Two Birds

The first bird seemed dead or near death. She sat frozen after flying into the doors of my high school. I knew how she felt. I was like a zombie back then, my body filled with what my mind wouldn’t accept – grief, anger, and loneliness. It drained me. I shed weight and light until I was a shadow. 

I picked up the bird and moved it toward a tree, so at least she could die in peace. She flew out of my hands, a shock of life. I clung to that moment through the rest of high school and well into college. I used it as evidence that God was working in my life as I sunk deeper and deeper into my faith. I didn’t know that was death, too. To fit into Christianity, I was bleeding my true self away, wearing the mask of a freed, spirit-filled believer. I thought this was flying, but I had just traded one death for another.

———-

The second bird was still fighting. Washing on the beach shore, she was battered by the waves and trying not to drown. I knew how she felt. Years after high school, I was still fighting, too. I fought the grief of my past and persistent doubts about everything I believed. I felt everything but compassion for myself. Anxiety electrified me, even though most days, I trained myself to ignore just how deep it went. 

I picked up the bird and moved it far up the shore. There was no resurrection this time, no eruption of flight. I’m sure she died there, but at least I gave her a quiet place where she didn’t need to fight. I realize now that that’s all I ever needed. I didn’t need prayers or church or the Bible. I didn’t need promises of healing or strange hands on me casting out demons. They never let me rest. 

I thought freedom could only be found in flight, but maybe, it’s just a quiet place where I can let go.

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Moving to Medium

My posts are getting more rare, but if anyone is still interested in what I put out into the world), I’ll be over at Medium from now on. You can find me by searching for Emmaline Soken-Huberty. I just posted my first thing, “Two Birds.” It’s a quick 2-minute read.

Hope to see some of you there!

Book Review: Pure by Linda Kay Klein

*content warning: general descriptions of trauma and anxiety*

I read this book in two days. I couldn’t put it down. What’s so engaging about it is that the author is intimately linked to her subject. Born and raised into purity culture, she suffered the same shame and traumas that the women she interviews did. She even grew up with some of them and experienced the exact same messaging. I don’t know if I’ve read a book of this kind before where the author is so much a part of it.

I’m thinking about this book at a strange time in my life. After losing my dog Yoshi, one of the great loves of my life, it was like the ground beneath me shifted. Things I had buried for years and that have been knocking on the door for months refused to be ignored a second longer. I’ve finally had to acknowledge that I do not feel safe in my own body. I’ve had to acknowledge that my very first memory – a strange, shrouded memory of some kind of physical trauma –  is still haunting me. It guides my sexuality, my anxiety, and how I feel in my own skin.

The extent to which this has affected my experience with purity culture isn’t clear. The big thing I’ve been thinking about is my first serious relationship back in high school. I was physically anxious constantly. I analyzed every little physical thing, feeling both intrigued and terrified. Because of purity culture, I believed that the warning signals going off were from God. If my boyfriend touched my leg or I stroked his hand, trigging a flight response in me, I thought it was God telling me what we were doing was wrong. Now, I know that isn’t the case. Because purity culture saw repressed sexuality as a virtue, it allowed me to ignore signs that something else was wrong for a very long time.

This book also made me feel very relieved. I’m not the only one who feels confusion and anger. Even with deconstruction and transformed beliefs, the women in “Pure” still struggle with the messages engrained at an impressionable age. In my head, I believe that “purity” is a false construct, but in my body and heart, there’s a battle going on. With me, there’s an added layer – that early physical trauma – that complicates things.

Basically, purity culture isn’t the end-all-be-all for my array of issues, but it played a strong supporting role. At certain times in my life, it played a starring role. I recommend “Pure” for anyone who needs to feel that they aren’t alone in dealing with the fallout from purity culture, and for anyone who wants to understand what purity culture does to people.

Purity culture isn’t a relic of the past. It’s alive and well in many communities, and I anticipate a strong backlash from the mainstream church in response to people telling their stories. That’s usually what ends up happening when the church gets called out. Thankfully, there are churches and spiritual communities that are different and willing to listen. They will also need to be vocal. It’s time for a change.

How Much Is Too Much?

I’ve been off Effexor completely for about a month and taking CBD gummies, and I’m now asking myself a key question: how much loneliness is too much? When do I need to start asking myself: is this new mental health structure working?

I’m feeling a lot more these days. Like, at the drop of a hat, something will make me want to cry. I haven’t really gotten comfortable with letting that just happen yet, because I’m afraid of feelings. I’m afraid that they will overwhelm me, drown me, and I’ll have to do something about it. And what is left to do? I’ve done various stages of medication, and now no medication, and therapy and blah blah blah blah. I’m worried that it’s my environment that makes me sad.

