WTH is happening to me & how can I deal?
The Trauma of Chronic Illness
Once you have lived in that desert, the smallest grains of its sands remain to fill your pores in ways no soap, no bathing dispels. I always feel this faint sloughing, meager doses of relief at mile markers that help me count each step of the journey, each hour away and toward. Time as my frenemy reminds me how far I've come, newly celled and closer to freedom, and how much farther to go.
Whenever I feel sick in July, I remind myself that it’s probably due to the dread of my birthday in August. I love getting older, it’s the day of my birth that is the problem. Recognizing the source of my anxiety always helps.
I have found that writing or any creative act can help me to move past my illness-making fears. Lately I've felt sick. Exhausted. Feeling as if the air I'm breathing is wrong. Am I flaring? Or is this something else entirely? (It’s almost a month now, what they said was a virus is now unrecognizable, perhaps undetectable but felt.)
I accept it as psycho-somatic (mind-body). Not as a negative. Not "all in my head" but all in my body responding to life in and out of my head which is part of my body.
Can I list all the reasons I might be upset? I listed 50, and then another 50, and then I realized I hadn't even mentioned the U.S. government.
Why do I do this? To insure my illness, or whatever is going on with me (breathing, digestive issues, exhaustion), is not being abetted by my inability to be in touch with my own feelings (alexithymia, it’s a thing).
People hate being told that our symptoms are psychosomatic, but the body has to get our attention somehow. Psychological stressors are often a cause of physical discomfort. I cannot separate the two.
Most of my experience with illness -- and I've been a sick pup for most of my life (I missed most of kindergarten) -- is trauma-related or (let's just say it) caused by trauma, trauma I was unable to process.
Does anyone get to process their trauma? Do most of us even know we have trauma? So much of it - and the heaviest parts - are from our preverbal infant lives. How can we know?
I look at my behavior. I question everything. I can build a backstory. But that may or may not serve me. There are huge pitfalls to creating backstories. Sometimes the reality is that the pills I take for my ulcerative colitis are expired. Discovering this really pissed me off. Rage can seriously increase my levels of inflammation.
So what serves me right now? How can I use my symptoms to understand my needs? I must recognize my suffering. When illness becomes the norm, the recognition of suffering can be diminished. Suffering continues unheeded as the norm. That can only lead to the body's need to escalate, to get louder, because the reality is that illness is the calling or crying out of a deep need.
Where are my compassionate lozenges? My kindness tea? The most comforting pillows? How can I allow myself to respect the suffering that rises in me?
I’m going to be okay. I’ve secured unexpired meds and am pulling up and out of my nosedive.
Artwork by Scott Sherman can be found on Instagram at ScottShermanStudio
Writing Prompt - FORMAL CONSTRAINTS
What decisions have you made about the formal constraints of whatever you're creating?
What is a formal constraint? All the craft that goes into a story or a scene or a play is full of potential constraints - things that formally constrain how you will create the piece.
Formal constraints are expectations. If you're trying to write some kind of "blockbuster," then you have probably spent some time trying to learn many formal constraints. Especially in film, there are rules that say what has to be happening on specific pages of your screenplay. In most narrative fiction, there is typically a beginning, middle and end.
A formal constraint can also be permission to play with formal constraints, to create new constraints, to invent your own constraints (like a poem that refuses to use the letter e)... You could decide to write from the middle to the beginning and the end simultaneously. In a play (and sometimes in fiction) you could decide to break the fourth wall. In some narrative fiction, there is the idea of happily ever after or an answer is offered to the problem posed by the story. You could formally decide not to answer any question in the story. Most stories are told forward, but some stories can be told backward, or try telling it sideways, etc.
You decide what the formal constraints are for the piece you are working on. For example, in one of my plays I consciously used the 3 Unities as a formal constraint because most of my plays don't use them. Aristotle was into the 3 Unities, pointing out that he preferred plays that happened in one place, in one time (preferably less than 3 days) and with one action (one thing happens). Marsha Norman's 'Night Mother does this. Episodic drama (Shakespeare) breaks the unities and creates very different formal constraints moving to many places across much time with more than one action.
So what are the rules or typical constraints for the thing that you are creating? How do you want to use them, change them, or break them? How will your chosen formal constraints affect what you're writing? Will they help to illuminate the story? Does the form and the formal constraint function together to inspire you and your audience/readers?
You might not have these answers until you write all the way to the end. This is, in part, why writing is so hard. Because we can't always know as we go, and we have to live in uncertainty with doubt. And even when we get to the end of something for the first time (because it's a process of layers) we may not be clear on what it is we've done or which formal constraints will help or hinder the work.
But we can test out formal constraints with encapsulated narratives that retell our stories/plays/screenplays with (or without) those constraints to see how they function. Create the story of your story in a few short sentences as it would exist with your chosen formal constraints. Then retell it with different formal constraints. Then with others… What excites you? What starts to work better? What creates more tension, drama, laughter, or joy? Or what creates more of whatever you want? What do you prefer? What do you want to do?
Announcements -
Brave Space is a community that actually meets several times a week on Zoom and extends to this Substack community. I’d love to add your announcements or events. Just let me know. Post a comment with a link or send me an email. This is read in 10 countries by almost 700 people! Please check below to see what your community members are doing! Support is important! Also I post deadlines for opportunities (mostly for playwrights).
Deadline July 16th! The Civilians’ R&D Group in NYC includes theater artists from various disciplines exploring strategies for making theater from their own creative investigations… apply here: paid opportunity
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