Therapeutic 'Un-Art'...

So it's been a little while since I wrote last.  End of semester university exams tends to not leave me much time for other things.  There's also the fact that when I'm feeling well, I don't write as much.  Suffice to say, today I'm feeling anxious...I just hope it passes relatively quickly.  I thought I'd blog about my first experience of art therapy in an attempt to distract myself from these sensations that have me teetering on the edge of the precipice...the half a diazepam is helping also.  God I hate taking those things and I rarely do, but there are days like today when I swallow one to take the edge off. 

Ok...art therapy.  I didn't attend a professional class although I'd love to.  The lack of community resources in this area astounds me, especially for people like myself who can't afford to attend those art therapy classes that are run privately.  Nevertheless, I decided to embark upon my own art-therapy journey...in my garage...complete with a 22 dollar easel and acrylic paints from 'Go-Lo'.  I suppose it's important to note that I've never been trained on how to conduct such a class (is it still considered a 'class' when the teacher and the pupil are one and the same and there is no-one else to constitute a group?) but I'm a big believer in intuition and so I followed mine.
For me the most important aspect of the project was the absence of 'a plan'.  I didn't want to deliberate over what I was going to paint prior to picking up the brush.  To me that seemed to be beside the point.  How would my soul send me a legitimate message, free of my conscious influence, if I was busy trying to interpret the message before it was sent?  And so I sat down in front of the blank canvas and began to paint...I sat there for 7 hours...minus the two toilet breaks I took.  The process was interesting, difficult, upsetting, frightening, and ultimately liberating.  There were many times that I wanted to walk away before it was completed.  I cried, I laughed (albeit with mirth full of bitterness), I sighed and I studied.  I had the uncanny feeling that I was a medium, not a creator, though in hindsight I suppose I was both.  I felt that the image was a component of that negative part of me, that dark place that helps to feed my panic disorder.  I thought if I could trap the image in the canvas, it would equate to me being purged of some small piece of the demon.  Once trapped, I would be free of it...and free to trap another.  My anxiety soared to great heights, told me I couldn't accomplish the aim.  I pushed through it, refusing to listen, which is no easy feat when up against such a formidable foe.  I succeeded and was able to take a deep breath...an impossibility in the throes of panic.  I knew then that I had finished and a small amount of pain had been siphoned from the mother-load.  I believe, indeed I 'know', that if I continue to paint, things can only get better.  The plan is to keep the paintings until it is time for them to be destroyed...I don't feel I will be entirely free of each memory until I am rejoicing in their death by dancing around the ash of their demise.

Adolescent Angst

Fast forward several years to early teenage-hood.  My mother had long since left my abusive father and moved interstate.  Of course he followed and I still had contact with him over the school holidays.  I was always petrified to go, but even more scared not to and so the anxiety remained.  That fact combined with the emergence of 'flashbacks' relating to my child abuse made for a pretty mixed-up teenage girl.  Of course I said nothing, I was ashamed.  I tried to tell myself every day that it was me who was making it all up.  I constantly viewed the world as unfair and everyone in it as potentially dangerous.  The only constant throughout my schooling was that I tended to do very well academically.  Eventually that too slipped away.  I always felt like a person on the margins, never quite fitting in anywhere.  School was extremely difficult...I remember most kids as just being cruel.  Still, I kept up a brave appearance, ultimately pretending I didn't care much about anything.  Sure, like many others, I tried to kill myself when I was 15 years old, and obviously failed.  I have spent the past 20 years attempting to ignore the scar on my wrist.  Enter the world of drugs. By partaking of them, I could go to the 'happy place' I could never quite find in the real world, and I could be part of a group of like-minded people who would become my friends.  My relationship with drugs continued into my early 30s.  I won't bother textualising all the happenings around my experience of society's underbelly as it would take forever.  Perhaps I will write about that some other time because undoubtedly the stories would fill a book on their own.  Suffice to say, the drugs themselves ended up turning against me in the end also so they are now no longer part of my existence.  This  now means that I have to face my panic head-on...I can no longer use drugs to numb my pain.  More days than not, it consumes me.  The presence of panic-disorder almost makes the memories of child abuse pale in comparison, though I personally believe it is the abuse which caused it in the first place.  It's an ongoing, every day struggle.  It is mentally, emotionally and physically taxing.  It feels like a sentence; a burden; a curse.  I want to scream out about how unfair it is.  I want to ask 'what did I do to deserve this'?  I want to punish the man who took away my innocence and blame it all on him.  I want to wake up in the morning and it will all be gone.  But panic disorder does not leave, it does not discriminate, and it won't explain to you why.  There are two choices.  1. Learn to live with it. 2. Stop living.   I know what I'm choosing and it's definitely not the latter.

In the beginning...

I cannot speak for other sufferers of panic disorder when it comes to the reasons why they have it.  Indeed the therapists who have treated me have all had their own views on which personal event of mine was the catalyst for developing such a disorder in the first place.  Yes, it could've been the fact that I was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused as a child.  Yes, it could also have resulted from being the quintessential high achiever from as far back as I can remember, and yes, maybe it was the traumatic medical events I had experienced as a young adult.  Not one of the therapists even brought up the illicit drugs I had taken during my entire adolescence and for most of my adulthood which I found a little strange.  Perhaps it was all of these variables combined.  Sometimes I think identifying the specific cause is worth exploring, other times I wonder if it would make any difference at all.

My earliest memory of panic would be around the age of four, give or take a year.  In any case I was just a little girl.  I remember being hysterical and my mother dragging me off to the bathroom to hold my head under the cold-water tap in the bath...just to calm me down, an event that certainly happened more than once.  I remember pushing all my girlie belongings from my dressing table with one violent sweep of my little arm, cheeks drenched with tears and fists clenched with rage.  I remember putting one of those little fists through my bedroom window pane and marvelling at what I'd done.  It's true I felt scared of getting in trouble for what I had just done, but I also felt powerful.  I'm pretty sure that this was the moment my love affair with opposing authority began.  I remember being frightened most of the time and I remember feeling lost all of it, and I certainly remember the first time I ran away.  I was five years old and had decided that the big, bad world had to have been better than staying where I was...so I packed my little bag, put on my little shoes and off I went.  Round and round the block I stomped...for two hours (according to my mother's recollection).  She had asked a neighbour to follow me from a distance, knowing full well, that if I had've seen my mother or anyone else coming after me, I would've refused to cooperate and return with them.  I'm not exactly sure how a five year old girl could refuse an adult anything, but obviously parents thought differently back then.  Never once did I cross the road...I simply knew I wasn't allowed to.  Ha!  My first real act of defiance came to an abrupt end when my little legs were too exhausted to continue...and so I trudged back to the place I had started.  Once inside, I plonked myself down onto my bed and sifted through the plastic bag I had taken with me.   Yeah that's right, a regular, good ol', plastic shopping bag. I had packed it in such a rage, that I had no idea what the hell was even in there.  As it turned out, I had only included the top drawer of my dresser.  The contents?  Singlets, undies,  socks...and get this...hankies. LOL!  I never was much of a planner...or a user of handkerchiefs :)  To be cont...