Welcome notes
A welcome from a painful and vulnerable writer who is ready to bare a lot.
This post includes themes of death, including thoughts of suicide, and illness. Please do what you need around this, and if it’s not for you right now I hope you might find yourself back here at some point <3
Hello!
Well, I’m here. And by here I mean existing in my painful, troubled and loved body-mind. And I also mean here, sitting on my living room floor as my dog pads around, finds a chew toy, settles down, takes a huge huff and begins to chomp. And here now, reflecting on how often I use the word “chomp” when it comes to my dog, and how little I use it for myself, even though I really do love to “chomp” things, including words. And here now, wondering how long it will take me to share really what I mean when I say that. And now that I’ve dangled it maybe more quickly than intended when I first started writing this just moments ago.
I’m reflecting now, on how edited these pieces of writing will be, or whether I will have the courage to share my streams of consciousness, or if I will have the time and patience to edit them.
It’s clear enough already at least that I’m here. And now I mean on Substack, and wanting and longing and dreaming of sharing my writing with you. I’ve been wanting to do this for some time, and it seems apt that a time of body-mind distortion through my new intimate partner - Shingles - is the time to start this adventure.
Some of the worst moments of my life are bound up in rashes, and so Shingles has been a particularly troubling virus for me to experience. I’m going to share a picture of the rash in a couple paragraphs just so you know, in case like me, you are someone for who rashes are a big deal. One friend wrote to me: “What the hell business does a virus have living in nerves” and it was the type of comment that made me extremely grateful to be friends with a bunch of sick crips who continually help me to process the overwhelming absurdity of these RIDICULOUSLY complex and horribly base vessels (I know… *rolls eyes in fatigue*…homes) we exist with(in).
When I wrote that it is apt that I’m sharing this in this moment, while a rash, now deep purple scabs with red mottled ripples, dry to the touch, stained chalky white with calamine lotion stretches across my intercostal nerve, deep on my abdomen, what I meant is that it makes sense that I would find my way here in the depth of a time when I’ve mostly been in bed, or on the sofa, vacillating between acceptance, fear, nervous system FUCKERY, short-temperedness, salty tears I struggle to expel so often, and a desire to rip my skin away from my bones. All of these things I know very well, and are themes you can expect from these writings.
You can also expect lightness and joy and deep wells of pride I feel at where I am, essentially still living, and with an access to beauty that makes colours burst, tastes burst, sensations burst, emotions burst, love burst, spirit burst.
It is also coming to you as an attempt to not just put words to experience, but to add a poetical, beauty-seeking task to my existence when these things are harder to touch. It comes after three days of not just refusing to take up that task, but not even thinking about or remembering that task is there. I know that sometimes we just need to ride out the peaks of these waves, the overwhelm of a crest so large that falling below and under seems like the safest option, and some days I’m not going to be able to access all of the beauty-seeking things. Sometimes I hate that beauty-seeking is even a thing, and especially a thing I benefit from. And today (there’s a whole piece I will write about how I choose “ands” over “buts”, and yes, I know there are buts above, I decided just now that this post at least will not be edited)
It’s also apt because the intercostal nerve - which has revealed itself on the outside of my skin for some time - is part of the somatic nervous system, the one that is not the central nervous system comprising of the brain and spine. It’s part of the peripheral nervous system linking to muscles and concepts of control and movement and voluntary. “Control” and “movement” and “voluntary”, three things you will definitely hear more about here. So too is “somatics”, and “nervous”, and “systems”.
I said to a friend last night that I felt like someone had died, have been convinced of it for the past couple of weeks, or that it was the anniversary of a big death, but I couldn’t think who or when. I sat in the park while tingles were occurring deep inside of me, and watched crows pluck worms from the floor and I thought about rotting flesh, and the death the worms might have fed on, how it runs in all of us. And I think now about how Shingles occurs through a virus “reactivating”, something that lies “dormant” until it doesn’t. and how the same really could be said about ideas, and also about the dead. Dormant until they’re not. And how one of the biggest paradigm shifts for me has come from realising this, that I can breathe life into the things I once believed were dead, or didn’t believe in at all.
Maybe this all sounds too abstract to hold right now, and I hope that through time some of these thoughts might have the space to settle more fully as I work through them here, like compost reducing in size over time, dropping further and further down in size and increasing in power, facilitated by worms.
I’m in the final year of my PhD now, and have been guided by philosophers, dance artists, sex workers, somatic practitioners and worms. So the essays I will share here will reflect that.
It would be fair to say that Shingles has triggered me. Not in the way that I used to use the word, which I can go into over time. This time triggered has meant not wishing to talk to people, and when I have done struggling not to be irritable, annoyed, short, coming away having to spend the next hours convincing myself that to love is to understand irritability, annoyance and shortness. It’s also taken me back at times to being hospitalised and covered in a rash. Rash=death. And it’s put death, and life, front and centre for me again. Wrestling with whether or not I want to, live or die. Suicidality will be talked about here, and how much work we have to do as a peoples to be able to hold these thoughts, and how much the systems - medical industrial complex, policing, prisons and institutionalisation among others - operate to cause harm to those who experience the deeply human, natural thoughts of wishing to not be here. I’ll always do my best to flag themes that might cause distress.
It’s a time of the season change, and I will use this energy to create something new. The transitions always bring with them this huge wave of darkness, like a curtain is being pulled across my windows, and it takes some time for me to settle in. I’m sure the same will be the case here, too.
And that is to say that I have no idea when I will write here, how often it will be or what form they will take in all honesty. That being said I’m sure there will be internal wranglings, I know there will be homages to crip artists of late, and homage to my own artistic practice. I am certain there will be learnings from Disability Justice (it’s in everything I do), and there will absolutely be somatic sharings.
So…in short….I will share my thoughts of decay, growth and feeling, really feeling, everything in between, of which I mean life, as a messy (non) human. Circles is where I will always be.
Kat x