initiations, part duex (the pain)

I want to explore the unique pain of initiation, or of becoming oneself and whole, because I sometimes get it confused with other types of pain that we are simply inured to as a result of living in a society where we are routinely abandoned and dehumanized. We don't talk enough about the starkly different types of fear, how one type can lead us further underground while another can drive us to claw our way to the surface. We don't talk about how one definition of safety means silence while another means visibility. We need different words. 

I think about the unique pain of limbs awakening, the indescribable pins-and-needle sensation that one must endure in order to be able to stand up and walk away (or toward). I think about the pain inherent in any moment when we feel clearly that something isn't right or aligned, when we know we will have to end or change something. I think about the fatigue and uncertainty of walking upstream with each step; I think about the sudden terror of visibility when one is accustomed to existing safely out of sight. 

Merriam Webster defines initiation as the condition of being initiated into some experience or sphere of activity. A "condition"; aren't conditions generally challenging, painful? I described becoming sober as an initiation into adulthood. Stopping drinking felt like willingly descending into the pain of being alive, of becoming enhumaned, enfleshed and embodied. For me, initiation has come to stand for a way of talking about being (and feeling) alive and whole. I think anytime one intentionally takes a step towards themselves, they are willingly initiating into dimensions of pain and fear that are necessary to feel.

There's nothing easeful about the process, about moving towards pain. I don’t think we are meant to do this alone. We move upstream towards ourselves, but in community and with support. Alone, we flounder. Maybe we most need initiation on the brink of young adulthood when we exist in the in-between lands; we need guidance so that we can aim towards becoming a full, autonomous adult at the same time as we retain our connection to our child self, bringing them along with us into the future. And, I suspect that we need constant, ongoing reminders of our wholeness, of our sovereignty throughout our entire lives, in order to keep from doing the easier thing: banishing our bodies and emotions to somewhere else, looking to others for permission, direction, and definition. Initiation walks this balance: autonomy, buttressed by community. 

Five years ago, I wasn’t surrounded by people who knew of and supported my decision, only because I wasn’t open about it at the time. Rather, I found support through writers who had arduously torn off the hazy curtain of alcohol to strip themselves bare and raw. Caroline Knapp and Sarah Hepola wrote beautiful memoirs connecting gender, self-realization, desire, power, and alcohol in a way that made me crave the pain of insight over the comfort of forgetting. Others rely on AA, sponsors, friends, family. Nothing happens outside of relationship. 

This year, I have told myself that I’m further initiating into my full human frailty, the human condition that is an ever-moving sea of fear, grief, joy, jealousy, desire, and connection. When we are uninitiated, we remain at the borderlands of our lives and selves, just out of reach. When we are uninitiated, so many of our parts remain unseen; we are grandiose, surface-deep, and afraid. It seems true that in order to be whole, we need to fully let in the truth of our fragility. To be full people, we need to fling ourselves wide open to life and to our own far-reaching internal landscapes. To be whole, everything must be included, including pain, including fear. 

Like many, I tumbled through most of my young adult life as an uninitiated person without a sense of inner authority. I sailed along on a river of alcohol, benevolence, and grandiosity, like nothing could touch me, like no one could affect me, like I had no choices. Not feeling safe in the world or in my body as an adolescent, at some point, I cleanly retreated, losing the wild-fire energetic connection with my limbs, torso, and heart that I used to have as a kid. I disappeared behind a layer of protective wood. Emotions became cryptic and threatening, something that other people experienced and needed my help with. I lived on the other side of a threshold that I didn’t know existed. Unable to exist fully in my own life, body, or depths, I danced on the surface of my relationships with others, avoiding the sort of open-casket intimacy necessary for connection. I became wooden, imperturbable, up for anything, a blank canvas for whomever needed it. At the same time as I felt internally frozen, my identity became amorphous and blurry; I was a wanderer, a transient, a could-be-anything. I was nothing and everything: a block of ice; a morning wind passing through reeds.

The chronic, dull ache of silence, of fragmentation, of unaliveness.

The fear was just as diffuse and pervasive. I wielded a double-sided sword, ever vigilant of external and internal threats. I collected weapons and medicine: Jagermeister, Spotted Cow beer, red wine, a small dagger I bought sort of jokingly at age 19 at a shopping mall, a perfect GPA, plane tickets, a boyfriend, a thin body, a smile. This was the kind of fear that I lived with, that I confused with life. I couldn't see past it, so I adapted to it.

