Relief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 44 of 88 · 20 per page

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Allendy is piecing the fragments together and talks about my partial frigidity. He discovers that I also consider this an inferiority and believe it is due to my frail physique. He laughs. He attributes it to a psychic cause, a strong sense of guilt. Sixty out of a hundred women feel as I do and never admit it and, most important of all, Allendy says, if I only knew what little difference this makes to men and how unaware they are of it. He always transforms what I term an inferiority into a natural thing, or one whose curse can be easily removed. I immediately feel a great relief and lose my terror and secretiveness. I tell him about June, of my desiring to be a femme fatale, of my cruelty towards Hugo and Eduardo, and my surprise that they should love me as much or more afterwards. We also discuss my frank, bold sex talk, how I reverse my true, innate modesty and exhibit a forced obscenity. (Henry says he doesn’t like my telling obscene stories, because it doesn’t suit me.) “But I am full of dissonances,” I say, feeling that strange anguish Allendy creates—half relief, because of his exactness, half sorrow for no specific reason, the feeling of having been discovered. “Yes, and until you can act perfectly naturally, according to your own nature, you will never be happy. The femme fatale arouses men’s passions, exasperates them, torments them, and they want to possess her, even to kill her, but they do not love her profoundly. You have already discovered that you are loved profoundly. Now you have also discovered that cruelty to both Eduardo and Hugo has aroused them, and they want you even more. This makes you want to play a game which is not really natural to you.” “I have always despised such games. I have never been able to conceal from a man that I loved him.” “But you tell me profound loves do not satisfy you. You crave to give and to receive stronger sensations. I understand, but that is only a phase. You can play the game now and then, to heighten passion, but profound loves are the loves which suit your true self, and they alone will satisfy you. The more you act like yourself the nearer you come to a fulfillment of your real needs. You are still terribly afraid to be hurt; your imaginary sadism shows that. So afraid to be hurt that you want to take the lead and hurt first. I do not despair of reconciling you to your own image.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I told him a little of the storm I had been through in the past days. I felt like someone condemned to die and then suddenly paroled. It didn’t seem to matter any more how often June might take Henry back. At this moment he and I were indissolubly married. The fusion of our bodies that followed was almost extraneous—for the first time, only a symbol, a gesture. A fusion so swift that it seemed to take place in space, and the movements of the body followed at a slower pace. I have written thirty pages about June in an intense and wholly imaginative manner, the best I have done so far. It is good to see all the laboratory experiments culminate in a lyrical outburst. Last night I deeply enjoyed myself at the Grand Guignol: the convulsions of a woman tempted by passion, lying naked on a black velvet couch. A lusty woman takes her pajamas down. I felt tremendous sexual excitement. Hugo and I visited another house, where the women were uglier than those at 32 rue Blondel. The room was lined with mirrors. The women moved like a herd of passive animals, two by two, turning to the phonograph music. Beforehand, I had been roused to high expectations. I could not believe the ugliness of the women as they came in. In my head, the dance of the naked women was still a beautiful and voluptuous orgy. As I saw the sagging breasts with their large brown leather tips, the bluish legs, the protruding stomachs, smiles with teeth missing, and that brutish mass of flesh turning lifelessly, like wooden horses of a merry-go-round, my feelings collapsed. Not even pity. Just cool observation. Again we see monotonous poses, and in between, when most uncalled for, the women kissed each other dispassionately, sexlessly. Hips, valleyed buttocks, the mysterious darkness between the legs—all exposed so meaninglessly that it took Hugo and me two days to separate the association of my body, my legs, my breasts from that troupe of turning animals. What I would like is to join them for one night, to walk naked into the room with them, to look at the men and women sitting there and to see their reaction when I appear, I and my halo of illusion. Cruelty to Eduardo. When he has elaborated a plan of intellectual domination of his pain, I sit very near him on the couch and make him read Henry’s writing, which he hates. He says I am breeding a little giant. I see him looking at my more aggressive breasts. I see him turn pale and rush away on an earlier train. Today I almost lost my mind craving Henry. I cannot live three days without him. Joyful, terrible slavery. Oh, to be a man, capable of satisfying one’s self so easily, so indiscriminately.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He was childishly courteous, the lie flowering effortlessly on his lips. Because he was lying, his mouth took on its boyhood mould poutingly provocative and rounded for a kiss. Edmee looked at him with an almost masculine satisfaction. ‘You’re looking well this morning, Fred. ... I must fly/ ‘Are you catching the 7.30?’ She stared at him, struck dumb, and fled so precipitately that he was still laughing when the front door slammed behind her. “Ahl that does me good,” he sighed. “How easy it is to laugh when you no longer expect anything from anyone. ...” Thus, while he was dressing, did he discover for himself the nature of asceticism, and the tuneless little song he hummed through pursed lips kept him company like a silly young nun. He went down to a Paris he had forgotten. The crowd upset his dubious emotional balance, now so dependent on a crystalline vacuity and the daily routine of suffering. In the Rue Royale he came face to face with his own full-length reflection at the moment when the brightness of noon broke through the rain-clouds. Cheri wasted no thoughts on this crude new selfportrait, which stood out sharply against a background of newsvendors and shopgirls, flanked by jade necklaces and silver fox furs. The fluid feeling in his stomach, which he compared to a speck of lead bobbing about inside a celluloid