Grief on the blue couch.
TW: child sexual abuse//suicidality
This year has been hard. I’ve spent most of it sitting on the teal blue couch my parents bought my partner, Noah, and I from IKEA. Anyone who knows me well (or not well) knows that this is unlike me. I’ve been buzzing around for as long as I’ve been alive. I used to naively think of myself as a collector of experiences. I thought that the more things I learned and the more time I spent “doing,” the more I could contribute to the world. Maybe the fact that I believed it was my responsibility to change the world at all tells you everything you need to know.
You know people like me. White women, often raised in Christian environments. Some of us are oldest daughters, or functional oldest daughters. We’re really “good” at what we do—school, work, friendship, daughterhood. People call us really nice and we believe that about ourselves, too, because we work really hard to make the compassion that we feel for the world show up on the outside, too, so we should get recognized for it, dammit! We’re the dissociated. The keep-going girls. The ones who get sick when the semester is over. Who say “yes” when we mean “no.” The girls who are always carrying around little lies, hiding them so deep in our chests that we can’t even find them ourselves. You know the type. Or maybe that’s just me.
This is who I have been. It’s not all that I have been. I have been many other things, too, like creative and a lover and a dancer and a mother without any kids of my own. I have been many things. This sorrow-swallowing, perfection-seeking part of me is just a part. But she is a part I have come to understand so much more this year, sitting on my blue couch.
In November of 2021, a week before Thanksgiving, my body, this self who I am learning to trust, decided she was ready to remind me of something I’d long forgotten. Noah and I had just gotten into an argument over the phone. We were talking about money, a topic that took time and a lot of work for us to get on the same page about. As the argument escalated, I asked him to come over to the house I lived in with two close friends so that we could talk in person. I’ve never been good at talking on the phone. It feels so unsettling not to be able to look into people’s eyes. He agreed immediately and let me know he was on his way.
Looking back, I can see how much safety and trust I felt from his response. Here was a man, my partner and best friend, who was willing to drop everything and come to me so that we could communicate and listen to one another through it all. I was safe to feel. And so while I waited, my emotions built. Suddenly, I found myself seated on the cold, wooden floor. I don’t remember if anyone else was home. Placing my head in my hands, I began to shiver. The next thing I knew, I found myself tapping my forehead with my closed fist, finding solace in the repetitive motion and the pressure on my sinuses. I immediately became aware of the strangeness of this behavior. As if watching myself from outside of my body, I remembered the story my parents would tell about how I used to hit myself in the head as an infant so that I wouldn’t fall asleep at night….and the article I had recently read that suggested infants found hitting themselves in the head were coping with trauma.
That was when the flashbacks began. Suddenly, my mind filled with visceral memories of pink and green wallpaper, of someone running a bath. A pit came into my stomach like I’d never felt before. I was confused and terrified to realize that my mind was filled with images of my deceased aunt. A beloved alcoholic aunt who had tragically slept walked into a lake and drowned when I was a child. Yet here she was again in my mind, 17 years later, in the middle of an argument with my boyfriend? I could only understand the feeling in my stomach in a way that I had heard described to children as the “uh-oh” feeling. It was a feeling that felt familiar but forgotten, like a shame that I never could place. Memories flooded in shattered pieces and I was filled with the darkest dread I had ever known as my whole body cried out that something really bad had happened to me.
When Noah arrived, he found me curled into a nauseous and unresponsive ball. I stayed like that for at least an hour before I inaudibly whispered the words, “I remembered something.”
Fast forward to 2022, when Noah and I moved to Chicago. Finishing out grad school with this new bewildering and painful understanding of myself had been hell. Feeling like I was still reeling myself, I had been terrified to talk about my experience with people in my life besides Noah and a couple of close friends. Quite frankly, I couldn’t talk about it without bursting into tears, feeling nauseous, or having a full blown panic attack. Moving was an opportunity to finally get the help that I needed.
