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CHAPTER TWO

Part Three

A slow story of what bed gave me (Part One)

I want to be with the moments of my everyday unseens. I want to be close up with them and I want to be tender here. I don't want to disturb the way the invisible bodymind or the everyday unseens move. I don't want to bring them towards me or towards visible material centric places. I want to go to them. The granular and the massive. I want to meet myself where I am in this bed. My bed is an everyday unseen.

I did not expect bed to do anything for me. I did not mean for bed to do anything for me.

One morning when waking up as a slow witness... I want to stay with and become closer with my everyday unseens. To stay with them. I have no energy for the physical; visible movement or material. I put my invisible bodymind in the middle of my waking up. One morning when waking up as a slow witness... I want to stay with and become closer with my everyday unseens. To stay with them. I have no energy for the physical; visible movement or material. I put my invisible bodymind in the middle of my waking up (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A centred grainy black and white image of a person in a night gown lying on their right side. Their hands are together next to their head. Their knees are bent slightly and their feet are together. It has a white background.

Figure 1

I am laying on my right side. My eyes are closed. In these moments before I open my eyes... as I wake up... I stay with my everyday unseen experiences and I observe them. I kind of map the sense of them in my mind. An everyday unseen embodiminded attuning. I map their expressions. They are not representations.

My first everyday unseen is my heart rate. It is beating at 90 to 100 beats per minute when I am laying down and it must have started to increase while I was sleeping. It is probably what has woken me up. I feel thick pulsing amplifications in my right breast and wrist. This is my irregular nervous system. It misreads signs from my blood and my heart and my autonomic nervous system misreads. Misfires. Mis-responds. One of the first missed responses is a rapid increase in heart rate. This has already triggered other bodymind experiences. I follow them.

 I feel around two minutes away from throwing up. During the day this is a constant. It has been this way for over thirty years and I have become almost used to it. But it always feels the worst first thing in the morning as a sudden experience.

Laurie Anderson refers to her body as a Nerve Bible (1992). I connect deeply to this term of the body and its reverence, awareness to sensitivity and affect in the raw reactions of the nervous system and that sometimes those reactions are all the body is. I am controlled by a rapidly fluctuating nervous system. Another way I learned to think about the whys and hows of neurodivergence.

Slow moving pooling blood. The pressure in my veins is weak. When my heart rate begins to rise my blood can't keep up so my heart reads this as "something's wrong" and beats faster. If I stand up my blood will pool. It falls with gravity. It falls from my brain into my legs. This is strange to say because when blood falls to my legs, it feels in a way the blood's going to my head. This triggers my brain to begin to lose control of thinking, speaking, its sense of space and balance. Hazy and racy at the same time and so very quickly. It sometimes causes my nervous system to shut down and reset. A lot of my everyday life is making sure I don't get to this point or recovering from when it does. My blood and heart rate are naturally slow. My heart rate is actually naturally very slow. My blood is sluggish and pulled at by my heart. It begins pumping harder to make my blood move faster. My autonomic nervous system misreads this. It thinks something is wrong. My heart pumps very hard. I wake up with a fast pulse.

My sense of motion is distorting. Though I am laying down still. Movement isn't coming from an embodied place. I wake up into already moving parts that are strange to me. I feel like a stranger in my own body a lot. Me as a body and a mind. I have not got to the place yet where I wake up as a bodymind. My body and mind are fraying. Are fragile. I don't feel like I am in my body. In a body. I feel like I am the moments before embodiment and after embodiment. A ghost echo of the middle. Nothing is stable. I already dread having to move. Having to get up. Standing up feels like underwater ambient pressure on the inside of my body. Standing up is a heavy gravity from my unseen insides. My laying down and standing life was so immediately different. My laying and standing self. My laying down and standing selves are whole other people.

Energyless muscles. My limbs feel like layered sheets full of empty little meat bits. Like... full of empty bits of sliced meat. I feel light and very dizzy on the outside of my body. I feel clunky and heavy and chunky in the middle of the body meat sheets. Energyless muscles. Energyless. Energy. The word energy is different from a body word like bone. Even writing it down isn't as beautiful. Bone is hardness. Marrow. Skeleton base. Breakable foundations. "I have woken up with broken bones this morning." People implicitly understand and empathise with the seriousness of this. Even if they haven't broken a bone themselves. "I have woken up with no energy this morning." People do not think of this as serious. Energy is my most finite, sensitive and delicate resource. My energyless muscles run bone marrow deep (Figure 2).

Figure 2: A centred grainy black and white image of a person in a night gown lying on their right side. Their hands are together next to their head. Their knees are bent slightly and their feet are together. Layered arrangements of crumpled blankets in pastel colors—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red—surround the person in the middle. Each colour is an expression of a different bodymind experience. It has a white background.

Figure 2

Here is what is seen (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The image is a black-and-white photograph of a the researcher lying asleep in bed, mostly covered by a rumpled white blanket. Heavy curtains hang behind the bed. There is dim lighting fro the sun coming through the covered window.

Figure 3

​When you see me here is what you can't see (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The image is a black-and-white photograph of a the researcher lying asleep in bed, mostly covered by a rumpled white blanket. Heavy curtains hang behind the bed. There is dim lighting fro the sun coming through the covered window. Layered arrangements of crumpled blankets pastel colors—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red— are imposed over the black and white photograpgh.

Figure 4

​Within less than a minute... my centred invisible bodymind pulsates complexity before my eyes have even opened.

I have never slowed down and been still with them and let them guide me through their movements.

I have never followed how the unstable, unpredictable, dynamic, continually emerging, moving and collapsing composites move.

I keep doing bed mappings. Staying still and attuning with and through care.

Attuning that is not looking to dominate, extract, pin down, solve or make better.

Not to locate, isolate, control, but to know more of, to give space to, to give care to.

It is a slow, responsive mapping of the everyday unseens that I have never given a mapping of.

I am no longer mapping anything onto my body. I am letting it map itself, and every day all of the maps are different. An ever-forming cartography for open exploration. Not a diagnostic tool.

I begin to attune with how immense the effect and affects of and on my invisible bodymind are to who and how I am.

I notice unseens in relation to one another.

I witness where bodymind unseens connect with each other.

I witness the creation of interdependent entanglements. My interrelational interconnected dynamics becoming generative when they meet.

Their joins are soft, porous and malleable. The subtlest and smallest and quietest movements expand so much.

It does feel strange to share this... to share all of this. There was no planning in this. There was no idea to ever share. This was not a project. This was not quote unquote "structured methodological research." This was me in a dark sour-smelling room alone wanting to be true and real and on the ground of myself. Curious and tired and worried and empty and wanting to let go of old ways. Shedding the performative wellness skin I had hid myself in. 

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