Saboteur in overdrive

May 29, 2020

Once I found my old blog I decided to write a post a day. I am in an inner dry state. Have been for a while. Cannot find thoughts, ideas, and the blank page has been scarier than ever -- bringing on palpitations and strong headaches when I sit with my laptop. Once when I was in a similar dry state, I wrote a post a day and it shifted things. It was a process that helped then, can it again? I don’t know. We can never enter the same river, walk the same path, twice. Or as a friend used to say, ‘eggs are broken but once.’

This is mainly a stream of reflections type of blog. I don’t write of ‘important’ things or make too much attempt to structure my work. I can do this, I thought. But two or three days have passed since and each time I have gone to the blog something metallic, tight and impenetrable descended on my head, squeezing and hurting and not allowing anything in or out. I have given up and proceeded to do something else, something less satisfying, something that I knew was a distraction from the ‘real work.’

There are times in life when the ‘real work’ is right there. Easy to know, easy to follow through on. Those are light and joyful states. When I am writing, and the words can’t stop flowing. When I am training, and the body can go on for ages. When I am reading, and I say just one more page until it is 4 am and the spouse opens a sleepy eye and says, ‘oye, go to sleep.’

This is not one of those times. Right now, my thoughts and days are scattered, discontinuous and alternating between feeling empty or filled with zooming nothings. Yesterday I had an Archimedes moment – Yikes, it’s the inner saboteur!

The saboteur archetype thrives on fear and low self-esteem. When in shadow it eggs one to self-destructive behaviour whispering – you don’t need to work today, chill, and do it tomorrow or why sleep now, stay up and watch the show you can sleep in, or whatever. 

Carolyn Myss has named the saboteur as one of the four survival archetypes. I thought hmm… ya, it would be active right now. It feels like a time when survival issues float within even when I feel safe and fed in my home. Lots of fears drift in and out of my body and mind. 

My saboteur is tall and slim, dressed slickly -- waistcoat and pocket watch. He is a man with a soothing voice whose face is always in darkness even when it is bright. He is barely visible but always present right now. His efforts to tear me town, label me useless, have been very successful these days. But last night though he purred in my ear, ‘watch another episode, it’s not that late.’ I turned off the tv and read a few pages of the e-book that I have barely read a line of all month. And here I am today and hope to will be tomorrow too. 

I am going to write everyday until... 

Two dreams and a beginning

May 25, 2020 

 Last night I had a dream… 

It was dark and I was outside a dilapidated building, it may have been a hotel at one time, in a seedy part of town. There were people in there that were being held – drugged and trafficked. I, along with two others, was trying to save them. We split up, they stuck together, and I was alone. We met up on a higher floor where the people were being held. The two, a woman and a man, had found them and were ushering them out. I stayed behind to stake out and distract anyone who came. Suddenly I was the only one on the floor and a man, the drugger/trafficker appeared. He cornered me into a room.

An old fear this one, of being held and sold as a sex slave. Brain numbed, body misused, no control over anything. Day after night after day. 

The previous night I had dreamed a similar dream…

An older friend was being held in a house. A very slick place with beautiful furniture. We had gone there for a party and she has gone upstairs – a place which I was too scared to go to – and then disappeared. I had run away but later gone back to find her. A big woman stopped me from going upstairs, but I yelled my friends name. A man grabbed me. I kept yelling saying I wanted to go upstairs. My friend staggered down. She had a nosebleed. She was obviously drugged. 

Rich dreams, many people, many parts, each one me – the drugged one, the rescuer, the abuser. Also the shabby hotel and the slick home. Closer and further from consciousness. I need a dialogue with each.

Much to explore here -- but the one thing that stood out was about being drugged. I have been feeling drugged for a while. There are moments when I suddenly feel alert but mostly -- since the covid stats and stories from different parts of the world began exploding daily -- I feel a part of me, my brain, my heart, have turned the intensity dial to low. It’s much too much at times. All too confusing. Feelings and impressions and sensations not always my own keep me submerged. 

It is a raw, exposed thing – this sharing of personal stuff on a public blog. It is an experiment. I don’t remember why I started writing that blog, I don’t remember why I stopped. I remember it was private at one time and then not. I haven’t written on this blog for five years. Strange to share dreams on my first post back, but they are one thing that wake me up. I think many of us are having strange dreams. 

One of my dreams shifted to another scene…

I was being driven along a dark road with low visibility. Suddenly it opened on the very edge of a cliff. It was dawn. I saw below a vast, alive ocean. There were huge steps cut into the cliff that people were clambering down.

