This is the definition of torture as I am reprogramming myself.
After all, I am breaking my own self apart. Letting go of the monster means saying goodbye to my life as I have always known it. As a result, I really do find myself struggling to occupy space and time.
But even though my life was mostly defined by pain and suffering, it is still hard to let go. Why? Because it really does feel like I am fucking dying.
I need to relearn how to breathe. To sleep. To eat, digest and even shit.
Removing all the old toxins, I have never, ever smelled this badly.
I need to learn that it is finally safe to let my life experience go. I do not need to spend any more time or energy seeking understanding from others.
My experience with the healer is like wanting to kill myself on repeat. Forever. I never want to seek understanding from anybody ever again.
In fact, he will no longer be known as the healer. Instead, like all of the people who have hurt me most in life, I am making him into an animal.
He is a koala because they are beautiful but dangerous.
It makes me physically sick that he still reads this blog when he makes me want to kill myself because he will not accept that he hurt me.
Fuck off, just get out of my life completely.
If I have to do this on my own, I am at war against you and all of humanity.
My body is in constant movement right now, as if the right and left sides are physically tearing me apart. I am dizzy just seated here.
At the moment, sleeping is my biggest challenge. Sometimes I cannot properly fall asleep and so I wake up before midnight thinking it is morning. Otherwise, I maniacally wake up at 3am still exhausted.
My clenched stomach makes it hurt to eat and I am losing even more weight. People think that maintaining a model’s proportions is a choice.
My last boyfriend even teased me because of my empty fridge.
Sometimes I cannot leave the house to go shopping. When I do make it to the shop, my body often starts seizing when I cannot find what I need to buy.
My diarrhoea has never been this bad. I even went on the floor after my ice bath last night. In the morning, I was throwing up while going.
If only people knew what I was actually experiencing, then they would feel like complete assholes for making me suffer even more.
But they cannot know. This is my curse.
This blog will be my last for a while. As my previous posts are outdated, I am now attempting to synthesise everything in the hopes of letting go.
I am fucked because my mum had her womb X-rayed before she knew that I was conceived. As a result, my stomach was not fully formed yet at birth.
I was also born face first, which bruised my delicate nerves.
Because I had stomach problems the first two years of my life, the gagging reflex pulled at my damaged facial nerves, creating unbearable pain.
I weighed only 18 pounds aged two.
My nervous system was in crisis but I could not communicate this to anybody. I tried by crying, which is probably why I am sobbing so much now.
Back then, my body’s defence – the preconscious way to protect myself physically – solved this problem by making the injuries inaccessible.
This is a fundamental piece to understand. My facial injuries are so painful that when my stomach started tugging at them, my body somehow sealed them off in order to stop any blood flowing through the agony.
I am only beginning to understand now, because of being isolated, why this means that my monster is one hundred per cent socially created.
My monster is you misunderstanding my injuries.
If nobody else existed other than myself, my monster too would not exist.
Language is mutually constructed and yet because humanity is closed, there is no language for me to communicate my monster.
Talk about an existential crisis: I have no language for pain and suffering?
I thought love would be the answer but it is the problem.
Why? Because humans are remarkably shitty.
We are such arrogant creatures that no human anywhere was able to open up his/her/their mind enough to actually account for my lived pain and suffering.
Every single time, he/she/they knew better.
Wow, writing that sucks. Can we not just get rid of all pronouns?
Anyway, I spent almost fives years in Iran, Lebanon and South Africa trying to learn. I do two ice baths daily to understand. Hours of daily exercise.
What effort did anybody else make?
Not one human has ever been able to listen. This is why the monster is buried so deeply inside of me. It is the product of human rage.
The scar tissue lodged in my vagus pathway and started behaving cooperatively to defend myself from other humans because of their arrogance, like the organoid I describe in Retuning my Story.
My monster only exists because of other people.
It has a physical presence. When I do the contrast therapy on my face and neck, it is like there is a lizard slithering underneath my skin.
This monster pre-consciously controls my body whenever I am faced by extreme stress, like at birth or somebody I love is physically hurting me.
My body’s physical distress response pushes me to such agonising extremes that I then have to defend myself with harsh words and actions that I later regret because holding onto the pain is just no longer possible.
In fact, the monster shut off the injured parts of my body so completely that even today I am only now starting to access them with pure oxygen.
My injuries make my body feel unsafe, so my nervous system figured out a way for me to survive around them in a slow burn state of flight or flight.
I only manage by fawning, trying to please others.
