The Blender

It’s a rare occurrence for me to take the bus home after work; I usually carpool with a friend. However, that night he had other commitments. The timing was bad. Earlier that day, a package had been delivered for me at work, an awesome stainless steel blender bought on my Air Miles points. It was a beauty, a fifteen pounds beauty which I had to take with me on the bus. This wouldn’t have been so bad if I was not wearing excruciating new heels which by then, we slicing my little toes in half. The bus arrived quickly, but as could be expected, it was jam-packed. I hustled my way towards the back of the bus and held on the best I could to a pole. The box was so large that I couldn’t carry it under one arm, two were necessary to hold it and I could not very well put it on the floor as the bus was very crowded and I was standing by the exit. The bus driver was not particularly smooth either jerking people in every direction, every time the bus abruptly departed or stopped. Mercifully, I didn’t have far to go. Half way through the ride, a big guy who had been sitting nearby suddenly came to life. “Wow, this box looks really heavy.” Need we state the obvious?
“Yes it is.”
“If you want, you can put it on my lap. I’ll hold it for you.”
“Gee, thanks. I think I’ll be fine.”

Jung's Syncronicity

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner which are unlikely to occur together by chance.

I had a dream. In my dream, there were two girls. I was one of them. We were in a small room, more like a closet, sitting on the floor, scared. In the distance, I could hear a little girl singing in a disturbing hollow voice while skipping her way towards us: “I know about food… I know about fear… I know about twins…” and as if in a horror movie, she grabbed the other girl with a swift hand and they both disappeared. I woke up screaming. I was confused and shaken. Was it my subconscious trying to tell me something? Or was it testing the ground, trying to find out if I was ready to know more about my past? Because the answer is no, I’m not. I am perfectly fine with oblivion now that I know the substance of it. But the dream really shook me up. Ready or not, I could feel that forces stronger than me were at work. Something was shifting.

A week earlier, the office had organized a fundraising event where used books were sold. Whatever was left at the end of the day was given to a charity. The day after I had the nightmare, my Superior and I were checking some inventories in a room where only the two of us had access. As we talked, I noticed a book which had been left on a table. I picked it up. It was an odd place for anyone to leave a book. I glanced at the title “My father’s house - a memoire of incest and healing”. How odd! All along my therapy, I referred to “My mother’s house” as the place where all hell broke loose, the similitude struck me. I took the book with me to my desk and then brought it home that night without further thinking about it. I threw it on a pile of books “to read”. In the evening, I kept glancing at it. Finally I picked it up and read the back cover: “Somewhere around the age of seven, Sylvia created a “twin” who shared her body while living a life apart from hers, with separate memories and experiences. For forty years, the existence of that twin and of the secret life she led while growing in her father’s house was unknown to the author.” Someone had circled the word “twin” with a dark pen, making it visible only at a certain angle. This really caught by surprise. I could feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck. This was definitely a sign, too many coincidences to be random. That’s when I knew I was on the right track about the twins, about the dissociation, about healing.

I read the book diligently. The author was a Canadian woman. Her story was very similar to mine, so was her background. Her reactions were identical, and also her conclusions. I felt validated. I was not so different after all from all the people I had met in my life; only, I had just not met those who had suffered similar life experiences. My reactions had been normal, so was my self-ostracizing from the world. Now, all that was left for me to do was to learn how to interact on the same level as the others, those who apparently never suffered traumas.

Mine is a story of early loss – of innocence, of childhood, of love, of magic, of illusion. It was a hazardous life which began in guilt and self-hate, requiring me to learn self-forgiveness. My life was structured on the uncovering of a mystery. As a child I survived by forgetting. Later, the amnesia became a problem as large as the one it was meant to conceal.

Children who were in some ways abused, abuse others; victims become villains. Like Sleeping Beauty I was both cursed and bless at birth. I was given the poison and the antidote at the same time and by the same people. The well that poisoned me also provided me with the ability to resist that poison. I believe that it is not so much the calamity that we are subjected to which destroys the soul more, but the one we inflict upon others.

In early retrospect - early – since the healing process started only recently, I feel about my life the way some people feel about war. If you survive, then it becomes a good war. Danger makes you active, it makes you alert, it forces you to experience and thus to learn.

As Katherine Anne Porter once said during an interview, we spend all our lives preparing to be somebody and one day we find we have irrevocably become that person.

Healing - What a Process!

