Means of Writing for Wellness

I was reading this article and found much with which I agree. It also made me think about the many means of writing I have used to help me cope in my past.

Obviously, I journal. I’ve done this in books and online for as long as I can remember. Okay. Maybe not that long because, as many a young girl is, I was inspired to keep a journal by Anne Frank’s diary. I wanted to someday be as profound and passionate as she was in her writing. I have not journaled each and every day of my life. There are huge gaps of silence. Some occur because I am simply not as committed, at that time, to writing in my book. Other times my not writing was what I needed to do to cope with my immediate circumstance. As I said to someone wanting to know if it is possible to write the pain away: “There are times to write and times for silence, when healingneeds to take place before it is safe to look closely at the scar andtouch it to see if it is still painful or if it has gone numb.”

Poetry became my second form of journaling for a while. It was safer than keeping an actual journal because my husband had no concept of boundaries and the only way I could write safely was to disguise it in the form of poetry. Somehow, when he read the poems he could not see himself in the pain or anger of my expression. Instead, he accused me of cheating on him and writing love poems to another man. But I kept writing. And I credit that writing with finally giving me the strength to get a divorce. I simply got tired of writing about the same pain and not making any changes in my life to have some new source of poetic inspiration.

Another way I have worked through situations is through fiction writing. When I found out that someone I cared for deeply was cutting herself, I immediately ran to the solace of books and information to try to get a better understanding of what this person was doing and why. I tentatively explored my feelings in both my journal and through poems. Eventually, however, I tried to write about it more directly in a few short stories and even in a still unfinished manuscript for a young adult novel. I learned so much about myself, about my own emotional response to this situation, through writing about it from a different (perhaps safer?) place.

As the article explains, when writing creatively, I have more control over the situation. I can change the ending to make it happier. I can write about something on which I know I shouldn’t act from the safety of its just being words on paper or a computer monitor. In writing about something I can shift myself from being subjectively consumed within the situation to being objective enough to observe and assess things. I stop being controlled by and see where I can make changes and choices that are better suited to my long-term wellbeing.

I’ve used poetry to understand my relationship to others and to myself. I have used poetry and fiction writing to put myself into the emotional shoes of other people. And I have used journaling to help me understand why I feel the way I do.

And now, I am committed to using my condition, this endless vertigo, as an inspiration for more than just another excuse to stay in bed. Which is how I ended up here, with this blog; I am finally writing about my vertigo in poems. Maybe I’ll write more than just an occasional poem. Maybe I’ll write a whole book about how it feels to have a condition that does not have a diagnosis, a cure, or even a reason, a condition that just is.

Or maybe I'll just let myself just be and see where my writing and this condition take me next.

Introducing Cancer Bitch

In rediscovering the power of writing to heal myself, I am finding encouraging resources on the internet. The ones I find most intriguing are the blogs and writings of others who are working towards healing. It is always lovely to know that you are not walking alone.

Naturally, I was attracted to Cancer Bitch . . . with a title like that the blog had to be good. I knew I had found the right place when I saw her picture, her bald head with the henna tattoo.

When my mother came to visit after her breast cancer diagnosis, I met her at the airport wearing a wig I would occasionally wear to the clubs. Black with bangs. Rather Cleopatra like. Some people thought that this was not appropriate, that my mother would take offense. Instead, she loved it. Loved that we were both wearing wigs.

The next day, in her hotel room, we were going to stencil, in henna, the Sanskrit for Om onto her head. The henna took too long to set and we didn’t have enough time to wait. I hope she did it when she went home but now that I write this I realize that I never asked.

I share this to reinforce why, finding Cancer Bitch’s blog, felt like coming home for me. One of those Anne Shirley kindred spirits who faces her diagnosis with a fierce freedom, a wild will, and words. Above all else words.

Earlier this month, she wrote:

I was at a dinner about 10 days ago and someone asked me, Are you a survivor? It took me by surprise. I said, I guess. I guess the cancer has been excised and I've survived. But it seemed sort of premature. On the other hand, why not? I'm sure there are even some people out there who don't survive the surgery because of some freak reaction. So I'm a cancer survivor.

I used to fight the title “Survivor” because it implied that I had first suffered something. I had survived my marriage. I had survived a challenging childhood. I had survived being a high school dropout with honors, no less. I had survived. But I didn’t like the implication of being a survivor, of having had to first fall into fetal folded sobs of failure.

Now, I find myself in some ways joining with other Survivors. No, I do not have cancer. What I have, we cannot define. No, I am not facing death. Not even the immediate threat of death. Still, every day I Survive.