ball, must come, he thought, from lack of sustenance, and he took refuge in a restaurant. With his back to a glass partition, screened from the light of day, he lunched off selected oysters, fish, and fruit. Some young women sitting not far away had no eyes for him, and this gave him a pleasant feeling, like that of a chilly bunch of violets laid on closed eyelids. But the smell of his coffee suddenly brought home the need to rise and keep the appointment of which this smell was an urgent reminder. Before obeying the summons, he went to his hairdresser’s, held out his hands to be manicured, and slipped off into a few moments’ inestimable repose, while expert fingers substituted their will for his. The enormous key obstructed his pocket. “I won’t go, I won’t go! ...” To the cadence of some such insistent, meaningless refrain, he found his way without mishap to the Avenue de Villiers. His clumsy fumbling round the lock and the rasp of the key made his heart beat momentarily faster, but the cheerful warmth in the passage calmed his nerves.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Cheri welcomed this outburst of virulence as a timely shower. His mother’s malice had parted the clouds again, bringing back an atmosphere in which he could breathe. Not so long ago he had begun to enjoy discovering traces of the old Charlotte, who, from the safety of her balcony, would refer to a pretty woman passing below as ‘ a tuppenny-ha’penny tart,’ and who, to Chdri’s ‘Do you know her, then?’ would reply, ‘No! Whatever next! Do you expect me to know that slut?’ Only recently had he begun to take a confused pleasure in Charlotte’s superior vitality, and, confusedly, he now preferred her to the other two creatures present; but he was unaware that this preference, this partiality, could perhaps be termed filial affection. He laughed, and applauded Madame Peloux for still being — and quite startlingly so - the woman he had known, detested, feared, and insulted. For an instant, Madame Peloux took on her authentic character in her son’s eyes; that is to say, he estimated her at her proper value, a woman high-spirited, all-consuming, calculating, and at the same time rash, like a high financier; a woman capable of taking a humorist’s delight in spiteful cruelty. “ She’s a scourge, certainly,” he said to himself, “and no more. A scourge, but not a stranger.” Looking at the way the points of her hair impinged upon her Jacobin forehead, he recognized a similarity to the blue-black jutting points on his own forehead, which emphasized the whiteness of his skin and the blackbird sheen of his hair. “She’s my mother all right,” he thought. “No one’s ever told me I’m like her, but I am.” The ‘stranger’ was sitting opposite, glimmering with the milky, veiled brilliance of a pearl. Cheri heard the name of the Duchess of Camastra thrown out by the deep voice of the Baroness, and on the stranger’s face he saw a fleeting rapacity flicker and die like the serpent of flame that suddenly flares up along a burnt vine-twig before it is consumed among the embers. But she did not open her mouth, and took no part in the volley of military curses which the Baroness was firing at a hospital rival. * They’re properly in the soup, it appears, over some new-fangled injection or other. Two men died within two days of being given the needle. That needs some explaining! ’ said Madame de La Berche with a hearty laugh. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ corrected Edmee dryly. ‘That’s an old story of Janson-de-Sailly resuscitated.’ ‘No smoke without fire,’ sighed Charlotte charitably. ‘ Cheri, are you sleepy? ’ He was dropping with fatigue, but he admired the powers of resistance of these three women: neither hard work, the Parisian summer, nor perpetual movement and jabber could put them out of action. ‘ The heat,’ he murmured laconically. He caught Edmee’s eye, but she made no comment and refrained from contradicting him.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  They took me to McDonald’s, opened their files, asked their questions. McDonald’s scared me. There were too many children, screaming and crying and sliding into pits filled with colored balls. I had nothing to say. This one was a man, white, with a clipped beard like the jack of spades. His hands square as a shovel, he wore a signet on his pinkie finger. He found me a permanent placement. When I left the group home on Crenshaw Boulevard, nobody said good-bye. But the girl with the scar tattoos stood on the front porch and watched me drive away. Clusters of lavender jacarandas emerged from the ranks of trees as we stitched along the gray-and-white streets. It took four freeways to get to my new home. We exited onto a street that sloped upward like a ramp. Tujunga, the signs said. I watched the low ranch houses get larger, then smaller, the yards chaotic. The sidewalks disappeared. Furniture grew on the porches like toadstools. A washing machine, scrap lumber, a white hen, a goat. Finally we were no longer in town. We came over a rise and we could see the wash, half a mile across, kids on dirt bikes cutting trails in the open land, kicking up pale plumes of dust. In contrast, the air seemed listless, defeated. We stopped in the dirt yard of a house, part trailer, but so many parts added on, you had to call it a house. A plastic garden pinwheel stood motionless in a patch of geraniums. Spider plants hung from pots on the wide trailer porch. Three little boys sat, watching. One held a jar with some kind of animal. The biggest one pushed his glasses up on his nose, called back over his shoulder, through the screen door. The woman who came through it was busty and leggy, with a big smile, her teeth white and shallow, all in the front. Her nose was flat at the bridge, like a boxer’s. Her name was Starr and it was dark inside her trailer. She gave us sugary Cokes we drank out of the can as the caseworker talked. When she spoke, Starr moved her whole body, throwing her head back to laugh. A small gold cross glittered between her breasts, and the caseworker couldn’t keep his eyes off that deep secret place. She and the caseworker didn’t even notice when I went outside. There were no fringy jacarandas here, only oleanders and palms, pear cactus and a big weeping pepper. The dust that covered everything was the pinkish beige of sandstone, but the sky was broad as an untroubled forehead, the pure leaded blue of stained glass. It was the first time the ceiling wasn’t pressing on my head. The biggest boy, the one with the glasses, stood up. “We’re catching lizards, you want to?” They trapped the lizards with shoebox snares down in the wash.