art by @bb_pluto <3
Around the age of 12, I began an unfortunate new morning ritual. Before school, I would wake up, get dressed, and promptly attach a super-sized menstrual pad to the back half of my underwear before finishing my bowl of cereal and running off to endure 7th grade.
I donned the pad every day of middle school and high school, hoping and praying that nobody noticed the strange ruffling sound my backside made as I stood up or sat down. When I got home, I instantly ripped the heinous thing off. Only then could I feel an inkling of peace or comfort in my body, which certainly eluded me the entire 8 hours of school.
The butt-pad routine was intended to ward off the dreaded, sweat-induced ass streaks I’d left on the brightly colored melamine chairs of my middle school classrooms one too many times .
It was only one of a handful of creative strategies I’d begun to develop to keep my hyper-activated (read: highly sweaty) body at bay. I was also hyper-vigilant about avoiding any activity that might require me to hold hands with another person, lest they get a load of the cold, slimy dish rags that passed for my hands. And, to prevent wide, damp sweat circles from blooming under each of my arms, I finished off nightly showers with an application of prescription Drysol -- a literal layer of aluminum chloride that left my skin burning and raw.
It was worth it to me, that chemical re-arrangement of the molecules in my underarm muscles that produced the sweat in the first place. I felt that if I could literally get under my skin to stop the sweat where it was produced, maybe I would have a chance at a happy (i.e., dry) life.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. As I type this post today, my hands are still slippery and wet on the keyboard, and I’ll probably change my shirt after I finish writing. The sweat persists, even as my flesh sack grows and changes.
I’ve felt that my damp, anxious body was rebelling against me for most of my life. Growing up, the shame of being seen as different by my extremely small peer group in my extremely small town led me to fear the skin I lived in. My body was uncontrollable, and that was terrifying.
I tried my best to hide its betrayals behind whatever medicine or padding I could find. By the time I hit my 20s, that looked and felt like full blown dissociation. Maybe if I’d known back then about the possibility of being non-binary, some of these feelings might have made a bit more sense to me. But at 35, I‘m still just beginning to figure that one out.
As a life-long “worry wart,” I do think I knew all along that my sweaty, problematic body probably had something to do with the deep, near-constant anxiety that walked with me wherever I went. But for most of my young life, I also felt powerless to intervene. I was a kid, after all, with a limited range of power or agency to alter the circumstances of my life at the root. My family did what they could -- they brought me to the pediatrician, they validated my feelings, they helped me create routines for comfort. But ultimately I sweated on, slippery and cold in this unruly body.
When I was 22, I found work at the RECOVER Project, a peer-to-peer recovery center based in Franklin County, Massachusetts. The RP changed a lot for me. There I found an intentional, “from the ground up” community of people trying to make sense of past hurts and harms in order to live more fully in the present. I found a group of people willing to be honest about the role of shame and fear in their lives and in their bodies. In their company, I began to suss out deeper connections between my humming, vibrating, leaky interior landscape and the exterior circumstances that grew me up.
Unexpected death of a close family member. Childhood illness. Family struggles with mental health, chronic pain, moving, being broke, alcoholism, opioids. Individually, each of these dynamics didn’t necessarily define “me” or the vibe of my home life. In my house we laughed a lot and I was surrounded with love. However, as a sensitive, intuitive kid constantly trying to make sense of what was going on around me, some of those more challenging experiences surely did affect the rhythms and realities of my internal landscape.
The wise women I worked with in Franklin County were on the leading edge of understanding the wily ways that harmful experiences “stick” to the insides of our bodies. They helped me intuitively know that what we’ve been taught to call trauma impacts our most basic ways of relating to the outside world. They showed me that breath, blood pressure, and yes, even sweat, are all messengers from our insides. These processes communicate valuable information about how our body relates to the systems, structures, and circumstances in which we find ourselves surviving.
