0111. The Cycle of the Forge

tldr: hold.

One of my favorite grounding techniques is box breathing: Breathe in for 4. Hold. Breathe out for 4. Hold. Repeat. There’s any number of visualizations one can associate to this, but my favorite is a feather. As you inhale, the feather goes up. As you exhale, it lightly drifts down Up. Still. Down. Still. Repeat. It feels like a microcosm of the universe.

But a few days ago, I struggled with this grounding technique.

I could breathe in, and hold. But when I breathed out, it was like the feather would slam to the floor. A friend of mine gave a useful picture here too: the feather is turning into an anvil. And she gave me a new breathing technique, fairly similar to Lamaze breathing, and for a day or too it helped.

But the other afternoon something shifted. I was no longer experiencing spontaneous anvil drops; I just felt the anvil. Heavy, in the pit of my stomach. A sinking feeling akin to the hollowness and everything-ness of a blackhole. I went to bed early that night.

The next morning, the feeling continued to linger. I felt it in my footsteps, in my heartbeat, in my gut. I’ve felt this type of heaviness before. All I figured to do was just… wait. But in the process of waiting, with this new found image of an anvil digging deeper and deeper into my chest cavity, a new image appeared: something striking.

Like someone took a red hot metal plate, to be shaped into a sword, and began hammering away. And with each clang against the anvil in my chest, came an almost keeling over effect. Like hunger pains. Like destroying pains. Like a keep-digging-until-you-hit-the-bootom-and-feel-pain pains.

With these pangs came raw emotions constrained to the forge. Rage that pushes against the skin. Wrath that tugs at the vocal cords in hope of a scream, if not a yawp. Sorrow hoping to dig the forge deeper down the blackhole. A pushing out, contained by a crushing in.

And I hate this feeling. Growing up, my mom always told me that I “kept emotions in until an im/explosion.” But as I’ve learned (or, at the very least hypothesized), such bursts of emotions are typically precipitated by poor emotional regulation; regulation that, ideally, would’ve been taught or made space for. We didn’t have that.

But I’m sorry, how could this pull to be angry, to scream, to punch a punching bag until my knuckles bruise, to cry, to wallow, to collapse in on myself — how can that be healing? At the end of the day, it seems to me that this growth needs to happen from within, so why let it all out? I guess I fear that if I open the bottle, I won’t be able to contain myself anymore. I won’t be able to wrangle it all back in. But why would I want to?

And so she withheld from feeling the weight of the world, allowing myself to instead feel its turning. This too shall pass, she thought. And thoughts are powerful — harmful — disarming — undying — crying out for all they could be and all they might not.

She held in her breath.

And when she exhaled, that sword emerged, cold and black.

How odd it was for this once red hot and shaping hunk of metal to look so refined after an unintentional act of quenching. It wasn’t glossy, but it was sturdy and sharp. How unnerving it was for her to be holding it flat with both hands in observation, looking — hoping — for inconsistencies and flaws. How could what once felt like hard metal, raw and ripe for the never coming harvest, lie here in front of her seemingly perfected? Shaped by neglect and disdain.

In a second of expedited irony, she thought to herself: “At least now it’s out of me.” But in the hollowness, the emptiness, the ever yearning desire for this sword to be in — to have remained in — her stomach, returned the pains. Anger turned in towards the blackhole, drawing attention to herself, drawing everything to herself.

How dare she have spit it out? How dare she let this too pass? How could she?
(How could I?)

And so the sword lifted above her, and began to melt red hot into her unsatiated throat, waiting for the forge to rekindle again.

She wondered how often this must have happened before.

Burning, Shaping, Emerging, Renewal.
inhale, hold, exhale, hold.

How her body ached to understand the history of this forge, to know the fires that eventually blew out, to hold the ashes to her chest like a phoenix returning to the grave.

To hold on, and not let go.

Which is why it pained her to know that those memories and stories have already been forgotten. Scrapped, melted down, reused into making her something new. Something stronger. In spite of what was, rather than in hopes of what would come next. There was nothing left to do with all that was forgotten — nothing but mourn.

To exhale, in anticipation of the next breath in.

How it filled her to feel her lungs deflate. A remembrance of the compressing in. Breathing, in this way, is its own kind of reshaping. A type that is desperately aware that it exists in a cycle.

But aren’t we always?
What does it mean to ebb without any flow?

Perhaps it means to heal from, and only from, within. But how shameful it felt to be weaker than the kid that could properly protect itself from the pains of holding on. It’s a shame that arises between the steps of renewal and burning. Of never having really processed the cortisol running through her veins, and moreover, the emotions that may have emerged if she had. It’s a shame that takes no shape — no reforging, just existing.

And as I wait for the furnace to start anew, as in my life it always has, perhaps it’s a shame I should just sit in. As much as I could try to let it go, as much as I want to be able to, to me this seems like a betrayal of the sham itself, and all it cries out for me to know. To remember.

So I won’t let this go just yet. Perhaps, like breathing, holding — waiting — can be a part of the cycle.