Ground to Stand On
Everyone needs a place in the world.
I mentioned last week that I have been reading the book “Third Culture Kids.” The book exhaustively examines the experience of living across places and cultures. So much of the book spoke to me because I am also struggling to understand my life. The ways that many people I know find definition in their lives simply do not apply to me.
I have had the experience of being lost and at a loss. In my mind and also in the world.
I am grateful for the strengths of my experience. I resonated with how the children of multiple cultures or the children without defined and certain home bases read across international news sources, take the temperature of the communities they find themselves in, play the chameleon to adapt, etc. I have learned to love the skills my history fostered now that I don’t feel the need to adhere to them inflexibly.
In working out the connections between my healed brain, my body and the world I found myself in after my MDMA treatment, I realized I needed to build new pathways for myself. The sense of my physical body, the security to rest, the safety to grieve. In putting to rest my father's memory, I felt fully in my body again, but the connection was still tenuous. The habits of a lifetime do not change quickly.
What we intellectually know is not always physically felt. No matter how much I knew I had my brain and my body back, I needed to take the time to feel the connections and find a way to ground myself in the world.
Most people who have gone to therapy for their mental health have heard of the practice of grounding. Grounding involves being fully and physically in the present moment through engagement of some or all of the senses. I never could do it until this year. Until I addressed the break between my body and consciousness created the day my father threatened to kill me, I never could convince myself to feel safe in my body. This had pros to it. I thought I had a high pain tolerance, and the ability to have four natural childbirths taught me to love my body and what it could do beyond what I thought possible. But also, I could never relax. As my very patient physical therapist explained, I did everything wrong. Including breathing. And I couldn’t cry.
So when I complained to my therapist that my life felt like continuously having to step into thin air, I had been thinking about how much I needed grounding. She invited me to sit with the realization that when I made decisions from my self, I was not plummeting. My life was not a series of freefalls. Instead, I had always fallen when I tried to stand on someone else’s ground.
I ended the session commenting that until I figured it out, I would just have my castle in the sky.
In the animated stories of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese studio that made classics like “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro,” there are actually a couple of floating castles. In the days I spent trying to navigate grounding myself, I let myself drift through Japanese story telling. I had worked through layers of my father’s history, his time, his food. Why not turn to the fairy tales?
There is a filmmaker I love. Makoto Shinkai creates modern Japanese fairy tales. The best known is likely "Your Name," but my family also likes "Weathering With You" and "Suzume." Just a warning that even with a significant appreciation of Japanese culture, my husband finds these movies weird in a way that I do not. Without spoilers, the three movies have a kind of movement across them. Trying to connect to time and tradition while opening the past up to the future. Space and light to water and sky to earth and grief. To me light is easy. I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but so many of the mental images that make up my internal interface are full of flame and sunlight and starlight. When I read the book “Anam Cara” last year by an Irish poet named John O’Donohue, I was delighted to find another person entranced with the generosity of light.
When I first began IFS therapy, I did inquire into the tears I couldn’t shed. At first I tried to tell myself that no amount of rain showers could wash me away, but when I really examined what existed inside of me, it helpfully manifested as a tsunami. How very Japanese of me. The tsunami had tamed itself into an impossibly deep well in the time I had devoted to it, but since then it had been waiting around for me to get back to it. Who we are and the work that we do for ourselves really does exist in cycles or revolutions. I have come back to so many past moments with new appreciation and insight. Like the moment, my brain informed me that the grief inside me was a tsunami with every intention of washing me away. My father carried the trauma of war and an empire, so perhaps the part of me waiting for a place in my reconstructing brain was not being so dramatic after all. As a well, it felt like my own unshed tears were connected to the history of sadness that I knew came before me. I needed to be able to cry some of those tears.
We need grounding to carry the weight of our history and move forward into the future. So I looked for a way to ground myself. Because I needed a place to start in my head, I started thinking about earth itself.
I wanted to tell my husband that obviously I needed to go back to California. I knew I had felt grounded there. It wasn’t an option so a friend of mine helpfully let me know that he loved the earth in caves. He’s always felt an affinity to bears. I realized when he said it that I also have a favorite kind of earth. I love the loamy dark earth between tree roots under leaves and moss. I remembered thinking about roots and synapses. About the intertwined world of books and ideas that exist between and around my husband and I. Our forests have been libraries, and the trees I climbed became books I got lost in. Ideas not grown from just one patch of earth, but from all the earth that has ever been.
I could not stop crying the day I connected myself to my own ground. I have always existed across cultures and places, but I didn’t feel it until I traced out that pathway in my brain. Something I instinctively knew, but couldn’t feel until I gave it all my attention. I can ground in my life now. I can sit on the edges of soccer fields while my children play and feel the whole world dial itself up so vividly in my senses it becomes almost muted in the equilibrium of everything. Just the way I remember from my childhood.
I cry a lot now from both grief and joy. And I keep building on and strengthening the healing I have gained. I am only going to live one life, so I intend to keep deepening it and expanding on it. I was after all a child that chose everything.