I AM LOST AND FOUND AND FALLING DOWN IN ORDER TO STAND UP AGAIN

I wonder who I am becoming? I feel like a work-in-progress, like the rubble pit an architect scans when trying to construct a new building in place of one that has been demolished. Can I use the bones of the one to flesh out the other? Aiming for continuity, a semblance of narrative to frame what was against what is and what will be. The body is a site where fear and desire intersect. At that point of intersection much can go wrong it seems. The biological fabric of Self tears, wears, frays and Self fragments, leaks out into the wilderness of the Undiscovered Self. How did I arrive at this intersection? What are the choices, good and “questionable” that brought me to this point? I look behind me and see the ghost of my Former Self, hugging a bottle, rocking in a chair, alone in a dark room in which the light struggles to make an impact. The walls of the room weep. She is bound up in psychic knots of frustration, anxiety and longing. But we all chase shadows in our dreams. I’ve stopped having nightmares. A weight has lifted. I nearly disappeared from view, literally. The weight of the past fell from my bones. Major illness, and major injury are sites of fear and desire manifest in the body. There is no escaping the body at such times. The body screams for attention but how to listen to the message? How to make sense? How to pick up the pieces of rubble and start rebuilding? Am I even the architect of my Self?

Who is the Self left in the wake of trauma? And what of that Self lost along the way? Where did she go, anyhow?

When the body is radically changed by trauma, when the physiological Self is affected by trauma, when the psychological Self is affected by trauma, the relationship to space/s change too. By trauma I am speaking of a violent disruption, or rupture. Navigating space is brought into a new awareness. I think of myself as a person who walks. I used to take long walks, through cities and landscapes. Now each step I am able to take becomes a victory, a triumph over adversity, and each step I can’t take forces me to grieve for what has been lost, that part of Self I thought was “real”. When someone close to us dies suddenly we lose an Other through whom we defined some part of our Self. The most traumatic example perhaps is the loss of a child. The (Mother/Father) Self might never recovery, will probably never return to that Self they knew before such significant traumatic loss. So what is the Self? Grief is visceral. We use phrases like, “it was an unbearable pain”, “every part of me ached with the sensation of loss”, and “my heart felt broken beyond repair”. How bound to the body is Self? Is Self constructed physiologically, or psychologically? If you have ever been “clinically depressed” for example, you might have asked: Am I this? Or am I a hostage to this?

The loss of Self, the search for True Self, the constant construction of social Selves for all occasions. Do our fears and desires tell us something about who we really are? How do fear and desire shape us? Inform our sense of Self?

Am I woman who can, or am I a woman who can’t? Am I a woman who will, or am I a woman who won’t? And how will the answers to such questions reveal (the real) Me?

(Fiona)