MEMORIES IN/OF WATER

This piece was originally written and published February 2, 2020 on www.queerfutures.com by sav schlauderaff

I feel at a loss since moving to the desert, this is the first place I have lived where I am not near a body of water. I am delighted during Monsoon season here, as it means the “rivers” that are not rivers for the majority of the year become full and tumultuous.

An image taken by Sav of the Rillito river flooded by heavy rains in Tucson.

“It must have been a desert person who said from dust we come to dust we return, because, for most of us, water is the true element of our origin. Broken birthwaters signal our emergence into the air world, and through our lifetimes it is water that sustains us, water that is the human substance, the matter of cells” (Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir, 31).

I never learned how to swim, as I cried and flailed every swimming class and my younger sister Sydney quickly passed me up at our YMCA swimming lessons. This wasn’t remedied by my obligated swimming class in the sixth grade, which only led to frozen hair in the middle of winter and an inability to get my skinny jeans on in time for the bus. Even though I can’t swim, water both terrifies and comforts me. When I think about memories of home and water, I think of my siblings.

I grew up with the Mississippi River, several lakes, ponds, bogs, and creeks within a mile or so from my house. Minnesota is denoted as the “land of 10,000 lakes,” Mnisota, “sky-tinted water” or “cloudy water”. An apt name for summer days in Minnesota with their soft blue skies reflected in the water.

An image taken by Sav of the clouds and sky reflecting off the top of a lake in northern Minnesota

An image taken by Sav of several canoes pulled up on a grassy shore with the clouds and sky reflecting off the top of a lake in northern Minnesota.

I grew up with people doing showboat plays on the Mississippi, the smell of the paper mill that gave Grand Rapids its distinct smell, jumping into old mining pits up the iron range now filled with clear water and not at all permitted for jumping into. Memories of my family going to my great grandpa’s fishing spot only to catch catfish and tangle up all our fishing line for our dad to untangle later. Of my dad showing me how to clean fish, my siblings and I catching crawfish, turtles, and garter snakes at the numerous campgrounds every summer. Me and my cross country teammates jumping off the rope swing into the lake at the trails behind the high school. I think of the many summers spent out on a boat on lake Pokegama, and my older sister convincing me the waves I could feel through the plastic inner-tube were fish trying to bite us.

An image of Sav, at age 2-3, and their dad. Sav is holding a fish and smiling.

An image of Sav, at age 2-3, holding up a fish in their parent’s back yard.

An image of Sav, their mom and all of their siblings (except for the youngest as she has not been born yet at the time of this photo). They are all sitting on a bench and smiling. It is memorial day weekend.

An image of Sav and their older sister in a yellow and red tube on a lake. They are both wearing blue and purple life jackets and smiling at the camera.

Even the small creek that sits between my parents’ and their neighbor’s backyards is full of memories. Of our older neighbor Sara from two houses down convincing all the neighborhood kids that there was an alligator in the gutter at the end of the creek & that we all needed to eat the reeds she put “special potion” on aka cherry chapstick. Here, my younger siblings would catch frogs in the summer, and we would jump over the creek on our way home from school as a short cut.

An image taken by Sav of the creek behind their parent’s house in northern Minnesota.

I remember how lake Superior was always too frozen even in the hot months of summer, and yet my siblings and I would force ourselves to jump into the freezing waters when we went camping every year. And that one year we found an old snapping turtle on the beach covered in leeches, and how we tried to pick them off its dinosaur-like body with long sticks.

An image taken by Sav of Lake Superior in the summertime. The water looks aqua, yellow and blue.

It makes me think of our trips up to Gooseberry Falls, and that one year we all had to wear those powder-blue t-shirts that said “chicks rule,” or was it “chicks rock”, with tweety-bird on them. Or that time my younger sisters got covered in the hairs from the stinging caterpillar and broke out in hives.

An image of Sav, their siblings, their dad and family friends at Gooseberry Falls. The timestamp on the photo states it is August 1, 2003. Sav and their siblings are all wearing the same powder blue shirts.

I remember my long bike rides through the Mesabi trails that connect to other towns on the Iron Range, where the red iron ore mountains brightly clashed with the lush green trees and clear blue waters of the old mines turned into lakes. This clear water we would jump into at “the pit” trying to avoid the fire ants that had claimed the shores of the man-made lake.

An image taken by Sav on the Mesabi trail. The ground is rusty red from iron ore, and there are many green plants and trees around the trail.

An image taken by Sav of “the pit” in the summer time. The water is very clear and a light aqua color. There are many pine, birch and poplar trees in the background.