And I am not alone.

Neither are you.

What is the writing on my chest? It says, I am sensitive. I am
itching. I am mired down. I am turning on myself. I am allergic. I am overreacting. Allergy is an overreaction, the body gearing up to fight what it perceives as a dangerous foreign body. (But self, can't you see, it's just the stuff that makes the band-aid stay on; and it's just pollen, and mold and dust mites; what harm could they do?) Cancer is overproduction, the assembly belt gone haywire, cells gone wild. The sorceror's broom wheeling out of control when the apprentice thinks he knows enough. Too much too much too many. Let's cut it out. Let's bombard it with poison. And wait.

Weekly State of Affairs

I may not actually do this every week but I want to keep a sort of check-in on where I am physically periodically. At the least, I am sure I will do this monthly beginning with today, the ninth month "anniversary" of my having this condition.

Today I have had vertigo for nine months. That’s two thirds of a year. It began on a Tuesday in November of 2006. I woke up and realized I was having another of my Equilibrium Days. These days were the norm for me. I would wake up feeling a little off. I’d bump into things. I’d misjudge distances and knock something over in trying to pick it up. My shoulder would hit doorways and my hips would bump into every table and desk within hips’ distance.

Unfortunately for me, I have birthing hips and gave birth to twins so my hips cover a rather wide distance. It is not unusual for me to end up with a few bruises along the way. What was unusual this time is that the trouble didn’t go away after my morning coffee. Nor after I’d had lunch. I eventually went to bed assuming I would wake up my normal self.

Instead, I woke up considerably worse. The room felt like it was spinning and my eyes were leaping all over the place trying to keep up with a room that simply wasn’t moving. When I tried to walk the four steps from my side of the bed to the bathroom door, I literally fell into the wall.

I would do this many times in the coming weeks.

I went to my general practitioner and she did some blood work, gave me a prescription, and sent me home with a referral to see an Ears, Nose and Throat specialist if the medicine didn’t make the dizziness go away. Of course, you already know it didn’t because the first sentence of this post gives that denouement away. In all I have seen three doctors (including a neurologist), a physical therapist, a faith healer and an acupuncturist. I’ve had 3 MRIs, 1 CT scan, been tested for many different diseases including Lyme, syphilis, and . . . well, let’s just say I’ve had a lot of tests and I am perfectly healthy. On paper, that is.

I still can’t walk without help or looking down at my feet. I can’t drive because I can’t turn my head quickly. And the list of things that trigger my vertigo is seemingly endless. Today I added a new thing—the sound of a helicopter flying too closely overhead. On a good day, I can sit up for an hour or two and read. On a bad day, I can’t read and even watching television makes me ill. Going to a movie is difficult and I’ve only been to one since the vertigo hit.

One of the questions the doctors asked me is: When did the symptoms first occur? Eventually it would lead to how long have I experienced Equilibrium Days? How long? As long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, I remember lying in my bed and feeling it move like a flying carpet beneath me. I thought I had a fabulous imagination and it was so cool that I could do this. Naturally, I assumed anyone could do the same thing. Anyone with a really vivid imagination, that is. It never occurred to me that I never outgrew this imaginative ability nor that others didn’t occasionally have Equilibrium Days.

So no . . . no tumor or aneurysm. No Multiple Sclerosis or Meniere’s Disease. No diagnosis. No cure. No answers. I have an undiagnosed condition and, because I look perfectly healthy on paper, there’s nothing wrong with me. Or at least, that’s the professional opinion at the moment. I’m seeking another opinion for obvious reasons. Only because I haven’t figured out how to get these so-called professionals to walk their opinions in my shoes for a few days and see how healthy they feel.

If you know how I can do this, get these professionals to live inside my head for a few days, I would greatly appreciate it. Especially if I could walk inside their head for a while. See, I have a lot of errands to run and I am tired of asking others to drive me everywhere I want and need to go. Plus, it would save me the trouble of trying to find a second opinion about what is really going on inside my dizzy head.

Writing and Wellness

The purpose of this blog is to write specifically about myself in relation to my current condition (vertigo) as well as to explore my past methods of using writing to help myself work through situations in my life that I needed to change and/or accept. I hope to include many different things from personal journal entries to creative writing (poetry, short stories, etc.) to essays and responses to other peoples' efforts to write their way to a sense of wellbeing.

Which is why I am calling this blog Satia's Wellbeing. Sometimes these posts will be brutal but they will never be anything less than honest. I look forward to this new facet of my using writing in my life and I hope that those of you who are reading this will find strength and empowerment through these words.