Anniversaire

How do you cope with a brush with death?

It's been eight years today since I was in a severe car accident. The consensus of everyone who saw the aftermath is that I should have died- if not on impact, then from internal injuries. The rear axle of my station wagon was driven up through the rear floorboard, which was basically nonexistent from the rear of the car being folded accordion-like against the back of my seat. The metal beam between windshield and driver door had crumpled down on my shoulder. The steering wheel held me in place.

My memories of the event were mercifully nonsensical at first: snippets of chiaroscuro, a voice. They came back, though. The darkness of a tarp being lowered over me to protect me from shards of glass. The soothing drawl of the state trooper speaking through my shattered window. Even the moment before the crash: Breaking Benjamin's "The Diary of Jane" playing over my speakers, the realization that the van behind me wasn't stopping, a struggle to shift into gear and pull off the road, the voice of my first chiropractor in my head saying that the worst thing about a car accident was the reflex to tense up.

I guess my deliberate loosening up helped prevent more serious injuries. I sang Iron Maiden on the stretcher. "Caught Somewhere in Time." I don't remember being placed in the helicopter. I know they cut my clothes off to look for injuries. In my dazed state days later, I mourned the loss of my favorite bra and brand new BDUs. My beloved Aunt Moose sat with me in the ER. I remember her voice. I remember snippets of my parents talking to me in the room that night.

I had a severe TBI and soft tissue damage. The trauma is probably what triggered my RA and definitely my fibro. There was a cut on the back of my left leg so deep that it left a divet. A similar hollow still exists on my right thigh where my steering wheel dug in so deep. The backs of my calves are still discolored. The damaged tissue feels crystallized beneath my skin. After the RA issues began, some of the tissue grew nodules. My back has never been quite the same.

People who have seen the car or pictures of it call this a miracle. I call it the worst thing that ever happened to me. It feels like I came to in an alternate universe. When I discovered the shamanic concept of soul loss, it made perfect sense. Some piece of me is gone now, not lost so much as dead.

After the worst effects of the TBI were gone, I learned a lot about myself. I guess being that close to death has that effect on one. It certainly got me over my thanatophobia. Arguably it made me morbid; I don't think that's such a terrible thing. Death is just another part of life.

Sometimes I miss the profound darkness I woke up from. Is lack of consciousness anything like death? If so, it isn't so bad. It's quiet and warm and black as a windowless room, a quilt pulled up over the head. I don't miss the haze of memory. My own mind was jagged as the shards of my windshield for months. Was it worth coming to? I go back and forth on my answer. Life has its pros and cons. I don't know if surviving was my choice or not, but here I am.

I have no time or energy for the trivialities of life anymore. The harder I aim for pre-accident normality, the harder it is for me to function. Normal is as dead as the girl in that little Subaru. They pulled a wild, mad woman out of the wreckage. I am the jagged edges of sawed-open metal and the softness of that black sleep.

Today I mourn that dumb, sweet girl that I was. I mourn all the lost potential. But I also celebrate the me who emerged from that crushed car.

Happy rebirthday to me.

Fifteen Years

You know what today is.

You may be young enough not to remember it. Or you may, like me, have been a child on the cusp of adolescence, too young to hear or understand certain details but no less horrified. This is the one good thing about traumatic brain injury: my memories of the day of and the weeks following are hazier. But they're still there.

It doesn't matter where I was. What matters is the feeling. All of us, adults or children, were glued to the television. We sifted through photo, video, audio to make sense of our collective shock. I don't know that any of us still fully understand. I don't think we can understand. Grief and fear of that magnitude cannot be broken down into manageable chunks of data. There will always be rough edges and shards.

After my own brush with death, I found myself obsessing over what happened on that day in 2001. What was going through the survivors' minds? Were their memories as fragmented as my own? Did they feel like me, like their souls had fled although their bodies had survived? So I read. I studied. I filled in every gap in my knowledge of the event and learned horrible things along the way.

The human capacity for suffering is astounding. We can inflict such evils on one another. We can survive nearly as much. We are as resilient as we are damaged, a patchwork of strength and frailty. And we fill in the gaps in one another's armor.

