I participated in a constellation circle for the first time in years last week. An extremely westernized summary to describe what a constellation circle is would be to say it is an empathy role play.
It’s a little bit like doing your own tarot reading, but the cards are instead represented by human people. It’s powerful af and allows you, with the shame-dissolving power of compassionate human witness and the participation of all your beingness and senses, to interact with ones inner world, issues, and ancestors.
I sort of view it as a kind of contact improv for my secondary psyche and emotional body to engage in with other people while taking the over-utilized intellectualizing brain mostly out of it. And when I say secondary psyche, I am talking about the nervous system in my guts, and the nerve network in my connective tissue and, yes, you have them also, because science.
I knew going in that I would likely be interacting with my suicidal ideology, because having been dangerously suicidal, again, was what prompted me to return to this work in the first place. And I want to talk about that for a minute to explain why I’m choosing to share this deeply personal, very private experience with you.
Most times I emerge from a suicidal state, I feel a wave of anger rise up in me. I always reach out to people when I am descending. I always tell at least someone close to me and usually more than 2 that I am not doing well, and usually show signs if not direct cries for help even more broadly. Even at my absolute worst, I’ve never not reached out to someone somehow.
I have betrayed over and over again what behaviors on my social media indicate that I am in trouble. I have told people directly, asked people to read articles, asked close people in my life to research and understand my illnesses, signal boosted mental health information through my Facebook (which I come back to later).
I have literally written instructions for my friends and loved ones, often when, like now, miraculously emerging from a suicidal state, countless times in my life. I have written documentation of me begging for specific help from my inner circles, my communities, even my fans, in keeping myself alive for over 20. fucking. years.
And still, over and over again, people make the same mistakes. Still they let me remain alone despite the signs. They don’t ask me if I am suicidal directly like I’ve said they need to to get through to me. They still offer open, vague invitations of ‘always being welcome’ when open invitations are insipid cop-out lies and worthless to a person in crisis.
Still, in the end, when it comes to supporting me in heading off my suicide, they so often do absolutely nothing at all.
I hear over and over again that I gotta use my words when y’all know I go nonverbal, that I gotta ask people to make an effort to be with me while depressed when y’all know I cannot believe I’m worthy of it, that I gotta articulate what I’ve already said when well, again, but now when when actively sick, that I have to behave like a person who isn’t acutely mentally ill to be treated with the care I need from my chosen people while careening toward becoming actively suicidal.
It doesn’t seem to matter if I live with others. It doesn’t seem to matter if I’m in love. It doesn’t seem to matter if I’m traveling or stationary. It doesn’t seem to matter if the friends in my life I try to talk to understand depression or have lost other people already. I give instructions and show them the signs and they let me down again, and again, and again.
And I think I’ve reached a point now where I am more tired of being let down than I am of being suicidal.
I think I’ve reached the point where I am sick and fucking tired of the people in my life further risking my suicide by being ableist about my conditions.
I think I am done with taking on that ableism as my responsibility, when I have done what seems like nothing with my fucking life but talk and express and sing and paint and write about what it is to live on the brink like this for 3/4 of my entire fucking life.
I am tired of being appreciated for my charms, my impacts, my talents, my magical nature, my experience, my extroversion, being told I’m so loved, that I’m a worthy person, that y’all are grateful for me being in the world as a human rather than what I’ve fucking done for you, and yet my chosen family seems incapable of a call and response exercise, or daring to show me with clear invitation and actions that they genuinely want to spend time with me in an effort to ensure I don’t die of fucking loneliness.
And I am tired of using my privilege as a ambulatory, abled-passing person to discount that I suffer from your ableism while living with chronic, comorbid mental illnesses, and that it feels like fucking shit and I’m fucking tired.
I don’t think I am alone in feeling like this.
So I want to share my constellation. Because I think people will relate, and I hope in that relating to encourage people who suffer similarly as me to become more open to exploring these sorts of healings, encourage myself to do more of this as well; and again illustrate in a new fashion why y’all need to stop telling me, yourselves, or anyone else, to be a way I, experts, science, and your own wisdom has told you I can’t fucking be in order to be treated worthy of the support I’ve been screaming into the void since 1995 trying to get.
