Ritual Magic: Walking

I am walking somewhere. On an empty beach with stinging and blowing sand. Through the bone whisper of dried marsh grass. Under crisp stars, the dark shapes of boats on dry land, and the somber gaze of planets. I lower my chin into the fuzziness of my coat, hands tucked into my pockets, eyes on my feet. My mind races with this frenetic churning, but I can’t keep ahold on anything, even thoughts or images that repeat over and over. It’s a slipstream of panic and the darkness between the stars roars at me until I want to sob. “In your body,” I suddenly remember—distilling a mountain of self-help books, therapy, friends, and PTSD recovery suggestions into one useless reminder. But I gulp and lift my chin into the wind, the rain, the sun, the heat, the snow and try to think about the strike of my foot on the ground. I force myself back into my body and it feels like placing my hand on a burning hot stove and holding it while the flesh sears. I take deep breaths and start naming the smells on the wind. Mud, salt, fish guts, sedge grass, brine, juniper berries, and pine.  I am a good writer of the earth’s details because I recite them like a rosary against the pain of existence, fingering each bead as they slip through my body. I am on a miserable walk, going nowhere and with no purpose. But it is this pointless, painful endeavor that I have poured all my hopes of healing into.

Two months after I move into the rented fishing cottage, where I am safe for the first time in my thirty-three years, my PTSD symptoms swallow me whole. My reactions to stressful things are always delayed. In the moment, I am calm and logical and as steady-handed as they come. But later on, when it is safe and calm, maybe days or weeks, I turn around and inexplicably fall to pieces. But this feels like nothing I have experienced before. It feels like my mind unzips and suddenly a million creepy-crawling acid-tinged centipedes scatter out to consume me and I scream, but no one can see the bugs.

That fall, where I thought safety would be peaceful thing, I am nothing but panic. I wake up from a dark sleep with my heart racing and dread twisted around my legs like a blanket, but there is no reason and no memory of dreams. I go to work, and I can’t focus or sit with my back to the stairs in my basement office, so I go sit in the dirty corner of the foreman’s office with my feet tucked under me and my hood pulled up. My heart won’t stop. My body feels exhausted, edgy, in a pain that has no source. My mind flickers too fast to keep up. Days will pass without a pause in the panic, like I am possessed and cannot stop running. Then my body collapses from sheer exhaustion, I sleep peacefully, and wake for a brief moment of peace before the cycle starts all over. The bugs are always crawling. Sometimes, when I walk across the manufacturing yard, I am so disconnected from my body I cannot remember how to walk or what the mechanics are and I start having a panic attack that I have forgotten how, even as my legs keep moving.

A friend comes from NYC to visit a few weeks after my symptoms take over my life. She is a friend, but also a publishing colleague and a professor and very far removed from the life I am currently living. I want to cancel, to hide this agony I am unable to hide in person, but since the trip has already been paid for, I don’t. This state of mind makes me feel terribly exposed, but I resign myself to it and pick her up from the train station on a Friday night and take her with me to clean the marina bathrooms. We chat in the cold, dark hours nearing midnight as I clean and mop. I can’t hide the manic of my symptoms or the scattered, disconnected way I tried to keep up with my thoughts or the rigidity in my body that has been overtaken by something frantic. But I play it off and keep talking. A lot of people profess to understand—they get anxious to! But she peers at me the next day and asks, “Are you able to pee?”

I am rocking in the chair, the wood squeaking with a terrible rhythm. But at her question, I stop.  “No!” I squeak out.

Here’s how I have been peeing—I go to the bathroom and sit down on the toilet. I hug myself tight. Sometimes I cling to my sweatshirt arms. I close my eyes and think to my body, ordering it, “You are safe, you are safe, you are safe.” I have to say this almost twenty times before slowly, something inside of me will unclench and I can finally release my bladder. I have had three children, but I can sneeze ten times in a row and not once trickle. The fact that she knows to ask this makes me trust her. I confess what’s happening and stammer out an apology every fifteen minutes she continues to witness my long, slow seizure. Before she leaves, she teaches me breath exercises, pays for repairs on my car, tucks extra cash into my glovebox, and tells me to keep writing these essays, if only for myself. That someday I will want them. Her breath exercises make it easier to pee.

