gig 2

I'm about to head off to perform my second gig.
I hope I'm this relaxed, but I'm so anxious my heart is humming loud enough to accompany a vocal solo. Update later

'

teaching domestic studies in the 21st century: a must-have list

curtains so heavy
they black it all out
           (I will cut my own stars in them
            but it was all dark, so 
            I made myself bleed)

a spine
or an ancient tree
            (I will climb it above the too-loud world
            and make-believe I'll never grow up)

flower petal teacups
that are infinite, evergreen
               (you will bring them out
              for Christmas and the first days
              of spring, leave lip marks on them)

a quiet lion living in a world
that has far too much pride
              (predatory protection, this city
               is a roaring desert)

 a jar filled with riddles, mysteries,
other words for secrets
           (later you will smash it against 
            the rock that conquers fear-
                Love)

an updated map of our solar system
and a model of Pluto and its moons, in detail
              (sometimes I'm small and seem
               far away but I still have my own gravity
                if even a handful, so don't let go)

Shortened version of Psychosis article

Voice 1: Why? How do I get rid of you?
Voice 2: To get rid of us you have to get rid of yourself.
Voice 3: If anyone knew what was going on in your head…
Voice 4: Look who’s really crazy now?
Voice 5: Help me.

My mother said in an email, ‘You’re right. Most people don’t know what happened to you with Ella’s death.’ I haven’t cried such tears of relief, ever. After the worst of it was over, I did not know enough to cry tears of relief because I was so busy gathering scraps of my sanity back. That sounds like a cliche or a silly metaphor but I will begin my explanation of what really did happen that left me gathering sanity scraps. This silly image is annoyingly as accurate as language gets to depict how I felt after the initial destructive event- the scattering agent. It was my mind, once intact, now unrecognisable and in pieces and it wouldn't work cohesively unless I found new ways to assemble the pieces and assemble myself all over again. In doing so, I reassembled an entire person out of the wreckage of someone who, though supposedly sane before, is also unrecognisable when I look back on her.

For a while, I experienced what my doctors explained was a ‘transient episode of psychosis as response to extreme emotional stress’. I had no sense of self as soon as it began, because prior to the episode I had put so much emphasis on the importance of my mind. ‘It’s my most treasured possession’ I would say, and in the most horrific hours I would be taunted by my own cackles at just how funny it was, how I’d practically asked for it because that treasured mind of mine was now gone.

Voice 1: I don’t want my body.
Voice 2: I want my mind.
Voice 3: Your mind is a long way-away-away-away-away…..

Doctors had recently diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder and I had been reluctant to fully accept this diagnostic label until they explained that transient psychosis is actually symptomatic of BPD. I will never be able to credit my therapists and doctors enough for their endless reassurance that I had not lost my mind, that it would come back, and that there was an end to what was happening.

The psychosis was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s also probably the thing (no, definitely) I’m most proud of going through. No one will ever give me a cheer or a pat on the back or congratulate me for battling a war with my own shadow and winning. I have to be proud of what I’ve done totally on my own, and I thank my fucked up little patched-together brain for teaching me through utterly going to pieces and only being reassembled to function with endless painstaking almost excruciating (no, excruciating) effort and time and working against horrible forces that only existed inside of me- invisible enemies only I could see because they were a part of me and still are- that sometimes the greatest things you’ll do aren’t about being evaluated by other people. I’ve learnt there are some victories you can enjoy even if nobody will cheer for you and there are some accomplishments that only you will be able to appreciate, and that is not a bad thing.

Now I can weirdly, proudly, semi-cryptically, and strangely say without the least bit of genuine profundity that I fought the demons and voices my own split evil brain created for me after throwing me into a Kafkaesque horror carnival parody movie-like hell, and I beat them by outwitting them
(You can only beat your own mind with your own mind) and it’s the best thing I’ve ever accomplished. The least enjoyable.