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He took a mouthful or two of the fizzy iced drink, leaned his head back against the yellow plush of the banquette, and was delighted to feel a slackening of the mental strain which, for the last fortnight, had been sapping his strength. The dead weight of the present had not accompanied him across the threshold of the bar, which was oldfashioned, with red walls, gilt festoons, plaster roses, and a large open hearth. The cloakroom attendant could be half seen in her tiled kingdom, counting every stitch as she mended the linen, her white hair bowed beneath a green lamp. A passer-by dropped in. He did not trespass upon the yellow room, but took his drink standing at the bar as though to be discreet, and left without a word. The Odol odour of the creme-de-menthe was the only thing distasteful to Cheri, and he frowned in the direction of the dim old woman. Under a black and battered soft hat, he could distinguish an old face, accentuated here and' there by rouge, wrinkles, kohl, and puffiness - all jumbled together - rather like a pocket into which have been popped, higgledly-piggledy, handkerchief, keys, and loose change. A vulgar old face, in short - and commonplace in its vulgarity, characterized, if at all, only by the indifference natural to a savage or a prisoner. She coughed, opened her bag, blew her nose vaguely, and replaced the seedy black reticule on the marble-topped table. It had an affinity with the hat, for it was made of the same black cracked taffeta, and equally out of fashion. Cheri followed her every movement with an exaggerated repugnance; during the last two weeks he had been suffering, more than he could reasonably be expected to bear, from everything that was at once feminine and old. That reticule sprawling over the table almost drove him from the spot. He wanted to avert his eyes, but did nothing of the sort: they were riveted by a small sparkling arabesque, an unexpected brilliance fastened to the folds of the bag. His curiosity surprised him, but half a minute later he was still staring at the point of sparkling light, and his mind became an absolute blank. He was roused from his trance by a subconscious flash of triumphant certainty, and this gave him back the freedom to think and breathe. “I know! It’s the two capital L’s interlaced!” He enjoyed a moment of calm satisfaction, not unlike the sense of security on reaching a journey’s end. He actually forgot the cropped hair on the nape of that neck, the vigorous grey locks, the big nondescript coat buttoned over a bulging stomach; he forgot the contralto notes of the peal of youthful laughter — everything that had dogged him so persistently for the past fortnight, that had deprived him of any appetite for food, any ability to feel that he was alone.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  And because of this interruption, he thought that she must be impatient to see the last of him. A few words were exchanged during Chen’s retreat, in the intervals of bumping into some piece of furniture, crossing a strip of sunshine from the courtyard window after the pink light in the drawing-room it seemed by comparison almost blue — kissing a puffy hand bulging with rings when it was raised to his lips. Another of L6a’s laughs, which broke off abruptly half-way down its usual scale, just like a fountain when the jet is turned off and the crest of the plume, suddenly bereft of its stem, falls back to earth in a myriad separate pearls. ... The staircase seemed to glide away under Cheri’s feet like a bridge connecting two dreams, and once more he was in the Rue Raynouard. Even the street was unfamiliar. He noticed that the rosy tints of the sky were wonderfully reflected in the rain-filled gutters and on the blue backs of the lowskimming swallows. And now, because the evening was fresh, and because all the impressions he was bringing away with him were slipping back perfidiously into the recesses of his mind - there to assume their final shape and intensity — he came to believe that he had forgotten all about them, and he felt happy. Only the sound of an old woman's bronchial cough, as she sat over her glass of creme-de-menthe, disturbed the peace of the bar room where the murmur of the Place de 1’Opera died away, as though muffled in an atmosphere too thick to carry any eddies of sound. Cheri ordered a long drink and mopped his brow: this precaution was a carry-over from the days when he had been a little boy and sat listening to the babble of female voices, as, with Biblical gravity, they bandied such golden rules as: ‘If you want your milk of cucumber with real cucumber in it, you must make it yourself or ‘Never rub the perspiration into your face when you’re overheated, or the perspiration will get under your skin and ruin it.’ The silence, and the emptiness of the bar, created an illusion of coolness, and at first Chdri was not conscious of the couple who, with heads bent close together across a narrow table, were lost in inaudible whisperings. After a few moments his attention was drawn to this unknown man and woman by an occasional hissing sibilant which rose above the main stream of their chatter, and by the exaggerated expressions on their faces. They looked like servants, underpaid, overworked, and patient.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  He went on biding his time, even after surprising Edmee in front of the looking-glass, after that flagrant exhibition of over-excitement, flushed cheeks, and untidiness. He let the hours slip by, and did not put into words — and so accentuate — his certainty that a still almost chaste understanding existed between his wife and the man who had been singing * Oy MarieJ’ For he felt much lighter in spirit, and for several days stopped uselessly consulting his wrist-watch as soon as daylight began to fade. He developed the habit of sitting out under the trees in a basket-chair, like a newly arrived guest in an hotel garden. There he marvelled to see how the oncoming night blotted out the blue of the monkshood, producing in its stead a hazier blue into which the shapes of the flowers were fused, while the green of their leaves persisted in distinct clumps. The edging of rose-coloured pinks turned to rank mauve, then the colour ebbed rapidly and the July stars shone yellow between the branches of the weeping ash. He tasted at home the pleasures enjoyed by a casual passer-by who sits down to rest in a square, and he never