Tonight I will do as I have done for the last decade and a half. I will pray for the dead and cry for the living, and then I will push the images from my head as I try to sleep. Our national wound is healed, but scars still ache. Sometimes we have to stop and rub at them for a while to still the pain.

Feeling Better

The cold porcelain experiment was not a total waste. I learned that you can color it quite nicely by scraping watercolor paint into it and mushing it in. Nice marbling effect! Also watercolor paint is the bane of my artistic existence, so it's a good way to get rid of it. And even better, I made handles for the most used of my crochet hooks. Some of them cracked a bit, because obviously I have trouble getting all the bubbles out, but most look pretty good. Just got to let them dry completely and seal them.

And like a good little student of divination, I've been practicing with my lovely Lenormand deck (another blog post on that to come in the near future). The readings have been consistently good. I swear I'm not looking for the best possible interpretation. I go into it neutral and am wary of anything too extreme in either direction. But my first Grand Tableau did show the Gentleman very near the Lady, and after randomly pulling a card last week with no real expectations for anything, I got the Ring. If you aren't familiar with the traditional card readings, use your imagination.

So are things shifting, finally? Trust me, I'm not going to make any split-second decisions, and I will not be assuming that life is suddenly shifting into a meadow of daisies and cupcakes or whatever. I've got the Return of Saturn to look forward to in the next few years, and Mercury is going retrograde next month. Learned the hard way that that's nothing to fuck around with. Cautious optimism, I think, is the way to proceed... but like 49% cautious, 51% optimism. We'll see.

Anyway, wish me luck. Burn a candle for me. Love you all.

Fuck Cold Porcelain

Sometimes I forget just how fucked up my body is, even when I'm doing something with the goal of making things easier for my poor, pitiful asshole of a body.

I've seen Pinterest fails like the rest of you, but cold porcelain, a DIY polymer clay, looked promising. The only reason I was looking at polymer clay is because I need cheap handles for my crochet books. Why? Because maybe if I can grip the damn things, it won't hurt so much to use them. So I gathered my ingredients...

...and now I'm sitting on the couch crying because my stupid fucking hands hurt. I don't like the texture. I only mixed the shit up because I figured it was cheap enough to warrant the work of mixing it up. How absurd it is: I get hurt trying to save money because I hurt too much to hold down a job.

I'm sure some of you are wondering why I didn't just do a quick money spell. Obviously I'm wondering it too now. It's demoralizing, though, to feel like I can't even mix up a simple craft item, and I still don't think of myself as disabled. My brain is a thousand miles ahead of my body.

And now I'm seeing something on the news about a family friend whose body has been missing since spring. There is not enough sage in this fucking world to make me feel less negative.

Shoutout to /r/Witchcraft

Confession time: because I am a bored computer-literate human being, I spend a lot of time on Reddit. 

(That's not a confession, really. I need something juicier. Alright, actual confession: when I raid my grandfather's candy bowl, I leave the Hershey's and go for the Lindt.)

And because I have spent all this time exploring subreddits--and praying that I don't stumble across anything too fucked up--I have found a few oases of calm in the otherwise turbulent seas of teh Interwebz. My favorite is /r/Witchcraft. 

The night before last, I shared a link to my previous post in /r/Witchcraft. I dithered about it for a while. Was it interesting to anyone but me? Would I look desperate for attention? (Which is silly, because I don't think that when someone else posts. But I am not always very nice to myself. Sorry, patronesses.) After a bit of back-and-forth, I said "fuck it" and hit the submit button. 

And BOOM. Awesome shit happened.

The comments were overwhelming. Everyone was so kind and supportive. Other disabled practitioners responded. I've been able to converse with people from around the world (and surprisingly close to me). 

So thank you, /r/Witchcraft, for making me see that I'm not alone in this. You guys are a trove of wisdom and inspiration. You are my tribe. Bless you all.

Ableism, Mundane and Magical

Sometimes I feel like every man I've been interested in either doesn't feel the same way, and the few with whom there's mutual attraction have no idea how to start or continue a conversation. Needless to say, this is frustrating as fuck.

