Creating from the Savage Place

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I’m in my Tuesday morning dance last week class and Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for Hero” comes on and I’m following the teacher kicking my right leg in the air and I feel a thud in my chest.

“And he’s gotta be strong and fast and he’s gotta be larger than life” the song goes. And I’m glad for dim lights and disco ball swirls so no one can see that this hero song has cracked something open in me.

Hours later I’m in the Trader Joe’s parking lot talking to someone I’ll affectionately call Dr. Hormone about a new strange surge of anxiety-sweating-foggy-sad-groggy symptoms I can’t make sense of:

“It’s been three months and I don’t feel fu*king fantastic!!!” I blurt out feeling more rabid animal than human.

“Fantastic” was the word she hoped we would get to within 4-6 weeks of working together. And we are not there. Yet.

As the words leave my mouth I am feeling simultaneously empathetic for this woman (who is truly doing God’s work supporting angry weeping menopausal women through one of life’s most difficult and sacred passages) …and also I’m taken aback by the depth of my own anger.

I used to be so much more polite.

Later it hits me. That through the last 9 months of trying to make peri-menopause + anxiety + insomnia go away, I have unconsciously recreated the helplessness of an early childhood experience. And I’ve been holding out for the person who can save me.

And it wasn’t my primary care doctor. And it wasn’t Lexapro or sleep drugs. And it wasn’t the naturopath. And, while Zoloft helped and other angel friends, family and healers helped, I was really hoping for a get-out-of-this-jail-free card with this last-resort doctor. And now it feels intolerable that, as of yet, even she can’t totally fix this.

A few days later I stumble on this quote: “Sometimes the most powerful creative expressions come from a savage place” (- Suleika Jaouad) and my skin tingles.

Because I’m realizing that the creative expression that has been coming through these last months of savagery, is less about what I’m writing, and more about creating the me that can save me.

This week, the anxiety thud has morphed into what feels like a heavy hand sitting on my chest that won’t move.

Cue another favorite quote: “Life will continue to present you with people and circumstances to reveal where you’re not free” (- Peter Crone)

And now I want to share (for you and me both) what is helping me save myself in the moments when it feels like nothing and no one else can. May there may be something in here to support you meeting the squeeze of the world or whatever hand might be pressing on your chest right now too.

Ask.. (the hand/the anxiety/the distress), what do you want me to know? what do you need? Where do you want to go? And, like a gps, it most often takes me to corners of insight and wisdom I wouldn’t otherwise have access to ( side note: I’m prone to skipping this listening part and it never goes well)

Choose.. I remind myself of the choice I believe I made to meet this fear and other material stored in my body at this time of life. Of the choice I believe I made to be alive on earth at this time. Of the choice I can always make to be with the fear without feeding it.

Dance..create, move with vs. against it. When I fight getting pulled into the underworld I drown. Yet sometimes “there is a bottle of oxygen at the bottom” (written in my journal from somewhere on the internet)

This past Tuesday, I went back to dance class and danced my heart out to what is now my “and she’s gotta be strong and fast and larger than life” Hero song and, at the end of class the teacher played another song she always does but hit me differently this time.

Free, it’s called (by Florence and the Machine). I am free, it goes. “I am free,” I sing along with the whole class busting and moving, “when I’m dancing I am free.”

Savagely, heroically, freely yours,

Cara

PS: Holding Out for a Hero: try this spinning and singing this one to yourself in the kitchen. So good. Or try this one too: Free

PPS: “The Animal” card I pulled this week along with all this