When I have a problem or an unknown, the first thing I do is try to find the answer in a book. That is how I read the classic PTSD book, The Body Keeps Score. Reading that book is the darkest moment in my healing journey. I know I have been diagnosed with PTSD, but I have no idea that I have suffered from it for so long. I am filled with unbearable guilt to read about the impacts of unmanaged PTSD on pregnancy outcomes and then look at my children, one who must now manage his severe ADHD, one who I didn’t bond with for at least six months, and one who has anxiety. Trauma has touched everything. My head feels like a jumble of wires that are all crossed and constantly shorting while my body, still connected to it, stands in a puddle. I am unable to stop electrocuting myself. I can’t figure out how to rewire anything. “Can we ever really heal?” I text the wrong person. By then it is late winter, and I’m a zombie, stumbling through panic that has not slowed. In that book, which I have picked up for healing, I find a bevy of treatment options that are available for people who have money and access to healthcare. I do not have those things. More so, the one time I do go to the doctor for help I am treated as if I am drug seeking and turned away. I feel forgotten and condemned. I curl on the corner of my porch and a strong wind wails through the screens. I sob with hopelessness.

There is one line or idea or stab of imagination that gives me hope in this book. Exercise can make PTSD worse, as it raises the cortisol in your body, but walking did not. Walking, and the flicker or things passing through your vision, could even maybe mimic the positive effects of EMDR therapy. Or at least, I think I read this, but when I go back to find it later, I can’t find any mention of this connection. But at the time, I latch onto the idea. I had already been walking—but with this shred of manufactured hope, I began walking as a ritual.

My children call them “sad walks”. I take them after dinner every night while they clean up. I take them on weekend mornings while the frost lays on the sedge grasses. I take them at work, pretending to be inspecting the trusses. I make a playlist of the dumb songs that make me feel good—a shit ton of Tool and Five Finger Death Punch. Songs that match my chaos or order the slipstream. I fight, on every walk, to focus on the strike of my foot. Or the stretch of my fingertips into the future. I sniff deeply. Look at the sky. I think of the moon, find the planets, listen to the lapping tide or the stillness of ice. The longer I am out there, the more animal I become, and the more animal I become, the easier it is to live in my own body. Sometimes, on the way back, I burst into tears for no real reason, and I come back into the house with my face wet and cheeks red. I guess that’s why the kids called them “sad walks”. Healing feels like these walks, loops with no destination.

But they soon become my answer to find my way back to myself. By the time it is hot, the panic releases its grip on me. I am down to one or two “attacks” a week instead of constant. I am able to break away from some unsafe people, my unsafe mind has latched onto. I am alone and grieving, but I am starting to feel tiny shreds of real safety and real peace. I find home inside myself, and it is not unbearable. I see progress and that my life will not always be this hopeless. I start to accept that I will always be healing. I walk every day.

Like all these other rituals I have written about, walking is such a common thing we don’t think of it as magic. Our liturgies are only rotes until we acknowledge them as structure for a sacred space that may not immediately or always be filled. It is not until we can take seriously that magic and healing are common and every day, that we can benefit from them. Rarely is an individual walk magic. It can be, but not typically. It is mostly concrete and leaves and idly looking at neighbor’s houses. It is wandering to the edge of the forest and sniffing into the wind. It is picking an empty trail littered with stones I have to pick my way through and slopes too steep for comfort. It is twilight, fading light, dark, dawn, haze, chill, rain and snow. It is the sound of water hidden in the valley and the rustle of deer on their paths. It is the howl of the silent dark and somber planets. It is face first into oblivion and silent forms in the dark. Day after day, walking is the ritual of making a place for peace.