So now, into the void this day in 2019; let’s begin.
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I’ll start by mentioning the settings for these experiences are a source of great embarrassment for me, as, even having an indigenous constellation facilitator instructing me off and on for 12 years, at one time training me to facilitate myself, as a colonizer, I do not feel that I have ethical access to these technologies. Which is to say the technology of my own spirit, and yes, I’m working hard to stop harming myself like that.
That said; Picture the most obnoxious blonde white yoga massage smoothie lady 3-day Bali retreat you can, imagine that virtually everything in the room triggered memories of instagram pictures of shit like that, add some hippy crones into the mix, and you’ll pretty much have what entering that setting felt like for me.
I like 3-card tarot spreads when I read for myself. Past, present, and future has been a staple, and now I’m moving more into me, my desired outcome, and my block, which half the time, I’ve convinced myself I don’t even know what they are. The latter is the formula we used in small circles of 3 for part of the evening.
Again as a somewhat belligerent summary, I’ll describe the circle setup as simply choosing groups, choosing roles, and the facilitator signaling the beginning of the constellation. None of us knew one another. We were encouraged to move slowly, take our time, and speak rarely if at all.
When my constellation began, I immediately felt a sense of a familiar calm, the same calm I imagine when I think about drowning while numb in a freezing black sea under the stars. That one is my favorite.
It’s the same calm I am when my state oscillates from being paralyzed by the pain, psychic lashing, and intrusive, violent suicidal thoughts, to imagining what a fucking beautiful, rewarding relief it will be when I can just get out of this bed to go get dead.
The person representing my block was compelled to curl up in a fetal position at my feet, slightly behind me, closing their hands around my ankles like shackles.
When they did that, I iimmedatelyt felt fused to the ground. I felt wooden and stoic. I could not lift my arms. I could not shift my eyes, which were down, fixated on the floor a ways in front of me, looking toward my desired outcomes feet, just along my peripheral vision. I felt trapped, heavy, calm, and ready.
When I shifted my attention to my block, I recognized a feeling of intellectual exhaustion, a feeling like I had been straining against this invisible forcefield tractor beam thing trying to reach this fetal block at my feet by myself for eons. For centuries. All the way back to the beginning of time. The fatigue was so profound I felt it in molecule.
My desired outcome stood facing me from a distance for a moment, while I recognized how glad I was that they were here. It was like the librarian in aeon flux finally handing over the blips reigns, but the reigns weren’t officially exchanged yet. A pole, immoveable, I waited. As my desired outcome moved in closer to close that gap about half way, still too far to touch even if I could raise my arms.
I lifted my head and met their eyes. Later, that representative said it felt in that moment like their chest was threatening to burst open from the energy. After a few breaths, my desired outcome came forward the last step and wrapped their arms around me. Later, that representative described the overwhelming energy in their chest becoming instantly not only bearable, but joyful. And huge.
Receiving that initiation changed what I was feeling, too. My feet were still fused, but I could return my desired outcomes embrace. I could breathe intentionally again. I felt supported and seen and cared for, invited. Genuinely invited.
As we were breathing like that the first words of my constellation were spoken, by my desired outcome, when they began to repeat awe-fully “you’re so OPEN..”.
Soon, I felt I could finally lean down to care for the fetal part of my story curled up on the floor, begging with all their weight and silence to be seen and cared for and supported and invited also.
The representative for my desired outcome took the liberty of slowly and carefully removing the hands representing my block from my ankles. As I watched, I was nagged by the desire to lean down and remove the shackles myself. I wanted to be the hero of my own story, the first person to touch that seemingly catatonic, but incredibly active under the surface, part of myself. But I didn’t protest, as my intention is to remain open and curious in these experiences, like in any other improv. Yes, and.
Yes. And.
Once unshackled, I crouched down, and asked the representative of my block if it if was ok if I laid down behind them, big spoon, as I was compelled to do. I received their consent and did that, and we laid there for a while, while my desired outcome pet my hair, and I spoke some words communicating that I was sorry to have taken so long to get to them, that I was there now, and we could stay like that as long as they wanted. Some time passed as I laid quietly, soaking in the scene, appreciating having my hair pet. Soon, the representative of my block indicated they were ready to sit up, and as they did, I smiled, and said a chirpy, kid-like hello, before the three of us hugged — my desired outcome insisting I be in the middle — and stayed that way for what felt like a long time.