It is a strange time and history will record the big picture. Our personal stories through this time are important. Our daily struggles, musings, hopes and fears. I will start writing here about mine. Would love to hear yours. 

And 2015 is here

I had forgotten I had a blog. Something reminded me and I hope to write about it in a later post, but I found this draft from 2015 on the blog and decided to press publish. I read the post I wrote at the end of 2015 -- the last one on this blog and this one is the beginning of 2015. It wasnt the year I thought it might be at all... Just like 2020, for all us.
Added today -- May 25th, 2020

Old draft

And 2015 is here. It slid in slowly and seamlessly without much that announced it's arrival within myself.  As usual there is a need to look back, make sense of the previous year, find patterns and even label it in some way. Yet, 2014 defied being pinned down in the usual ways i look back and describe years even though there are months that i can group together and say yes, this was the essence of those.

January to March the theme was bodily healing with the goal of getting through the annual Koh Samui gasshuku and getting my nidan.  2014 began with debilitating back aches and knee pain that lead to days when i dreaded getting out of bed. Visits to the physio, daily exercise for both and slow, ever so slow training characterised the days. I achieved both goals eventually but my biggest learning of this time was something so unexpected. 

It was saturday, the second last day of the gasshuku and we lined up to do our test at 5:00. Sweat threaded down my neck even though the sun and the heat were slowly setting Of course I was nervous but i also knew that the week had prepared me and all i had to do was be present now. I did the best i could do, even relaxing and having fun by the time we arrived at the bag work, the kicks and hiji's seemed easy now. We finished our hundred crunches, push ups and samui star jumps and lined up again, heart thudding i stood there, full of hope just wanting the tension to end. Pass or fail it needed to be done. 

But Sensei had other plans, he announced the results of the kyu grades but held back the dan grade results. I was gutted, i needed to know where three months of perseverance had got me and i spoilt the evening for myself. Tormented all night with all kinds of emotional devils - hopelessness, doubt, anger - i could barely smile in the morning. The training shifted my mood and eventually the tension ended but i hated myself for the places i had allowed my mind to roam during the night and exhaust me so that i could barely enjoy my achievement. Something flashed through my mind - i could have made the choice of just feeling satisfied that i had done what i had set out to and had a great evening. in the end really that was what really mattered. It would have been a different last evening. 

The next six months were for emotional healing. I dug deep, wrote and rewrote my memoir of therapeutic abuse. The focus just finding my story and i found a deadline for myself, vowed to enter it to a memoir competition. Months of reconnecting to people and parts of myself that i had cut off - either fully or partially, allowing myself to be vulnerable, apologising, forgiving and recognising when there was nothing to forgive. A time of really knowing who i was, who i had become and the values really important to me. When the date to send the memoir arrived, i knew that though i had got what i needed from it - it was still far from being ready for a competition. Yet i sent it off as a symbol of both being done with it and of acknowledging my achievement. 

The last quarter was the richest, bringing together elements from the past and launching me into the future. Karate camp in Jaipur tied up the karate thread of the year, i trained, i met friends, i could acknowledge that i had managed to keep the club going after Sensei left. I had been able to tap into the collective knowledge and people were still enjoying the training. I finally found an indoor space once i returned. 

But i also got a glimpse of the possible future of bringing together my creativity and my activism. Re-writing myths really began to look like it could begin to be a bigger movement. In Bombay i found the group i needed to go deeper into the work and after wider. Here i found a way to start getting people to think about myths and who they have unconsciously seeped into their psyches and defined who they are.

Rifal got new life. slow, uphill task this improving.

The warrior got a quest, the owl a deepening. 

And the year ends with a slow, slow looking back - not so much looking forward yet. Have a few hopes, a few dreams but mostly it is about believing in the moment and the connections between moments that will create the flow. I think it might be a very interesting year.

End 2015 musings

Who would have thought that stability is a restless pain that is harder to endure than unpredictable change? This year has felt so heavy, so ‘draggy’ and i have had a hard time trying to describe my emotions during it. My journal entries have been terse, tinged with sadness bordering on depression. It is only during the last month of 2015 when the need to find and make sense of the themes and patterns of the year has quickened that i have finally pushed past, or rather slipped through the cracks of, the walls that have kept me from reaching my core essence all year.

This year has been the most stable year of all in the last or perhaps even the last two decades. Two decades of fairly constant change and upheaval. Anyone would think that a year or two of stability would be welcome. Unfortunately i railed against it. I constantly dug at the ground around my feet refusing to let it and myself settle and find comfort. Not a good choice – i could have used the time to integrate and heal.

