Pain & Beauty
When we first arrived in Las Cruces, a plumber wouldn’t work on our water meter until we had a prickly pear cactus removed from the vicinity. Our yard is decorated with yucca, ocotillo, barrel, and hedgehog cacti (yes, the prickly pear is gone) and their spines are sharp enough to make anyone say ouch. The photo on this blog post is a yucca just coming into bloom. I’ve gardened around it enough to know I don’t want to get too close – my arms already bear scars from brushing against the painful, sharp spines. I read in a Southwestern gardening book that transplanting cacti is more dangerous for us, the transplanters, than it is for the cactus.
Pain & Beauty
This week, as I nursed some of those scars to healing, I wondered about the pain that yucca caused me, and the surprise its beautiful, big flowers elicited in me. I wasn’t expecting the flowers; I’ve just moved to the Southwest and didn’t know the life cycle of the cactus. Somehow, the yucca moth – the only animal species able to penetrate the spiney protection – had enabled this specimen to produce two magnificent flowers. I stared in awe that such a sinister life-form could create such beauty.
Pain
Sometimes it feels like life is one big cactus, filled with painful memories of the past and painful experiences in the present. Each is like a yucca spine filled with unwanted reminders that we are vulnerable. Like the spines, life hurts when you brush up against its rough edges. A pinch of a relationship today reminds me of a betrayal in the past. A slice of fear in the workplace mimics the near constant fear of my childhood. A cloud of doom when I make a decision is way too close to the cloud that followed me around all day, every day as I tried to navigate my childhood world. The Southwestern gardener working in and around cacti learns to keep a healthy distance from the spines that pierce the skin. You and I try to avoid the triggers that create inner pain.
Beauty
Like the majestic yucca, is it possible that we, too, may produce something beautiful beyond the pain? Many cacti don’t bloom until they reach full maturity and only after a dormant period. How many of us feel a mixture of stagnation and growth as we come to terms with our dissociative pasts and chaotic presence. Sometimes we may feel incapable of any forward movement. Other times, we may feel prickly both inside and out (ask our loved ones if they ever feel like they’re navigating a cactus around us, lol!). Both of these states of being, and more, may be a part of our life cycle that eventually lead us to bloom.
Our pain and prickliness is real and cannot be denied, but so is our beauty and awesomeness, our creativity and brilliance, our compassion and hope. Like the cactus, we are complicated organisms, people with dark and light, good and not so good, friend and foe. There is no excusing the abuse we experienced, but our amazing psyches find a way to take the worst that was done to us and turn it into the best that’s within us. In time, our life cycles push us to heal, urge us to grow, and lead us to bloom. Not without pain, confusion, and uncertainty, perhaps, but bloom nonetheless with large, fragrant, colorful flowers that represent the truth of who we are, not the lies we were told. Like the yucca, I am beautiful, you are beautiful, we are beautiful. Put on your garden gloves, keep a safe distance from the spines of any cactus in your garden, and let yourself bloom!
Self-Care
Take a piece of paper and fold it into two. On one side, write the word “Pain,” just the word, no examples. You know this may include all the pain that was inflicted on you, the pain you still endure, the pain you inflict on others. These are issues for you to work on, but not today. Just write the word Pain.
On the other side of the paper, write the word “Beauty.” Here, include all the examples of beauty in your life: beauty that emanates from you, beauty you see in the world around you, beauty you create. Beauty can cover a lot of territory, so think of your strengths, your resiliency, the way the best of your parts support the rest of you. I know, some of your faults will start creeping into your thinking; just tell them they’re included on the pain side of your paper and you’ll get to them someday. Go right back to your beauty and continue the list of your best traits, the thing that made you smile today, the hope you have for the future.
Now, with a list of your Beauty that takes up a whole page, just sit there and think about that. Let your beauty sink in. Receive your beauty. Be your beauty. Yes, the spines are still there, but remember the blossom. You are the blossom.
Dissociative Writers Publications
The first step in publication for a dissociative writer is sharing their writing with others in a supportive writers workshop. At Dissociative Writers (DW), we have lots of people who publish this way. Another way to publish is by submitting a guest blog post to me for our larger community to read. Some of our folks are researching ways to publish poems and short prose pieces in literary journals; more word coming to you when that research is complete. Some of us have published (or are in the process of publishing) memoirs, children’s books, and professional books about DID.
Creative Healing: An Anthology of Poems, Prose, and Art can be downloaded for free on the Dissociative Writers website by clicking here . Staying in the Room: Managing Medical and Dental Care When You Have DID by Cathy Collyer and Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory by Lyn Barrett can be purchased from Amazon by clicking on the titles. Support your dissociative writers!
A beginners, six-week Memoir Class for dissociative writers will be offered in September and October. Potential participants are encouraged to speak with their therapists before signing up. Some sense of inner stability is helpful when diving into this class. For more information or to register, go to the Dissociative Writers website by clicking here.
🕊
Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves.
Song of Solomon 1:15
Lyn