A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [151]
I did not die for only one night, but for the several years it took for the lessons of that night to travel to every cell of my body, and for the layers of old skin—formed in an earlier time of trauma, when I had different requirements for survival—to scrape away or slough off and be replaced by new ones.
When we imprison another we must also place one of our own in prison as a guard. Likewise when we imprison a part of ourselves, other parts must move into that same dungeon. Prisons—whether made of steel, razor wire, floodlamps, and observation posts, or a steel will holding emotions and flesh in check—consume a tremendous amount of energy. When as a child I vowed to no longer feel anger, to no longer feel anything, not only did I lose access to banished feelings but I lost also the energy it took to keep them at bay. Where did those emotions go, what did they do? They did not vanish into the psychic equivalent of thin air. How did they twist and turn to find their way out, as ultimately they must? How do frustrated emotions make clear their need for expression, and how, in the end, are they expressed?
The collapse that night in the hospital taught me the inefficacy of attempted control: diarrhea was an embodied manifestation of a lesson I needed to learn, and Crohn's disease was a teacher. Let go, Derrick. Let go. If I could not control my bowels, how could I hope to control my emotions, and certainly how could I ever hope to control any other? If I could no longer cope with physical pain by simply walling it off, what made me think that process worked any better for psychological pain? That night made clear that my attempts to ignore pain were killing me, both physically and psychically. It also made clear that control was a dead-end street.
I still have a notebook from that time in which I wrote a tentative declaration of this new direction: "All my life I have trained myself to be guided intellectually by intuition [I always did well on tests, standardized and other, because I'm a good guesser], and emotionally and practically by will. Now I wish to begin training my intuition to govern those other aspects of my life, tempered by will." That was as far as I could say at the time. I hadn't yet realized I didn't need to "train" my intuition so much as I needed to quit trying to impose my will upon it, and to instead begin listening to it. I hadn't yet learned well enough the lesson the disease was bringing to me.
By speaking of Crohn's disease as a teacher—both literal and metaphorical—I'm not suggesting that everything in our lives is a result of our having called it forward to teach us what we need to learn. Napalmed children do not call fiery death into their lives, nor do salmon call into existence dams to teach them about extinction. The notion of all calamity being in some measure self-inflicted is just one more attempt to deny accountability to perpetrators, one more means to silence victims. It insults not only the victim but also objectifies the agent of calamity, diminishes it to just another resource to be consumed, this time for our education. But the agent may have a lesson to deliver, and it may not. That's up to the other, or sometimes to chance.
I got a lot of that "blame the victim" stuff soon after I came down with the disease. All through the summer of 1985, and over the next couple of years, perhaps a dozen people approached to tell me the disease was my responsibility, that somehow I had brought it on myself. This was annoying enough the first time; by the fourth or fifth I lost patience and began, exasperated, to ask, "Would you tell me to take responsibility for getting hurt in an earthquake?" I am not certain whether it was the question, or the vehemence with which I asked it, that usually shut them up. One person didn't shut up. I was on a plane, stuck for hours on a runway at Chicago's O'Hare while the pilots waited for a break in a