Spiraling

I stumbled into Linda Barry’s illustrated guide to documenting the small things that are easily lost at the beginning of May. Barry’s modest practice starts with an inquiry about the pandemic–when did this become real for me? She has you set a timer for 2 minutes and use that time to draw a spiral, also known as moving a pen on paper in a way that is at once doable and dynamic. Next, you reset the timer for another 2 minutes and write down things related to the inquiry that came to mind during your spiraling.

I found great solace in this activity in weeks where we were “only” in the midst of a pandemic. Once we entered pandemic + revolution, it became a lifeline. The world is on fire, and I am drawing circles and jotting down word salad on square slips of paper. Like gratitude journaling, this practice sounds flimsy, and yet it the best tool I’ve found to process all that’s happened and happening. It is also the only way I have been able to put words to my reflections and any imaginings of what might be possible for us as individuals and Americans.

Spiraling–that’s what I’m calling this practice–is a way to busy my body so my nervous system calms down and lets my mind to slip out and wander. It’s kind of similar to what happens in your brain when you wash the dishes and stare at nothing, except that I’m taking notes after. With so many serious issues and concerns to address, I’ve had a hard time convincing myself that it’s ok to let my mind wander. I have this idea that the appropriate, or at least the most effective, way to respond to problems is with action. The bigger the problem, the more action is required.

Experiencing two, nationwide upheavals in two and a half months gave me the opportunity to see that I definitely have a go-to reaction to crisis: I over-function (aka “action on steroids”). This is exactly what I did when the protests started. I spent the week following George Floyd’s murder frantically trying to figure out what I needed to learn, change, rearrange in my being, to get myself back to being a “good person”. I say this not as a bid for your sympathy or an invitation for your judgment, it is simply a cathartic articulation of what’s true for me.

I didn’t want to be a racist, I didn’t want to be complicit in white supremacy culture, and I didn’t want to be maintaining systemic racism. In response to all of these unwelcome thoughts and feelings, I threw an epic internal tantrum. I stuffed myself with information, believing that my brain could figure out how to be better, take the right action, and protect me from all the things I didn’t want to be.

Something shifted when I heard trauma specialist, Resmaa Menakem, explain that trauma does not get figured out or healed, it gets metabolized by the body. Those words helped me see that while my mind was telling me I could think my way back to safety, my body was telling another story. I wasn’t sleeping, gnat mind took over, my hips and back ached, and I felt hungover all the time–shaky inside, tender and weak. My body needed some time to digest what I the content I was ingesting and what I was experiencing.

So I picked up my pen and a square of paper and, I spiraled. I rested, and I spiraled. I found ways to participate, and I spiraled. I worried, and I spiraled. I cooked and cleaned, and I spiraled. I read books and listened to podcasts, and I spiraled. I felt ashamed, and I spiraled. I got inspired, and I spiraled.

Most days the question I ask myself when I spiral is simple: what am I experiencing? This inquiry is fruitful because it asks me to put words to my experiences. Once I have a name for something, I can talk about it–something that’s hard to do without the words–and it draws the details of the experience into my awareness, so I notice next time it happens. Just last week, I caught myself trying to read an article online while listening to a podcast. I noticed it because I recognized the twitchy, panic-laced agitation I was feeling as “that thing that happens when I’m starting to over-function”.

Nothing about the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the pandemic, looks linear to me. I see cycles, I see webs, and I see layers. I do not see straight lines in or out. I think that’s why winding and circling, on paper and out in the world, feels like the right kind of path and pace to integrate all that I’m learning and naming within myself and out in the world. I’ll never know what’s going to happen next, but I guarantee that more will be revealed at the end of the next spiral.

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p.s. Speaking of naming things- this document does an incredible job of naming the characteristics of white supremacy culture, and the antidotes to it. These pages made me cringe and they also made me feel incredibly hopeful about what else might be possible. Let me know how it lands with you.

p.p.s. Spiraling is my latest in a series of practices. I have written about the power of practice recently, and I also wrote about the value of it a few months after the 2016 election–another time of upheaval. I think I keep coming back to practice because it is the one thing that reliably works for me when I feel destabilized by discomfort/change. I also appreciate that the word practice is used both to describe something one does habitually and something one does to learn or polish a skill.