there is a peace in
silence that becomes thrumming
great cacophony
Author Archives: Rexicorn
Christmas Lights
I came in
-Rex M
to work tonight
for my dad
at midnight,
as I have
been tending
to do lately
so the majority
of my time
can be free
of Christian music
and misgendering
and deadnaming,
and I saw
that my mom
had turned
on the
Christmas lights
on a cool
mid October
midnight.
I automatically smiled.
Then I appreciated
that smile,
and the fact
that I could
appreciate
that smile,
and how far
I have come
to be at peace
with myself
while they
be them.
Suddenly
my dad
walks in
while I am
writing this,
to check on
whether my brother
left his office
light on.
Just me.
Tapping on my phone.
He mutters
about the doorknob
needing work
and says
his goodbyes
and wanders
in to bed.
I fix the doorknob
when he leaves.
Sometimes
it feels like
all the effort
towards a relationship
is on my end,
other times
the conversations
between us
flow incendiary
and the world burns
and societal norms burns
and spiritual standards burn
but then on such a fundamental level
they just don’t get me,
they’re waiting for
this phase to pass,
they hope if
they just ignore
Halloween
they can skip
the demons
visiting their house
and head straight
to the celebrations
they understand
so here we are
hopefully lighting
Christmas lights
on a cool
mid October
midnight
and waiting
for the demons
to pass.
fear made biological
I am fire misspent into compression
I am yearning for a gasp of air
and the freedom to grow beyond
the boundaries of this engine
that is caging me
that is using me
I am fear made entirely biological
I am lost in the spirit
GISHability
For #gish item #158 and #disabilitypride we were asked to make a portrait of a disabled person out of something representing their contributions.
I made this piece in honor of Marsha Linehan, the woman who has saved my life and many others with her creation of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy as a method to treat Borderline Personality Disorder, a disorder that she shares with her patients. It is made with quotes from her textbook and DBT skills.
When it comes to explaining art, especially if it is fairly plain, you always get the question “how do you know when it’s done?”
Of course, it’s never done. No such thing.
But this comes from a basic flaw in understanding the artistic process.
Artists just fix the most wrong thing they can currently see. Then the next most wrong thing they see after that. So it’s an easy assumption to make that by improving the amount and type of flaws an artist can see, they would improve substantially.
But it’s not as if the painting has a certain number of flaws and after each one, check mark that part is done. Because every line and color that gets adjusted changes how the eye perceives. And the more flaws that you are attempting to rework at the same time, the more likely you are to become demotivated and just give up.
This is a perfect metaphor for the process of growth through DBT. Thesis and antithesis reaching synthesis. Followed by re-evaluation. Then do it again. You continue to fix the most wrong thing that you can see. Until… when?
Until the risk of exceeding the limit of your skills is greater than the reward of the fix you are trying to make. “If I push this further am I gonna ruin it?”
This is likely what people find most frustrating about the first line traditional therapies. The skill gap. Your ability to see flaws will improve before your ability to handle them does.
This is the opposite in DBT.
Your ability to see flaws and cognitive distortions improves as you begin using skills and gaining experience with them. It is only then then you begin making the connections as to the true sources and solutions of your behaviors.
Those connections may have only traumatized you if you were still functioning at the same level as before.
You need practice walking up to the line and knowing whether you can take another step or not and you cannot learn that academically.
You’re gonna ruin a lot of work. Eventually you tune in your sensitivity and awareness so you can spend more time in the safe zone of fixing things before you reach the limit of your skills. That’s when you can actually begin the real and profound work safely and know that wherever you end up going with it, you have the capability and control over what’s directly in front of you to be able to handle.
I had stopped making art for 10 years after a cruel drawing professor in college. I also was institutionalized 22 times during that decade. That part was more about identity. It was play that developed the confidence and learning that results in me now being introduced as an artist, and as the person that I’m actually comfortable living as day to day.
Practicing non-judgmentally which gives you the time and experience to develop your own meaningful conclusions, and improving your eye but not practicing systematically, will both allow you to improve. One has gotten you into a productive practice, though, and established a baseline, and done so without relying on installing a harsher critic.
I lived it before I became it.
And it is only now that I feel safe enough to go deeper.
But it is with a better understanding
And a better mindset.
And now… no one can take it away from me.
See I once thought that the goal was to get good at something.
Now I realize you only need to be good enough to fix your mistakes to be quite dangerous.
And you’re already ahead of everyone that’s not even trying.
But is this piece done?
Not if Marsha Linehan says it isn’t.
I’ll be fixing it up digitally to give away as a downloadable if she gives permission.
