On Numbness

"I just wanted to hear your voice..."

When I first began this essay, I thought it was going to be a piece about not feeling, about the wisdom of our bodies, and how they orient toward what is wise, even if that wisdom crafts a cloak of protective numbness. And now, as it unfolds I have taken myself somewhere new, which is why I bother to write at all. In the process of writing this essay over the last week, I am noticing the heightened moments of aliveness. The very act of writing impacting my perception, my capacity to feel. Changing me.

My friend Kele wrote a text to me this week when we both forgot to reach out to the other because we each have people in our lives that are dying or who just died. He said of grief, “It’s a clouded experience, or rather some things are heightened and others obscured.” That feels true.

At the moment, I am terrible about returning texts. I am behind on things I am usually never behind on like bills, paperwork, getting my bloodwork taken care of—and I don’t care. I had a bout of vertigo yesterday that humbled me, and my insomnia, panic, and anxiety have been back in ways that feel too close to some of my lowest mental health moments. My therapist openly names how skilled I am at compartmentalization multiple times a session.

My father is dying and it’s hard for me to feel. And, yet, as I type this, my chest feels tight, my throat is aching, and my eyes are watery. Feeling. Here. All of a sudden. I have spent so many years protecting myself in a family where other kinds of protection were confusing, that I find it difficult to move back and forth between armoured and soft, walled off and receptive—even to myself. Avoidance as a survival strategy is never solely an outward experience, and I have found that healing an attachment wound that tends toward running is most difficult on the inside. Learning that closeness with other people can be safe was somewhat easier. Not perfect, but there were some models—my grandparents, friends, the stability of living in the same town for most of my life, my kids, and a few key romances. Feeling often makes me embarrassed. I will apologize to you for my sadness, for being hungry, my anger, my fear, my insecurity. I will even apologize for running. “You come from a long line of people who don’t feel,” my spiritual teacher says. “So feel.”

I would say, I come from a long line of people in denial, so be alive.

Numb itself comes from the old English word Niman, which means “to take, to seize, to grasp.” I love this. To take what? To grasp from where? Who is doing the taking and why? When we are numb, this new perspective on the word insinuates that something has been stolen, seized. A protective cloak thrown around me that encapsulates me from me. Steals myself from me. At an event recently where there were lots of queer people and women crying and laughing, my friend, who has had one of the worst years of her life looked around and said, “I think I’m ready to have feelings again.” In this space, it did look fun. Like the capsule was maybe more of a cocoon, ready someday to explode with beauty. There is wisdom in numbness.

And, maybe the wisdom of numbness is that we get to visit grief in little bits. I’ve seen what happens when grief takes over. I’ve seen how it can make a mother disappear, and I cannot afford to be that mother.

So I go the Safeway to gather up my dad’s strange selection of chemo craving foods—orange juice, ice cream, and sliced peaches in a can. And as I stand in front of the orange juice selection, which is massive. MASSIVE. I realize I have no idea if he likes pulp or not, and I panic text him. He doesn’t answer because he’s always asleep now, and I burst into tears holding a no pulp version in the self-checkout line.

Here’s another moment of feeling. I am laying with my head on my lover’s belly next to a river on a very hot day. We just got out of the water and are drying off in the shade. I am staring at the sky through the dappled light of the trees. We had been talking about osprey earlier, and at that moment I see one fly over us. Instead of speaking I turn my face toward him and point. I see that his eyes are closed so I watch the osprey alone, and then am overcome with an ache that makes absolutely no sense. He puts his hand on my heart, and doesn’t do anything other than be with me while I feel. When he asks me about it later, as we walk through the woods, I try to make sense of it with words, but it doesn’t really track. Something trite about not really knowing my dad, and life’s fucking preciousness, and he says, “Maybe it was because when you turned toward me, my eyes were closed and you wanted me to see the osprey with you, and when I didn’t, you felt alone.” Yes. That felt right. A different kind of seeing landing, because the truth is loneliness is the hardest feeling to feel.

We have a saying in our family, “I just wanted to hear your voice.” My mother says it to me, and I have found myself saying it to my kids, especially as they have grown. I’ve said it two times in the last two days, once to each child. And, I’ve had it said to me once this week by the aforementioned new lover. All of us searching to see if the other is still there.

The first time I said it was after holding an injured pregnant woman in front of my house. She was in a terrible car accident, and she couldn’t feel the baby moving—the mother’s eyes moony, darting back and forth like an animal being hunted. She reached down instinctively and checked her underwear for blood right there on the side of the road with her fingers, as her a three year old wailed in her face. After she was taken away by the paramedics, and I got the three year old a snack, I called Veda in NY even though it was after midnight, and I had literally just promised hours before that I would not call them late at night again. They answered, and I said, “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

The second time I said it was after speaking to my brother in Australia, my secret brother, the one I didn’t know existed until 2021. The child my dad had when he was 16 that we never knew about. My dad had four kids and yet my family feels so small. “My dad has liver cancer,” I tell him. Should I have said “our dad” instead? I didn’t know. Is it our dad? It still feels so confusing.

He was shocked. “It’s my natural father after all,” he says when I ask if he wants updates. We couldn’t stay there too long, in the grief together. It felt too close for a brother and sister who don’t really know each other, but really wish that we could. “Do you think it’s all right if I call him some morning, or afternoon?” I love how he specified the time of day, as if that might make a difference. I hate how he specified the time of day, the way he made himself small, like he knew he had to limit himself, his contact.

“Yeah, let me talk to him first.”

“Of course,” he says. “I’ll be away for the weekend, so I’ll call on Monday or Tuesday.”

This may be the most honest conversation I have had with this new sibling. This acknowledgment that he had not been told by our father, that I am the one who had to speak the words, and that he would have to ask me if it’s okay to call. Our secrets make us sick. Our secrets are meant to wield power. Our secrets are passed on to our children to deal with whether we like it or not. So I call the second kid while he’s working at Chipotle, and say, “I just wanted to hear your voice,” and I tell him that I told my brother in Australia about the liver cancer, and he says, “That’s so sad Mama,” in a voice that is much younger than his almost 17 year old self. Then he encourages me to listen to a podcast he likes about inspirational bank robbing stories. “I cried at the end of the last episode while I was doing the dishes.”

While my dad is dying, there is a certainty that I find myself craving. I want to know if the chemo will work a little or not at all. What are we talking about in terms of suffering when we are prolonging a life? Will the suffering be worth it? I want to know the quality of aliveness he will be left with and if that is enough. If I could know the day he is supposed to die I would want to. Anne Lamott says that the opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty. What about when there is no certainty and yet we crave it so desperately? What’s that? A longing for false faith? A totem? Back to worshiping the map versus devotion to the mystery?

I googled Carl Jung quotes about secrets and was surprised to find a direct connection to numbness, although he doesn’t use the word numb, instead he says, “…an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men.” The numbness also, then, steals from us our sense of taking our place among the family of things—our sense of belonging. This also feels true. Like a lover’s eyes closed to the soaring bird, like a father who has never let me really know him, who kept secrets so that one day I might have to reveal his.

“To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised in and for oneself that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid and guilty in his fellow-beings—for such of course are the things that we keep private to protect ourselves. It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession—a significance known in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: "Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.”

―C.G. Jung,Modern Man in Search of a Soul

It is not lost on me that my writing is a sort of confessional. A testimonial. A creative act meant to expose my insides, my secrets and my emotions.

All of that to say, I love you and appreciate you reading.

Audra