In August I made an espresso without crying
On the body, grief, and the stories we hold
I’ve been trying to write about the body, about the nervous system, about somatics, since July. I have sentences and snippets and segments scattered across my daily morning pages over the past two months. Last week I realized the stories I want to share on the body are much longer and more nuanced than I can fit in a single newsletter (I can feel the press of a book-length project against my chest when I pause). But for now, I’ll start with this.
My ex husband had this way of giving me the most thoughtful gifts. They were often personal and more extravagant than I would ever give myself. Gifts that made me feel deeply seen. They were ways of saying: you deserve the whole world, and I want to give it to you, piece by piece.
The last birthday before I asked for a divorce—actually, he gave me the gift early and I asked for the divorce and then it was my birthday. The days and events get all jumbled around that time. But, the last birthday gift he gave me was a beautiful teal espresso machine. It’s called the robot, and it’s a feat of engineering. It allows you to make espresso by hand, pulling down the levers to create the pressure needed to pull a shot. The espresso it makes is gorgeous, full bodied and dark and rimmed with crema. And it’s a beautiful artifact of design, to boot, a machine that will last a lifetime.
I’d put the robot away for the better part of the last year, and finally a few weeks ago, I took it out and made an espresso without crying.
I still cry plenty. (Although I only cry on days that end with ‘y’.)
I saw a quote from Jillian Turecki online, “To walk away from someone you care about who cannot meet your needs is one of the bravest acts you can do.”
Most of the last year I have not felt brave. One of the hard parts of the divorce has been the disorienting process of living in my grieving body. One moment I’m fine, the next, I’m engulfed. Caught up in the deep waves of loss, loneliness. Feeling the tight band of anxiety around my chest. The clench of fear in my gut. The heavy gauze of sadness accumulated around my heart. The burn of shame and guilt in my throat.
At first it felt as if my whole life was haunted. Every moment offered triggers and reminders. The whole experience of living, a cloud of loss and disregulation.
I really didn’t want to get a divorce. But I knew it’s what I needed to do. Deep in my body, I knew. It took me years to accept it. Years of learning to listen to myself, listen to my body.
I have a complicated relationship with listening to my body. (In this culture, don’t we all?) I’ve slowly built a deeper and deeper relationship to my body. A willingness to experience its sensations, emotions, knowings, truth.
I learned young to hide my feelings, push them down. I learned my tears weren’t welcome, that it wasn’t safe to cry. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad, triggered and frustrated, raising his voice at me and telling me to stop crying. I learned to dissociate from feeling. I learned to hide, to fit in, to meet others’ expectations of me, to control myself, to stay in the warm glow of others’ love, as best I could.
Dance was my entry into knowing my body, but dance taught me control, too. Ballet class was a place my body felt good, strong, graceful, capable. But in ballet there were ways of moving that were right and wrong, and if I worked hard enough I could achieve them. I could get my splits. I could lengthen my extensions. I could master leaps. Ballet was a way of being with my body in ways that still made sense with the worldview I grew up in: accomplishment, achievement, self discipline, all slivers and facets of perfectionism.
But dance was also an outlet. In the studio I grew up in, I found community and belonging. It was one of the places I felt most free, most peaceful, most able to be myself and be accepted. A paradox I could live with, that I both belonged and felt I needed to work harder to conform.
Dance and art were where I got to know myself. The rest of my life was for other people, but creativity was for me. Everything else I did for security, but art I did for self knowledge, self expression, joy, pleasure.
At some point I’ll write the full story of my embodiment journey, it all wants to be told—burlesque, dance, teenaged sexual trauma, people pleasing, EMDR, believing that I and my body and my life are made for others, getting in touch with my own desire, female sexuality class, the free-feeling of being on the Grand Canyon and in the mountains, the sourcing all of my life choices from other people, the slow slow return to embodiment, the somatic therapy, the deep waves of shame as new desires surfaced, all the frustration and resentment and fierce kick of wanting to feel a freedom I’d never felt.
A freedom only I could give myself.
A freedom I’m still learning to give myself.
All this month I’ve thought about stories. How the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, shape what’s possible. How the grief needs a story to heal. How maybe a new story means the healing is done. How maybe the grieving is never done but the story shows us that it’s okay. How the story helps us transform.
I’ve been trying to write my story, trying to sew this story of divorce and grief and loss and body and experience and desire and shame and forgiveness into a quilt that might bring me some comfort. I’ve been trying to tell my body it’s safe, it’s safe, it’s safe for the better part of a year or maybe it’s been a decade or maybe this whole life.
I think my body is slowly starting to hear it, to soften, to let me feel even more of my truth.