noticed how long he remained there, lying back with his hands dangling. Sometimes he gave a fleeting thought to what he called The looking-glass scene* and the atmosphere in the blue room when it had been secretly troubled by a man’s sudden appearance, theatrical behaviour, and flight. He whispered over and over, with foolish mechanical regularity, “That’s one point established. That’s 'what’s called a point-testablished,” running the two words together into one. At the beginning of July he bought a new open motor, and called it his Riviera Runabout. He drove Filipesco and Desmond out along drought-whitened roads, but returned to Paris every evening, cleaving alternate waves of warm and cool air, which began to lose their good smells the nearer the motor drew to Paris. One day he took out the Baroness de La Berche, a virile companion, who, when they came to the barriers of the Octroi, raised her forefinger to the little felt hat pulled well down on her head. He found her agreeable, sparing of words, interested in wayside inns overgrown with wistaria, and in village wine-shops with their cellar-smell and wine-soaked sand. Rigid and in silence, they covered two hundred miles or more, without ever opening their mouths except to smoke or feed. The following day Cheri again invited Camille de La Berche with a curt ‘Well, how about it. Baroness?’ and whisked her off without further ado. The trusty motor sped far afield through the green countryside, and came back at nightfall to Paris like a toy at the end of a string.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In this way the (fear-immobility) feedback loop is broken; colloquially, it runs out of gas. As a client learns to experience the physical sensations of the immobility in the absence of fear, trauma’s grip is loosened, and equilibrium is restored. In the next four chapters, I discuss how therapists can help clients learn how to uncouple the fear from the immobility and restore active defensive responses. When clients achieve this, they often describe the physical sensation of immobility (in the absence of fear) with a mixture of curiosity and profound relief or, often, “as though waking from a nightmare.” There is an important caveat to this simple “prescription.” Where trauma has been lengthy and deeply entrenched, other factors come into play: primarily, one’s very faculty for change and reengagement in life becomes impaired. This aspect has been poignantly portrayed in Louise Erdrich’s compelling novel The Master Butchers Singing Club . In the first chapter, the male protagonist, Fidelis, leaves the trenche s Charting Duration of Immobility Amongst Different Scenarios Figure 4.1a This figure illustrates the duration and severity of “freezing” in three situations. The first scenario is similar to an opossum being attacked and playing dead. The opossum freezes, and the predator, losing interest in this inert carrion, walks off in search of livelier prey. Left alone, the opossum “shakes off” this encounter and goes on its way, none the worse. This is called self-paced termination . The second scenario illustrates what happens when an animal emerging from immobility is restrained and frightened. It is thrust back into terror, and the immobility is far deeper, lasting for a much longer time. This paralyzing terror is the effect of fear-potentiated immobility and leads to PTSD. This is why the phrase “time heals all wounds” simply does not apply to trauma. The third scenario shows what happens in a successful therapy session. The therapist gradually guides the client to briefly touch into the immobility sensations, and then guides her to uncouple the immobility from the fear. In this way she can discharge the underlying hyperarousal and return to equilibrium. of World War I and returns to his mother’s cooking and kindness. He sleeps for the first time in his own familiar, comfortable bed, an experience that he has not known for years. Fear/Immobility Cycle Figure 4.1b This is how we become trapped in the fear/immobility cycle. Now that he was home, he understood, he must still be vigilant. Memories would creep up on him, emotions sabotaging his thinking brain. To come alive after dying to himself was dangerous.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In a strange way, though, I was relieved that he had no feeling; that way I wouldn’t have to feel either. Intellectually, I distanced myself from feeling and from Adam. I was able to do this by falling back on a clinical analysis, wondering what mechanism he had used to wall himself off from his horrific experiences and how he had kept himself from winding up wandering in the streets, like he had done as an orphan, or in the back ward of some mental institution. As a way to try to initiate a little contact, I questioned Adam about his work, his family and friends—any topic where I thought there might be an entry point to even a tiny trace of positive feeling. Nothing came of this. I found myself, strangely, asking him to describe the last few hours of his day. Puzzled, he told me of missing his flight and frantically renting a car to drive the two hundred miles from Curitiba to São Paulo to meet with me. At the rental lot near the airport he recalled seeing children flying kites that they had made from things found at the garbage dump. h I caught the first flicker on his otherwise expressionless face. But then, just as quickly, his face became flat again, and his body slumped forward in resignation. Not wanting him to collapse, I asked him to stand up with his knees slightly bent. Standing requires the activation and coordination of the proprioceptive and kinesthetic systems. This had the effect of keeping Adam’s awareness online by engaging the arousal branch of his nervous system. This intervention is the opposite of allowing a client to collapse, activating the shutdown response and thus perpetuating the mortifying feelings of shame and defeat. While he was standing erect with relaxed knees, I then directed Adam to “look inside” and find some place within his body where he could “find the picture of the children playing with their improvised kite.” i At first, he reported feeling more anxious (due to sympathetic hyperarousal), but with encouragement, Adam was able to locate a small circle of warmth in his belly. I asked him to “just get to know that sensation for a little while.” He abruptly opened his eyes, surprising himself with his own words: “This could be dangerous.” “Yes,” I agreed, “it could be; that’s why it’s important to learn about feeling, just a little bit at a time. Your body has been frozen for a long time; it will take some time to thaw,” I add. It was important that I validate his legitimate fear and offer him an image (thawing from freeze) that would help mitigate his fear, inviting him to explore his internal experience. Adam then sat down and looked around the room. I asked him to describe what he saw. j This provided the opportunity to connect the warmth in his belly with how he perceived the external world in the here and now.