Above all, my recovery community helped me to figure out that whatever we call “trauma” isn’t a definable experience easily linked back to a single event. Sometimes it is that. But it is also the messy accumulation of stress, tension, violence, loss, and uncertainty in the body through time. It is psychic and physical. It is inherited. It is the way that the hurtful systems and structures we live within (including white supremacy, capitalism, the gender binary, colonization) attach and bond to our bodies. And our organs and nervous systems bear the brunt of it all.
So what is my sweaty ass trying to tell me after all these years?
I took these lessons with me to graduate school hoping that maybe I might answer some version of that question in the process. During my master’s program, critical theory became my favorite, most cherished tool for exploring the vast terrain of trauma and the body. I devoured theory on affect and embodiment. I read classic works by Freud on hysteria and Derrida on archive fever. I reflected it all thru the life-giving lens of queer theory and queer-of-color critique. Writers like José Esteban Muñoz and Jasbir Puar and Sara Ahmed offered up radical takes on failure, pain, belonging, and community-building for healing and liberation. They showed me other ways of living and existing in a body overflowing with shame.
During that time, I began to think seriously about our bodies as archives. If an archive is a physical space that holds and protects precious bits of knowledge and information, then might our bodies--the physical holders and keepers of our most tender and sharp memories-- be such a place?
Trauma clinician Bessel Van der Kolk would say yes, I think. His work suggests that over the long-term, it’s our bodies that “keep the score” by tracking and recording the effects of our lived experiences and storing that information inside our muscles, nerves, and bones.
I wrote my master’s thesis on the topic of body-archives, and it brought me up close to a set of childhood experiences I had long abandoned. My body’s own “score”--long sealed up in the archival space right around my spleen--opened up to me and what was lost was found, a least a little bit.
Fast forward 10 years, and my understanding of body-archives and the “stickiness” of trauma continues to evolve. Through the framework of somatics, I’ve learned that our nervous systems--especially our limbic systems and our autonomic nervous systems--are the real “keepers” of the score. By opening and closing the neural pathways that activate and deactivate muscles, nerves, and hormones, our nervous systems contain the instructions that our bodies have built over time for how our bodies “should” react and respond to our external environments.
More often than not, the instructions we receive from our nervous systems lead us down neural pathways that no longer serve us...Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Squish. Squish. Squish.
Luckily, I’ve learned some pretty rad practices for forging new neural pathways that can take me somewhere different. Meditation, somatic grounding, Zoloft, EMDR, Al-Anon, acupuncture, stretching, Akashic Records, astrology, and tarot have all been crucial for cultivating deeper and more intentional connections to creativity and spirit. Creativity and spirit are what deliver me out of the darkness where I can drown if I’m not care-full.
By knowing and utilizing those portals, I've gotten a lot closer to understanding my queer nervous system and how it works. Today, I have rituals of release and a deeper knowledge of grief and growth and the systemic harms that pull us down slowly and less obviously. And still… my body leaks and leaks and leaks.
So now, a new order has presented itself -- heal myself and I heal all of you. But how?
Drip. Drip. Drip.
As I ride the tides of my own body’s seemingly bottomless ocean, I’m beginning to think that the archive I host inside of me is quite a lot more filled up than I previously realized.
Can you drain an ocean? Do I want to?
As I circle around and around the tipsy tall pile of ancestral baggage delivered by my ancestor--the merchant seaman and mummy captor Larkin Thorndike Lee-- straight into me, I inherit his legacy through the tangled up archive of my DNA.
As I open that archive’s heavy door, I’m tasked with the question of how this salty, wet seaman and his deathly anxiety relates to my own cup, which overfloweth with salty wetness, too.
What is there of that seaman in my WAP (Wet Ass Pants)?
Is his eternal wetness my eternal wetness?
Or is my ass just full of old seamen?
The records tell me that in 1825, Larkin Thorndike Lee’s earthly fate was sealed into the wet, wet, ocean when his body was tossed overboard upon his death “of Anxiety, off the coast of Africa.”
The more I live aligned with the principle that time isn’t linear or real in the ways we’ve been taught (more on this in a future post!), the more I can feel the tightness of that old sea rope that binds my body to his body, tethering us to eternal swells and squalls with fine and complicated knots.
