The Power of Suggestion

Last week on North's birthday there was a snow storm up there and he was low on alfalfa for the nursing goats. He lost no time driving up the mountain to the feed store before the roads closed, loaded up the bales, and shut the truck door on his own hand. "All the way shut," he would later tell me on the phone. The young feed-store helper nearly fainted as North yanked the bone of his broken little finger into place. Many ibuprofins later, as we're having this chat, I tell him stories of the times I've used my strong right hand to slam a dresser drawer on my left while it was still in the drawer. We laughed, me harder than him.

Next morning he calls, much earlier than usual.
"You'll never guess what," he says.
"What?"
"You'll never guess what I did after we hung up last night."
"No. What?... Oh no..."
"I slammed the dresser drawer on my same finger."

Everything that hurts, it seems, is the result of a disconnection, a severance, a break, a break-up, a parting, a tear, a cut, a snap, a shattering, a loss, a separation. One of the more graphic illustrations of the fragmented mind is vitiligo. It's not the quick crack of a finger-bone, but the infinitisimal snap of countless nerve filaments, screaming ruptures in the walls of nuclei,
the ebb of blood and life. It's the thought-forms no one else can see, turning on themselves, freezing out the thinker with self-rejection. It's the emotional cancer of these thoughts and borrowed beliefs, cannibalizing their host with self-disgust. When my poor dear Dad turned his lion-roar on me, the heartbreak was so bleedingly bad I barely held to consciousness. Blind with pain, I began at twelve to go numb, to not hear, not obey, not feel, to shut down.

Breaks and disconnects at the cellular level, so tiny, so by the millions, so every nano-second, draining the life-force of the neglected, abused, stressed, and anxious child, or inner child in an adult of any age. It's as though finger-tips and elbows, scalp and knees, were retreating from exposure and vulnerability. The outer became a perfect mimic of the inner drama of my excruciating self-consciousness and pathetic body-image. At fourteen, two parallel identities were born, one bearing the wounds of her fore-mothers; and the other creating her own glorious life.