Hello dear ones,
On Fridays I share excerpts from my forthcoming book “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” a memoir-in-essays that map my healing journey from a traumatized adolescent to a chronically ill adult. My book will be published in the fall of 2025, so you’re getting to see it before anyone else does! Today’s writing comes from Chapter 6: “Soft Magic.”
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I’m sitting on my floor arranging the sixty affirmation cards in front of me. In less than two weeks, I’ll be staging my first installation, Soft Magic, for the #CripRitual exhibition at Tangled Arts + Disability, a gallery in downtown Toronto.
On their website, the curators of #CripRitual explain how
“Disabled, crip, d/Deaf, Mad, and Sick people face a lot of barriers and stigma. One way that we deal with these barriers is through rituals. Rituals can be things that we do to create accessibility, mark important moments, or to be in community with others who have similar experiences.”
For my installation, I have created a space with three stations, each representing a different ritual that has supported me in moments where complex trauma has been overwhelming. I name them ANCHOR, AFFIRM, CONTAIN.
Within the world of trauma healing, there’s a lot of emphasis on the practice of grounding, which is when we move out of states of nervous system activation by feeling the ground underneath us. In my experience, grounding often feels inaccessible. Anchoring, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to fully come back into contact with the ground.
When I imagine a ship’s anchor, I think about how the ship floats above on the water, knowing that the anchor is keeping it safe and connected to the seafloor beneath. In their tarot practice, teacher Lindsay Mack explains that
“Anchoring is when we intentionally develop a root system of safety around a practice, or a tool—the breath, a certain person, deity, phrase or mantra, prayer, scent, etc--so that we can call upon it in moments of distress. Anchors help us to stay in our center when the inner storms rage. They can act as a foundation in moments when we feel that the bottom has dropped out of our lives, an experience and feeling that is shared by many trauma survivors.”
For Mack, a tarot card can become an anchor. My altar is filled with anchors: ceramic cats, tarot cards, crystals, tinctures, sacred objects from my mother.
These pieces come from the altar in my bedroom. Every morning, as I pull a fresh pair of underwear out of my dresser drawer, I encounter their magic. So few objects from my childhood remain. These gifts from my mother – my bronzed baby shoes, a figurine of a girl with long blond hair with the number ten marked in front of her, clearly a gift for my tenth birthday – are some of the most magical objects I own. They’re reminders that I was loved, cared for, deemed worthy of remembering at various stages in my life that stopped abruptly at age eleven when my mother died. I feel her living in each of these objects at my altar; they are talismans, offerings of protection from her.
It would be all too easy to label the objects at my altars as inanimate, as lacking animacy. Jane Bennett seeks to disrupt the argument that inanimate objects lack vitality in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. For Bennett, objects have the power to act upon us and direct our actions – a kind “thing-power” as she calls it: “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”
I’m reminded of Mel Chen’s words in their book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, in which they explore “how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways.” I’m particularly struck by Chen’s proclamation that animacy – or, in Bennett’s words, vibrant matter – has the capacity to “rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different communalisms.”
At my altar, human, animal, spirit, and nonhuman objects overlap and commune: a photograph of my mother and I; various ceramic cats; crystals; candles. Each with their own important magic. It is my hope that my ALTAR station can create other conditions for intimacy: between myself and those viewing it; between them and the objects gathered there; between all of us.
The next station, AFFIRM, features sixty collaged affirmation cards. I began to make affirmation cards in 2018, a year after starting somatic therapy. Making these cards enabled me to activate my ventral vagal nerve, the part of our nervous system that enables us to feel present and socially engaged. Any creative practice will do this.
I’d also found a lot of self-soothing potential through affirmation cards, but the messages I was reading didn’t quite fit with my values, politics, and identity: you’re so resilient; this too shall pass; it will all be okay. I’m a queer sick and disabled femme deeply committed to social justice work, and I wanted to see affirmations that reflected the ways in which trauma is something that impacts us on an individual and collective level.
I wanted to see affirmations that addressed how systemic oppression causes and exacerbates trauma. I also wanted to acknowledge that when we heal ourselves, we heal the world that we live in. Committing ourselves to our healing work is a personal and political act. And so I sat down and created the affirmations I’d wanted to see: your boundaries are sacred; your fear is valid; it’s okay if it’s not okay.
At this station, viewers are invited to submit their fears to me, and in exchange they will receive a ritual connected to one of the affirmation cards. At the end of the exhibition in April, I will gather all of these fears and hold a public ritual for everyone who submitted. Together, we will thank our fears for all that they’ve done to protect us, and we will release them. I read through all of the fears that people have submitted and what I saw coming up again and again was the fear of abandonment, the fear of never finding someone who’d love you and all of your messy parts, the fear that they’ll never heal from their relational wounds. I know these fears all too well.