My post on polyvagal theory helps to explain this further.
However, I am still always in pain and so I never stopped looking to others for help. The more I love somebody, the more I need them to see my pain.
When they cannot, they lock my monster even deeper inside of me.
Therefore, the more I try to seek help from others, the more worthless I feel.
After all, I am in such painful agony that I must deserve to suffer.
So I get angry, making me say and do things I regret.
Afterwards, I fucking hate myself. My life is now isolated as a result.
My mother’s personality made my situation worse. She was loving but overly optimistic and simplistic. She dismissed my pain and suffering as histrionics.
She called me ‘Sarah Heartburn,’ making me suicidal.
As a result, my monster grew gigantic wings of despair, constantly telling me to kill myself because others could not see my pain.
In fact, nobody even believed my pain as a child because of my talents. I excelled in almost everything: maths, writing, reading, arts and sports.
To be so talented while unable to express real life pain and suffering has always been a nightmare, as whenever I try to explain why I am excluded everybody always talks down to me, making the monster stronger.
I got most of my talents from my father, who was emotionally abusive to my mother. This made her ridiculously defensive with me.
She hurt me over and over and yet always denied responsibility because in her mind I was the able bodied one and she was only trying to love me.
But my pain was real and so was my monster.
Because of the inability of others to understand, I blamed myself.
My talents as a child also made my peers defensive. Despite being in pain, early on I excelled at most things I tried and the adults around me adored me.
This led to resentment and my friends bullied me.
I tried to explain to them that I was suffering, but my hurting pleased them.
When I broke my finger aged about nine, my best friend grabbed it in her hands and pulled it back all the way to my wrist, laughing.
A couple of years later she convinced me to publicly ask out the boy I had my heart set on, saying that he had broken up with his girlfriend. He had not.
I asked him out and was publicly rejected.
The following year, she and another friend harassed me into asking out another boy, one whom I did not even like. I did not want to, but after a week of being coaxed I felt guilty and finally did, only to get rejected again.
‘We only do this because you react so much’.
I was not even close to puberty at this stage, as my development was stunted. I was inches shorter than everybody else.
But I was talented.
My school even created a special art class for me every year.
The friend who had convinced me to ask out that boy along with our mutual best friend recently saw me after more than three decades.
I explained to her how I was so unwell that I lost my career. Her immediate response was that our art teacher made her suffer as a child!
My words do not seem to resonate with anybody anymore.
My childhood friend was convinced that I was still her oppressor just because the adults had such high expectations of me over thirty years ago?
The more accolades that I started winning as a child, the worse I ended up feeling about the monster growing inside of me.
I was suicidal before becoming a teenager.
The Tuning Room last year brought all of this trauma crashing back. It was like being forced into in an alternate reality, where my pain did not exist.
I describe in ‘Searching for Dorian Gray’ how my pain and suffering made me run away from home, only to make me feel even worse about myself.
Working with VIPs made me feel super small.
Just like being in love always makes me feel worthless.
My first kiss was in Paris. Sounds romantic, no?
It was fucking ridiculous.
I was competing at an international gymnastics competition, aged 16.
We were there for about a week, everything paid for. It should have been a huge achievement, except my abilities were starting to diminish, making me fearful of even getting up on the beam, let alone flipping on it.
I had a crush on an older gymnast, 21, from Ukraine but living in France. He was the best gymnast I had ever met, even Olympic quality.
He easily won the competition and I performed dismally.
At the after-dinner celebration, a bit tipsy from drinking wine with the French, I hid in the corner crying because I felt like such a loser.
I could not imagine anybody possibly being interested in me.
My younger colleague was tugging at my arm, telling me to look up because there was somebody who wanted to ask me to dance.
Yup, it was the Ukrainian. We danced and eventually even kissed.
It ended up being crazy though as my coach got angry and ordered us to go back to the hotel. However, the French organiser picked us up again and my coach called the police. All I can remember are those flashing lights.
That was the peak of my romantic life.
My life is too often this dramatic because I am so desperate to be seen.
So, for example, I not only went to Iran alone as an American female researcher, I was also so curious that Iranian counter intelligence had me under surveillance. When I tried to leave, they interrogated me for five hours.
While holding onto my passport and threatening me with jail!
And that experience was way easier than what I am going through now.
My seizures are not panic attacks because my body is weak.
They demonstrate the force of a monster inside of me that is holding onto all of my life’s traumas that are predicated on me not being seen.
My monster is socially constructed by all of you not believing me.
