(Written in October 2003)
I feel dazed and trapped in a small space, unable to move. It feels like there is shaking or quivering in my upper body that’s just on the edge of happening. Tried dancing but it didn’t help, my energy is still caught in my upper body. Tried reading, tried lying down. Reading is meaningless and painful, lying down is not restful. Finally drove up to Gov Gallen & walked to the picnic table with Bella. Tried to be in the present, pay attention to my feet but not very successful.
Feel like everything I’ve done in my life is wrong, Neskaya is a big mistake, a waste of time and money, and so is the house. What does that feel like in my body? My upper body is full of trapped electrical zingy prickly energy. It’s agitated with nowhere to go. Trapped in by something like armor. My legs don’t feel like muscle & bone they feel like dead fiber, dry dull bland tasteless. No energy, no fluidity. What does the electrical prickly energy want? To be held and comforted, to be reassured that everything’s all right, that it doesn’t have to do anything and can relax. There is no need for action right now, it is truly profoundly OK to rest, all is being taken care of by a larger, wiser, older being. But nothing changes. This is what is so discouraging. I try so hard to “be with” it, to accept it and comfort it, and nothing does any good. Patience — a badly frightened child may take time to calm down, and if it’s been left for too long it will be untrustful and rejecting of the parent when it does show up. There there dear, you are doing the best you can with an extremely uncomfortable and painful situation.
It’s beautiful outdoors, sunlight behind red leaves, piercing and painful. I can’t/won’t make myself go out. I refuse to make myself go out. I’ve put on the Oratorium in Memory of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 — thinking it might ease the pain in my heart.
Danced the Ode Verse and Shoror — it’s helped. The sun has gone in — that helps too.
That music helps restore some sense of context. I’m not the only person who suffers, who feels lost and alone in a vast cold landscape, trudging onward carrying the fragments of what was once/would have been a rich and vital culture. I’m not the only person who sinks down by the roadside unable to keep going because of the weight in the heart, and the fear that there is no oasis out there, no camp full of friends, no refuge, but only a barren waste where one will die sooner or later.
And yet I have been able to create Neskaya, this refuge, this “healing sanctuary” where people are able to come and be their real selves, knowing that they are welcomed. I have created for others what my parents denied me, and I seem to be unable to participate in the healing myself — is that true? or is this place healing me little by little?
Shoror is the name of an Armenian Dance step, it’s a rocking step, like rocking a baby. Laura Shannon choreographed a dance to music from the Oratorium called Berceuse.
This entry, from 2003, shows that I am using the techniques of Somatic Experiencing as best I can, but I’m really deep in a very horrible place.