BODY PAIN: A PRACTICE OF REMEMBERING

This piece was originally written and published August 23, 2020 on www.queerfutures.com by sav schlauderaff

“If healing work is a call to remember and remembering is embodied then we would want to situate the body centrally in this healing complex”

M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing (2005, 316)

“Recovery from trauma requires creating and telling another story about the experiences of violence and the nature of the participants, a story powerful enough to restore a sense of our own humanity to the abused”

Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories (1998, 15)

Of all the parts of me I have written about, this remains the hardest.

This memory of a feeling that has intermittently floated to the surface.

A memory of my elementary school’s walls, and staring down the long hallway from the gym to outside. The pain and blood and confusion. Did I walk outside?

And then, half a memory of the staircase down to the boiler room, when did I go down into the boiler room? What business did a third grade child have there?

M. Jacqui Alexander writes in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred in “section III Dangerous Memory: Secular Acts, Sacred Possession”, “...at times the forgetting is so deep that forgetting is itself part of what we have forgotten. What is so unbearable that we even forget that we have forgotten?” (276)

This quote has stuck with me for years, namely because most of my traumas I remember vividly and too often for comfort. But others, are elusive. They come to me in pieces fragmented over time. Truly a shitty puzzle that I don’t want to put together, but one that I feel drawn to complete.

Alexander describes an activity she often leads in workshops, where she has participants do a free-write activity to both the statements “I remember” and “I don’t remember” (278).

Reconnecting with journaling and writing exercises in certain graduate courses has been one of the most healing exercises for me. Rather than needing to posture through dense texts, it has given me the space to write and process through thoughts I may not have yet thought of.

I remember standing in my elementary school’s hallway between the gym and the restrooms.

I remember being alone

I remember staring down that hallway towards the light coming through the doors

I remember feeling stuck

I remember feeling pain

I remember blood

I remember arriving at the door to the boiler room

I remember staring at the hot water heater and at the metal stairs back up to the door

I don’t remember who was there

I don’t remember being assaulted

I knowfeel that something bad happened

I know that this violence is embodied

I know that these memories have resurfaced with every subsequent sexual trauma, my egg extraction, the scraping, sampling and removal of my abnormal cervical cells.

“So much of how we remember is embodied….Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit” (Alexander, 277)

I remember after the first time I donated my eggs, I was taking a long hot shower and the sharp pain hit me. I stared at myself in the bath faucet confused. Again, standing in my elementary school hallway, in pain, bloody and confused.

That I always first see myself, my younger self, from behind, I can see a bright light at the end of the hallway.

I’m floating above myself, and then I look down at my hands and suddenly I am the younger me looking at my hands. I glance down at my stomach and I can feel a shooting pain in my vagina and I see blood in my underwear. And then I’m gone. The felt-memory, or the flashback, or the message I am meant to receive is over.

These feelings enmesh themselves with the felt-memories of when “A” drugged and raped me the summer after highschool.

Perhaps my telling of this story seems circular, and it is. But my processing has felt that way, as if I was on a rollercoaster that just didn’t get enough momentum to fully complete the loop. I roll back to the start. I start over. [re-learning my bodymindspirit through trauma studies].

Again and again and…

...something bad happened.

All I can recall now is that there was a drastic shift in me between the third and fourth grade. I became quiet and anxious, with a permanent pencil lead streak across my face from compulsively rubbing my hands on my face. I pulled out my hair and picked the skin on my neck, cuticles, and wrists until they were raw and bleeding. I remember experiencing what I now know would be termed dissociation. I was constantly going to the nurse’s office during lunch time because of severe stomach aches, but nothing ever came of these visits.

Something bad had happened.

All I can recall now is pain, and blood in….

...I remember becoming a “moody child” who didn’t want anyone to touch them. Someone who would sit and watch themselves cry in the full length mirror in my room.

But perhaps from the outside not much had shifted at all. I was always a sick kid. I had/have a laundry list of allergies, and was always covered in scratchy red eczema patches and scabs that I would pick until they bled. I was prone to getting sick, coming down with colds and getting strep throat like clockwork. I was also always a shy kid or at least that’s what our family home videos tell me.