Understanding this alternative arrangement of past, present, and future--understanding the ways I’ve been knotted up to Larkin as he literally drowns-- is the route to releasing the wetness that’s been coded into my Permanent Record-- my DNA. Heal myself and I heal all of you. Anchor your ship, and now I’m dry too.
In a recent episode of the Bespoken Bones podcast, artist, activist, and healer brontë velez talks to us about the necessary work of alchemizing trauma for our ancestors. For velez, this means finding ways to acknowledge and feel the weight of our ancestors in the present moment--to feel their needs, their hurts, and their losses--so that such lingering pain can be transmuted into the materials of liberation. I love this.
Like me, brontë velez seems to have come to this earthly plane ready to dig themselves out. Through the conduit of a ritual where they were laid in the forest, covered in dirt, and photographed emerging through layers of vegetational debris, velez had a vision of a sexual assault their grandmother experienced, which led her to being literally buried alive.
In that moment of connection across time and space, velez uses their own body to consensually close a circuit once left open by a non-consensual act of violence. It’s an act of transmutation. By feeling the weight of dirt on their own body, velez listens, witnesses, and learns what is needed to relieve the insistent pressure of the past exerted on their present body and spirit. It is a gift of relief they give to their grandmother from the future, which is also the past.
This story -- the one about Larkin and Betsey and the mummy -- has to do with the specific kind of pressure velez names. It has to do with an ancestral inheritance that sits in your body and presses on you. Or, in my case, just leaks right out.
I’m drawn to the power-term velez uses to describe this process: ALCHEMIZE. It evokes the possibility of a deep and maybe even permanent state of change in the condition and presence of our ancestors in our body. It speaks of the core transformational power of magic and ritual. To alchemize is to convert -- to make new with.
There’s so much more to explore about the alchemy of salt and the labor of conversion.
At 10, I was diagnosed with Conversion Disorder, which is another part of another story that is also this story. I can’t help wondering if “disordered conversion” has something to do with the unresolved pressure of Larkin and his stolen mummy leaking into the present moment, reminding us of the wrongness of linear time. Stay still and maybe he will pass.
But maybe Larkin is still in me--in salt, in blood, in bone. Maybe he is underwater, pumping those instructions for WET WET WET through my blood vessels and sweat glands and pores and spleen and heart and hands, even when such instructions no longer serve me.
What happens when you alchemize salt water?
Larkin and Betsey want me to ask that question, and others -- What remains of their bodies and their actions in the anxious, watery grave of my DNA? What of their harms need transmutation in this body, here and now?
To alchemize trauma means altering core components from within that ineffable “home-place” ties us to the pool of source we rested in until we were called forth into the bodies we now call home. It's deep work that takes place across portals we thought were closed.
brontë velez’s ritual and its accompanying call to alchemize trauma for the ancestors is one way to honor and dignify those who have lived and lost and have since passed through that most major portal we face as human beings: death.
By setting our dead ancestors’ hurting and harmful experiences in light of our own energies and intentions, we can redirect the gifts and the hurts they’ve left us with toward revolutionary ends -- towards the possibility of peace and freedom-- both personal and structural.
In releasing what is stored in the darkness of flooded-out archives long sealed, we make room for the growth of new systems and new containers for holding us in all of our complexities. We make room for the dryness of land. Alchemize. Transition. Transform.
Thanks for sticking with me through these first few posts which have to do with the big-picture project I’m setting off the ground.
Join me again next week for a return to some of the nitty-gritty details of my research and writing on Larkin and Betsey Lee. Less woo, more history. Well, still woo -- but history too.
I’ll explore intuitive research processes and the logistics of world-building and the labor of historical-fictioning.
I’ll share some tools I’ve been developing to organize information and thematics in my writing, and I’ll talk about my recent roll through the North Shore looking, looking, looking for Larkin everywhere -- at the house his mother lived (it’s still there!), at his grave (I found it!) and in the harbor to which his ships came home (the perfect place to daydream about history while eating a Bill & Bob’s roast beef sandwich).
As always -- more will be revealed! <3 <3 <3
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