I remember Big Sandy lake at church camp and how the mayflies would live only for a day and then their bodies would coat the surface of the rust-colored water for the remainder of camp, sticking to our wet bodies on the way back to our cabins. And how in the winter, it would turn into the perfect surface for games of broomball.

I too miss the loon calls, sounding like a bird and a wolf calling out together, now replaced with the many coyotes in my neighborhood.

When my family first moved to northern Minnesota they had a house on the Prairie river, which my mom quickly wanted to move out of due to the overwhelming number of bull frogs that would hop onto the back porch at night. That same river was home to the U.S.’s largest inland oil spill to-date in 1991. Who knows how many animals, like Linda’s loon (24), were harmed by this spill? How many trees? People? Walleye and painted turtles?

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At 18 I moved to Minneapolis, with the Mississippi River cutting through the city. But this part of the river was so different than back home, as it and all the lakes were so polluted swimming was often banned despite the sticky humidity of summer in Minneapolis. I spent a lot of time by the Mississippi river in undergrad. I would walk for hours on the trails between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It was often, besides class, my only escape from abusive partners. Or not, as they would spend hours berating me on the phone as I paced the trails. But water, red dirt, and cloudy skies have always felt like “home” or at least like comfort.

The summer after my first year of university was easily the most painful time in my life. When school ended in May I was given the “options” of returning up north, likely to work at the same job as the men who drugged and raped me the summer before, or to keep pretending my current relationship was going well and to stay in Minneapolis. I still can’t pass by Loring Park without being abruptly pulled back in time, and at the same time, pulled into no time at all. We lived in an old worn down apartment on the second floor, the second apartment on the left, overlooking the park. He never allowed me to unpack or touch things without permission. I slept curled in a ball in the corner of the bed. I would often be kicked out of the apartment for hours, and was never given a key. I would sit on a bench by the small pond in the park, to watch the ducks in the water and the many squirrels run around and up the oak trees. Or would go to the Dunkin Donuts coffee shop down the block and to pay for black coffee and steal food so I could eat that day. That summer was a haze of daily panic attacks and dissociation. The abuse only became worse when I moved in. From frequent physical, sexual and verbal abuse to hiding my birth control as an attempt to get me pregnant, to restricting the hours I could work to make me financially dependent upon him.

It was the fourth of July, a hot summer night full of exploding fireworks and excitement, like a predictable novel, when I finally left.

What started as a fun night with my friends, because he was out of town for business, ended in him threatening my and my family’s lives. My parents drove down the next day and moved me into my grandparent’s house in a suburb outside of Minneapolis. I still lose time in July, drawn back again to this fight, my fear and my desperation. To my mother’s sadness and her vomiting in the apartment parking lot, sick at where I had ended up. In a sad, dirty apartment in an abusive relationship with a man over twice my age.

I was staying in the room my uncle David had been in only months prior, sick with pancreatic cancer. I slept with the lights on, a knife under my pillow and pepper spray in my hand. I lost so much time, so many friends, so much weight that summer—triggering the painful return of my anorexia. The rest of that summer wasn’t at all the summer’s of my childhood up north. It was a mix of me being terrified he would show up at my family’s or grandparent’s house, and my grandma’s grief over the loss of her only son. Neither of us ever articulated our sadness, rather we simply shared space together at her kitchen table. She would talk while doing her make-up and I would listen.

So many people in my family remarked at how they could never move in with her. Her, at the time diagnosed, dementia and grieving and delusions were seen as too overwhelming. Susan was often (mis)understood as “too much”. When like most of us, she just wanted to be listened to, or as I heard her cry to my grandpa, that she just wanted to be held.

My grandma passed away not long after David. The combination of grief and a series of previously undetected strokes led her to hospice rapidly. She had gone down to visit her adoptive family in Kansas—was this after my great-grandpa Coyne had died?—and my grandpa had gone to the Ozarks to go fly fishing. She had a bad fall due to her dystonia. This led to a loop of visits in and out of hospice—until the loop ended.

No one in my family talks openly about their sadness and grief—let alone their trauma or hallucinations or delusions. And yet, there are so many of us whether we are labeled “crazy” or “sad” or “brilliant” or “troubled.”

I vividly remember my great-uncle Ronnie coming to our house one summer, I must have been 10 or 12. He had a wagon full of water, and I remember he rang the front doorbell, which no one ever rang. He too must have felt at home with water. Whether this was because of the lithium, him traveling so many miles, or perhaps, the sloshing of the water provided a pleasant backdrop to his journey. I wonder what was so urgent that day or what he and my dad talked about. I too now carry around copious amounts of water with me because of my own medication. But I’m not treated like Ronnie.

