Truth is paradoxical. The closer you get to it, the further away you might actually be.
What is truth anyway ? The timeline of my childhood is full of holes, and a lot of contradictory and blurry facts. When I try to remember events, my mind gets foggy, as if I was in a cloud and I often get an icky feeling in the stomach. When I listen to fàmily stories (mainly by my mother), I have a strange sense of not existing, almost. There was a time, as a teen specially, I convinced myself that I was adopted. Strange feeling of not being where I should be…This has stayed with me for a long time.
I do not recall much of my early childhood. Black out. For sure, a lot was going on in my family of origin. It is said (and proved), that traumatic memory and amnesia dance very well together. Clever phenomenon of protection. You can only live if you forget. But how can anyone grow in health, when information is erased, blurred, twisted, complex, exploited, manipulated, one-sighted? How can you fully inhabit your body when you were constituted by elements that are dislocated? Like water running into the cracks of an arid and desert earth, like sand in the palm of the hand, memory needs to escape. It is its nature.
I did not trust my body - or my emotions - not until very recently. I did not trust any of my reactions either. How could I? Brought up in a quite dysfunctional1 family, where humiliation, lies and power games are served daily on the menu, how could I? But the more I age, the more I shake off my body all this, the more I am able to revisit my scars - the ones that are visible but also the ones that are invisible, the more I do the work of bringing them into my field of resonance (with care and tenderness) the more I am able to uncover some subtle traces of memory.
From there, I can start the excavation. Like an archeologist, I dig out. I unearth. It is like working on location at a dig site. I have always admired the delicacy of the people who are finding things in the ground. Have you seen how they go about with their delicate small pencils to take away the dust around their precious discovery? Like them, I don’t know how deep yet…. how big yet… I have to go slowly and… brush out the dust….As I do the work, I know I need to be careful ; some things can lead to huge bomb-like material which can explode at your face...
I used to judge the burdens and curses that life provided me with, with a heavy sense of injustice. The why-me-symptom was very present and back then, it was really difficult to see anything in my life as a gift. Wrapped in a dark, disgusting, crusty, gooey material, commonly called “shit”, it was difficult to see through or beyond. Events were often discarded as useless, and as mere bad luck. Probably a good dose of victimisation - as direct inheritance from my mother´s lineage - helped me build that part and some others of my blindspots. Why was life so unfair? But underneath the thick layer of the putrid, terribly smelly texture, there is a layer that has been seeding itself into flowering2. Unexpected and beautiful opportunities to strengthen my resolve, identify my shadows, and let them go out in the light, disintegrating like small stupid vampires!
A scene pops up in my mind. It is not from my childhood, though in many ways it is. The year is 1999, I think. I live in Brussels. I am 33 and I am in love with a younger man. His name is T. I have to admit that though this relationship lasted almost 7 years, I think I was really suffering from occasional delusion of adequacy, and I was often in denial not able to see what love is, really. T was very obviously not committed and though we were sleeping together I guess he was never really in a relationship with me. Anyhow, this is not the story I want to share, but as I write about it, I find it really interesting to question my capacity of clarity about certain aspects of myself. I think that at that time, I was really sad, he made me very sad. He was often flirting with other women and though this was a sign for me to understand that “we were not a couple”, the situation only reinforced my pain. As I was raised to not be good enough. I was trained to accept the unacceptable. He flirted, freely, openly, sometimes in front of me. To put it clear and cruel: he was not respecting me, and, I was not respecting myself. I did not understand the pattern back then, but this is what happens when you are so used to abuse; that is your normal. Life was more clever than me : it was providing me with a (new) chance - an opportunity - to see, to understand, to learn. It was right in front of me again. Unfortunately, I was not ready for the lesson and so, this (painful) story lasted way beyond its expiration date.