Little moments
Today I saw the brain zapping technician that was my favorite, always the gentlest, most uplifting soul, at the pharmacy when I was picking up my meds. I got to tell her that I was doing better, that I was figuring it out. She smiled and asked for a hug and said “That’s why we do this.” I did tell her that ECT hadn’t been a good choice for me, that I didn’t have the adequate coping skills or experience with being happy or the inevitable huge difference that the eventual crash felt like compared to a depression when you were used to no more than “meh” normally. I told her that after my first suicide attempt, when they tried ECT again I lost 8 months of memory. She told me it wasn’t uncommon, and a number of patients coming out of depression feel weird and unable to tell if they’ll ever feel normal. We talked about institutionalization and crime and how we as a nation feel 4 years at a state hospital is too mean but we are totally okay with the resulting homelessness and prisons full of mentally ill. She made me promise that if I ever lost this hope again, that I’d “let them fight for me, because we’ve done it. We’ve made people better.”
I said, “yeah, hope is not the winning. Hope is the battle.”
“And we’ve already won the war. Anyways, I gotta get goin.”
I do not like that I noticed that the only thing in her hand was a fifth. I do not like that I worry about the drinking habits of people I haven’t seen in nearly a decade.
Rusty
I admit I am becoming drunk on the sense of possibility.
I should explain.
I’ve always been so goddamn suicidal that the answer to the question of what I wanted to do with my life was meaningless.
I wanted to die.
That was it.
That veil is lifting now and I’m remembering what it’s like to use my brain for things.
Good lord am I rusty.
But I’m getting better.
I’m seeing potential in things and ideas whereas before I only saw obstacles.
What a gift.
Now to go gently, so I don’t flame out.
Truce
I have reached
a bit of
a stalemate
with my
neurochemicals.
They don’t
hurt me
and I don’t
hurt them.
No more
drinking
and various
self abuses.
I’ll take
my meds.
I’ll do the
sunshine thing.
I’ll even
exercise.
This gets me
to the point
where I can
exist at equilibrium
only the
faintest whispers
of the
craving of death
pounding
like a heartbeat
from the
hollow cavern
in my chest,
I feel like
this is
as close
to normal
that I may be
capable of.
I’ve made
a truce
with my
brain.
We don’t talk
as much shit
about each other
any more.
I’m learning
to remember
the love
I had for it once.
Before the
shock therapy
And the concussions
And the whole
“smacking myself
in the head when
in distress” thing.
I’ve apologized
to my hallucination goo.
I’m gentler on it now.
I hope it can forgive me.
Unlicensed Food Truck
I’ve realized what’s been missing in my life. I’ve had a general level of lazy survival distraction filled with ennui and a simmering craving for death. Just- existing. Not managing to get anything really done or use my habit trackers or do my diary cards or show up to therapy consistently. I realized that it’s time to dig in, make the effort count. I’m getting back into the system and if the journal entries from here on out aren’t a whole lot more consistent, well, I’m fucking human and progress isn’t linear. So I’ll cope with that. I can deal with gaps in dates for entries, but I cannot survive long term lack of any structure. I try. I try so hard. But I do not do. Must do.
I was listening to the MBMBaM podcast and the topic of unlicensed food trucks came up and the strangest thing happened. It just hit me like a punch to the gut. I processed my feelings for a moment and came up with what it was touching on.
When I was a child, I was super entrepreneurial. To my detriment in many ways, honestly. But I remember putting together business plans and sketches and studying about loans. At one point I put up a couple sawhorses and a board with a sign I made advertising a dog boarding service. I sat outside, waiting for customers, apparently thinking that people are just driving around with dogs they need boarded. After a while, I went to ask my dad why I wasn’t getting any customers.
He had no idea what I was up to, naturally. So he said “you can’t do that!” and took down the setup. I do not remember exact words of the lecture as much as I do feelings and a sense memory of a sneer. I was crushed in this moment. I think it may be a root memory for fear and inadequacy.
But I realized… this is just a harmless kid thing. Anyone driving by would probably be going too fast to read the sign and they’d think it was just a lemonade stand. No one stopped, but it was totally normal and developmentally appropriate kid behavior. I hurt no one but they hurt me for it.
And that was the lesson I learned from the unlicensed food truck.
Review: How Yoga Works
I must admit, I picked this up as a gift this season and then sheepishly messaged my sister to ask if it was inappropriate to read someone’s Christmas present before giving it to them. She kindly gave me permission. I thought it would be a great gift for her, knowing her interest in yoga, but I didn’t realize what a gift it would be to me.