I heard mostly my own voice, but fragmented into many different Daisys. It began with family’s voices (mocking, mostly, by my sister and her boyfriend, my cousin, my grandma, aunt, other cousins, and mother).and graduated into my brain going off on wild loops, thoughts as if heard from outside that I never put there and rhapsodising poems without my consent, speaking in dialects, letting me in on the voices of social realisms I didn’t even know I was aware of. This content of the voices shows that my unconsious mind, beneath the level of awareness, was aware of and considering things I'd never consciously thought about. My unconscious mind was split from me, it was angry, it got powerful the more scared I became, and it hated me. It had it in for me and wanted me to die. It told me I had to end my life if I wanted the voices to go away. They told me I could save my cousin through suicide. When you’re sad, you can get very superstitious.

As it worsened and my life was terrorised by the voices, I would see things and hear things and the world became inescapably violent and unpredictable until it was impossible to maintain a façade of sanity. I remember covering my ears on a train platform and crouching down yelling because I heard all the trains cackling at me,

My evil unconscious mind, somewhat ingenious despite being Machiavellian- would jump into speakers and amplifiers on tube and in supermarkets and broadcast across whole shop/train carriage with my own voice saying, “Look what I can do.”

Of course, the doctors were right. It did end, when I began to listen. The least dreadful voice(s) were the last to go, and the ones that stayed latest at night, and the quietest. They were small voices asking ‘why?’ and saying ‘help me’. I heard ‘listen to me’. It wasn't until I started listening to them that I began getting over them. I see them now as being the angry fragmented voices of the angry fragmented person I had stamped all over and dressed up in different identities and denied, denied, denied. The person I really was got so sick of being mistreated- I wasn't even drinking water or sleeping, that’s the extent to which I was denying and neglecting myself basic care without even thinking- that she got a voice, then she got more voices, then she got louder, then she went on a power trip to punish me for what a mess I’d made of whatever it was I organically was meant to be, by pretending to be a whole load of other things and never letting myself be happy and making people around me sad too.

But I’m so lucky I never quite believed the voices totally. If I had I wouldn’t be here to talk about it. I knew from the start, perhaps because the nature of the voices and my unconscious mind with all the tricks it played on me was purely and exclusively Machiavellian, that they weren’t words I could believe or trust, if I wanted to get out of it alive (no hyperbole), and if I wanted a future. It’s very hard to tell yourself not to trust the things you find inside your own head. Usually you assume your thoughts are your own and therefore true to you. I had to continuously believe that my mind was not to my own- the things I heard were not my thoughts. Often they were the things, I discovered, that I was afraid of thinking or feeling, or afraid that other people thought I felt or thought, or the things that I absolutely did not believe or think or feel.

The voices made me conscious of what I was doing, what I was afraid of really, what I was becoming, what I was losing, what I was missing out on that I could have but was so busy being wasteful and harmful and in denial that I couldn’t even see it was being wasted. There is nothing I've experienced more terrifying than hearing a voice in your head you know did not come from the outside world but sounds like it did, but actually shocks you because it’s not your own thought.Not an inner voice or imagined. A shocking, surprising, horrible thought in spoken word- a voice probably recognised- that you did not put there yourself and you do not want to be there.

I won’t write anymore about this now but listen to this recording
and it will give you a short insight into how some of it sounds. It’s like this and it doesn’t stop.

Altogether, it has now. I'm better for it.

The voices were there for a reason, and even though my unconscious mind went above and beyond to show me how much it hated me, I hope I’ve gained some of its respect back, at least enough to start talking in entirely the first person and continue on in my life as a whole person rather than the scraps of someone I don’t know and don’t care about enough to look after in the most basic way. Since the psychosis, I’ve been reluctantly able to accept that I am deserving (of water etc.) and sometimes need to be listened to, because there’s nothing to be that is ever going to work if its fiction and not fact. The scraps I’ve collected are structured day-to-day, moment-to-moment, and it can be ugly. They are demanding little bitches, those voices. Still, whether they meant it all along or I somehow managed to salvage the tiny speck of good leftover from the hellish experience, those voices gave me insights and taught me lessons that have been invaluable, and though they destroyed me for a while what they destroyed was not a real self, just a costume, or many costumes, and in retrospect I see that they saved me, the real one, the invisible self disappearing under so many costumes I lost any recognition of who I really was. I guess I have to thank the worst parts of my mind for helping me rescue what can now become the best parts.

