War-Paint: The Theater of Visceral Experience

When memory crashes in; your gut, your heart, your lungs; taking imperfect swings; a somatic guided recording from me to you

Today I am offering an essay about memory, writing, and trauma, as well as an informal guided somatic recording for you at the end that I hope will serve you well for these darker winter days with the holidays approaching. I was just texting with a friend who brought up the sometimes confusing contrast of winter being a natural time to go inward, a time of allowing what needs to die off to die, and re-emerge in the spring with new wisdom, but as a society we have created an immense amount of socializing and busyness during this time which can feel at odds perhaps with that desire to, you know, casually excavate the shadow. Make soups and cast spells and things. There’s something I love though as an adult about creating magic around this time of year, leaning into ceremony, and sharing space with others really intentionally. I do think it always comes back to intention: getting clear on your desire for this season, and then really intentionally saying yes to things that will bolster that desire and no to things that do not. Easier said than done you might be thinking, but remember it’s a practice like anything else, and progress wins the day over perfection every time. Even small steps make huge differences.

Before we get going, though, I want to offer a warm hello to everyone—so thankful for the connections I’ve made here over the last year (!) and really thankful for your readership as I’ve stretched my wings in this space. Also, a special welcome to my new subscribers! I am so happy you are here. I was so pleasantly surprised when Emily Leibert included my substack in The Cut’s recent post election newsletter round up of writing substacks. So, if you are new here, welcome. Know that my posts are written with a lot of love, a ton of intention, and a true desire to connect in our shared desire to unblock whatever hinders us from making the art we desire, making the life we desire. Art and life to me are completely entwined. Emily described Make Up Your Life as a place '“for craft inspiration and reminders to move your body — whether it's with a quick walk or shaking out your hands, arms, and feet — before sitting down to write.”

Yes, I thought, that certainly sounds like what I’m always talking about and want to talk more about. My shaking practice actually came up frequently on book tour and I actually got to lead a bit of shaking memorialized forever on the Book of the Month podcast recording, which was so much fun, and you can listen to that here if you’re interested. I loved that interview. Speaking of interviews, I finally organized my website to include a big round up of podcasts and interviews I’ve done. I really value all the time it takes to put these together and produce them and I wanted to make them easily accessible in one place. You can see them here.

Just a note that because the following post goes pretty deep into my personal story it will be for paid subscribers. This allows me to feel a sense of control that when I’m sharing vulnerably it’s being met by people who are here because they are familiar with my work and have opened their arms to me. I’m also a working writer who has published a lot and am past the stage where I’m cutting my teeth offering up myself for free in hopes someone will deem me worthy. Trust me that when I paywall something it is meant to be expansive for us all, an active reminder that we must value ourselves, not abandon ourselves, and be discerning about what goes where. To everyone new here, I do publish free posts as well, but today is not one of them. I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber and engaging with this essay and joining me on the great journey. I have been simmering a lot over this fall season about where I want this newsletter to go and be, and now that the push of putting Madwoman out is behind me, I am really thrilled to dig in a lot deeper with you all. Thank you again for being here.

Before we get into it I want to mention for any Portlanders that I will be at the writer Leslie Stephen’s (of Morning Person and the novel You’re Safe Here) book exchange party at Schoolhouse Electric on Friday night—register here! It’s sort of my dream holiday event, feels so exactly intentional and the way I want to be socializing. I hope to see you there!

War Paint: An essay on memory and makeup

Memory is probably the number one thing I’m obsessed with as a writer and is something my fiction circles again and again. As I wrote Madwoman, my intention was to make memory feel dangerous on the page. I knew that was part of the assignment of that book—to figure out a way to make a charged memory, a triggered memory if you will, feel dynamic and frightening the way I have experienced memory in my daily life. I’m also obsessed with lack of memory, that ominous dark space, and what comes to fill it, its fallible nature, and the many versions it can take over a lifetime. The way memory warps and shifts and illuminates, how and when it’s triggered, etc. The way we can’t outrun it for long, even if we want to. Annie’s Little Library recently posted a review of Madwoman I loved so much and in it Annie wrote: “There is a line in Leslie Sainz’s “Sonnet for Eleguá” that says, “What occupies me is also running. It never tires, but rather, repositions itself.”

Wow, I thought, yes. The repositioning of memory. Memory is running, too.

I haven’t had social media on my phone lately and in the absence of it, I am reunited with my interests, my desires, and authentic movement again. This is such a relief. I’m always amazed at what I get up to once I’ve taken away the option of the scroll. So in this expanse, I felt the call to re-read The Body Keeps the Score again, and have been so struck by certain aspects of it and the emotional releasing its been prompting. I came upon a phrase the other day I really responded to. Van Der Kolk writes:

When our emotional and rational brains are in conflict (as when we’re enraged with someone we love, frightened by someone we depend on, or lust after someone who is off limits) a tug of war ensues. This war is largely played out in the theater of visceral experience—your gut, your heart, your lungs—and will lead to both physical discomfort and psychological misery.

Beyond just loving the phrase theater of visceral experience, I find it endlessly fascinating that things like anger, sadness, anguish, fear, anxiety, etc. are played out and felt in the body—the gut, the heart, the lungs. Of course we know this to be true on some level. I remember going through a terrible break-up in my early twenties where for months I could barely eat, my guts were so churning and nervous 24/7. Or when my father died, I felt that someone had placed a very heavy weighted blanket on my body and I developed a strange sort of head twitch I couldn’t control—it felt like my body was shorting out, it was telling me: too much—listen to me now, take care of me, or things are going to be bad. When I had my second baby and moved to my hometown for eleven months in a wild and flailing swoop at what I hoped would offer more freedom, support, and naively, more time to write, I lost the ability to take a deep breath for three years. Due to the stress of plunking myself back into the place where so much of my early trauma had played out, triggering deep somatic memory, my diaphram basically seized up. My body was screaming at me: this was a wrong turn, correct correct!

These experiences, especially the diaphragm issue sent me on a somatic healing journey that I am now beyond grateful for, even if at the time it felt I was simply cursed and unlucky and maybe even the universe hated me a little. I wasn’t cursed but my emotional experiences were playing out in the theater of visceral experience very obviously. Discomfort and psychological misery ensued.

I used to be terrified of my memories. It seemed if I let them go free range they’d catch on fire. As a young adult, I’d lay in bed and repeat the phrase everything is good, everything is fine loudly in my mind lest I be swept away into my own theater of terror. As a teenager I learned the first time I smoked weed that substances quieted memory. I was happy and light in a way I had never been during that first high. I remember holding a cup of Dr. Pepper from a gas station in my hand in the backseat of someone’s moving dark car and simply letting it go. In my altered state it seemed the Dr. Pepper had vanished in the abyss, that nothing mattered, that spilled soda on the floorboard was if anything, hilarious. I later found drinking to be an even better silencer of my torment…imagine my shock when this only worked for a few weeks, maybe months? Not long in any case. Soon substances made memory much worse, depression heavier, and my life a total dumpster fire, always trying to chase that first feeling of holding the soda and letting it fall, that perfect peace.

In Madwoman Clove says, Hell was an empty movie theater playing my childhood over and over forever. When I wrote that line, I was still figuring out how to sit in my own movie theater and not be fucking terrified. Now, having healed quite a bit, I feel like I can sit in the the movie theater pretty okay, maybe even eat some popcorn.

Most of the time at least. I used to describe the feeling of my traumatic memories as being flooded. I’d close my eyes at night trying to sleep and the wave would take me. “I’m flooded,” I’d say to my husband when occasionally he’d ask why I was quietly crying in the dark. “I’m just flooded again.”