I’m really disconnected from community. I haven’t liked to admit that, because it makes me feel like I’m dismissing or insulting the friends and family I do have, but at the end of the day, I’m very isolated. Sometimes it feels like days go by and I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone except Chris. I certainly haven’t done anything with anyone except Chris, because the friends I do have are not close by. Sometimes it really feels like I’m just standing on the edge of a cliff, shouting into the void. I’ve kind of felt that way my whole life, always trying to hear the echo.

Now, at night, I’ll have trouble sleeping because of an aching hollow in my chest. It’s the feeling of loneliness the medication has numbed for a long time, and I’m really scared that I’m feeling it again, and it’s scary that it’s never really left. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to ask from people. I’m trying to do things differently, create a different social structure for myself. I’m going to church now for god’s sake, but in a lot of ways, it brings up so much anxiety and fear, it makes the ache worse.

I don’t know what I need to make this ache go away, because what if it can’t go away? What if this is just normal for me, and I should just ignore it and focus on the positives? What if this is just what being medication-free is, and it’s the trade I make to not have side effects? How much pain is too much pain?

Belonging

For most of my life, I’ve struggled with belonging. I distinctively remember being in 1st grade, six years old, on the playground at the international school I went to when we lived in Belgium, and getting hit by a wave of loneliness. I was on the swings, other kids swinging on either side of me, and I felt like I was about to sail off into the sky by myself, detached from the swing chains. I felt very old, like I’d lived a hundred lifetimes already. I felt…isolated.

That feeling has followed me my whole life. I never quite fit in as myself. If I wanted to “belong,” I had to change somehow. I had to listen to certain music, watch certain movies, and keep my mouth shut about the stuff I cared about. When I got older and more independent, I didn’t bend to peer pressure as much, but in order to feel okay with it, I had to take pride in my loneliness. “I feel this way,” I told myself, “Because I’m special.” That’s a dangerous way to live, because in order to feel joy or connection with others, I had to let go of that whole “special” thing.

I’m over that now. I don’t want to be isolated or lonely. I don’t think that’s what makes me special. But I still don’t feel like I really belong anywhere.

Chris and I have been going to a church lately, and for practically the first time ever, I actually don’t hate going to church. I feel safe there. But it isn’t easy. At one of the services, to celebrate the co-pastor getting her Masters of Divinity, one of her professors spoke. He spoke directly to the congregation, offering advice and encouragement and so on, and I got hit by that wave again. Specifically, a talking wave that said, “You don’t belong here.” It felt really strange, like I was looking in a window, spying on the service. He isn’t talking to me, I thought, because I don’t know anyone here. I’m not a part of this community. That sad little voice added, “And you never will be.”

My instinct is to say that voice is the devil, but I don’t think it’s that cut-and-dry. It’s fear, yes, which doesn’t come from God, but I am sick of identifying every negative thought as a demon hissing in my ear. I’ve lived that belief before, and it is exhausting. I think that voice is six-year old me, fearful, who is counting out all the times I’ve been lonely or rejected, and telling me that’s what will always happen. She doesn’t count all the times that hasn’t happened, though.

So, what do I do? My spiritual director has given me advice for when fear like that comes up, when our past selves try to convince us of something that isn’t true. I reassure six-year old me. I tell her it’s going to be okay. The idea of treating fear with compassion is still new to me. Since I believed every negative thought was a demon, I’m more familiar with going on the attack, like my head is a war zone. The result is always a bloody battlefield, without much peace or hope. I only succeed in traumatizing myself even more. It’ll be different this time.

I’ve been to church since that wave of isolation. I didn’t feel it as strongly this time, because I anticipated it, and I knew how to respond. When the little voice tried telling me, “You don’t belong here,” I knew what to say: “Maybe not yet, but that’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

Location, Location, Location

Broken glass, pins, nails…these are the items that litter my dreams at night. They start growing from beneath my skin, they fill my ears, eyes, and nose, and they coat me like a suit of armor. When I told my spiritual director that these are the sorts of reoccurring dreams I have frequently, she looked taken aback. She asked if I had ever seen a Jungian therapist, or one who specialized in dream interpretation. Um, nope. That sounds…odd. Her concern did prompt me to start researching dreams, though. They are symbols of the subconscious. If something is bothering a person, it will eventually emerge in their dreams. There’s no escape.

That all makes sense to me. It’s how I know that I’m still not over my fears about witches, demons, and the trauma inflicted by charismatic, evil-obsessed spirituality. In my dreams, I’ll frequently get attacked by a witch or start getting possessed, and the language I learned from the old days comes spilling out, in an attempt to fight. It never works.