Look, I know I'm not the easiest person to be involved with. I'm opinionated and moody. I have health problems on top of that. Believe me, I did not plan on being disabled at 23, but I also did not expect that I'd be single at 26. (That happens when you're raised thinking that being married is the ultimate goal of your life.) I know my imperfections intimately because I'm a perfectionist and I obsess over them. But I'm a good person. I'm loyal to a fault, loving, and intelligent. I make a mean focaccia, too. 

It's hard not to get down on myself when someone who seemed like a nice guy just stopped talking to me when I said I was disabled. I understand immediately cutting off a conversation, but only for situations where someone's being creepy or offensive. If I had said something like, "I have a crippling addiction to heroin" or "I only get off to crushing testicles underfoot," I would understand him disappearing into the cyber-ether. But being honest about disability and the unemployment it entails? If he had said, "That's a dealbreaker" I would be disappointed, but it's so much worse to think that he doesn't even think I deserve a response, all because of chronic illnesses I can't control.

So yes, I'm hurt. I'm used to having people treat me like my illnesses are a character flaw or hypochondria. It sucks when it's strangers. It's worse when it's family. And sometimes--and this may be the worst--ableist logic even permeates witchcraft. 

Yes, magic takes energy. But to imply that a sick witch can't cast a spell without fucking up is ridiculous. I am sick every day of my life. I live in a constant fog of pain, but if I bind a spell properly, it works. To say that I am incapable of magic is just another form of discrimination. 

If you are chronically ill, it's okay to feel upset when you read some bullshit about not practicing when you're sick. Get mad and use that power, if you must. Sometimes you can't control what happens to your body, but your mind and spirit and all the energies at work in this world are yours to command. Your illness is sacred. It teaches you compassion. Never let someone else's prejudice impede your practice.

Feel your feelings, my friends, but do not give in to the lie that you are anything less than a powerful, beautiful spirit capable of creating magic.

Witches Get Stitches

Arianrhod is probably my favorite goddess. I've always had an affinity for the moon, and I have a soft spot for anyone who's been screwed by patriarchy. But you know what else makes me so fond of her? She spins and weaves the threads of fate. Grandmother Spider, another weaver, also has a place of honor in my personal pantheon. I worship the deities of my ancestors unless another one specifically comes to me. Athena is in that category.

These three are just a few of the goddesses who weave and spin. Consider the ancient Greeks' Moirae (Fates), Egypt's Neith, Hinduism's Maya... I could go on, but my hands hurt so I'm keeping this brief. All these cultures throughout history have goddesses who excel in textile arts. Hell, even Tolkien's Varda (also called Elbereth) sewed the night sky. Why is this archetype so firmly embedded in our consciousness?

Perhaps one reason is the importance of fabric. It's safe to say that without textiles, human civilization would not exist. For one thing, we don't have fur. In colder climates, clothes are necessary for survival. In hotter climates, they protect against the sun. Even if you never wear a stitch of clothing in your lifetime, you're probably going to need a blanket or a tent or a bag. After a certain point in our evolution, textiles became an absolute necessity. I'm not knocking naturalism (nudism) by any means--though I'm too much of a fashionista to go naked--but imagine a life without any type of fabric except animal furs or leather. It worked for our ancestors once they came out of the trees and started losing hair, but now? No way.

But there's magic in the mundane, and even something as practical as fabric can be mystical. So many connections are made between threads or tapestries and fate in mythology. Fiber arts allow for ultimate control over the finished product. I have dabbled in most of them. I spin yarn from newspaper and plastic bags. I sew by machine and by hand. I crochet (badly). And if I ever get a loom, I will weave, because I loved it when I tried it in school. The best part is knowing that I can make something I have imagined come into being. That is the art of creation. It connects me to all of these goddesses. And isn't the whole point of magic to create your own fate, to make your own world?

Working with fabric can be an extremely powerful form of magic. Each stitch holds intention. Each thread ties you closer to the divine. The next time you need to connect to any of the aforementioned goddesses, try a little sewing project. It can be as simple as sewing on a button or making an Ojo de Dios, or as elaborate as taking up point lace just to make an altar cloth (which I may or may not have attempted). All that matters is that you know that you can manipulate the threads of Fate.