I look back at the list I’d made, titled “things i’m afraid of”:
I’ll be alone forever
Everyone I love will realize I’m a horrible person and abandon me
If I do find love, something horrible will happen
Someone will abduct, rape, and murder me
Someone will break into my home, rape, and murder me
I’ll always live with chronic pain
I made up my trauma
I experienced trauma(s) I can’t remember
Everyone will hate my installation
No one will participate in the affirmation ritual
I’ll get sick and die young just like my mom
I’ll never be a successful writer
I’ll live in poverty forever
No one actually wants to be my friend
My needs are too much
Heights
Spiders. All bugs really
Rats and mice
Vomiting in public
Going for intakes
I’ll be broken and inconsolable when my cats dies
I’ll always live with intrusive thoughts
Being pushed onto the subways tracks
Being hit by a car when riding my bike
Being hit by a car when walking
Being in a fatal car accident
Being in a fatal plane crash
I’ll never experience secure attachment again
I’ll never have emotional and sexual connection in the same relationship
I’m doomed to repeat the patterns of behaviour that I want to let go of
I’ll relapse and overdose
I’ll cause irreparable harm to others
I’m broken
You’ll read this list and think that I’m super fucked up
You’ll read this list and find me insufferable
You won’t read this list at all
To protect ourselves from the things that scare us, we make up stories: Our fear of abandonment becomes “I’ll always be abandoned.” Stories become beliefs. In this way, we create self-fulfilling prophecies. And I say that not in the sense of “you make your own reality” because that kind of spiritual bypassing ignores the reality of the world around us and places the onus of achievement solely upon the individual.
What I’ve been learning is how, when old beliefs come up, my trauma brain immediately starts to find selective data to prove that that belief is true. If we find evidence for the beliefs that were ingrained in us by caregivers, loved ones, or the world, then we don’t have to grieve the heartbreak of never being fully loved. Our beliefs become a method of controlling the world around us. They help us armor up. It’s as though if I can predict what will happen, it won’t hurt as much when it inevitably happens. The funny/annoying thing that I’ve learnt is that prediction doesn’t actually protect me from disappointment when the thing I’m afraid of happening actually happens. It still fucking hurts.
As someone who lived most of my life gripped by fear in the form of intrusive thoughts, panic attacks, dissociation – the tools fear uses to keep us from feeling the pain of our trauma – I’ve longed to be free from fear. But the more I tried to cut fear out of my life, the louder it screamed. The goal, I learnt, wasn’t to be free from fear; the goal was to learn how to listen to, be present with, and collaborate with my fear.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to take this approach in a world that has labeled fear as a weakness, something to hide, something to overcome. If we don’t feel fear, then we don’t need others to comfort us. I think about how, as a child, if I woke up in the night terrified, I’d run into my parents’ room and they’d comfort me. I honored the fear; I sought out connection.
Later, after my mom’s death, when intrusive thoughts took over my life, I didn’t tell anyone. I pretended that I was fine (except, of course, for the fact that I slept in a spare bed in my dad’s room for months). I knew that things were different. If I named the fear now, my father would dismiss me. It would take until my early twenties before I expressed my fears to another person again. This time, my best friend. And each time I did, she showed up and validated my fears. In this way, my fear was the catalyst for moving towards connection.
We think that the first thing that happens when we’re afraid is that we go into fight or flight mode. But that’s not true. First, we look for connection: is there someone here to protect me, comfort me, validate me, care for me? In the absence of a caring other, our sympathetic fight or flight is activated. And when fight or flight aren’t options, a different state of fear takes over: tonic immobilization. We freeze. We play dead. Fear becomes a permanent state rather than a fleeting emotion that we move through. The antidote to fear isn’t control. It’s connection, interdependence, care from another. Affirmation is the missing experience that I want to offer to others and to myself as well.
The hard truth is that the only person we can ever truly depend on is ourselves. For those of us who grew up as caregivers in our homes, always placing others before ourselves, this truth can feel like heartbreak. And yet it has freed and empowered me in ways I couldn’t imagine. When I stop responsibilizing others to soothe me, and I turn towards myself for that care, I heal the younger parts of me that never had a safe and stable adult to trust. I get to be that adult for myself. This is what so many call the act of reparenting.
I want to provide participants with a strategy for reparenting their inner little ones, for holding themselves in moments of fear. And so I create the final station of the installation: CONTAIN. At this station is a video of me, in bed, surrounded by pillows and covered by my weighted blanket. One of my cats comes to join me, as I sit, hands over my heart, and breathe. Throughout the installation are various pillows that folks can sit with if they wish to join me in the practice of container building.
Early on in trauma therapy, I learnt about the power of the “container”: a space within ourselves where we can go to feel safe when we’re triggered, a space that enables us to feel held. In her book The Politics of Trauma, Staci K. Haines explains how humans have three core needs: safety, belonging, and dignity. Trauma can be caused by any of these three needs being threatened or unmet.
In my own healing, restoring my dignity and sense of belonging has been challenging but not nearly as hard as restoring a felt sense of safety. Because the reality is that we live in an inherently unsafe world, and the more marginalized identities we inhabit, the more dangerous the world becomes. I recognize that I can’t control the world. But what I have learnt is that no matter what the world does to me, I can always return to a sense of internal safety by creating my own little container.
I love looking up the history of words in the dictionary: container: con (hold) + tain (together). What I see in this word’s etymology is that we don’t need to do this work alone. We can hold trauma together, a collective act of care that reminds us of how much we need and deserve connection. Container building is a kind of world building. A sacred practice of interconnectedness and care, in which we all work towards building a world big enough for us all to be cared for in the ways that we so deserve.
The list of fears is so relatable. I honor your courage in sharing and tenacity in overcoming these fears. Your writing makes me feel seen.
I feel seen! Thank thank thank you so much! I feel so alone and isolated lately and this came through at the perfect time.