I can do work when I’m awake to try and decipher the dreams, to deal with what understanding I can glean from them, but while I’m in the dream, I feel powerless. I started looking into how dreams could be controlled, and “lucid dreaming” came up. It’s when you know you’re in a dream and gain a heightened sense of awareness and control. You can effectively create objects, conjure specific people, and perform actions from thin air, just like you would if you were awake and writing a story. This time, though, you’re living the story within the dream world.

I read “A Field Guide To Lucid Dreaming,” and learned that I mostly dream in the second tier of dreaming: I know I’m dreaming, but I have very limited control. In nearly every dream I have, I know it isn’t real, but I can’t do the things I want to, like fly or make nightmares go away. In order to get more lucid and improve my control, I’ve had to start keeping a dream journal again. It’s an overwhelming process, because I remember my dreams in great detail, and I dream pretty much every time I go to sleep. If I take a nap during the day, I’ll dream, so that’s two dreams per 24-hour period.

I’ve written down about ten dreams since I started my new dream journal, and I have dozens of dreams written down from a few years back. In going through them, there are patterns that emerge. The first one I’m going to take a look at is where the dreams are set. One of the most frequent locales? High school.

High school was really hard. Making friends was like trying to tame a wild animal, when the roles of wild animal and human switch frequently. The strict adherence to conservative evangelicalism and policing of thought ground me down to an angry, throbbing pencil nub that felt like it couldn’t be useful anywhere else. I loved a boy who couldn’t love me back the way I needed, and when he left me, I realized I had poured all my energy into that relationship and I had nothing left for healing. Depression hit hard and the medication trials hit harder, so both my mind and body were exhausted.

It’s been so many years since that time and I tell myself I’m over it, but when I go to sleep, I’m back in those hallways, and things are a little bit stranger. My uniform shrinks and grows, transforming its shape, so I can’t focus on anything else. I get lost and panicked that I’ll be late for class. I try taking a math test, only to suddenly collapse with blurred vision while the teacher remains uninterested and unconcerned in what’s happening. I get into fights with classmates from my past, screaming at them, but their faces are blank and they move like shadows past me.

In those dreams, I feel a handful of emotions depending on what’s going on, plot-wise, but there are trends: abandoned, voiceless, trapped, neglected, alone. These are all feelings I had in high school, and they all came to a peak when I was so depressed, I wasn’t going to school. I don’t even know how many days I missed. During that time, I don’t recall maybe more than one person reaching out and asking if I was okay. Some would ask my brother if I was coming to school when he showed up alone in the morning, but eventually, after getting the same answer every time, they just stopped asking. If I had gotten mono or something other longer physical illness, I might have gotten get-well cards, or flowers, or a visitor or two. For depression, dead silence.  

On the rare occasion when I was in at school, I was so lifeless, I just fell asleep during class. I couldn’t fight it; I had no energy for fighting. Someone trying to keep me awake wouldn’t have been helpful, but I can’t even imagine what a pat on the back or squeeze of the hand from a girl sitting next to me would have done for my motivation to keep trying to live. It felt like people were just watching me slowly die. I have no idea what they thought of it. Pity, probably.

The dreams I keep having tell me I’m not fully-healed from the feelings of abandonment and neglect high school spawned. Those emotions are a refrain in a song that will play in my head whenever my soul aligns a current experience with the past, and they send me right back in time. All the years of learning and maturity and recovery crumble, and it’s like I never left that building.

I’m not quite sure what to do about it. Well, that’s not true. My spiritual director recommends writing letters to myself as if I was back in the moment of trauma. I would be sending my own get-well cards into the past. That sounds like a good enough plan as any, especially since I’m a writer, it’s my strongest love language, but it’s also kind of scary. It seems so emotionally overwhelming and painful, like tearing the scab off a wound that never really healed. This is the year of wild emotions, though, so I have to start somewhere.

finale

My time on Effexor is drawing to a close, slowly, but surely. This week, I tried to stop completely. I was on half a pill all last week and experienced very few symptoms. Monday was a bit rough, but I was optimistic. Then Tuesday came. I woke up feeling like a can of soda pop that’s been violently shaken. The pressure in my head was so bad I felt like I might go blind. It got a little better after I had breakfast, but it was very hard to focus still. Luckily, I had a good excuse to not write very much: my computer’s keyboard broke. I used Chris’ computer for a while, but I hate it because it feels like the keys weight a million pounds and I’m always accidentally opening tabs, so I just worked on one project for a little while.

A nap will help, I thought. The pressure got worse when I lay down. It was like it all flooded into my brain when I went horizontal, so that was a no. I took a shower in the dark and felt a little better, but I knew that wouldn’t last very long. Showers are just temporary relief. Since lying down wasn’t an option, I decided to just read. I ended up reading like 300 pages of Tana French’s “In the Woods,” finishing it, and writing notes for my own mystery novel. The good news: I definitely have enough plot points. I’ve always been worried that my novel’s story was too simple, but “In the Woods” oddly mirrored mine in that it had plot threads going on in the main character’s past and present. I also figured out how to structure the law enforcement/police department, so it feels more real. That will mean going through my pages and changing every incidence of “Sheriff” to “Chief” and the deputy is now a detective.