Within the first two months of living in Chicago, I had a PTSD diagnosis and a sexual trauma therapist. As a small town girlie suddenly living in the southside of Chicago and driving around the city at all hours of the day and night to work as a birth and postpartum doula WHILE actively trying to fight the PTSD out of my body, I quickly felt defeated. As much as I loved caring for new birth families, my body simply did not have the capacity anymore. I’m not saying that I figured this out right away. I fought to control the life that I was trying to build, because fighting for control was what I told myself I was good at. But my body wasn’t having it. She let me know with migraines, vicious hives all over my body, vomiting before breakfast, panic attacks when I stepped outside, that this wasn’t going to work. It suddenly felt so impossible to be alive.
And quite frankly, there were many times when I didn’t want to be. This wasn’t my first rodeo with suicidality unfortunately. It was not my first rodeo with the anxiety to overwhelm to depression pipeline, and so I knew that I would make it through. That said, this was my first experience feeling so out of control over my body, so I had no idea what “making it through” looked like. I was supposed to be having my ~small town girl in the big city~ moment. The Methodist voice that seems to always live inside of me (often against my will) told me that I was supposed to be using everything I had learned and achieved up to this point to create an ever more seamless and wise present moment for myself now. But Body said, “sit.”
And so I’ve been sitting. On my blue couch. Resting. Crying. Going to therapy. Occasionally applying for jobs. And it has been hard. And it has been stupid. And it has been so totally out of my controlled 5-year plan for my life.
I have so much more to say about gratitude and embodiment and codependency and religion and sexuality and how allllll of this has tied together throughout the journey of the past years, and so, I’m going to do that. This newsletter is going to be a practice, a little journal of some of the things I’ve been wanting to say, but haven’t been ready to say. I’m ready now. In addition to my own thoughts, I’ll share some of the artists and stories that are keeping me hopeful and inspired right now.
SO! Oldest daughters, trauma kids, deconstruction babies, perfectionists learning to be messy, people trying to reconnect with your creative self, or friends who want to follow along, we are all welcome here! I’ve never felt safe in spaces that feel dishonest, so this will be a safe space, but also an honest one. May you take whatever you need from it, and leave what doesn’t feel right for you.
If this is a journey that you’re interested in following, I’ll be here, sitting in Cafe 53 on Tuesdays in between teaching yoga classes, writing.
For now, I’ll send out a newsletter every Wednesday. I’ll make adjustments based on interest aaaand based on how much Body wants me to sit on the couch, lol. I’m keeping my Substack free for now, so all you have to do is hit the subscribe button below to receive newsletters in your inbox. Thanks for reading about my journey. It’s a little scary to put this all out there, but it’s all been brewing inside for so long waiting to be written down.
As I say at the end of every yoga class, “Thanks for practicing with me today. I bow to you in gratitude.”
XO,
allie
Things that are inspiring me
Irish Eyes by Rose Betts is the song in my ears this week. Rose makes me feel like I’m on a train traveling through rolling Irish hills? (I’ve never been to Ireland, idk!!!)
I couldn’t have made it through this year without Marcus Mumford and his brave and truthful album, (self-titled). It’s my dream to hear these songs live. Hmu if you wanna go to a concert with me!
Mae Martin is funny and beautiful and powerful in everything they do. But I only recently watched Feel Good on Netflix and it really meant something to me along this journey. If you’re a laggard like me and still haven’t seen it, run don’t walk!
My dear friend, Hunter Wade has a Substack, too, called Necessary Detail. Go read it— it’s amazing, especially if you love to linger on topics like God and bodies and powerful women!!
THE blue couch—good for grief, cozy for naps.
My beautiful friend, I have learned SO MUCH from the way you traverse the beautiful and the brutal and hold it all together in your experience of life!! THANK YOU for these words, and those to come, they are a blessing for us all!!!! 🫶🏼💖🥹