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She was watching and listening to her old enemy in satisfied astonishment. The huge inhuman eyes, the chattering lips, the restless, tight little body - all that was facing her across the table had come simply to test her powers of resistance, to humiliate her, as in the old days, always as in the old days. But, as in the old days, L£a knew when to answer, when to be scornful, when to smile, and when to retaliate. Already that sorry burden, which had weighed so heavily the day before and the days before that, was beginning slowly to lift. The light seemed normal once more, and familiar, as it played over the curtains and suffused the little drawing-room. “Here we are again,” Lea thought, in lighter vein. “Two women, both a little older than a year ago, the same habits of backbiting and the same stock phrases; good-natured wariness at meals shared together; the financial papers in the morning, scandalmongering in the afternoon: ail this will have to be taken up again, since it’s Life, my life. The Aldonzas and the de la Berches, the Lilis, and a fewhomeless old gentlemen: the whole lot squeezed round a card table, with the packs jostling the brandy-glasses, and perhaps, thrown in, a pair of little woollen shoes, begun for a baby who’s soon to be bom. ... We’ll start all over again, since it is ordained. Let’s enter on it cheerfully. After all, it’s only too easy to sink back into the grooves of the old life.” And she settled back, eyes bright and mouth relaxed, to listen to Charlotte Peloux, who was greedily expatiating upon her daughterin-law. My L£a, you should know, if anyone, that what I’ve always longed for is peace and quiet. Well now, I’ve got them. Cheri’s escapade, you see, was nothing more than sowing a few wild oats. Far be it from me to reproach you, Lea dear, but as you’ll be the first to admit, from eighteen to twenty-five he really never had the time to lead the life of a bachelor! And now he’s done it with a vengeance P ‘It’s a very good thing that he did/ Lea said, without the flicker of a smile; ‘it acts as a sort of guarantee to his wife for the future/ ‘The very word, the very word I was hunting for!* barked Madame Peloux, beaming. ‘A guarantee! And ever since that day — one long dream! And, you know, when a Peloux does come home again after being properly out on the spree, he never goes off again! * ‘Is that a family tradition?’ Lea asked. But Charlotte took no notice.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  “Be off, be off...” Quivering, Lea stood watching Madame Peloux as she crossed the courtyard. “Go on your mischievous way! Nothing can stop you. You twist your ankle, yes - but it never brings, you down. Your chauffeur is careful not to skid, so you’ll never crash into a tree. You’ll get back safely to Neuilly, and you’ll choose your moment - to-day, or to-morrow, or one day next week — to come out with words that should never pass your lips. You’ll try and upset those who, perhaps, are happy and at peace. The least harm you'll do is to make them tremble a little, as you made me, for a moment. ...” She was trembling at the knees, like a horse after a steep pull, but she was not in pain. She felt overjoyed at having kept so strict a control over herself and her words. Her looks and her colour were enhanced by her recent encounter, and she went on pulping her handkerchief to release her bottled-up energy. She could not detach her thoughts from Madame Peloux. “We’ve come together again,” she said to herself, “like two dogs over an old slipper which both have got used to chewing. How queer it is! That woman is my enemy, and yet it’s from her I now draw my comfort. How close are the ties that bind us!” Thus, for a long time, she mused over her future, veering between alarm and resignation. Her nerves were relaxed, and she slept for a little. As she sat with one cheek pressed against a cushion, her dreams, projected her into her fast-approaching old age. She saw day follow day with clockwork monotony, and herself beside Charlotte Peloux — their spirited rivalry helping the time to pass. In this way she would be spared, for many years, the degrading listlessness of women past their prime, who abandon first their stays, then their hair-dye, and who finally no longer bother about the quality of their underclothes. She had a foretaste of the sinful pleasures of the old — Hide else than a concealed aggressiveness, day-dreams of murder, and the keen recurrent hope for catastrophes that will spare only one living creature and one corner of the globe. Then she woke up, amazed to find herself in the glow of a pink twilight as roseate as the dawn. “Ah, Cheri!” she sighed. But it was no longer the raucous hungry cry of a year ago. She was not now in tears, nor was her body suffering and rebellious, because threatened by some sickness of the soul. Lea rose from her chair, and rubbed her cheek, embossed by the imprint of the embroidered cushion. “My poor Cheri! It’s a strange thought that the two of us — you by losing your worn old mistress, and I by losing my scandalous young lover — have each been deprived of the most honourable possession we had upon this earth!”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Maybe if I’d kept grinding away in fear-based reactions, I would have reached my cancer-free goal. Or maybe I’d just be broke. None of these treatments were covered by my already too-expensive insurance. But since no one could tell me how long it would take to reach the finish line, or how effective these treatments would be, there was no end in sight. Did I mention that my oncologist had no idea what I was doing? Afraid he would try to stop me, I kept quiet about my extracurriculars. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he asked me if there was anything new going on. “Well, there is one thing,” I said, lowering the neck of my shirt to reveal my port. “What the heck is that?!” he said. “I tried to cure myself—again,” I replied, sheepish. He agreed to surgically remove the device if I promised not to wander off the beaten path again without consulting him first. Fair enough. But the experience (and his alarmed expression) really got me thinking. I was spending 90 percent of my time running around trying questionable therapies that my highly qualified doc didn’t sanction. What if I lived a long life with cancer, but missed out on the simple moments and everyday magic by wasting my days in worry? I couldn’t stomach that kind of regret, so I did what I rarely do. I quit. I quit trying to have perfect health. I quit comparing myself to other patients and coming up short. I quit blaming myself for getting sick and for not getting well. Most importantly, I quit seeing myself as anything other than whole. And while I quit trying to cure myself, I never quit betting on myself. This is how I learned that there was a difference between healing and curing. Curing takes place at the physical level. It’s absolutely possible but never guaranteed. Healing, on the other hand, takes place at the spiritual level and is available to all of us—no matter who we are, what we look like, or where we come from. And just like love, healing never ends. In fact, we can be healing and dying at the very same time. The only thing required to enter the healing path is the decision to do so. Nothing and no one can take it away from you—not even your own mortality. While figuring out how to truly accept this paradigm is by no means easy, know that on the other side of this awareness is a greater ease and appreciation for life, as well as a deeper compassion for yourself and others.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I ask her to put her verbal narrative aside for the moment and to place her attention, instead, on the nascent message her hands are communicating to both of us. I encourage her to pursue this avenue by slowly repeating the movement and keeping her focus on its physical sensation. a Moving slowly and focusing attention on a movement allows it to be felt in a special way. When clients do this, most often they will experience their arms (or other part of the body) moving as if on its own (“like my arm is moving me!”). People will often smile or laugh because the sensation of the arm moving itself seems so unusual. b Perplexed at first, Sharon describes the gesture as though she is “holding something.” A noticeable shift occurs in her body; her face is visibly less strained and her shoulders less rigid. Unexpectedly, a fleeting image of the Hudson River appears in her mind’s eye, the daily view from the living room in her apartment across the river from Manhattan. Jumping back to the narrative story, Sharon becomes agitated as she tells me how she is haunted, revisited, by the smoldering smoke plumes, which she now sees every day from this same window. They evoke the horribly acrid smells from that day; she feels a burning in her nostrils. Rather than letting her go on “reliving” the traumatic intrusion, I firmly contain and coax her to continue focusing on the sensations of her arm movements. A spontaneous image emerges , one of boats moving on the river. They convey to her a comforting sense of timelessness, movement and flow. “You can destroy the buildings, but you can’t drain the Hudson,” she pronounces softly. Then, rather than going on with the horrifying details of the event, she surprises herself by describing (and feeling) how beautiful it had been when she had set out for work on that “perfect autumn morning. ” This process is an example of expanding the “aperture” of an image to its pretraumatic state (as described in Chapter 7 ). Up to the moment before the impact of the jet, it had been a perfect day, infused with vibrant colors and gentle scents. These sense impressions still exist somewhere in the catacombs of consciousness, but they have been overridden by the traumatic fixation. Gradually restoring the full spectrum of the disparate parts of an image is an integral component of resolving trauma. c Sharon’s body and images are beginning to tell a story that contrasts markedly with the one her words are relaying, almost as though narrated by two entirely different persons. As she holds the images of the Hudson River, along with the associated body sensations, she becomes aware of a tentative sense of relief.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  O 31 n the evening late in August when the play closed Vanessa took the yellow roses provided for her curtain calls and laid them on the stage, beneath the photograph of John and Quintana on the deck in Malibu that was the closing drop of the set Bob Crowley had designed for the production. The theater cleared. I was gratified to see how slowly it cleared, as if the audience shared my wish not to leave John and Quintana alone. We stood in the wings and drank champagne. Before I left that evening someone pointed out the yellow roses Vanessa had laid on the stage floor and asked if I wanted to take them. I did not want to take the yellow roses. I did not want the yellow roses touched. I wanted the yellow roses right there, where Vanessa had left them, with John and Quintana on the stage of the Booth, lying there on the stage all night, lit only by the ghost light, still there on the stage right down to the inevitable instant of the morning’s eight-a.m. load- out. “Performance 144 + 23 Previews + 1 Actors Fund,” the stage manager’s performance notes read for that night. “Magical evening. Lovely final show. Call from the director pre-show. Roses at the call. Champagne toast. Guests included Griffin Dunne and daughter Hannah and Marian Seldes. Café Didion served up its final Piece o’ Chicken and sides.” By that evening when the play closed it seemed clear that I had in fact maintained momentum, but it also seemed clear that maintaining momentum had been at a certain cost. This cost had always been predictable but I only that night began to put it into words. One phrase that came to mind that night was “pushing yourself.” Another was “beyond endurance.” “I 32 fell prey to water intoxication or low sodium, which is characterized by hallucination, memory loss, and corporeal ineptness; a veritable cornucopia of psychoses. I could hear voices, see four different images on the television at one time, read a book in which each word cd separate to fill the page. I’d ask people on the phone who they thought they were talking to cause i certainly didn’t know. & I fell constantly. On top of this phantasmagoric experience, I had a stroke.” So wrote the playwright Ntozake Shange, in In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life After 50, about the maladies that struck her from the blue in her fifties. “The stroke put an end to nanoseconds of images & left a body with diminished vision, no strength, immobile legs, slurred speech, and no recollection of how to read.” She learned to remember how to read. She learned to remember how to write.