I have realised that i am one of those people that do not handle stability well for with stability comes a despairing lack of progress and a decaying feeling of standing still as the world around changes and grows. Sure, those previous years of insecurity were terribly exhausting on the spirit but they also were times of constant transformation, of dragons hatching from stones and of unicorns emerging from cocoons. I cannot say that i have not yearned for peaceful times then but when they finally arrived i hated them.

What can i say – i perhaps am also one of those people who find it hard to be content and relax into the moment that is? I have a long journey to get to that space of enlightened peace which includes both shifting impermanence and solid calmness. From having experienced this space at least once in this lifetime i know too that it is merely a stop, a temporary space, which i come to after an outwardly spiralling path which both widens and deepens me but takes me away from this spot again and again.

So yes today once again, i have, as Eliot says, arrived where i started only to know the place for the first time. The year of procrastination and drifting, of finishing a book but not to my satisfaction, of feeling that i have accomplished nothing makes sudden sense. If nothing else i have learnt how not to do things - and that is huge.

The owl and the warrior have felt bereft for much of the year. Peering over the edge into 2016 all they see today is mists with vaguely formed possibilities. They know it will be a year of shedding and letting go for the other theme of 2015 has been death – both external and internal. Fortunately internal Death is an energy, an archetype they understand better than stability. Mostly because they sense they have re-birth to look forward to.

A meaningful 2016 to all.

Women in SF and a missed opportunity

Yesterday i attended and facilitated an UN Women event on Women in Speculative Fiction. It was a great discussion with three super panelists and a small audience. We talked about how SF has been a male dominated genre and how that is changing - too slow for some perhaps. The two women panelists spoke of how women tend to self-edit a lot and submit stories/manuscripts less often than men. One said that though submissions by men on online journals are higher than those by women the published stories by gender are on par. One of the panelists who is founder editor of the journal LONTAR shared statistics of the percentage of stories by women in the journal. They had dips but on average the stories by women hovered around 45% of the total. Yet published books by women writers of science fiction, epic and high fantasy lag behind books by men. 

Are men better writers? Are they more confident submitting or is something else operating here? Is what they write more commercially viable?

Next we spoke of female characters and how the roles they play are changing. One of the authors on the panel described one of her characters, a werewolf dealing with werewolf issues but also a mother of three. Why should women in SF only be young, curvaceous and leather clad, she said. Many in the audience nodded vigourously. The author also spoke of different kinds of strength not just that which is depicted by sword yielding warriors. A question was raised - women characters in SF have changed but have male characters changed? Depends on what you read, one said - but there seemed to be a consensus that male characters have not changed much. One of the panelists pointed how often readers related easily to stereotypical roles and it was easy to write within those roles and much harder to try to change the stereotypes. Someone in the audience said that it was not enough to have just the women change but men's behaviour towards the women also needed to. 

Mad Max, Fury Road - a feminist film? There was some disagreement around that. One of the panelists said that change in popular culture themes and roles need to come in slowly to be accepted. I felt a slight constriction in my chest and wondered do they really?

Then we moved on to speaking of SF worlds and how SF has been used well to comment on and challenge existing fault lines in society. The setting of a different world allows our minds to reflect on phenomena that we find too painful to face in ours or have normalised in our realities. An interesting question was asked - when writers write politically do they need to be gentle in their writing so as to not turn off readers but create opportunities to introspect? One panelist said if she wanted to write strongly about an issue she would go ahead and do it. One talked about books where the issues have come up very silently (Neil Gaiman - American Gods) or books where the characters and narratives have been so absorbing that the issue though very direct has felt natural (Left Hand of Darkness). 

It was at this point that a question began slowly forming in that constricted chest. I seem to have written this long post just to get to that question - which i still  have trouble articulating clearly. Something feels wrong here - worlds like the one George R.R. Martin has created with a very disturbing form of patriarchy - dystopic - are accepted easily. Despite having a few strong women characters he really does hit you over the head with a culture where men dominate and control and rape culture is normalised. In our current times when we are struggling towards an equal world - is he not also making a 'political' statement? Maybe i have got it wrong but it felt that if i wanted to make a counter statement in fiction about how abhorrent rape culture is i might need to tone my voice down - to be heard, to be commercial enough?  Why is it wrong to have a 'feminist agenda' but not wrong to have a misogynist voice? As i write this i see that perhaps i too am too careful in my own re-write of the hindu myths - i too am approaching the issue too gently.

Writing counter culturally is hard -  i need to push my boundaries. But i wish that this question had formed clearly within me yesterday - a missed opportunity :( for discussion from the panel and audience.