It’s a really weird feeling to be starving, but then when you eat, you throw up. That happened twice yesterday; weirdly, the only thing I did eat that I kept down was Ben & Jerry’s Half-Baked Ice Cream. I spent the evening reading and propped up at a weird angle, and eventually my head felt so close to exploding that I took a quarter of the Effexor. I almost immediately felt better, though falling asleep was still rough and I started getting sharp chest pain.

Didn’t set an alarm for this morning and ended up full-on sleeping till 11:30 am. I took a quarter pill again, because I did not want to be completely debilitated. It’s been much better today. The usual neck and shoulder stiffness, some head pressure, but no throwing up and I’ve been able to catch up on my writing projects and clean. For dinner, it’ll be zucchini bread pancakes, bacon, and eggs, and I should probably stretch really well, since the last 30+ hours have consisted of moving as little as possible.

The plan is to stick to a quarter pill for a week. Who knew that 18 mg could make such a big difference? I’m happy to push off the withdrawal for another couple days, at least, because I have a fun weekend coming up with baking on Saturday at a friend’s, and then MST3K-ing on Sunday with another friend. I’d rather not be on the verge of head implosion.

Day 16 on 75mg

If I wrote this yesterday like I planned, it would have been a more cheerful blog. Today, however, has been unexpectedly rough. I think my first mistake was eating a breakfast with too much sugar and caffeine. I had leftover nectarine crumble and a chai latte with my new blend. I was careful to not add too much sugar, but within ten minutes or so, my head felt like it might explode. At the same time, I was struggling with an article’s images and trying to get pics in a high enough resolution, and that made me really angry for some reason. So I was frustrated, in a lot of pain, and walking the clock, because I was supposed to have a doctor appointment.

That didn’t happen. Chris ended up having to cancel it while I lay in bed, clutching my head, praying for death. It hurt to think, but thoughts still pounded through. These last few days I’ve been getting increasingly angry with the Brett Kavanaugh situation as more allegations emerge along with  revelations about how Republicans knew and have been trying to rush the nomination process anyway. A lot of Christians (like Franklin Graham) have been trying to shrug off what Kavanaugh did or just say outright that the women are lying. It’s been making me feel physically ill.

These extreme emotions are new to me and I don’t really know what to do with them. Writing them down in my journal helped, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

Aaaand now I’m feeling nauseated, so let’s end there.

Day Eight On 75mg

Oh boy, has this been a rough week. I don’t even want to reflect on it. Let’s just say it’s taken every ounce of will power to not explode like a balloon of puke and pain.

It’s every day. Pretty much all day in varying degrees. Again, mornings are the worst. I dread them so much, especially since I wake up feeling great. Then I have to take my pill, eat something, drink my ginger tea, and wait for the nausea and crushing head pain to start. It always does, and then I lie down in a fetal position for a few hours until it passes and I can start writing.

A few hours more and then the head pain gets really bad again. I think of it as a giant fist trying to open inside my head, but there isn’t enough room, so it’s squeezing against the inside of my skull. Tylenol doesn’t really do anything about that kind of pressure.

Haven’t been able to focus on anything for very long. Haven’t touched my book this week. Barely cleaned or cooked or exercised. Barely think in complete sentences.

Down to 75mg of Effexor

Well, I finally went down to one pill a day. I was happy about it, but also not so happy, because I knew I was willingly returning to withdrawal symptoms. They started pretty much right away that first day – a crushing, squeezing pain at the back of my head, headaches, joint pain, irritability, fatigue. It’s the fourth day now on 75mg, and I pretty much know that I’m going to be nauseated in the morning, so I head it off with ginger tea and lying down with my eyes closed until the wave passes.

The rest of the days haven’t been too bad. I even made dinner on Monday and key lime pie bars yesterday. They’re pretty much the only thing I want to eat. Well, that and ramen noodles. So I’ve mostly been eating that. Based on how I feel in the evenings, Chris is going to need to be taking of dinners this week.

I got a new job writing articles for a lifestyle magazine with a human rights focus. It pays really well and it’s right up my alley. This week, I’m doing human rights movies, LGBT movies, and human rights books published in 2018.  I don’t have linking info on the magazine yet, hopefully I’ll find that out soon.

Aaand that’s all I have the energy to do right now. Here are some pictures.

Key lime pie bar, but with orange zest added, and orange juice+lemon juice instead of lime juice