On Doing the Work

As a capitalist society, we talk a lot about work. Productivity. Putting in the time. No one eating without working. As a neurotic society, we talk about “doing the Work.” Finding a good therapist. Taking up yoga. Setting boundaries.

Then there’s Allen Ginsberg’s definition from The Fall of America back in 1963 that goes like this:

Well, while I am here I’ll do the work –

and what’s the Work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else, drunken

dumbshow.

As a survivor, I have done a lot of the Work, but I have also come to realise that there is a belief surrounding this Work that is perpetuated by the 8 week groups, the therapeutic goals prescribed by insurance payments, the “happily ever after” narrative that we inhale daily. This belief is that when you do the Work, and you do it sufficiently well, the Work will be done. When it is done, you will then step into the stream of the happily and ever after.

This is a giant lie that we’re all selling ourselves. We have built to mythic proportions the hero’s journey, the narrative that a Survivor is someone who has overcome. Overcome suggests an endpoint, a ceasing, an arrival after which there is no more Work to be done. Overcome says that you will reach a stage where your past, your wounds, your pain will be healed, completely and irrevocably.

Instead, it seems more real to say that the Survivor has all the symptoms of a phantom limb. The wound is healed. There is a scar. But that isn’t the sum of the Work, just the beginning.

The Work is dealing with the burning sensation in your pelvis even though you haven’t suffered that particular pain in years. It’s waking in the night to the memory you thought you’d erased. It’s seeing the same mistakes played out time and again when you believed it was over.

Is It ever really over? Why do we expect it will be? Do we expect survivors of war and bombings to be stop flinching when they hear a loud car start? Will a veteran never again wake up in a sweat after yet another dream where his friend is blown up in front of his eyes? Studies seem to suggest that is an irrational expectation, and society seems to be more accepting of the ongoing consequences of this sort of physical and psychic trauma.

Why do we expect this to be different for survivors of different types of war? Why do we expect that the vestiges of sexual assault and molestation, of boundary erasure and manipulative love, will magically disappear because someone has been doing the Work?

I certainly had that expectation for myself. I truly believed that I would one day be “free.” Heaven knows I prayed for it often enough. To never again smell something that brings up overpowering waves of nausea. To not jump when someone comes up behind me. To not feel my body go numb when physicality becomes overwhelming. I’m still waiting for this freedom to arrive, and I have begun to expect it never will.

I’ve also extended that expectation to others, including friends and partners. If they are doing the Work, I expect that they will stop having intense anger, stop needing extreme amounts of attention, start being capable of activities they were never capable of before.

But I was wrong to expect this of myself or of them. I cannot know where someone else’s Work will lead them or which path they will choose to travel at what point in their life. I cannot know when they will decide that particular Work is not worth pursuing further, because something else needs their attention.

Beyond that, there is a pain of living that a Survivor never loses, because it’s etched in the cervices of their body, in the corners of their minds. And even the slightest bit of shame or confusion can trigger a whole new onslaught of memories, of fear, even of physical pain. With every major life change, like the loss of a loved one, a divorce, even a much longed for child being born can require more processing. At every point where a person’s being shifts and stability is lost, when they are truly living, they experience that pain. Then they can choose to drown again or return to the Work, painstakingly rebuilding their raft out of the wreckage. If they have done previous Work well, they may have large pieces of the prior creation to draw from, but there will invariably be days when it seems like none of that effort mattered, like they have returned to the beginning all over again.

I have been here multiple times. With the ending of a marriage, of a relationship, the loss of parents, the loss of friends, and even the birth of LA. That last one shocks me even now.

There has never been a way to express the maelstrom of emotions that flooded through me after his arrival. Joy, of a kind never felt before, most certainly. A bit of fear that I was not nearly as prepared as I had hoped. All the usual feelings you read about in books. But there was also pain and a deep sadness. At first I imagined it had to do with the child that poured out of my body and onto the linoleum floor, lost to me forever. That was certainly part of it. But it was also the sadness for when I was born, for when the world was still new, my parents present, a world I don’t remember except through photographs and the stories my father told me. That little baby with her blue and pink hat, face scrunched against the bright lights, she disappeared too soon. She became an adult for all the wrong reasons, and I grieved for her as I held LA in my arms. I grieved for all those years taken away from her. And I grieved for all the years taken away from so many others like me, statistics on paper who are still subject to the completely real pain of living.

That grief on receiving new life into my arms, coupled with sleepless nights and general exhaustion, slowly undid the Work that had been done before, forcing me to a place where I had no choice but to start the Work again.

You either do it, and keep doing it, and hope that in doing it something good will remain for the next round, or you fall into whatever is your personal version of a drunken stupor. That’s the part they really don’t talk about.