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  • Nowhere Place
  • Heather Johnson (bio)

Loosely tethered to my body, my psyche resists its physical boundaries. Reaches out, trying to escape from this breathing object, me, but it can only go so far. My fingers curl and uncurl, clench and unclench. Spasms of habit trigger points of pain in my wrist and the joints of my hands. Tighten my fists until it becomes sharper, more insistent, something I can't ignore, and it's this ache that anchors me, reins me in, or, at least, brings me a little closer to my body.

Shift on the overstuffed couch, draw the red throw blanket closer about my stomach, and rub its soft static texture between my fingers. Open my eyes. A smile plays on the mouth of Dr. C, my therapist, seated across from me on his well-worn leather armchair, pen and clipboard resting on the faded black of his jeans. Rays of sunlight sift into his salt-and-pepper hair from the closed blinds and glint off his John Lennon frames.

Breathe as he has taught me to do, slowly, imagining the inhalation as a stream of golden energy and the exhalation a murky, gray expelling of anxiety and impurities. Detachment remains, but I'm calmer. Everything is alien—my body and how it experiences reality. Stale smell of sunlight, like dry honeysuckle, is acute, and even pressing my lips together sounds crisp and strange.

This is normal, this sense of unbelonging. I've discussed this feeling, this nearly constant state of detachment, with my therapist many times. We understand what contributes to it and we've agreed on a definition: dissociation. It's not complete separation but rather a resistance to reality, a resistance to being as I am. It's a coping mechanism I've developed to deal with the demands of daily living, and it originates from layers of trauma, but it's also something I actively cultivate.

I do this in several ways. When I'm in crisis it's easier. At first, the emotions, whether fear, anger, or pain, engulf me and become too much to handle. Then my cognizant self puts the emotions aside and numbs me [End Page 9] to what's happening—it directs the automaton of my body and I experience the anger and fear as if it were happening to someone else. I feel it only vicariously. I think more clearly, act more rationally. I'm a spectator watching myself perform. From the outside, I look strangely calm. My eyes widen as if I'm dazed and my facial muscles relax. My voice deepens, my language becomes succinct and clinical, and my limbs move carefully, each motion slow and deliberate. It's a practical coping reaction. It's why I'm high-functioning in the midst of crisis.

Another method I use to detach is alcohol. Alcohol loosens the tether between my rational mind and its control over my body and impulse. When I'm overwhelmed by the oppressive weight of depression and stress, I'll seek out the dissociative symptoms, the sense of unreality and emotional numbness, to find relief. Liquor brings on a fugue state where reality is more bearable, more surreal. Binge drinking is my defense mechanism to endure my perception of reality. But alcohol has its own risks. Because I don't have control over my own impulses I can end up harming myself, if I can't induce the dissociation quickly enough, if I linger too long in the depressive thoughts. Alcohol is, after all, a chemical depressant.

This resistance to being is part of the mindset I developed growing up in an unwanted physical space where an unwanted population was put aside. This "reserved space," the Navajo Nation Reservation, has many associations for me. The name itself is an emotional and spiritual trigger. The rez evokes contradiction: fear of reexperiencing trauma, an actual ache for home/my mother that lives behind my sternum. Hate of our collective commitment to suicide by alcoholism and drug use, shame of the pervasive desensitization and self-neglect so many indigenous people must assume to be able to live on the rez, and a love and spiritual hunger...

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