Lighting the House on Fire and Ambien or Slowing Down to Tell Your Story
What if there was a moment in your life—maybe when you were born and your mother disappeared, or maybe the moment you gave birth and your child disappeared, or maybe the time your best friend in second grade ran away from you on the playground and claimed, to your shock, a new best friend, or maybe it was the time when your father whom you loved most in the world angrily whacked you in the face—when events were too much for you, and your breath sucked up—your diaphragm sucked up, up tight against your lungs, and then stayed there, stuck? For the rest of your life you existed as a clavicular breather? The breath coming in and out in sips, in itty bitty puffs of air. Barely there at all.
When you breathe as if you are under stress, lightly, high in the chest, guess what? The brain takes note and acts accordingly, flooding the body with stress hormones. You are ready to run from that wild goat! Your fight or flight system has been activated and you are ready to GO. All. The. Time.
Go’ers aren’t the best sleepers. Or the best, I would argue, writers.
For a year after my mother died, it seemed like the only way I could fall asleep was to take Ambien. Once I tried to set fire to the lamp by the bed. Once I made a call (using my hand as a phone) to Visa and told them to invest in Los Angeles. (One benefit to being married is that you have someone to report back to you the things you did when you were wasted on sleep meds. And to blow out the match.)
(One thing I later learned about Ambien is that it basically just helps you forget you didn’t sleep. Stupid drug.)
I wish I had just lain down on the floor and had someone hold my hand while I breathed into my abdomen and let the feelings roll through me and out the front door. Out the back door. Out the windows.
I have noticed with the people I work with as a writing coach is that really what they are doing is searching for a life of deep breaths. What they want more than anything, I think, is to feel heard so they can then sigh, let their diaphragm release, and breathe.
Here’s the thing: you can’t rush story. I mean you can, but here’s an argument why it’s good to take your time, good to tell your story a spoonful at a time:
If a parent gets impatient with his or her crawling child and decides it’s time to get off all fours and walk like a person, damage is done to the development of the psoas, your personal filet mignons, the deep core muscles that help you lift your leg and walk. We crawl, in part, to lengthen and tone the psoas (pronounced without the p unless you want to make bodyworkers laugh) to prepare those muscles to help the bones bear the weight of the body, standing.
What if you wanted to tell your story, and instead of getting all jammed up about it, instead of lightly breathing your way to panic, you told yourself you had all the time in the world, and you started with Once upon a time and, word by word, you got the listener from not knowing your story to knowing it?
What if you breathed deeply into your belly the whole time you talked, feeling there was no rush, trusting you had an audience (or 1 or a million) that really wants to listen? What if you gave your body the time to get strong and stand in story?
What if, instead of stumbling, tired, to get your morning coffee, you crawled into the kitchen just for the reminder that you were once young and things looked different from the floor? What if you crawled just because you could? Your body likes to go back to child movements. Your body remembers, resets, relaxes.
Guess what? The psoas is delicately attached to the diaphragm. When people would come to my office with chronic neck problems, I would check the psoas. If the psoas is tight, it pulls on the diaphragm, and that pull makes its way to your neck, to the very top of your head.
Our bodies are babies. They want to be rocked, nurtured, told everything will be okay. We carry stories, and stories are things that are meant to be shared. If we feel we can’t tell the story or that no one will listen, we cause tension in the body and then the party of us slows down and feels tight, off, worried.
The world is a better place because we tell each other our dreams. Can you imagine a world without the books of Toni Morrison?! If you have the burn to tell your story, your stories, know you don’t have to tell it or them all at once. I tell people for years I couldn’t write my memoir because it felt like I was trying to shit a watermelon (There are too many details! I have no idea how to get my whole life in a book!), and it wasn’t until I let myself slow down and trust in the process of word by word, scene by scene, that the book made its way to the light. Mostly I had to trust that someone would want to listen, would want to read what I wrote.
That someone, of course, was me.
If you want to write but feel stuck, crawl for a while. Make lists instead of sentences. Take naps. Dream about the things you want to write. Lie on the floor and breathe into your belly. The more deeply you are connected with breath, the more deeply you are connected to the wind on which your story sails.
