Daily Archives: Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Happiness

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’m feeling happy right now. It’s so good. It’s so novel.

Like. This is new for me, right. This is a new thing for me to feel at all.

I’m noticing, I think—it’s distinct, and it’s not that I’m equating the two, but there is a part of euphoria in happiness, as I understand it.

Like, happiness as I am defining it here, this feeling that I get, it’s… there’s an element that depends on a certain kind of a connection that I did not possess before.

Like, it relies as one of many preconditions on my existing as a person in this world. I have to be able to feel myself. I have to have some kind of awareness of myself and my humanity and how it relates to my body and to others and to this whole shared space that we inhabit, that contains all of these other emotions, right. That serves as the medium for all of these forms of contact and human connection and meaning.

It’s this groundedness, like lying on a patch of warm bedrock in the forest, running your fingers through the moss. But, you know. Of being. Of knowing, and appreciating and enjoying the texture of the passage of the fact of a thing, from one juncture to another.

And I can’t do that if I don’t exist. I can’t see it, I can’t feel it. It just stops at the borders of me.

It’s a shared euphoria in the other, in the moment, in the universal, and it hits me like that spark of understanding of the most brilliantly obvious joke in the world.

It’s a joke without the humor.

Like, what I am calling happiness here, it’s a love of the privilege of connecting to something outside of my self, and enjoying the completeness it brings to my hold on reality—at least for that one gentle moment.

It’s this recognition that I exist as a part of the world, as a facet of all of its love, and that this is good.

Bad Air

  • Reading time:3 mins read

My voice lesson the other evening, one of the professors popped into my breakout room with my grad student to comment on a thing he’d seen and heard with my breathing, how I seem to unconsciously seize up and hold it, and how that cascaded to affect various things in my voice. I thanked him, and it made sense at the time because I know my history of wind problems. Like, I’ll just forget to breathe all the time. Then there was that mysterious respiratory ailment that took hold a year after meeting my ex-spouse and let up right after the divorce. With some more thought it was clear that the breath thing, it was a stress response. I’m all up in the freeze and the fawn, right. And I think that’s just automatically the first thing I do; my throat seizes up, almost like it’s afraid to give me away lest someone notice me.

So this is basically this core trauma response that I didn’t fully realize was happening, beyond all these individual data points that I hadn’t really strung together. And the thing about breath is, it’s this load-bearing process that affects just about everything about a person. It’s kind of astounding how much gets lumped onto breath. It has all of these knock-on effects, for my emotional state and my physical well-being, the way I move my body, the way I use my voice, the energy I have to work with moment to moment. And I feel like every time that my breath is taken away from me like this, like that’s a little bit of myself that’s taken away. Like I’ve ceded a bit of my being, as a human.

It’s like my breath is this anchor to my physicality, to my humanity, that radiates out, and underlies and supports all of these other structures, all these other concepts. And by removing my breath, you’re removing all of my power. You’re removing my voice. You’re taking my energy, you’re taking my connection to my humanity, and on a present, visceral level, to my sense of self. I mean, we’re all verbs. We all exist in the doing, not in the being, right.

Just like shame is some share of your soul that somebody else has claimed, I feel like some piece of me is being taken away by the damage that’s been done to me by other people. Like, this response isn’t actually me. It’s nothing directly to do with me as a person. It has nothing to do with me as a person, it’s nothing to do with my core principles, or the way that I’m wired intrinsically. I’ve been miswired over the years in response to my experiences and the abuse that I’ve been through, and this stress response is part of that whole mess.

I think that reasserting—not control, but that conscious relationship with my breath as a core element of my being—a key link between my body and my self—without allowing it to be taken away from me, would be a really substantial step forward in my recovery process.