Two weeks ago, I returned to our home from a program that was intended to help young blind people gain confidence with different aspects of living in a city. Its technical purpose was to increase our job skills, but I describe it as a confidence builder because that is what I got out of it more than anything. The days were full of events, and I had to get up around a surtain time in the morning, which helped fix our day/night rhythms such that we could be awake when we wanted to be, during the day when panic is less likely to come to the most vulnerable of us. We have managed to maintain that balance, and several other habits which have proven useful in maintaining consistent communication and interaction between us, and, in my case, encouraging acceptance of the truths of the others of this community. Even before I boarded the plain that traveled the short distance from the local airport to the training center, I had already decided that I was going to use my time there to build on things I had learned about our structure in weeks and months prior, and this is exactly what I did.
Spesificly, I had learned, while waiting for a talk therapy session, that while I could not communicate purely internally with the others I share a body with, I could ask them questions in thought and allow them to answer out loud. In theory, the reverse could also be done, and I could allow them to internally communicate to me and answer them verbally, but I struggle to allow their words to be what they are when relying on what is, for all intents and purposes, mental content alone. With the need for purely internal communication having been left behind as I established that we could safely allow quiet responses to be spoken physically, I stopped trying to change this fact, instead spending the week at the training center deciding, morning after morning, to try to journal again. In previous years, particularly before Deep Feeling Therapy began to connect my thoughts and emotions to form what I know as feelings, I had been unable to allow the others to write; the experience of my muscles wanting to move in directions I had not asked them to was intolerable and I would frequently get up and abort the effort. With the therapy reconnecting me to who I was and providing me a context for my present-day struggles, as well as lowering the amount of things I had never gotten to feel in my personal past and the past of this body/life, I found that these same sensations felt satisfying in a way I had not known I needed to be satisfied; as emotional regression to my past was connecting me with myself, a process many would call audomatic writing was reconnecting, and in many cases connecting me for the first time, to the others I shared myself with in at least some ways. After the first day of success, which came about merely because I began to write out the emotional impressions I was given from a vulnerable community member, I never looked back.
We’ve connected to one another a lot since then. I’ve continued to ask daily if there’s anything somebody wants to talk about, and have consistently met one presence who organizes where I couldn’t in 2019, who assures me that I, as long as I maintain the stability of our physical situation, am doing all I can at the moment. I greatly appreciate his presence among us. I know we have a ways to go, but the fact that we can write, and that I’ve been able to continue to check in with the rest of us, morning after morning, and get consistent assurance that I’m doing the right thing, is comforting to me on a level that I can’t put into words. With a lot of the inner responsibilities I felt I had to take care of rested from my metaphorical shoulders, I don’t quite know what to do with myself, but at the same time I’ve been liberated to do a lot more than at any other time in our consciously being plural. There are many questions I can ask now, and I will, with time. But as I gather my words in preparation, let this one thing be known.
I will never go back to fighting us again, now that I have the tools, the safe environment, the knowledge of who I am and the confidence nessisary to turn around and communicate with the rest of this community instead. For the first time in a long time, I’m not tired on every level, and the connections I’ve been making internally are largely responsible for that; more to the point, the nonresistance I finally have toward them is responsible for that. I can walk on my treadmill now, without having to be worried about any number of things going wrong, and when I save enough to eventually move out of this small town, maybe I’ll be able to start the next leg of my journey into open plurality.
Next stop: the rest of our lives!