For the Birds: So I go to the page and get some air

Masks / mushrooms / poetry / & self-awareness. Plus: The Resiliency Circle is happening tonight!

Dec 17, 2024

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Thanks for being here! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours. Paid readers gain access to The Resiliency Circle & receive one nourishing prompt, tool, or worksheet every month.

Reminder: Tonight is the first of two Resiliency Circles I’m hosting this month! We’ll gather this evening, the 17th, at our usual 5:15pm Pacific. Then, we’ll meet (again) this Friday morning, the 20th, at 9:30am Pacific. Come to one, or both! Zoom link found here.

A macro shot of a dying white flower, with white text overlaid that reads: The Resiliency Circle. a gathering place, for creative nourishment.

Saturday morning.

I’m sitting on our blue couch with three books next to me: Texture Notes (Sawako Nakayasu), Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Claudia Rankine), and Research for people who think they would rather create (Dirk Vis).

I stopped drinking daily caffeine back in April—an experiment in lessening my anxiety—but today is a rare morning, and I let M pore about an inch of coffee into my ceramic cup. The same cup I drank mushroom tea from back in August.

Whether it’s coffee or orange juice or water, it always feels sacred, more intentional, when I drink something out of this cup.

On first glance, its glaze looks white, maybe linen. But when you hold it up to your face, you see other colors sprinkled in its smooth surface: deep pink, dull green, royal blue; tans and browns and oranges.

They’re there, but they’re also not there. Scattered.

Kind of like our masks.

Close-up shot of Sarah's left hand, holding up the ceramic mug she is writing about. Out-of-focus plants and snow-covered grass can be seen in the background.

How did they get there?

The colors, I mean.

How can a color exist briefly, fleetingly, in the surface of another one, so that you can’t tell if it’s really there or not?

I don’t know if I’m asking a scientific question, or an emotional one.

Either way, I’m asking genuinely.

The cup has two slight indents on either side, indents my fingers fit into perfectly—indents that prove the cup, after being thrown on a pottery wheel, was glazed by hand.

My ceramist friend is the one who pointed this out to me.

I had to google, “what do you call a person who makes ceramics?” in order to write that last sentence.

A list of predicted Google search questions, based on the phrase, "what do you call..." The last four predictions on the list include: What do you call a fake noodle, what do you call jokes, what do you call a bear with no teeth, and what do you call a group of turkeys?

So it’s Saturday, and I’m sitting, and drinking, and reading. And then, before I know it, I’m rocking.

I am rocking forward and backward, about a foot in either direction and without much speed—it’s early, and my body is still waking up.

I don’t realize that I’m rocking. I’m just doing it.

But eventually, I become aware of the rocking, and it stops.

I don’t experience the stopping as a choice.

I experience it as a happening.

I think, wait, that felt good. I think, I’d like to keep doing that. And I choose—force—my body to resume the movement.

But it seems different this time. There’s no momentum. It feels inorganic.

Before, my body felt like soft bread.

Now? I feel starched.

The momentum was in the happening, not in the thinking about.

So that the moment I am thinking about what’s happening, what’s happening slinks away.

When I’m feeling emotionally stuck—let’s say, when I’m having a meltdown, or when one of my “manic” days runs smack dab into the part of me who really, really dislikes being manic, and the cycle of inner turmoil starts up again—I try to think about what might be going on, desperate to understand it.

I used to call that latter part of me, hella Taurus. Stubborn, bull-headed, etc.

Now I call her, autistic.

I no longer vilify my desire to understand what’s going on in these moments, because I know that the desire to know why is a genuine feature of my neurotype. But I will admit that the effort doesn’t always create momentum, especially in real time, and especially when I’m already dysregulated. The thinking about is too similar a shape to the emotionally stuck. They aren’t different enough to create velocity. They just sit, one on top of the other, keeping me feeling the same, or worse.

I think, but I don’t get anywhere.

(Less profound Descartes.)

A photograph of Sarah, looking to the right of the frame and wearing a pink baseball cap over short hair. She is standing on a rocky short at the beach. A house, some plant matter, and a mountain can all be seen in the distant background.

The truth is that I feel most alive when I am writing, and I’m not without awareness that this is, on some level and in certain human contexts, a problem.

I don’t necessarily want it to be true.

That being said: it is.

Anyway,

Sitting on my blue couch, with my three books and my baby coffee, revisiting the poems that changed me in grad school, I become aware of the rocking, which is when the rocking stops.

I try to get it going again, but it doesn’t work.

Where did this mask come from, I think to myself.

This mask of self-awareness.

From Texture Notes

Layers of clarity.
I wake up this morning in the dark and can’t see, which is nothing terribly new. But I do not know if it is the darkness, if I slept without removing my contacts and they have thickened in my eyes, if my lenses are in normal shape and my eyes have somehow gone to hell, or if it is the darkness.
A developing ability to sleep deeply on the train. The never-been-broken-hearted club. A late night discovery or disturbance.
Things are clear enough, and thick enough—and if clarity is it, all that it’s hyped to be, and to be in the thick of it, this.

Sarah's hand holds a copy of Texture Notes, by Sawako Nakayasu, over her lap.

When I did therapeutic mushrooms back in August, I mostly did it the “right” way, lying flat on my back with an eye mask on and going inward, inward, inward. Inward to the cosmic netting of the universe, all buggy and floral. Inward to The Language-less Place.

But occasionally I bolted upright, took my mask off, and had something to say.

On one such occasion, I asked my facilitator to please read me the definition of the phrase, “self-consciousness.”

Ok, she said. It’s a long one…

That’s fine, I said.

“Self-consciousness is a heightened sense of awareness of oneself. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. Historically, ‘self-consciousness’ was synonymous with ‘self-awareness,’ referring to a state of awareness that one exists and that one has consciousness. While ‘self-conscious’ and ‘self-aware’ are still sometimes used interchangeably, particularly in philosophy, ‘self-consciousness’ has commonly come to refer to a preoccupation with oneself, especially with how others might perceive one's appearance or one's actions…”1

But that’s not self!…I said out loud, before sliding the eye mask over my face and slipping back to wherever I came from.

Well, what do you call a fake noodle?

I keep having this thought: That I am too self-aware to know anything real about myself.

And before you try to reassure me otherwise…just think about it for a moment. Just look at the evidence.

Another grainy, foggy photograph of a lighthouse in the background, this time further away, and with more foliage visible in the foreground.

So like I was saying, I keep having this thought: That knowing about oneself is very, very different from experiencing oneself.

That you can be—maybe, sometimes—too aware.

Because even if I know a lot about myself, it mostly lives in the realm of ideas, in the language place.

That doesn’t mean it’s true. That doesn’t mean it’s real.

Lots of true and real things can’t be put into language.

Which means—maybe, sometimes—knowing can become its own barrier.

Like in those moments where I find that I’m a person who isn’t being herself, but who is instead looking over at her self, and the disconnect that follows.

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Is there a diagnosis for that?