jumbled

Jumbled jam jars lined up on the windowsill,
which seeds are your own? You planted them yourself
in a bed of cotton wool and watch the days go by
while roots grow further and stretch until they stop,
when they have found their place.
I never set my roots down in school or at home,
grew them to the toe-ends of black patent
pumps, propelled from then into a well-made madness.
They let me go stale and I have no roots to go back to.
The root of all whatever-
Gold star blisters, stickers, bird names
assigned to school houses in yellow-blue-green-red.
Between the houses the walls went up- 1, 2, 3....
go- without direction, without waiting,
the soles of both my feet will not wait for me
to find joy in the older years to come.
Clean out of the nesting place, I go cuckoo,
other thoughts audible to me, and I want to go back.
Run at the speed of light then faster
so you can make me a time machine. I'll go back
and pick up all the scattered sticks, brush away
weeds, budding with hooks, clinging on
to follow you from nettle gardens.
Dead bees litter the lawn. I see them when
the ascent becomes illuminated.
The belief that only that which can be observed
and measured can be known- positivists agree.
I would be one of them if I didn't feel excited
about the other things that do exist and we can't see
so just don't know about yet. Things yet to conceive of:
I am cutting clean through whatever roots I managed
and I'm another uprooted Daisy.

There are no signposts, just dreams
and those I can follow. I can almost remember
the song that I can almost hear them singing.
Imaginary trumpets, blues bars,
up the sleeve trump cards for safekeeping.
Summer has come and I'm old now,
and in retrospect, I pay myself more respect.
.
Normality is something that is transient

and arbitrary.
Melancholy and happiness too,
but I'm happy, and it's arbitrariness doesn't make a difference.

fingerpainting and to-the-future poems

Here be dragons

When I was a small dragon, winters ago,
it was always winter. I spat fire and ash,
my skin sagged like a coat on a cold blue hanger.
It was summer's ending when the voices came,
and clinic bathrooms, 
a coyote hungry stare,
the silence of September.
For thousands of days I ha not felt my body.
I did not even photosynthesise, and in my mouth
grew ulcers, and teeth died.

When I looked at the sun reflected
in the mirror, stared at the skull-head there,
it looked less and less like a dragon's everyday.
Slowly becoming human,
a mouth still charred. I began to drink water again.

There are the bones of a dragon
gravely buried inside me.
There are phantom limbs attached too, but not mine.
They belong to soldiers who shared beers
in Vietnamese hideouts. They belong to the widows
who lose their wedding rings
down the garbage disposal. 

Dreams/Nightmares

We don’t dream of cities
but name our children after them. I had a dream
about a family, not my own. A girl called Virginia
who could tie cherry stems with her tongue
even though they were sour and had dark hair
gathered with the long grasses in the field when I saw her
standing out there under a demonic-tasting night sky.

I think she was looking for her sisters.

We give our children elegant names
then cut them down. Alex. Ella. I had a dream
about a family and in the dream I took hope-
it was shaped like a wire weathervane-
and turned it into a thing of misdiagnosis.
Deer from the field died in still water, lungs emptied,
secrets drew blood and I drew life
from the skin of the sisters in the family, with elegant names

In another dream I went to visit my father's grave-
he was just another soldier on the list of those remembered
after the first world war. In uniform,
in a picture on the stone memorial someone put there,
decorated in medals, gleaming sepia ribbons and coins.
There were poppies all over my feet, for Armistice,and the tall grass
in that field where he lay had grown gold, glowing, shimmering,
so it could not have been November. Maybe May,
My cousin was dressed as a princess when she arrived
to beckon me back into the shuttle bus home.
My sister stood by the window, squinting blindly out.
Then suddenly my cousin had jumped off the bus into the grass/
I lost sight of her glowing hair amid all that glow harvest.
Gold horizon, medals on war heroes,
the plastic crown part of her princess costume.

moments and weeks in motion

Looking tired again, and that's not always loneliness or sad.
It's like student's eyelids before that stampede of letter-writing,
expectations and predictions and the old aching of not knowing
where your letters will send you. Holding onto a past,
a present you aren't sure you want, a pair of spectacles,
a lucky pencil, the blueprints to those important smiles.
It all comes down to the architecture of your face and
a dream you have that you know you can’t say aloud.