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  If you’re on the fence after the first meeting, reflect on why you’re questioning this fit and raise these points with your therapist. How they respond will tell you a lot about whether or not they’re the right person for you. If something in your gut doesn’t feel right, don’t dismiss it outright. At the end of the day, it’s important to work with someone you feel comfortable going to uncomfortable places with. Medication When Dad became terminal, medication helped keep me from sinking under waves of depression. His loss felt too big to handle without completely losing myself. And yet, for years I was resistant to pharmaceutical intervention, even just as a bridge to get me to a steadier place. Medication, especially in the wellness world, is often stigmatized. Not surprisingly. The incidents of doctors overprescribing medications are well documented, and many medications carry unwanted, and often debilitating, side effects. But medication wasn’t new to me. It helped me through difficult periods at other times in my life, including when I started having panic attacks after meeting BD. So, I knew what chronic depression felt like, I’d experienced prolonged bouts of white-knuckling through it, and I could tell when I was sinking into it again. And yet it took me nine months of unbearable struggle before I was brave enough to meet with a psychiatrist and get my own prescription. I was so relieved once I did. There’s no shame in finding reasonable ways, including medication, to help navigate these kinds of highly emotional and upsetting situations. Medication has helped me navigate my own grief and trauma. I never expect it to solve my problems or replace the hard and rewarding work of healing, but it has allowed me to stay buoyant when the ocean swells surround me. Everybody’s journey is different and personal. I hope that by sharing my tools and experiences, you feel less alone. Pillar Four—How You’re Resting (The Health Benefits of Sleep) When I talk with people about their biggest health challenges, sleep is often the number one issue. Most of us know how stressful it is to toss and turn all night, and many of us experience this on a regular basis. In America alone, 70 million people suffer from some sort of sleep disorder. Either folks aren’t getting enough sleep, they’re staying up too late or rising too early, or their sleep is so restless they wake up feeling exhausted. When we’re affected by grief, overwhelm, stress due to increased caregiving, prolonged worry, personal health issues, a global pandemic, toxic politics, social unrest, injustice, economic hardships, and so forth, sleeping well can feel impossible. But many major restorative functions occur while we sleep. For adults, the biggies are muscle growth, protein synthesis, and tissue and cell repair. For infants and children, hormone production and brain development are key (which is why they need so much more sleep than we do).

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “We are going”, he added, “to the Fifth Avenue Hotel away up town in Madison Square: we’ll be comfortable there”, and he smiled self-complacently. I smiled too, and thanked him; but I had no intention of going in his company. I went back to the ship and thanked Dr. Keogh with all my heart for his great goodness to me; he gave me his address in New York and incidentally I learned from him that if I kept the key of my trunk, no one could open it or take it away; it would be left in charge of the Customs till I called for it. In a minute I was back in the long shed on the dock and had wandered nearly to the end when I perceived the stairs: “Is that the way into the town?” I asked and a man replied, “Sure.” One quick glance around to see that I was not noticed and in a moment I was down the stairs and out in the street: I raced straight ahead of me for two or three blocks and then asked and was told that Fifth Avenue was right in front. As I turned up Fifth Avenue, I began to breathe freely; “no more fathers for me.” The old Greybeard who had bothered me was consigned to oblivion without regret. Of course, I know now that he deserved better treatment. Perhaps indeed I should have done better had I accepted his kindly, generous help, but I’m trying to set down the plain, unvarnished truth, and here at once I must say that children’s affections are much slighter than most parents imagine. I never wasted a thought on my father; even my brother Vernon who had always been kind to me and fed my inordinate vanity, was not regretted: the new life called me: I was in a flutter of expectancy and hope. Some way up Fifth Avenue I came into the great Square and saw the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but I only grinned and kept right on till at length I reached Central Park. Near it, I can’t remember exactly where, but I believe it was near where the Plaza Hotel stands today, there was a small wooden house with an outhouse at the other end of the lot. While I stared a woman came out with a bucket and went across to the outhouse. In a few moments she came back again and noticed me looking over the fence. “Would you please give me a drink?” I asked. “Sure I will”, she replied with a strong Irish brogue. “Come right in” and I followed her into her kitchen.