The story follows Friday, a young girl trained in yoga, traveling from Tibet to India. She gets stopped along the path at a small village and is found to be carrying a very valuable and ancient book of yoga and not much else. This is regarded as suspicious and she is held in the jail until they can ascertain if the book is stolen. In the meantime, the Captain of the jail, who has a bad back, decides that if she is capable of fixing his back, perhaps she really is as versed in this tome as she claims to be.
The lessons with the Captain are where the meat of the education lies, and the progress and revelations of the characters rapidly move you deeper into the lore and history. You’re learning about the why and how of yoga, and the mental approach, at the same time as the Captain, through a dialogue of very reasonable questions that a yoga student might ask their teacher.
The characters are interesting and possess vivid voices, and the pacing and reveals keep the mind engaged. It’s also interesting how effective the book is at making you aware of your body; a number of times I read something and then became aware of those sensations and was immediately driven to shift and stretch. In that way it’s highly motivational.
As someone who is intimidated by yoga, this made me want to start in a very real way. Which, I’m pretty sure, makes it a success.
Daily Habits
I haven’t been talking much about how I’ve been doing. I think part of that is shame. I feel bad for doing so well, comparatively to before, during such a tremendous and world enveloping crisis. I feel like if I was suicidal when things were more okay, I should be crushed right now under a grief so total that it should destroy me.
But I’m not. I’m growing, I’m changing, I’m experiencing a spiritual awakening. This, I’m realizing, is not instead of the grief but because of it. If I had not managed to develop the coping skills and system that I did, when I did, I surely would have been obliterated by the weight of the world right now. It was a necessity of the moment. The seed was placed in enough darkness that all the potential work it had put in allowed it to sprout.
Early on in the quarantine I wanted and probably needed to go to a mental hospital. I knew that it would reset my year without hospitalizations in order to get bariatric surgery but i was ready to do so anyways. Then I heard that they would place you in an isolated room in the hospital for 5 days to ensure you didn’t have symptoms before even bringing you to a unit. I have enough history with hospitals to know that those 5 days would not be care, they would be abuse. They would be a constant stream on regurgitating everything that was bothering me to any medical staff that wanted to know, over and over again. I knew I’d be without belongings or clothes, for my safety. I knew I’d be educating half the people who came in to talk to me about trans issues and how to properly refer to me and a lot of them still wouldn’t get it right. The more I played the tape through, the more I saw that I could probably do the good things that a hospital does at home and without having to experience all the trauma.
I could create routine, regular meals, a study of psychology on my own as “group time.” I could work on the level that was appropriate and interesting for me, rather than relying on whatever was pulled out of the binder that day to go over.
So naturally, I started watching YouTube. A quick review of “mini habits” and how having low expectations to check something off as achieved for the day often led you to do more, since it doesn’t paralyze you. Knowing that you only have to open the book and read two pages is much less intimidating than telling yourself that you have to read for an hour, but it gets you over that inertia burst, that hardest part of the task, which is starting. You may set up and start meditating for two minutes and find that 20 have passed when you are done. Learning this theory was a key moment in establishing something that could work for my brain.
From there I wrote out a spreadsheet with a variety of things that I wanted to achieve every day. I put this in Google Drive so that I’d have access to it across any devices and lose excuses for tracking. My list is living and growing week by week, as I learn that I am capable of achieving all of these things every day and find my interests pulled in different directions, I expand more. I’m currently thinking about spreading about my “reading” section into workbooks, philosophy, art, education, and psychology but I haven’t done it yet.
I made a section below the list with each day, asking the same questions:
Daily gratitude?
Synopsis of the day?
How did you work toward your goals?
In this way I created little classes for myself and I started to modulate the inputs to my brain. I began putting in better stuff. Instead of focusing on all the bad in the world and on the news, I began to learn constantly and feed myself with motivation, inspiration, and the seeking of a better, healthier soul.
Things like meditation and watching TEDx talks, stretching, chores, taking meds, and attending to Activities of Daily Living, those are a good place to start. Add more as to your interests and skill sets. I watch a lot of educational videos and have started reading again, I can’t believe I had forgotten how much I loved to read.
It’s not perfect. I had a panic attack yesterday that left me non-verbal and in tears. I spent most of today in bed. But I still managed to knock out my daily habits, and that’s more than I can ever say I did when in that sort of state before. I would have done something harmful to myself. And I didn’t.
Astonishingly the suicidal thinking has abated to a level I’ve have no memory of ever being this low. It still comes, in the rough times, in the critical times, in the times when it is a worn groove that requires conscious effort to jump out of. But not having it be constant, drumming, persistent, always in the back of my mind? I feel lighter. It’s easier to exist. My mind is friendlier to be with, and ultimately that’s the goal, because your mind is the one and only companion you’ll have for every moment of your life. It’s a lot better when it doesn’t want you to die.
Rexicorn 