For almost forty years, I lived a split life. Somewhere inside my mind was another person who had the memory of all that I experienced as a child and the reasons behind most of my choices in life. To this day, she has only shared glimpses with me and those were quite disturbing. I may never recover these memories. It may not be necessary for me to recover them either. The fact that I know about them might be enough. I wouldn’t want to be haunted by the graphic nature or the emotional intensity of these memories, as I am certain, they would resurface with the same magnitude as I experienced them at the time. The fact that I cannot remember them, I learnt, is due to a phenomenon called dissociation.

Dissociation is a mental process that severs a connection to a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity. Dissociation is a normal response to trauma, and allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time. It occurs when unable to remove herself physically from the abuse; a creative child victim finds other ways to leave. Many incest survivors refer to this separation as "splitting", others as creating a “twin” who shares the same body while living a life of its own.

During my work with John, an image kept coming back to mind over and over again, the one of two small children holding hands. They were motionless, expressionless; they were no more than black pictograms, black holes devoid of depth. They were standing by the wardrobe door where I used to hide, in the basement of my mother’s house.

I felt like they were holding me back that I could not escape them and move on with my life. Yet, I felt terrible at the perspective of leaving them behind. I was stuck, but I needed to know. I could not figure out who they were and why there were two of them. Two children without identity, without real existence, silent and scared. That’s what I felt about them. I knew instinctively that there was something more, something hidden. This was not a random vision, they meant something. After much brainstorming, I came up with twice, as in twice as much, as in twice as scared. That was it! It was the explanation or so I thought at the time. I was on the right path though. I was so scared that I lost all substance. My fear was so terrible that it duplicated itself. I was so scared that I became completely paralyzed by fear. Sadly enough, all that was true. But what my mind was really telling me was that I was so scared that I became two distinct people with separate memories and experiences. And I understood that only the day I could join them up could I truly reclaim my life. Through much, much more work with John, the story slowly revealed itself and with it, the extent of the devastation and the amount of work ahead.

The obsession of a lifetime was drawing to a close though. My path of revelation was to be the path of dreams – dreams triggered by physical shock. After the events of my past finally resurfaced, I went through a year of extreme confusion. There was so much to understand and to absorb. I was on a constant emotional rollercoaster. I believe that many unexpected deaths occur when a person finishes one phase of life and must become a different sort of person to continue. And nothing or nobody ever dies without one last fight. I needed a chance to heal, to be free. I’ve earned that right. Forty years is long enough for the working out of any curse.

Fortunately, I could feel changes were coming my way, and coming fast.

The Risk

I was finishing an undergraduate certificate in public relations. Getting the exact courses I wanted was getting rather conflicting since I was also enrolled in a full time program at another institution. So I ended up in a class called - Introduction to Labor Relations - a subject for which I have no interest whatsoever. To make matters worst, the teacher was mortally boring. He would speak very, very slowly, enunciating every word in deep monotone without punctuation; it was like listening to one long senseless sentence without beginning or end. Worst still, he would stand absolutely motionless, reciting from memory the entire content of the manual without ever breathing or making eye contact. At first I attended diligently, then I started leaving after the first half and soon, I had much better things to do on Tuesday nights. I thought I’d be fine just reading the manual. Alas, the final exam caught me utterly unprepared.

The exam season has always been a very serious affair in that institution. The exams are held in the gym where hundreds of tables are lined up five feet apart. To avoid plagiarism each row writes a different exam. Therefore only the person sitting in front or behind me or two rows down is writing the same exam as mine. Two pens are allowed on the table. No matter what the circumstances, a student is not permitted to leave the table until 60 minutes have elapsed. It can be quite maddening to watch other people write and write and write, filling up pages when your own brain has frozen.

That’s what happened to me on that night. The exam paper was placed on the corner of my table waiting for the start buzzer. I was already hyperventilating by the time I turned the paper and realized that there was only one question: What is a risk? Eeeee? Eeeee!Eeeee… EeEeE... EEE@#@**@!!?

After 6o minutes, I got up, handed in my copy and left. The moment I stepped outside I puked in the snow bank by the gym door. I was pretty bummed out.

A week later, all the results were posted but mine. Next to my name was a note, the teacher wanted to see me. Doomsday! I was a nervous wreck by the time I reached his office. “Hello… you wanted to see me…?” He turned around and studied me for a while. “Ah! I was wondering who it was. Gutsy! I must admit, that was a hell of a risk! Here…” he handed me a copy of my exam paper. In the top right corner, in bright red felt pen: A+.

What is a risk? “This is a risk” had been my answer, followed by eight blank pages.