I am at the same time. Happy standing still but yearning to move forward to something.

The pull of The Hermit making me root down and the call of Cailleach pushing me to shed another skin and inhabit the body of the wise woman who I still can’t quite find.

So here I go again, becoming an edgewalker once more. Neither here nor there. Setting off through the trees, the Fools journey, tentative, unknowing and vulnerable.