In retrospect, all that I’ve come to accept as reality in the last month — as a result of various traumatic events in my own little domestic economy after the birth of my daughter— is not new to me. What is new to me is not the intellectual content of this understanding, but rather, the application of it, judiciously, in my embodied understanding — as represented in the most simple things, ie: daily life itself. When you are abused for a long enough time, you develop a very strong ability to dissociate from yourself. This is a protective mechanism, in the same way that dissociation in the practice of meditation enables an objective distance from one’s thought processes, or the way that an extreme amount of physical pain can produce a sort of phantasmagoric “out of body” experience. I’ve eaten food so spicy, so overwhelmingly capsaicinized, that it invoked a hallucinogenic experience. This ability to “step out from oneself” is something I take for granted, but its origin in myself is much earlier, in my rather dreary childhood, which I do not remember so fondly as most remember their own childhoods. It’s sad to me how little I look back on my childhood as a time of happiness. I recognize now that this is abnormal. Most people remember their childhood fondly, but I remember hiding under blankets in closets praying to God to remove me from life. A seven year old should not be entertaining suicidal ideations, but this was how it was for me. My life has been one of continual improvement— I have only become a happier person as I’ve gotten older. I was most miserable and sad as a child.

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