I wonder how many more people in my family are like Susan and Ronnie and Me. How many more have never been diagnosed, or were misdiagnosed, were never listened to, never told they would be able to have a space to talk about their trauma. Did their sadness too feel like a weight in their chest? Like me, neither of my grandma’s had good hearts.

My grandma always wanted to go on a cruise in Alaska, my grandpa had even bought them tickets. But her fear of small spaces and of being lost stopped this dream before it could start.

I think about the dragonfly on her door during hospice. Symbolizing change, transformation, rejuvenation after hardship. She deserved all of this.

The ability to go, to fly. To be like one of the many dragonflies over the lakes and rivers and ponds at sunset in the summer.

———

My pain rapidly increased the spring of 2018. A combination of completing my MA thesis, experiencing multiple sexual assaults—most by close friends, losing a friend group due to being assaulted, losing a relationship, and donating my eggs in order to pay for my tuition all created too much stress for my bodymindspirit that it felt like I had broke. I felt alone and scared. I isolated myself from many of my close friends and chosen family, and had convinced myself that they didn’t want to be around me either.

It started with increased fatigue and my face became swollen and felt like it was on fire and numb all at the same time. My hands and feet would flash red or quickly become ice cold.

Raynaud’s, paresthesia, TMJ pain, migraine symptoms, neurasthenia, a pinched nerve in my cervical spine--take your pick of the many potential explanations I have received. The inexplicability of pain makes it so hard to talk or write about. How am I meant to quantify my mental or physical pain on a scale from 0-10?

How can I exactly pinpoint the number of days or percentage of time I have felt this way in the past 1-2 weeks if all my days blend together into a long grueling (non)reality or feel as if they have passed without me actually existing/experiencing them. How I need to slowly assess each part of my bodymind, inhabit it briefly to understand how I am feeling today, this morning, this moment.

Is it searing, pinching, crunching, rolling, stabbing, dull, shooting, creeping, tingling, scratching, throbbing, pounding, aching, tinging, hot, sharp, or numb pain? What other descriptors and adjectives am I missing?

Does it feel like I have been punched, pinched, scratched, slapped or stabbed?

Has it shifted quickly or slowly from parts of my body? Where did it start at?

How long does the pain last?

Has the feeling changed over time?

How much has it impeded on my day or my sleep?

Did it make me cry or it is just annoying?

Do I need to take my extra medication for it?

Is it just one area or most of my body?

Will I be able to work today?

For how long? In what positions?

“This book is a book about love. It didn’t begin that way. I sat down to write about pain and wrote, instead, about healing, history and survival” (Linda, Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir, 16)

I am not sure how long I should inhabit the space/time of pain in my writing.

Is it able to exist alongside love, care and healing? How can we make sure to not shy away from or override our “bad” and hurtful thoughtfeelings?

What recognition does our pain deserve from us?

And how can it also teach us to better understand and communicate with our bodymindspirits?

How can we learn to stop, listen, and observe rather than look for ways to cover it up? Can we give our pain and trauma space to breathe without feeding the flames too much? Without being consumed?

If pain/trauma is fire, is the water healing?

It would be easy to pin our tears as the water alone. They are necessary and I have shed enough of them in the classroom, on public transit, in the woods, in my bedroom, at my kitchen table with my dog trying to jump on me.

But too much water will lead to root rot and landslides and blocked trails.

“When the pain took up residence in my body, I spent years learning it, speaking with it, befriending it, dreaming and seeking out the medicines and plants that might heal it, trying to coax it away with charms, as with doctors of all kinds. Finally, my doctors became earth, water, light and air. They were animals, plants, and kindred spirits. It wasn’t healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world” (Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir, 16)

This is to say that our pain and ways of self/community care need to communicate in ways that don’t see “healing” as a linear destination or our pain as inherently negative. Because the sun too is fire and necessary for the Earth to grow—but it needs to be kept at the correct distance. I want to grow alongside my pain.

I don’t want to romanticize my nerve, muscle and joint pain nor my emotional/spiritual pain—but I don’t want to demonize it either, as pain makes up my daily life and if I hated it I would spend all my time wishing my bodymind was something else or nothing at all.

———

My pain is best soothed in a hot bath. But like many people with chronic pain will tell you, a hot bath is a savior and a harm. The hot water can help relax my muscles and joints, but will inflame my skin turning it bright red, swollen and tight. Getting out of the bath and walking to a towel becomes a feat as each step sends pain up my legs.

A hot bath is both care and pain, an act of love that requires compromise.

An image taken by Sav of them in a hot bathtub. There are candles lit and you can see light coming through the bathroom window.

Love alone will never save us from pain, in fact it has been ‘love’ that have led me back to rupture again and again.

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Works Cited: Hogan, Linda. (2001) The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. W. W. Norton & Company: New York & London.

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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.