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I am struggling to embody the values of anarchy, communism, and mutual aid because of how utterly failed I have been by my peers, my family, my friends, and the mental health system in what passes for modern civilization. Because as disgustingly privileged as I am by this society, I literally have to figure out how to do it another way in order to save my own fucking life.
I am anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchy, and just impaled myself on the righteous spears of social justice for the last 5 fucking years as part of my struggle in reckoning with my having done the same things I’m complaining about, and much more, and much worse, to others.
I am dismantling, however selfishly, the centuries of white supremacist trauma inside myself that has cut us all off from our souls, from our guts, from our pelvic floors, from our movement, from our tears, from our WORK, by recognizing that that work is in our bodies, in our secondary psyches, in our courage to step into our responsibility to use these socially-designed tools we have at our disposal to do that work together. Because that is the ONLY way it will get done.
I recognize that, at least in my lane, we’re all suffering this inhuman condition to some degree, and it’s inextricably linked to how we are accustomed to living our lives and handling each other.
I see how absolutely fucking broken our amatonormative neoliberal society is, how absolutely fucking ineffectively we are conditioned to relate to one another, how deeply traumatizing and dangerous it is, and how utterly entwined all of our wounds and pathologies are in reanimating this shit again and again, like a shitboulder rolling down a fucking shithill mowing down anyone in its shitpath.
For all the identity crisis and writhing embarrassment revisiting my 1990’s era journal has recently caused, one thing going through that flavor of personal fucking hell produced is the evidence that I’ve known this, and been trying to warn myself and you, through my screaming, through my art, all along.
I am aware that we will continue to flounder, suffer, die, and lose our people to this hellish loneliness if we continue to rely on systems that were designed in an effort to only work for white, cis, affluent, class privileged people, and to uphold white supremacy. That we remain lost when we do not learn how to subvert the damaging, ineffective, corrupt, impossibly expensive systems, and their associated myths that are keeping them in place, to ‘help’ those who are in crisis; including the fucking pigs.
I am convinced that it is impossible for us to show up for one another in the ways we need to while using platforms of some twisted sense of perceived convenience that manipulate, steal our identities, and gaslight us, in order to keep in touch with one another. So many people who might have needed to see this never will because I didn’t fucking post on facebook, a moral graveyard that has fucked us over at every turn, run by a man that has shown us from its absolute inception that we cannot trust him, cannot sway him, and that he doesn’t give even a single fuck about the damage he’s done to any of us.
For all my mistakes, and my insufferable shitty human parts, I believe cultivating the courage to show up for one another, baring our chest pain to show a shackled person that they are seen, that they matter, that they are worth stepping toward, worth admitting to wanting to be close with, that they don’t have to use their words in wordless times, that they aren’t writing their manual and enduring this all in front of you for nothing, is one of the most important things I could be doing.
As it turns out, once again, as I emerge from another life-threatening identity crisis back into the breadcrumbs I’ve left, that that’s what I’ve been doing, out on the edge here, periodically losing my shit, all along.
It’s taken me a long time to figure out that publishing every self-harming thought while acutely mentally ill is not the same thing as mental health advocacy. I get that for a lot of my attempts to get these ideas across, I was being more of a shit funnel than a shit umbrella.
And I don’t think I’m the only person who has some reckoning to do with that, either.
Thanks for reading this, and to my sustainers, donors, fans, friends, and frenemies, who have all contributed to the lifestyle that enables me to navel gaze and philosophize and geek out about this kind of shit the way that I do.
As an artist, for better or for worse, I consider my role as a creative successfully achieved when what I have communicated, via the personal catharsis I experience in the making of my art, encourages the viewer to understand some part of themselves more deeply, or in a new way.
I am a full-time artist musician facilitator accomplice mender person, and I rely on those who appreciate my work to fund it. If my emotional labor in living this and writing it down has helped you, please pay me directly for it, treat yourself by buying the album associated with it, and/or join my community of supporters though this site, or on patreon.
Take care of you,
-nee