I now know that I must intellectually come to terms with the fact that some very bad thing happened to me. I don’t want this to be true. It’s a good thing that I’m not in my right mind, because who, in their right mind, would want to come to such a realization? If one had the chance to forget, to lock something bad away so that one could live one’s life without the haunting memory of the thing, wouldn’t that be the reasonable path?
Well, that’s what I’ve done. Must have done. The problem is that The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now doesn’t exactly get to escape the ghost of my/our past — because, inside of me reside the people who KNOW what happened. Not only do they know, but they are stuck. They are encapsulated in the moment of the terrors, forever in that shocked state of the denial of a reality that was so much for them to bear that they broke off from me, sacrificed themselves for me, so that I could go on living the normal part of our lives.
In the wee hours of this morning, I awoke from a dream that was fleeing my conscious mind, as dreams are wont to do, and the dream itself had nothing to do with reality and didn’t even seem that symbolic. There were emotions though, in the dream, and such was their nature that they left me feeling helpless and hopeless. I’m not sure if that’s what triggered her, or if she was just there because of built-up stresses over the last couple of weeks, (for I’d felt her timid presence trying to break through several times), but something reached far into the sleeping depths, and awakened Shaky Girl.
Some people might take issue with the fact I give my personalities such odd titles; mere descriptive terms instead of proper names. It’s even tempting to imagine that they might get offended by the sheer silliness of how I chose to refer to them. The thing is that they/we understand that to become more and more integrated, to become all one big person, this is the goal of our communication, and so we try very hard not to make people who are more and more distinctively separate from myself. Our lives are actually one life, broken into snapshots, better yet, little time-elapsed reels of experiential video. We are all the same person, but we cannot all access the memories of the entire being. Thus far, in our lives, this has been a very good thing. Without it, we would most likely be already insane (more insane?) and at an even less functioning state that what now serves us. As it lies within us now, there are still differing parts of my selves who have contracts to deal with certain things that we encounter in our lives. The Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now isn’t aware of all of the terms and conditions of the contracts. I only know when someone nudges at the control center of the mind, pushes on the membrane of the symbolic wall that separates those who are in control of the body at any given moment from those who are not, letting me know that someone else has something pressing that they must say or do.
As I was awakened this morning, this was apparently the case, because I came directly out of a sleep state into the State of Being that is Shaky Girl, my body jerking and spasming. She is what she sounds like. Someone who shakes and shakes, and shakes some more. From an outside perspective, it looks as if my body is having a seizure. It’s as if I something cold has stricken me to the core.
I believe that Shaky Girl is more aware when things are wrong with me than I am. My entire lifetime has been built around hiding from myself what I am feeling. I’ve gone to such extremes to do this that I’ve invented people who can hold certain pains for me, and I’ve constructed various Shell People that I can wear so that I appear to be functioning to the outside world when, inside, I’m not functioning at all. Inside, there are always people screaming. Perhaps Shaky Girl is closer to the core of my true self than my “presenting” self is. I believe that she can hear the people screaming and knows when trauma needs to be dealt with. She allows herself to be used as a release valve for all we are running through our already overloaded capacitor.
Shaky Girl has not revealed to me where and when she was born. Perhaps she doesn’t know, herself. When she comes into my being, as she did this morning, I’m not even sure that she is aware of me. She locks her spirit into the body-shell that we share and overlays herself. She takes the body and I can not get it back until her shaking is finished. I’ve tried speaking to her and telling her that I need the body back (especially when this has happened in the presence of a person who is distressed by my apparently seizing self), but she does not seem to hear me. No one else would hear me either, for our speaking to one another always happens inside my head — all the better to hide from the outside world how disjointed we truly are. Once, during a time that I really needed to come back, I tried singing to her in my mind, with the same melodious tunes that I had used to comfort my birth children when they were infants. To my great surprise, this worked! She never responded or gave recognition to my presence, but she did begin to calm. She was able to let go of the body and go back to where-ever-she-goes, and I was able to stop shaking.