One day, T and I had an argument (something stupid - I don’t remember what). He was shouting at me sometimes; it could also be for no apparent reason. Looking back, (now that I have processed some things…) I think he had a lot of unprocessed anger and some manic-depressive traits, more commonly called now “bipolar”? He had long periods of not feeling so good, very low self-esteem, not wanting to do anything, feeling worthless. At other moments, he could be clearly all over the place, crazy happy, having so much fun, hysterical. Anyhow, that day, the argument escalated quite fast. I got scared. He was yelling, gesturing like a mad man, as if “possessed”. He was very tensed. His jaws were clenched. Suddenly, out of nowhere and very close to me, he made a brutal movement, bringing his hand very close up my face, pointing his finger, very near my nose. He was really tempted… he was about to…
I immediately felt through my whole body like an electrical hot and cold at the same time, a wave of something very strange. The image is still there inside me. I still recall the terror. Inside my cells and my bones. Freeze. Hell. Escape. My entire system. My heart. My blood. I think my soul too? It took me just a millisecond; I knew what to do. As if it was the most natural thing to do, as if I had done that before, I went to hide under the kitchen table. I crawled under there, braced myself in a kind of foetal position, an egg of a sort, and stayed there. Head down. Be small. Be invisible.
T got so puzzled that it completely disarmed him! He for sure did not expect that. He shouted a little more. He looked under the table with pity, and left after a slightly gaslighting remark: “You should be ashamed of yourself, you are acting like a child, you are not even able to have a normal adult conversation with me”. Yes, he pitied me; I think, at that time, I pitied myself too!
This image of hiding under the table, this position has stayed with me long after. What was that made of ? What is an act of recollection ? An extended, highly fearful anamnesis - a trace of the past ? Which past? Mine? Was it triggered by a primal fear lived in my childhood ? What did my body remember so well that my mind/head did not know about ? Did my parents really fight physically - as well as verbally - as my mother revealed recently ? (I don’t remember) Who was hiding under the table? Me ? Her ? The whole maternal lineage ? A million questions pouring out. A bleared flow of memories of a million other events. An alcoholic and violent grand-father coming back home ? A raid in a village? An attack on our house ? Another desperate humiliation from a mother to her daughter ?
Repetition, moreover, is an acknowledged form of consciousness both here and elsewhere. Relentlessly resuming something you have already said. Consenting to an infinitesimal momentum, an addition perhaps unnoticed that stubbornly persists in your knowledge. Edouart Glissant.
We spend a lot of time embracing the idea that we don’t know, we don’t recall, but there comes a time, I think, when we finally have to admit that, down deep, in our cells and in our bones, we know. We knew all the way….
There is a real tension in remembering an event, specially a traumatic one. It is hard to remember and at the same time it is impossible to forget. Any form of recollection seems inadequate. Traumatic memories are like detached memories, they float around, inside our body, but also outside, sometimes far away, sometimes close, around our bodies, in the aether. They are neither here in the present - nor there in the past. Grasping them involves a let-go, a naming of the absence, the hole, in order to release the tensions that constitute the states of dissociation which go with the experiencing of the traumatic events. A dissociated truth, a cut-out consciousness or an un-thought known, can bring you into different states. Like this one for me: under a table, at 33 years old! OK, this one is kind of obvious, it is kind of easy to understand what that was. But sometimes, memory’s ghostly echoes, the censored, the erased, the ones only leaving subtle traces in the field, makes us act out, makes us vulnerable, makes us unpredictable. This is when we are called on becoming the Archeologist of our own site and grounds. We are called on taking our little brushes out. We are called on to conjure away the noise, the loudness and step a foothold back into the story that has been reduced to powder. Maybe then, by bringing back some movement, some light and a lot of awareness, we will be able to recover the little piece of our wandering soul that has gone missing long time ago - and that only wants to stick back to where it belongs.
I have a little problem with the term since I do believe that all systems are basically inherently dysfunctional. But for the lack of a better word, I am using this one that gives a certain understandable image for most of us.
While writing this piece, I received by email - I don’t say by coincidence anymore - I prefer use the word “by resonance” - an article written by Rhyd Wildermuth while he was in Patmos (the island of the apocalypse). “But there’s a funny thing that happens to plants growing in a patch of soil watered with human shit and piss: they grow, and they grow large. Particularly in the summer, the wildflowers rooting in that miasmic dirt were startling to behold, more vivid and brilliant than any blossoms I’ve seen in my life. Open sewers grow gorgeous flowers.