Serpents, Worms

I am angry.

I stand before the mirror. I am shut in the bathroom. It’s the only safe place to be angry, when I’m home alone with my child, which is most of the time.

I vibrate with it. But it doesn’t feel righteous. There’s a newness to the sensation - so much of my anger has been refracted and warped back towards myself, a perversely comforting prism of nausea. The usual things I did to stop my voice from erupting, stuff it with food and pluck it back out again, or spiral backwards, blaming myself for all ills, hating myself so much any recipient or observer couldn’t help but hate me too, doused and soused in the circular masturbation of self-pity. The things I made my hands do so I wouldn’t feel their power, direct them towards myself, pick up objects to hurt myself with. And if I couldn’t do any of these things, inwardly I’d scorn myself, press it down, to the point where all that black bile, my imbalanced humours, would itself begin to refract back and forth between my liver and gallbladder, and occasionally pancreas, forming little pebbles of stinging injustice that burned me worse than labour contractions, forcing me to lie on my side and be still, wait for it to be over. Someone I don’t speak to once told me gallstones were ‘calcified rage’. I’m angry at them too.

But now. Now. My fingers are vibrating, very softly. I look at them. They’re curling upwards, rising before me in a gesture something like - what do you want me to do? Or maybe, offering a choice. Idiotically, even as I know I’m touching something very ancient, I think of The Matrix. Or maybe they’re weighing something, like balancing scales. I look between the two upturned paws, and instinctively am drawn to the left.

It opens. Slowly, each finger peels away from my palm, and I almost want to wince, expecting a slap. Instead, it touches my throat. Again, I expect violence - I’m so attuned to it, from myself and others, and it would be cathartic to strangle myself, cut off my voice, which is what’s got me into trouble yet again. It strokes. The muscles in my throat tighten, half-heartedly, and release. My hand moves down to touch my heart. That’s when I begin to weep. Mercy. Gratitude. At my lowest, something within me is showing me care.

Then it moves to my belly, my solar plexus, the place rage usually begins to boil within us. I distantly note it seems to be following some of what can be called chakras. I allow myself to feel the rage, like lava slopping unsteadily up and down my torso, and I say it to myself, You are allowed to feel this.

Now that I’ve noted the chakra pattern, it’s not a surprise that it moves down to my uterus. First, though, it lifts from my body and curves in an almost performative fashion that seems to want to draw my attention to this part of me. I have been having a lot of womb-related signals recently. As old memories and feelings have resurfaced, so have stabbing pains throughout my pelvis and womb, old brown blood shed along with secrets and resentments held within for many years. When I said goodbye to someone, because they couldn’t see me properly, and then I weakened and said sorry, I was doubled over with almost menstrual cramps for hours, despite not being in that part of my cycle. During an argument last week which revisited an old trauma, I had to curl up, as I got stabbing, hot-burning pains in my genitals.

I have realised my body and my mind are inextricable, and in order to create, I must engage my body too. I have lived in incongruence for much too long, compartmentalising in order to assuage other people’s shame. Wearing long sleeves, including on my wedding day, so no-one would be made uncomfortable by my self-mutilation scars. Pretending to have weaned breastfeeding so someone would find me desirable, unsullied by the physical evidence of motherhood. Shutting off my nervous and somatic systems so I could be as fuckable as possible to my clients. Pretending to live a fuller life than I really have, when in fact I spent my adolescence entombed in agoraphobia and as a result have only begun to make real friends very, very recently. Creating a pseudonym to make my work, so my family won’t be appalled and ashamed of having harboured a whore. And this has taken such a physical and emotional toll on me that I’m finally done. The rage lives. I let it. Whatever burns away during this inferno wasn’t meant to stay.

I spoke to my mother today. I told her I felt angry. She said, don’t you think you could do with professional help? I said I can’t afford it. She said, what about medication? That’s what started it. She said, I don’t want your son to be damaged by your feelings. I hung up, sent a blistering voice note about my own childhood, regretted it, felt guilty, felt angry for feeling guilty because she didn’t, and here we are. In front of the mirror.

I’ve often felt a disconnect between my reflection and my body. Ever since adolescence, I felt possessed by something external when I looked at myself in mirrors. Through my neck and spine, I’d be seized up, and something I used to call ‘the trickster’ would puppet my entire body, looking at me glassily. I began to experiment with revisiting this part of myself earlier this year, trying to understand how I can ‘reconcile my opposites’ if I contain something so profoundly unrecognisable and, I thought, evil. So I challenged it. I looked it in the eye, and told it I loved it.

And ever since then, we’ve formed a truce. The image I’ve always felt ambiguous towards, felt alienated from. We’ve started to join forces. Small gestures of comfort seemed to erupt from somewhere, the more I looked at its face. A tender motion of hand-washing. A deep stretch that unfurled and unknotted all the aching kinks in my back. Cathartic, violent, ritualistic and deeply healing plays of losing and gaining children, when I’ve engaged in dance and movement.

Once I told my best friend, Andrea, about these encounters. They said, ‘It sounds a bit like you’re psychotic again.’ (No judgment, for they are too - all the best people are.) But then - ‘It’s a part of you. And whatever is part of you loves you, even if it has a funny way of showing it.’

And today, once I’ve finished holding my womb, both my hands are lifted to my face, caressing it unbearably gently, and I weep even more, for the mothering I’ve never known, for the mother I had who never knew such mothering, and for the mother I am, fear becoming, don’t want to be. And I’m hugging myself, tightly, rocking from side to side, swaying myself like I’ve swayed my son what must be thousands of times, because no one else has or will. I’m mothering myself. It hurts that I have to, but it glows like the last ember in the wreckage too.

I’ve resisted talking about trauma or even using the word. I think this is because of a weariness and cynicism towards the women’s-trauma-farming industry of the 2010s, but also because of a misguided belief that if I didn’t name myself as traumatised, that meant I couldn’t be. Even while I was enduring violence, I told myself I had agency, and that meant I couldn’t be traumatised. Yet despite it being so ubiquitous a sentiment as to be a cliché, the body does, unfortunately and fortunately, keep the score. My organs started to fail, softly and acidically, and I was forced to reckon with myself, brutally, gloriously. It sounds grandiose and embarrassing to even put it like that.

I write about this because I must, and because I’ve accepted I find catharsis in sharing these things, because I’ve felt seen when others have similarly shared them. I’m in a liminal place in life, unsure where I’m headed personally, professionally, creatively. All I can do when shrouded in mist is write. I write because I don’t know what the fuck is happening, or where the fuck I’m going. And I share it as an exercise to train myself out of shame. I’ve been reading a lot about the twelfth house in astrology, the house of karma, confinement, death and rebirth, which I and my son are afflicted with. Depending on its placement in ones chart, it can indicate the unlived life of the parent, their unfulfilled dreams. I spent so much time thinking I had to choose between living honestly and being a good mother to my son (my own madonna-whore complex putting that of all the men I’ve ever fucked to shame), that I failed to realise my own mother’s demons were a result of this struggle to integrate motherhood with the rest of herself. I realise it is an imperative to try and reconcile all my contradictory and hideous parts if I am to avoid passing this curse down. What am I most scared of? Being seen, and judged. So I look the serpent in the eyes, and put it on the fucking internet.

When my hands are freed again, I touch my reflection. I feel calmer, for a while. I go back out to where my son was watching CBeebies, blissfully unaware of my inner turmoil, and resume mothering. What else can I do?