I've been reading your words for as long as I can remember - since the platform you first used when you wrote about the taboo of Mental Health. It feels like it might've been in the 2009-2010 range of time, but all of that space is so vague for me now. I was a fan during the Shatterboxx era, have downloaded a million of your quarterly reviews and rose, bud, thorn e journals and have just... been sort of tangentially witnessing your becoming and find your words having impact on my own simultaneously. The last 4 years have been some of the hardest of my life in the ways that they changed, destroyed, attempted to rebuild, and tried to burn down my physical body. From miscarriage to second trimester delivery to ruptured ectopic pregnancy, ruptured discs in my back and hernias in my esophagus and bellybutton, rupturing my ACL and tearing all the surrounding muscles, being backed into a corner to have a hysterectomy, fighting bacterial meningitis and crippling postpartum depression and most recently being diagnosed with CRPS - I have thought long and hard and I have cried long and hard and often and I have written so many words in so many ways about how life in this physical body is untenable and impossible to maintain - and today I read this and felt it deep in my soul. My brain and my heart and here and they've done years of therapy and feeling and processing and trauma work and recovery, but they're impossible to adventure on their own when my body is a place that cannot stay whole, that causes tremendous and unrelenting pain, that pain has no immediate relief and as hard as I try I just can't outrun it... I feel caught in your words, especially you words at the very end. How do we start to protect each others bodies if we cannot even protect our own? If we cannot even protect ourselves from our own bodies? I am struggling to understand this harder than I've ever struggled with anything in my life, and I also feel like there's probably no real answer either - that every soul in a body has to reach a thing that feels real and attainable to them to survive within. Anyway, I know this got long and wordy, but I felt called to respond, to share, to thank you for narrating your experiences and to express gratitude that you are caring for yourself in the wake of grief and loss and change and challenge and that even that looks different day to day, hour to hour.
I've been reading your words for as long as I can remember - since the platform you first used when you wrote about the taboo of Mental Health. It feels like it might've been in the 2009-2010 range of time, but all of that space is so vague for me now. I was a fan during the Shatterboxx era, have downloaded a million of your quarterly reviews and rose, bud, thorn e journals and have just... been sort of tangentially witnessing your becoming and find your words having impact on my own simultaneously. The last 4 years have been some of the hardest of my life in the ways that they changed, destroyed, attempted to rebuild, and tried to burn down my physical body. From miscarriage to second trimester delivery to ruptured ectopic pregnancy, ruptured discs in my back and hernias in my esophagus and bellybutton, rupturing my ACL and tearing all the surrounding muscles, being backed into a corner to have a hysterectomy, fighting bacterial meningitis and crippling postpartum depression and most recently being diagnosed with CRPS - I have thought long and hard and I have cried long and hard and often and I have written so many words in so many ways about how life in this physical body is untenable and impossible to maintain - and today I read this and felt it deep in my soul. My brain and my heart and here and they've done years of therapy and feeling and processing and trauma work and recovery, but they're impossible to adventure on their own when my body is a place that cannot stay whole, that causes tremendous and unrelenting pain, that pain has no immediate relief and as hard as I try I just can't outrun it... I feel caught in your words, especially you words at the very end. How do we start to protect each others bodies if we cannot even protect our own? If we cannot even protect ourselves from our own bodies? I am struggling to understand this harder than I've ever struggled with anything in my life, and I also feel like there's probably no real answer either - that every soul in a body has to reach a thing that feels real and attainable to them to survive within. Anyway, I know this got long and wordy, but I felt called to respond, to share, to thank you for narrating your experiences and to express gratitude that you are caring for yourself in the wake of grief and loss and change and challenge and that even that looks different day to day, hour to hour.