Dot-to-dot

She struggles to connect the dots – a little child with a new book full of puzzles to puzzle over. This one is particularly difficult for the dots are events in a person's life and the lines that connect them need to be emotional as well as rational. The ensuing picture that is created can then be colored in with the vibrant colors of life. As you can see, this puzzle book is nothing less than magical.

So the little girl begins her puzzling, as scenes pop into her mind teasing her, the scenes she anticipates might emerge as she connects the dots. One line is drawn – connecting the event that is shadowy and at the beginning, the number 1. Just a 2 year old, overwhelmed with sexual advances of a faceless man while mom is away for forever. These emotions are hard to color, as they are physical sickness, vomit that pushes its way up; and fear and panic and terror and a deeply confusing sense of not knowing where this mom is, and not knowing how to differentiate between self and this man and absent mom and the actions that happen then. The line is shadowy, thick, and for all her efforts to draw a solid line it will never be solid as this event happened not only in its fullness in reality but it happened to this sweet child who could not incorporate it fully into consciousness. So it is shadow, and she left herself then, and what she knows she really does not know and besides, it should never be brought to our knowledge. The line will be left in this puzzle book incomplete.

Then come events 2 – 12. They are warm and pleasant and confusing and shameful and hurtful and bad and good and everything that is incestuous as well as bizarre. She colors them lavender and gray and yellow and black. Looking back on the lines she has drawn she is mostly sad, for children should not have to try to layer these kinds of emotional events onto their public lives. She sees the lines have layered themselves over the first line, the shadowy one, and despite the raw emotion pounding with force in her chest she can see that these lines defy rationalization. They are not reasonable. And because the 2 year old left herself these new lines are not actually connected but layered in another dimension. You can peel the line that connects 2 to 3 for it is on its own sheet of transparent paper. You can peel the line that connects 3 to 4, for it is on its own sheet of transparent paper. And so on to number 12. She continues her puzzling, despite the vomit again rising in her throat. As always, she swallows it down.

All the events from 12 to 18 are gray with streaks of black. All the lines are lines only because the brain insists on creating a gestalt, so this child puzzler frantically connects dots that cannot be connected because the 2 year old left herself, and continued to do so, and continues to do so even as she works to connect the dots. When she stands back to look at this part of the picture she is amazed at the depth of the depression and rage, the intensity with which she fought to hide these shameful emotions, and the shallow smile painted upon the horrific canvas that cries for death. She can almost see the holes in the picture. Add some drops of red, for rage and the blood she so wanted to spill. Place some olive green in there, carefully, and only a spot of it, for the compassion it represents is painful.

Next comes an event that insists on being circled, many times, with heavy strokes. It is a defining event, complex, and experienced by many selves of the child. It is rape and in its aftermath came both surrender and fight. Layer this event upon the rest of the lines, the shadows, the colors and the holes within an emerging picture and it overwhelms the story the picture is trying to tell. It is the color of vodka and pot smoke. It is both erased and reinforced by the next event, a smaller and less colorful one, in which the hand of a beautiful man with kind, deep, blue eyes appears to touch the child's very soul. The puzzling child stands back, takes a breath, as the memory of this man's hand and eyes both draw and repulse her as did the incest. And then both are gone, represented in a dot-to-dot, as a rape followed by an illicit affair/molestation. Events 18 and 19 are both blue, but different shades. One a cold steel gray blue and the other a warm ocean green/blue. The child is compelled to circle the rape event a few more times with heavy strokes. She resists the urge to gouge out the eyes of the other man, there's just not enough room in the picture to express the love and the hate and the gentleness and the pain. As she layers this upon all the other lines the overlap of the affair/molestation with the lines from 2 to 12 are striking in their emotional similarities. It cannot be helped to equate this tenderness and affection coupled with confusion, loss and pain to self-injury. Here the saw that cuts one line from another, separates the events and layers the sheets of transparent paper becomes the saw that dismembers. She leaves herself again. Dissociation (emotional dismemberment), self-hate, and the urge to physically dismember herself by cutting off the left arm layer nicely but do not connect.

Participants in a study were paying attention to a particular task as a bear walked through their midst. Oh gosh, I forget the details. I just know they were so busy paying attention, they didn't notice the bear, even though the bear was completely incongruent within the context of the task. What am I supposed to be paying attention to? What am I actually paying attention to?

Next come lines connecting 19 though 30. These are vibrant lines, from powdery white lines of crystal to primary color lines of childrearing to jagged black lines of sexual dysfunction to rich leathery browns of academia and professionalism. The juxtaposition defies forming a comprehensive, intelligible picture yet somewhere in the layering a picture does indeed emerge. It becomes clearer as dots 30 – 40 connect, without the blurring caused by alcoholism, with the painful clarity provided by therapeutic insight. The colors dull with medication. The tears she weeps dry – the bear that walked through the picture both captured her attention and pulled it away from the picture itself, but was meaningless.

The child apologizes for such a shitty picture. Dot-to-dots are not fine art, and this life though complex and intricate with terrifying and disturbing events punctuated by a will to live and fight to survive and hope in a peace to come and moments of joy, laughter, love is a drop in the bucket of a million lives past, present and future. It is what it is, and to end it may be tragic but tragedy can also describe the fucking dot-to-dot. The child resists the urge to rip her piece of work into tiny bits of meaningless confetti. Some people, I would guess, find meaning in the living of life, the very act of day to day connecting the dots. But this poor child's dots don't connect and so much meaning is lost in her day to day struggle to just keep breathing. There was plenty of joy in life as she was growing up – riding her friend's horse, playing with her dog, walking through the fields and streams of her childhood home...and plenty of joy in the events of the present – camping and having lunch with her friends and listening to music....but those dots don't connect to the deep despair that surfaces in the face of past memories that don't connect to each other. Nevertheless, she has puzzled out quite a bit in this one page of her book of puzzles.

The quest to find peace and meaning and a comprehensive picture of life for a child who is many and has boundaries established that prevent the events of a lifetime from connecting, from emotional processing, from integrating into a whole picture is a mighty quest, and a sad journey, and an ineffective though on some level intriguing use of time. Above all it hurts, a painful quest, and she chuckles through the tears because she knows tomorrow may bring a hearty laugh and a comforting hug and feelings of love. Then she cries some more.

Am I Running or Traveling?

The dreams keep coming - I'm in a hurry to get somewhere but it will take days and miles. Sometimes I'm on a motorcycle, sometimes on foot. I usually have to travel in stealth mode, hiding from some evil pursuer. I usually do not mind the traveling. And obviously, such is my life. I'm trying to get away from the past as I move toward a pleasant future, and the present is not so bad despite the horror of the past. I need new shoes.