licking wounds !

shan fahey's october newsletter! Huzzah!

It’s not a new story for a woman to realize her anger is valid.
I am not a woman. so it hasn’t been like that for me.

Once a therapist I had told me he thought the Pixar Movie Inside Out™️, should have been about Anger and Sadness. He believed, in his doctorate-holding opinion, it would have been more psychologically accurate to have the emotions of Sadness and Anger joining forces to overcome the woes the prepubescent heroine was having in regards to a cross-country move against her will. This was the idea he mostly tried to get me behind. Not only that the movie was wrong but also the idea that if I pushed myself to hold more anger with my sadness, I would be a lot more functional. I wondered if he told another universe version of myself who was TOO angry the opposite. I wonder if he told them that if they got a little more sad, maybe they would be less angry.  The answer to that question was a solid “probably” when three months after the film came out, two plush  versions of Sadness and Anger from The Pixar Movie Inside Out™️ received a permanent spot on his therapy couch. I sometimes would look at them, through streams of tears, wondering what it would be like to be them. Maybe if I was the little plushie sitting on the therapists couch, I could gain enough information from every other patient Dr. Van de Berg had to realize that my situation wasn’t all that bad and actually I had it pretty good considering and actually I shouldn’t feel anything at all, I should just be happy to be here, getting therapy. 

I am not the animated prepubescent girl from The Pixar Movie Inside Out™️, experiencing emotional pain due to a cross-country move against her will . I am a 28 year old real life person who has always deeply struggled to properly feel and regulate their emotions. I also chose to move a 2 hour car ride away from home away from all of my friends. So instead of slamming the door in my moms face for the first time and  wondering where the fuck that little firefly woman voiced by Amy Poehler who lives in my head went, I am going to read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk™️.

I learned in my year working at my colleges costume shop that one’s own personal saliva is the best stain remover to blood. The situation In which I learned this was when the shop was in full swing working on a production of “Marie Christine”, a musical adaptation of Euripides’ Medea in which a mother murders her own children in a divine act of revenge. The head seamstress had explained this trick of the trade to us after pricking her finger on the needle of a sewing machine while mending the white gown worn by the titular character in the show. The white gown itself had been a bit of a puzzle to everyone on the costume crew because it had to be drenched in blood at the end of every performance. The wardrobe team figured out a solution to the directors vision by creating an easily washable blood formula that wouldn’t stain the dress each night. But in this moment, the blood that stained the dress was real and the shock of it staining the white dress to the average eye would be tragic. The seamstress’s trick worked and I never forgot about the ironic yet poetic nature of this moment.

After this incident I kind of wondered why we spent all this time to create a washable blood formula to drench the dress each night. It would have been way more cool and deep if we used real blood every performance and then soaked it in real spit to clean it out.

It is interesting that two bodily fluids can cancel each other out. It is interesting that your body can heal mistakes by itself.

It’s always been instinctual to me, after cutting my finger on a sharp edge, to sink the wound into my mouth surrounded my saliva and suck away the blood from my bleeding wound.

The impulse to suck the blood from one’s own wound seems like one of those evolutionary wonders that keeps us closer to animals than we think. I mean when a puppy is born the mom literally eats the shit out of all that shit it comes out covered in. Would it be gauche for me to do the same? To Myself?

In college, my participatory theatre professor told our studio class that after the birth of both of their children, their wife took her placenta and put it in a blender with a pint of orange juice. They both drank it for health reasons. 

I think about this often.

I imagine my professor and their wife in their kitchen, each bouncing a baby on their hip. They pull out the placenta, shiny and dripping, from their vintage-looking FRIDGIDAIR refrigerator which they bought full-price online. I watch them heroically toss the veiny sack into their Nutri-bullet. My professor pours a gallon of Tropicana so hard and fast into the blender that it splashes up and out around the placenta and hits the new baby’s face. They both laugh and press the button at the same time, squeezing their index fingers together on the tiny button. The concoction twists and turns to make a sickening salmon-colored smoothie. They fill two yard-long glasses with the mixture and miraculously, this sacred organ has blended up to the perfect amount that it fills both humongous glasses. With perfect focus and utter integrity, they devour the contents of each of their cups in one harmonious gulp. They wipe their faces clean, and jump into the air high-fiving.
They will never be mentally ill again.

Recently I came upon a  particularly deep cut to my knuckle after attempting to give my sister face-framing layers in my 8x6 ft bathroom after 3 glasses of boxed white wine. My impulse to use my healing saliva to soothe the shock of this deep cut actually did very little to make me feel better. The cut was so deep that when I plunged my knuckle between my lips, I immediately felt a flap of skin brush up and down against the roof of my mouth. My saliva was worthless in this situation. The feeling of the flappy flesh wound on my tongue reminded me that my skin isn’t as thick as I believed it to be, and professional haircutting shears are a lethal weapon.