After a visit from Shaky Girl, I am left exhausted! Often, my muscles are sore from being drawn up so tightly and shivering all over. When she is needing to express herself, I can feel her for days, tapping at me, wanting to come out. My clenched teeth will be noticed, and a background, constant hum of calming will be running through my mind. I’m not sure who the gatekeeper is, who decides who manifests and gets to control the body and who doesn’t, but I know that it is not in my conscious control. Whomever is the gatekeeper, this entity is apparently aware of when it is safe to have someone manifest who cannot function at all, or when it is best to let no one function (as is the case when Skeleton Man shuts us down in order to prevent acts of self-harm to the body). This Master Controller doesn’t agree to let Shaky Girl out when I am driving, or standing in an office surrounded by potentially dangerous strangers. When sleeping in my bed, I guess it is deemed safe enough to allow her the time she needs to process her traumas.
When I come directly out of a sleep state into the Being of Shaky Girl, my body having been hijacked, quakes ripping through me as earthquakes do the planet, this is a frightening thing to have happen. It is especially frightening because I do not know what it is that is wrong. I cannot hear or see anything through her. I’m not sure that she hears or sees, either. Our experience is that of an intense emotional state, the tension of which causes painfully knotted muscles giving me great incentive to get Shaky Girl to stop her control of the body. It isn’t a comfortable feeling to have one’s self taken away from oneself, and while she is relieved to be able to process and manifest, I am unable to move or speak – or stop shaking. That’s one of the irritations of sharing a body. What affects one, affects all of the others.
There also is no assurance that allowing Shaky Girl to come forward will actually help me, or her, in any way. She seems just as “stuck” every time. She doesn’t seem to be able to be reasoned with, and when I allow myself to meld with and become co-conscious with her, I can see or hear nothing beyond the emotion that is happening. I have no idea why she is distressed, why she can’t speak, why she is shaking. I have no idea what has happened to her, what has birthed her. I would like for this to change. I would like to help her to get “unstuck”. I think that whatever experiences she holds for me, they must be pretty horrific to her. The thing that I want her to understand is that “we” are no longer stuck wherever she is stuck. That things that were unbearable for her might not be unbearable for us now. I want to be strong enough that she can trust me to handle whatever knowledge might come forward from her. I hope that I am.
This morning, for the first time, Shaky Girl parted her lips – and made a noise. To my knowledge, it is the first sound that she has ever uttered. It is the first time that something other than shaking has come through. It was hardly a word. It was a guttural, animal, low calling out. A distressed beginning of a shriek; but it was something. At least she is trying. I am proud of her for that. I’m proud of her for having borne up to the task of holding some awful secret for The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now for so many years. I would like to find a way that Shaky Girl and I can be there for one another, comfort one another, share experiential memories with one another.
In a lot of cases where one person is divided into many, as we are, the separate consciousnesses of the self fear that to integrate is to die. Since I can’t really access any thoughts from Shaky Girl, I have no idea how she feels about this. It is my guess that her only fear revolves around her memories, and like the others residing in this form co-consciously with me, she is not afraid that she will cease to be when we are, at long last, all of us, merged. Most of us have realized that we don’t have to be afraid of becoming One. Becoming one continuously, linearly remembering/experiencing person does not mean that any of our individual selves will cease to exist. To disappear into the whole does not mean a total disappearance of any one self, because that one self must exist in order to construct the whole. It only means a difference in the way we function.
It is the same sort of thing that will happen to the whole of the human race in the eventual. We are all already One — tied together in an inescapable, undeniable way, hurling through eternity, each of us needed to produce the glorious manifestation of our vastly different experiences. All of the positive, all of the negative, all of the traumas, all of the victories, all of the living, all of the dying, one day, we will all remember. This connectivity is already there, and we are all, already One; it is a simple dysfunction in our communication that makes us seem otherwise.
Dedicated to my now departed friend and fellow writer:Â
Paula Arnold
~ with whom I appreciate being joined in the great One, and with thanks to her presence in the place where so much of her heart still dwells:Â Heartfriends Inn
Heartfelt thanks, as always, to my brilliant fellow traveler, who lends me his beautiful imagery for visual representation of my story (and who tells great ones of his own):Â Jim Dollar Photography
Thank you, my friend, for sharing your journey towards total integration and for your acknowledgment of Paula’s love and talent. The lack of her physical presence here is painful beyond words. I anxiously await the day that pain will resolve enough to allow me to feel her spirit all around me and again experience the comfort associated with her presence.