I was someone not consciously living an intentional adulthood, which requires both sovereignty and responsibility. I saw myself as faultless, always somewhere safely removed from the problem at hand, feeling smooth compassion for those struggling with all the difficult things. Keeping my own unknown hard things stacked outside of some unspecified door; moving thousands of miles away when the stacked things started to tremble. I wasn’t sensitive to joy or grief; I wasn’t sensitive to my own life. The opposite of initiation is abandonment: wholesale, piecemeal. It is a vast numbness fogging up your land. 

This abandonment (by self, by other, by society) doesn’t happen randomly or in a vacuum. It’s not just me; it’s all of us. I believe that humans long for wholeness, that we will search forever for ourselves (that that’s perhaps what is meant by spirituality, by being on a path), that even if everything else in our lives is ideal, lacking a sense of wholeness will make none of it worth it. I think it’s what matters the most and what our society most denies us, all of us. It’s not an accident that we are kept from ourselves, that we are kept from each other, that we go without our most crucial human medicine, that of self-knowledge and connection (to self, to other, to divine). Our society is violent in many obvious ways, and yet it is all upheld by a less visible psychic violence; our souls are kept from what they most need. This is to say that I see my story as one voice in a chorus of many (of all), yet we each experience abandonment in different ways and to different degrees due to our positioning and visibility in society. The self-abandonment simply mirrors the larger abandonment of self by society/culture/systems. We are taught, according to our place in society, just how much we do(n’t) matter outside of the levels of productivity we are able to keep up. The pain we experience as a result of this abandonment is chronic, invisible, pervasive. The pain of self-forgetting is so vast that it is the water we swim in.

One of the ways in which this self-abandonment showed up for me is that I felt invisible and inchoate. I struggled to talk about myself. I was really attentive to those around me but completely forgetful about myself. I still default to this when I’m feeling anxious or ungrounded. Even as a writer, I didn’t know my story, though I had the longing to write it. In college, I populated my creative writing thesis with short stories almost entirely about driftless and aimless young men; in one magical realistic story, I wrote of a man who literally floated around the country in a hot air balloon, drifting in and out of peoples’ lives, breaking hearts before leaving again, always seemingly unaffected himself. Anything I wrote about women or people of other identities was about their disappearances. I couldn’t seem to write agentive stories about anyone but men. And, all of my characters wandered, in one way or another. It’s like I couldn’t pin myself down. I wrote the pain of being separated from myself, of being fragmented, of not belonging. I wrote my own invisibility.

Shortly after I stopped drinking, I got Daphne permanently and painfully etched into my arm. At the time, I mostly saw it as a vague feminist symbol. Looking back, it was this and much more. I believe that I got the tattoo to serve partly as a protective charm and reminder of how to be safe; partly as an act of gratitude for having mostly survived a young female adulthood (thanks to the lessons from Daphne); and partly to set Daphne, and all the others, to rest. It was a tangle of motivation; sweet hope and sharp fear mixed with soft longing. Survival is complex. Hope: Perhaps if she/they sat on my skin everyday, I could be reminded that I no longer had to be wood, that I didn’t have to disappear, that it could be safe to be myself. Fear: I was still haunted, so perhaps I could make my flesh into monument, into memory; I wanted my own body to be a symbol of every ghost that clawed for air inside of me. Longing: This part was aspirational and would emerge by degrees. I knew that I longed to long, to want, and that this lay ahead on a path winding me further into my own green forest.

The tattoo felt gigantic and garish. The day after I got it, I cried and looked up tattoo removal services. I had a strong sense of being suddenly less attractive, less pristine. Having a large feminist tattoo on my arm felt demanding. It made me feel less safe, less protected by my usual charms. I felt exposed, less feminine, in danger. It activated a visceral fear inside of me even as I started to reach, across a gaping void, towards myself. There are many types of fear, all of them valid, and this was a type that I'd get more familiar with in the intervening years. A type of fear that was onward-leading, a fear that I knew it was fruitful to move through, to expand into. A fear that sharpened my vision, animated my limbs, stirred my heart.

I think that becoming oneself, being initiated, is a sort of passing through. It's an emergence, an unfolding. I think, by its very nature, that it's painful and frightening, since it necessitates the slow awakening of one's emotional and physical limbs. It is a clear-seeing after a vast fog. It is a slow, arduous, grinding movement towards oneself. It is pain, both aching and chronic.