Every single person in my life has made my monster stronger.
This is why the koala damaged me more than he will ever know. I will never, ever let anybody fucking near me ever again!
Your inability to see me makes me feel unloveable and worthless.
My body contorted itself into a monstrosity to navigate your false expectations of me, deforming me internally so you can think that I am beautiful on the outside but in reality I cannot live a dignified life.
My body is so internally twisted that I cannot even enjoy sex!
Although I have always easily made friends, none of them have taken my pain seriously. In fact, most people seem to get annoyed with me.
Why? Because I look fine?
People always tell me how good I look. Fuck you all!
Ever since my health starting falling apart, even my friends have been dropping like flies. How can people who care not fucking believe me?
My more epileptic seizures started about seven years ago at the same time that my academic career collapsed while working for my intellectual mentor.
My book was based on almost two and a half years of fieldwork. It was funded by prestigious grants and won a university award. Unlike British students, I also did over two years of PhD coursework.
I turned down a more successful imprint to publish my book with my mentor’s series because I looked up to and admired his work so much.
During Covid, my mentor did not defend me or my research. I lost my career.
My mentor even told his students to bully me, one of whom I had previously considered a brother. Overnight they acted as if I did not exist.
At a time when I just started having seizures and spasming uncontrollably.
And yes, I was also suicidal.
The irony is that I was only in this position because I wanted to understand my own disability while helping other oppressed communities.
I did not deserve to lose my career because of my mentor’s cowardice.
Pluto Press has not even sold enough copies of my book to pay off the indexing fee, which was exorbitant because there are so many references.
Yes, my book is that amazing, which is why I am so proud of it!
My research on the Israel lobby with Professor David Miller was also so impactful that there was a national campaign to smear him at the time.
Perhaps this is why my mentor did not defend my research?
I had to move back to New York and live with my mother and stepfather in total humiliation, having lost any means of making a living.
The failed academic experience hurt me so much that I even destroyed my entire library of books about the Middle East and Islam.
I was and still am really, really, really hurt by that shitty mentor.
Although he asked me to continue editing his work when I left, after telling him that he hurt me he since refused to write me a reference.
He will be known in my memoir as the scorpion.
Meanwhile, at home my family did not take my suffering seriously either.
One night I even jumped into the snow and raved about like a lunatic, leaving bruises all the way down my arms and legs for weeks.
I needed them to finally see my pain.
Over the course of my healing, my seizures have changed. The first time I had one where I could not breathe was about four years ago.
My stepfather got really angry at me, trying to push open my bedroom door because my body could not engage in an argument with him.
It was a violent seizure and I was making sounds, struggling to breathe.
My stepfather made fun of these sounds.
That made the breathing even harder. When I asked my mother to bring me to the hospital, she told me that they would section me.
It was one of many misunderstandings that strengthened my monster.
This is why I came to Cardiff without any friends or job prospects. It is also why I cannot visit my family in New York right now. I am too scared.
The last time I tried was a year and a half ago.
I had secured part time work during a short window of feeling better. But when my healing stalled and the job made me worse again my line manager was more concerned with the work than my well being.
She got really upset with me whenever I seized, as if I could control it. I mean she fucking even pulled an angry face!
Obviously, this made the seizures get worse, so I had to quit.
My mum also does this too. I will never understand why humans punish other humans for expressing pain. It certainly makes me hate everybody.
Feeling forced to quit, I did ask the university for disability help as I do not know how to get benefits. They ignored me and I still have no help.
At the time, I also lost my rent deposit for the first time in my life as moving with a fucked up nervous system led to seizure after seizure.
My family is not wealthy enough for me to sustain this.
So, I was at the lowest point in my life when I met the koala.
I did not explain to him all of the above, but most of it. And a hell of a lot more, too. I spent countless hours trying to help him understand.
After all, he was so confident that he could help me.
At first, I was attracted to this confidence because I still did not have any access to my right side and thus had little faith in myself.
Even though I did not have confidence in myself, I did have a lifetime of knowledge and experience. Unfortunately, the koala did not respect that at all.
At the time, I really had faith in him. I believed in him with all of my heart.
I am old and my insides make me feel ugly. No wonder my nervous system convinced me that he was my last chance for happiness.
Afterall, nobody had ever excited me that much.
But the koala did not respect my knowledge. Nor my experience. He was too certain of his own, very limited, framework.
Network spinal would cure me.
I know what I am doing, I just lack confidence.
By caring, he did not value me or my lifetime of disabled experience.
