I do my thing, and you do your
thing,
I am not in this world to live up to
And you are not in this world to live up
to mine
You are you and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s
beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Frederick S.Perls
Do Your Thing, you Good Thing!
I get a bit confused about other people, but this simple quote strips it back. Few people have understood what ‘my thing’ is in life, but god, when they do, it’s magic.
Luckily I have some of the best friends in the entire Universe. Thanks to Tamasin, Andrew, Sarah, Lisa and Mum. I also have other friendships that are becoming richer and deeper, such as with my flatmate Tieneke.
We need to be dedicated to the magic, beauty, and sweetness of life. In New Zealand, 2008, there were 497 deaths from suicide and 2465 hospitalisations (exceeding 48 hours) for intentional self harm.
Intentional self harm is quite interesting. I nearly got into that years ago, but somehow pulled back from it. I was 26 and recovering from a pretty bad accident, the infamous fall from the golden lion in the Civic Picture Theatre. At least 20 feet (or was it metres?) into the basement level of the theatre through a hole on stage. Ok, yes, I was drunk, but it was probably just as well. If I’d been less relaxed it’s likely I’d have died. Leighton, who was working as an usher, had to resign from his job thanks to my little drama. He was Sarah's actory flatmate, and he'd asked us to wait while he finished up at work. We didn't wait. We were loose in the Civic. Not a great night for Sarah or her sober sister.
The recovery from a pelvis fractured in three places, a slightly displaced hip and a ‘moderate’ head injury was fucking boring, depressing and excruciatingly painful. I remember only snatched minutes from the whole first week of hospitalisation; I was in intensive care heavily pumped up on morphine. When I started understanding where I was and what was going on, all I could ask about was sitting my exams, and asking if they’d removed my contact lenses.
The morphine induced paranoia and hallucinations, I thought the Japanese doctor who kept taking my blood was keeping it for nefarious purposes; that this was war-time and he was going to find out secrets only traceable through blood. I hallucinated some kind of computer at the end of my hospital bed, one designed for measuring the secrets contained in blood.
As I became more lucid, my mum was always there, reaching over and pressing my self-administering morphine pump when I would groan from the physical agony of splintered bone.
“Why hasn’t anyone come to see me?” I asked
Turns out they had been, but I was either unconscious or couldn’t remember the visits. I’d also been dispensing a lot of wisdom, not that I could remember it.
It was November, I think 1996 . I turned 26 lying in bed, catheter trailing, my finger permanently positioned over the morphine pump. The balloons around curtain rail were doctors and nurses heads; they appeared to have hung themselves on the rail and looked at me with blank, dead eyes.
They decided not to operate, that I was ‘young enough’ to heal if I kept still. The television didn’t work on my side of the building, and I was extremely restricted in movement. I wasn’t even allowed to sit up or put any weight on my left hip (the displaced one) and constipation was my constant companion.
After about two weeks they took away the morphine drip, and the catheter was also removed. I was shifted to another bed, and the compression tights I wore to prevent blood clotting looked like some kind of kinky punishment. They itched and drove me crazy. My muscles and fat melted away. All toiletry and bathing needs were compliments of a bed pan and bed bath, usually administered by an evil nurse exhausted by excessive hours, seething resentments and shit covered shoes.
My scalp ached from not being able to take it off the pillow, my thick hair was hellishly hot and unwashed for three weeks. I begged the only kind nurse to wash it for me, I think her name was Jo. It was really hard for her to fit it into her schedule, but she wheeled my bed over to a sink. It was such a relief to feel water on my head, tears leaked from my eyes the whole time.
The real star was a nurse who gave me the injections each night to prevent blood clotting. She was a big girl and commented that if I’d had some fat on my body, this wouldn’t hurt as much. I think she quite enjoyed jabbing the needle into the remnants of muscle of my stomach and seeing the tears spring up in my eyes. God does love a Sadist! One day I rang the bell to go to the toilet. She came in and said “you’re not the only person in this hospital you know” and left me for more than half an hour. I couldn’t hold on and was left lying in the urine soaked bed for another hour or so. Fun times!
I think of this now, and it’s really like looking at someone else. I have many little stories about those seemingly endless weeks in hospital, nearly six weeks I think it was. The first time I got to sit up in bed I passed out, my eyes rolling back in my head. Mum thought I was dying, the poor thing.
One of the most delightful things about having even a ‘moderate’ head injury is that your ability to control your emotions is severely limited, and you suffer from excess exhaustion. I slept, read words in the dictionary, cried and raged. I took pleasure in underlining specific words in a Mills and Boon novel. How many times did the sadistic, handsome love interest smile ‘sardonically’? How often were his eyes described as being like flint or ice? This was emotional pornography, and one of the few things simple enough for me to read.
I couldn’t move around properly, so mum had to come and look after me in the flat. I was on crutches for three months, but I looked completely ‘normal’. At a poetry performance someone thought I was using crutches as a ‘prop’.
The best thing about it all was that my poetry improved. I couldn’t finish my degree that year, but went back and did so the year after. I was horribly out of sync with people doing Journalism, many of them were really straight sorts who’d already done a degree in law, not the crazy crew I’d grown to love in the previous two years study.
The self harm aspect came up through sheer frustration and excess of feeling. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to get the feelings out of my body. Fortunately something in me stopped, just stepped back and went “really?”.
I would toy with it, pressing the edge of a knife into my skin but just enough for it to bite. One day knew I wanted to take it a bit further, that I wanted to slice. I rang a friend. She came over. She told me I must never do it again, and I didn’t.
But that doesn’t happen for a lot of people. Something in them takes them over the edge.
I had some lovely young flatmates a few years back, a couple from London. He was English, she was Polish. She sported the most amazing scars up the insides of her arms, neat and clean looking, all perfectly aligned. They went across rather than vertically, and they were far enough up the arms to affirm that these were not suicide attempts.
“Oh,” I said
“Scarification or self harm?”
“Oh, self harm” she said lightly, as if we were discussing shoes or tattoos. She’d gone through a rough patch in her late teens. Looked like a very long patch judging by the slices. Yet here she was, happy, travelling with her love, milking life and laughing. There was still an undercurrent of darkness that would occasionally surface, but I have that too, so it never bothered me. I hear they’ve had a baby now.
A Safety Net
I’ve been talking with Lisa who may as well be an angel, her insights and energy are that good. Mellow, leaning back in your chair, honey slow and kind, she’ll say things that just fit.
“You need a safety net for your heart” she said.
Yes. That sounds good. But there you have it; I don’t know how to make one, or how others do it. It mystifies me. I’ll see if I can work it out, and if I do, I’ll let you know.
I should have been hurt a million times more than I have been, but to be honest, most of the time it’s worked out pretty well. I take pretty big risks, but the rewards are amazing. I have loved and been loved so well.
We’re all just ‘doing our thing’. So you see, my thing has to be love. It has to be pleasure (not hedonism) and finding joy in pretty simple things. Happiness wavers, but joy runs deep.
...I refuse to be
intimidated by
reality anymore.
After all, what is reality anyway?
Nothin’ but a collective hunch ...
I made some studies , and reality
Is the leading cause of stress
amongst those in
touch with it.
I can take it in small doses, but as a lifestyle
I found it too confining.
Jane Wagner.
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