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When I was in the third grade my mom had a very intensive surgery that went wrong and led to many more surgeries. She was very sick for a long time. And I remember going to see her in the hospital and she had wires and machines all around her, but she made room on the bed for us to sit with her. I remember feeling so nervous and sad.

an image from sav’s elementary school diary dated 12/22/2002. Text: Dear Diary, it’s three more days till Christmas and one more day till my moms surgery.

a photo of a poem written by sav in elementary school titles “Cries”: Do you hear me cry/ Out loud trailing off/Can you help me.

At the bottom sav’s mom wrote in pencil: “Savannah wrote this when I was sick”

I apparently wrote this poem for my mom when she was sick. I don’t remember writing this poem, but I did write a lot of poetry throughout elementary school.

Did I write this about my mom? Was she crying?

Did I write this about myself? What was I sad about?

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I don’t know if I’ve ever felt angry about my traumas. I feel detached, embarrassed, ashamed, disgusted, but not anger. Anger is hard for me to feel. Depression. Depression I do feel. Loudly. Intensely. I often feel I am eternally bound to depression, apathy, and numbness. Bound to mourn 8 year old me, and 13 year old me, 18 year old me and 18 year old me and 18 year old me, and all the other ‘me’s’ who have been assaulted, raped, beaten, violated, demeaned, thrown away, humiliated, and mocked throughout my life. I mourn how alone I felt, and how that loneliness froze me and silenced me for so many years. Do you ever feel connected to the ‘you’ that experienced trauma? Or do we need to become new people on the surface to protect ourselves? M. Jacqui Alexander writes: “Spirit brings knowledge from past, present, and future to a particular moment called a now. Time becomes a moment, an instant, experienced in the now, but also a space crammed with moments of wisdom about an event or series of events already having inhabited different moments, or with the intention of inhabiting them, while all occurring simultaneously in this instant, in this space, as well as in other instants and spaces of which we are not immediately aware. Spirit energy both travels in Time and travels differently through linear time, so that there is no distance between space and time that it is unable to navigate. Thus, linear time does not exist because energy simply does not obey the human idiom. What in human idiom is understood as past, present, and future are calibrated into moments in which mind and Spirit encounter the energy of a dangerous memory, a second’s glimpse of an entire life, of a dream or a sequence of dreams, of a shadow lying under a village, of the vibration of a feeling, of a letter to be delivered, a decision to be made, all penetrating the web of interactive energies made manifest” (309-310). That all these “me’s” are at once past, present and future “me”. I have been working to make myself feel connected across timespace. To not cement myself in the past, stuck to relive and only live through my traumas. It is never about “moving past” and forgetting, but learning to live with these traumas. To not feel shame or disgust towards myself. To be patient and compassionate, because healing is slow and inconsistent. To remember that this is a start (again). For me. I just want to know what it feels like to feel at home in my body, and not in pain, not overwhelmed by numbness, not dissociated or depressed or full of shame. I want to feel love and care and kindness towards myself that isn’t dependent upon someone else.

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Sav is a trans, queer and disabled PhD student in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Their research in critical disability studies questions the ways chronically ill individuals engage with mainstream medicine, biotechnology, biohacking and alternative forms of healing. As well as the interconnections between trauma, chronic illness, pain, (embodied/felt) memory, and self care/community care for the bodymindspirit. Sav utilizes their academic training in genetics, molecular biology and gender studies with autobiography, poetry and new media. They graduated from San Diego State University in 2018 with their M.A. in Women's Studies, where they completed their thesis "Rejecting the Desire for 'Health': Centering Crip Bodyminds in Genetic Testing"--bridging their undergraduate degrees in Genetics, Cell Biology and Development (GCD) and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) from the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities. Beyond, and intertwining with, their academic research, Sav is passionate about education, activism and community building especially around the LGBTQIA+ communities, trauma/PTSD, eating disorder recovery, and disability--in addition to the multiple intersections of these topics and identities. They always strive to create accessible, intersectional, collaborative and intentional workshops and lectures. They have worked to create interactive workshops, classrooms, internship programming, and mentorship connections with undergraduates and high school students centering the values of radical vulnerability, kindness, listening, and meaningful reflection. Outside of research, they are currently the Graduate Assistant at the Disability Cultural Center, a Safe Zone facilitator at the LGBTQ+ Resource Center, and a member of the Disability Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona. Sav is a co-founder of "The Queer Futures Collective" where they experiment with different forms of writing, workshops, and performances in-person and online. Sav integrates reflective journaling with theoretic work in their Sunday Sentiments articles, and creates accessible teaching materials and handouts that are free for users to download.