Instead, he thought he could save me. Bless him. However, by imposing his limited able bodied expectations onto my disabled body, he discounted me and my knowledge and put me into the worst crisis of my life.
For example, I would come into our sessions saying that I overdid something, when there is no wrong or right with a body like mine.
And he would chide me.
He even told me to stop doing ice baths when I am in agony.
He thought he knew better than I did and because I was in love with him, I submitted myself wholly to his power.
Which made me physically worse and worse until I tried to kill myself.
He was supposed to be professional and I was a vulnerable client.
He was so confident in himself that he did not take my pain and suffering seriously. Nobody should fall off the table with gentle touches.
Just like my mother, the koala had no respect for me.
When he flirted with me about art, that was not chivalrous. He was stirring up all of the painful traumas for why I had to give it up.
He, in his youth, was just so fucking cavalier about everything.
Working with the koala, I lost any remnants of my confidence.
He thought he held the keys to the universe and could take away a lifetime of pain and suffering with his innate wisdom and talent.
Whereas, once again, my extensive knowledge counted for nothing.
The koala still makes me want to kill myself.
That was an entire year ago. It has taken me over 500 ice baths and 1,000 hours of exercise to even begin to get my strength back.
For the first time in my life, I am learning how to protect myself.
The koala is teaching me self-defence because I fucking hate him.
He knew that I was suicidal and yet when my body got out of control in response to our work together, he still ignored the danger.
I almost fucking killed myself working with him.
Meanwhile, what was he doing?
He told me that we were on an incredible journey together.
Together means that you equally share the burden. I was terrified and needed his help, thus I surrendered all of myself to him.
But when our work together made me suicidal, he was not there.
I was completely alone.
In fact, he was totally ignorant of my suffering!
When I almost killed myself!
He only called emergency services days later after I guilted him.
What kind of human does not take suicide seriously?
I have never felt so poorly cared for in my life. The koala made me feel worthless and un-loveable. He never made me hate myself more.
Afterwards, my seizures and spasms were so out of control that the only way I could wrestle myself back was by sitting in a hot bath for several hours every morning after waking, topping it up over and over.
Crying the whole time.
The heat makes the pinched nerves really angry and so the pain gets worse, but this is the only way to break up scar tissue that is decades old.
Then I would exercise afterwards for three or fours straight, until exhaustion. I needed to physically force my body to undo its monster logic after the koala.
Only then would I do my ice bath.
I did this every day for three weeks until I saw the shaman.
Keeping it up was harder than running the marathon in 3:39. It was like I had to physically torture myself for ever trusting the koala.
I started doing extra ice baths at night about six months ago precisely to freeze him out of my heart. Finally, I could sleep again.
But I fucking hate ice baths! Which makes me hate him even more.
When I do both hot and ice baths now, I wrench my head back while holding my breath underwater, opening my jaw as wide as possible.
I also do the opposite, like an extreme spinal cat and cow.
I make cat and cows out of everything to teach my body to heal.
Nobody else stays with their heads under water in ice baths for more than a few seconds because they say it is way too painful. They all tell me.
I have lasted almost a minute. That is how much agony I am in.
I shared my negative review with the koala before publishing it. If he had shown any responsibility or remorse, I would not have posted it.
He was only concerned about himself and his place of work, not me.
His pride was more valuable than saving my life.
Later on, I shared an unpublished blog that I wrote about the koala with the shaman, who told me that it was bad enough to cost him his license.
Not his job, his fucking qualification.
Nevertheless, he refused to apologise even when I begged him to.
He recently blocked me from social media and refused to allow me to apologise to him. I keep writing how this is making me even more suicidal.
So why is he reading these blogs?
And making me more suicidal?
I know he reads my website because I see the locations.
What kind of person are you to do this, making me suffer even more now, after all that I have already been through with you?
You have no right to speak to anybody about joy.
I no longer regret any of my words. You have now even earned the position of being the worst person I have ever known in my life.
I hate you even more than my former mentor.
Just like my mother, you hurt me and yet refuse any responsibility, making the urge to kill myself even stronger.
Exactly when I am at my weakest ever?
And you still visit my website?
So, a final message to you.
I did not want to have to say these angry things out loud.
I will probably even hate myself at some point for doing so.
But stop fucking reading my blogs as you no longer deserve to know me.
You never deserved my love.
If you cannot apologise, stay very far away from me.
You have done enough harm.
I do not want you or anybody near me ever again.
Please just stay the fuck away!