My body isn’t good at healing itself, it was never properly taught. Instead of healing itself it just finds ways to soothe the pain.

My mom was a big fan of the “cry it out” theory. When I was an infant and when my siblings were also infants, a cry in our crib at night would not summon her to rock us to sleep again and hold us close. Instead she let us cry it out. In an effort to create the illusion of touch I craved, I learned to feet rub. Making my own version of a mother  and a rocking chair with my two feet. Back and forth. Until I was asleep. And subsequently, Mom was too.

My mom was never really the physical touch type.
Sometimes I wish my mom drank a placenta smoothie.

When I was a toddler I was hospitalized for pneumonia that was causing me to have seizures. My aunt gifted me a stuffed wind-up lamb that was gilded with pink satin as a consolation prize. That lamb became lamby and he was a non-binary king. This plush friend came everywhere with me. The satin that lined his ears and the bow around his neck became a new place to soothe. I rubbed his ears and bow along with my feet together each night. I rubbed his satin so hard that it disintegrated. This stuffed lamb went to war with me. He deserves a purple heart

When school started Lamby wasn’t allowed to come along. Luckily, I saw Paige Foster chewing on her hair. “Genius” I thought, as I watched her day in and day out, loop a lock of her long brunette hair around her finger and into her mouth, she would suck it until it was soaking wet, pull it out, and then take the wet end and lightly paint around her closed eyes as if it were a little paintbrush. Easily influenced, I began trying this to supplement my need for soothing, and found myself immediately hooked. I can still taste the iconic flavor of Loriel kids strawberry smoothie shampoo and dirt that coated the cuticle of my baby hair when I would suck it down at recess. It started as just a peer-pressure thing but quickly turned into a habit that got out of hand. Soon I was doing it almost all of the time, including at home.
This ended in a bowl cut for me.

If you know me IRL in the flesh you have probably seen me doing this:

It’s a classic Shan move, I take this chunk of hair on the top of my head and rub it between my fingers, braid it, let it dance back and forth. Now you know it’s origin story. Hopefully you find it charming.

My ways of self-soothing aren’t always healthy and aren’t always physical. A lot of them are mental games I play in my own little head with just me, myself, and I. I use my visual interpretation of the world as a smoothing map to answer all of my anxiety inducing questions of my life. There are answers to be found in every line of tile on every bathroom wall. Just ask a question and count- yes, no, yes, no. Not the answer you want? Count the screws in the door. No again? Best four out of five, Yes/no your steps back to your desk. Somewhere the answer will feel good for a little while. Sometimes I draw a flower and I count the petals yes/no too. Sometimes I listen to the sounds of the giant printer at work. The hmmmmm sound is yes and the hmmmmmph sound is no. What will the answer be. Am I bad?

These numerous ways of physical and mental self-soothing are not recommended by most psychologists. The one exception, of course, being Dr. Van de Berg. That is why I stayed with him most of my early 20s. He seemed to have answers, and that was soothing. He told me that my flower drawing and tile counting was okay because they were soothing. He licked my wounds by telling me what I wanted to hear. He didn’t believe in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I was just taking care of myself by doing these things. If I just took his advice and acted more like the little red man voiced by Lewis Black in the Pixar Movie Inside Out™️, I’d probably have a lot less problems to cry to him about.

I think Dr. Van de Berg had a point with his criticism of the Pixar Movie Inside Out™️. Anger doesn’t receive an appropriate enough role in the healing of this prepubescent teenaged girl’s “lowercase-t” traumatic event. She was allowed to be angry at her parents for moving her across the country at this sensitive age, away from all of her friends. Feeling anger wasn’t a bad thing, it was kind of a protector.

I think that anger serves a purpose that I have yet to really grasp. But protector seems right. I bet since Anger is traditionally thought of as masculine and tough it is probably the thing that helps you scab over a little quicker. It probably clots the bleeding and makes it less messy.

I haven’t finished The Body Keeps the Score yet because its hard to read. It’s hard to realize that there is no actual way to heal except to feel. It’s hard to know that the wounds we accumulate on our souls and bodies overtime cannot be fixed with distraction and external stimuli. It’s hard to know that my efforts to soothe a wound are only making it worse and in order to heal I have to embrace the deep cut to the knuckle and just let it bleed out.

I just wanna to rub my feet together.