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “We are going”, he added, “to the Fifth Avenue Hotel away up town in Madison Square: we’ll be comfortable there”, and he smiled self-complacently. I smiled too, and thanked him; but I had no intention of going in his company. I went back to the ship and thanked Dr. Keogh with all my heart for his great goodness to me; he gave me his address in New York and incidentally I learned from him that if I kept the key of my trunk, no one could open it or take it away; it would be left in charge of the Customs till I called for it. In a minute I was back in the long shed on the dock and had wandered nearly to the end when I perceived the stairs: “Is that the way into the town?” I asked and a man replied, “Sure.” One quick glance around to see that I was not noticed and in a moment I was down the stairs and out in the street: I raced straight ahead of me for two or three blocks and then asked and was told that Fifth Avenue was right in front. As I turned up Fifth Avenue, I began to breathe freely; “no more fathers for me.” The old Greybeard who had bothered me was consigned to oblivion without regret. Of course, I know now that he deserved better treatment. Perhaps indeed I should have done better had I accepted his kindly, generous help, but I’m trying to set down the plain, unvarnished truth, and here at once I must say that children’s affections are much slighter than most parents imagine. I never wasted a thought on my father; even my brother Vernon who had always been kind to me and fed my inordinate vanity, was not regretted: the new life called me: I was in a flutter of expectancy and hope. Some way up Fifth Avenue I came into the great Square and saw the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but I only grinned and kept right on till at length I reached Central Park. Near it, I can’t remember exactly where, but I believe it was near where the Plaza Hotel stands today, there was a small wooden house with an outhouse at the other end of the lot. While I stared a woman came out with a bucket and went across to the outhouse. In a few moments she came back again and noticed me looking over the fence. “Would you please give me a drink?” I asked. “Sure I will”, she replied with a strong Irish brogue. “Come right in” and I followed her into her kitchen.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  When I returned that night I was presented to Mike: I found him a big, good-looking Irishman who thought his wife a wonder and all she did perfect. “Mary”, he said, winking at me, “is one of the best cooks in the wurrld and if it weren’t that she’s down on a man when he has a drop in him, she’d be the best gurrl on God’s earth. As it is, I married her and I’ve never been sorry: have I Mary?” “Ye’ve had no cause, Mike Mulligan.” Mike had nothing particular to do next morning and so he promised he would go and get my little trunk from the Custom House. I gave him the key. He insisted as warmly as his wife that I should stay with them till I got work: I told them how eager I was to begin and Mike promised to speak to his chief and some friends and see what could be done. Next morning I got up about five-thirty as soon as I heard Mike stirring, and went down Seventh Avenue with him till he got on the horse-car for down-town and left me. About seven-thirty to eight o’clock a stream of people began walking down-town to their offices. On several corners were bootblack shanties. One of them happened to have three customers in it and only one bootblack. “Won’t you let me help you shine a pair or two?”, I asked. The bootblack looked at me: “I don’t mind”, he said and I seized the brushes and went to work. I had done the two just as he finished the first: he whispered to me “halves” as the next man came in and he showed me how to use the polishing rag or cloth. I took off my coat and waistcoat and went to work with a will; for the next hour and a half we both had our hands full. Then the rush began to slack off but not before I had taken just over a dollar and a half. Afterwards we had a talk and Allison, the bootblack, told me he’d be glad to give me work any morning on the same terms. I assured him I’d be there and do my best till I got other work. I had earned three shillings and had found out I could get good board for three dollars a week, so in a couple of hours I had earned my living. The last anxiety left me. Mike had a day off, so he came home for dinner at noon and he had great news. They wanted men to work under water in the iron caissons of Brooklyn Bridge and they were giving from five to ten dollars a day. “Five dollars”, cried Mrs. Mulligan, “it must be dangerous or unhealthy or somethin’—sure, you’d never put the child to work like that.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I hear the pages rustle from behind closed doors. Moving Out or The End of Cooperative Living I am so glad to be moving away from this prison for black and white faces assaulting each other with our joint oppression competing for who pays the highest price for this privilege I am so glad I am moving technicoloured complaints aimed at my head mash themselves on my door like mosquitoes sweep like empty ladles through the lobby of my eyes each time my lips move sideways the smile shatters on the in thing that races dictator through our hallways on concrete faces on soul compactors on the rhetoric of incinerators and plastic drapes for the boiler room on legends of broken elevators blowing my morning cool avoiding me in the corridors dropping their load on my face down 24 stories of lives in a spectrumed madhouse pavillion of gnats and nightmare remembering once we all saved like beggars to buy our way into this castle of fantasy and forever now I am so glad to be moving. Last month a tenant was asked to leave because someone saw him wandering one morning up and down the tenth floor with no clothes on having locked himself out the night before with the garbage he could not fit into the incinerator but it made no difference the floor captain cut the leads to his cable TV and he left covered in tangled wires of shame his apartment was reconsecrated by a fumigator I am so glad I am moving Although workmen will descend at $100 an hour to scrape my breath from the walls to refinish the air and the floors with their eyes and charge me with the exact amount of whatever I have coming back to me called equity I am so glad to be moving from the noise of psychic footsteps beating a tune that is not my own louder than any other sound in the neighborhood except the blasting that goes on all day and all night from the city’s new toilet being built outside the main entrance from the spirits who live in the locks of the other seven doors bellowing secrets of living hells revealed but not shared for everybody’s midnights know what the walls hide our toilets are made of glass wired for sound [image file=image_rsrc6HF.jpg] 24 stories full of tears flushing at midnight our only community room children set their clocks to listen at the tissue walls gazing upward from their stools from one flight to another catching the neighbors in private struggles next morning it will all be discussed at length in the elevators with no secrets left I am so glad to be moving no more coming home at night to dream of caged puppies grinding their teeth into cartoonlike faces that half plead and half snicker then fold under and vanish back into snarling strangers I am so glad I am moving. But when this grim house goes