Healing in Public

I’ve recently had a streak of experiences that I can only describe as abnormally enjoyable sensory attacks. What’s stood out about each of them is how mundane the inciting stimuli have been. Two, for example, happened on the same day and were entirely because of coffee—at that, the same damn coffee I’ve been drinking every day for the better part of two years.

For some unknown reason, there was a day early last week where it was like I was tasting my morning cup of pour-over for the first time ever. I think I even whispered a satisfied damn to myself after taking a sip, and I definitely remember sizing up my white Sub Pop Loser mug I was drinking out of like it contained something from another planet.

That discrete gustatory moment with coffee was the first I have had in I don’t know how long, and it stood out because I almost never get overwhelmed by sense perception in my day to day. It’s something I’ve become aware of in the past few months as probably a relic from my formative years. Apparently, it’s not unusual for entire regions of the brain dedicated to processing sense perception to go offline in folks who’ve had chronic exposure to trauma in childhood. I’ve kept that in mind lately as I’ve been essentially trying to relearn how to be alive in the present as an adult. So the experience stood out on its own, but I probably would’ve forgotten about it entirely if it had been a one-off. It wasn’t though.

Later that same day, I took the tin I use to store my coffee beans to the co-op to replenish my dwindling supply. Just to put into perspective how mindless this refill process usually is, two strips of masking tape on the lid already have the tare weight of the container and the PLU number for Morning Sun beans from Olympia Coffee. Those strips of tape have probably been on there since Morning Sun earned my allegiance back in 2019. So this is usually a pretty undemanding exercise of entering the bulk section, removing the lid from my tin, walking to the appropriate dispenser, pulling a handle until my tin is full, replacing the lid, and exiting the bulk section. Hand-washing and a staff member to enforce a capacity limit of four in the bulk section have been added to the front-end of that process since the beginning of the pandemic, but you get the idea: I could probably do this shit blindfolded at this point.

That refill trip, however, stood out because I could smell those beans like never before as they poured out of the dispenser. As a thoroughly repressed individual, I’m not the type to holler in public, but I nearly did then. It was that much of a shock to me how good those beans smelled. That something like that had happened twice in one day made me wonder what was going on. But what really did me in was a similar experience toward the end of the week.

There’s this grey Toyota Tacoma that’s usually parked across the street from the community center not far from my house. I walk by it often—almost always on my way to and from the co-op, in fact. It only stands out to me because it has British Columbia license plates and I’ve always wondered why its owner keeps their vehicle registered in Canada even though the truck seems to dock primarily on these more southern shores of the Salish Sea. But I wasn’t really thinking of any of that as I was about to walk past this truck once again last week. I just noticed it again because I got a distinct whiff as I was coming up on it.

The smell, of all things, was water coming out of a garden hose. I know it doesn’t sound like the makings of an idyllic sense memory, but I have to say it was a two-tonne machete of a smell to walk into on a sunny Friday with spring nearly upon us. For the second time in a matter of days, it was all I could do not to holler in public. At about the moment I might have if I weren’t such a self-censoring puritan, I caught a glimpse of who I presume is the elusive owner of the BC Tacoma, watering something between their house and vehicle that I couldn’t see from where I was walking.

It’s not as though I’ve just been unable to smell anything all this time. I notice the smell of cedars in the treestands I run through most days of the week — especially after it rains. I notice the putrid smell that wafts from our paper mill when I drive or bike through Glen Cove, and sometimes elsewhere when the direction of the wind changes. I can smell the cherry blossoms around town when they start to bloom. But all those smells are mostly associated with locations and habitual activities, not discrete experiences. I don’t know that I can explain it very well for folks with more conventionally organized nervous systems other than to say that I just don’t associate much in the way of sense perception with specific memories.

I suspect it’s probably a cognitive adaptation that helped me avoid total sensory shutdown so I could survive the chaos of my early years. Sadly, coping mechanisms like that tend to follow us into our adult lives, even when they no longer serve us. And I’m one of the lucky ones because I get to say it’s a tragic adaptation that I no longer need to survive.

If what happened in the past week is the slow beginning of reassociating sense perception with all the other ways I process self-awareness in real time, I’d be over the moon. But I certainly wouldn’t have pegged garden hose water to be one of the early signs of a slow recovery of my long-dormant ability to be fully alive in the present. I love that something so innocuous could do that though. And I honestly never realized how much I like that smell.

An expression that I haven’t heard in ages is “wake up and smell the coffee.” Having recently done this in a literal sense, I do think it’s funny that the saying is traditionally reserved for getting people to grasp the unpleasant reality of a situation that they’ve either been sugar-coating or neglecting altogether. I guess it’s funny to me because my standard cruising altitude has become a pretty bleak concept of reality that’s not inaccurate, but is almost certainly incomplete and unfair. By that, I mean I don’t think that I give reality enough credit most days. And I say that as a person who has made a concerted effort to extract my understanding of the vagaries of synthetic, organized society from the realities of the living world. I think it’s a really important distinction because so many of us who bemoan our existence in a world of plutocrats, greed, extraction, and other causes for despair that we didn’t willfully create, and feel powerless to rehabilitate, forget that we feel genuine love or at least loyalty to the antithesis of all that — the living world, which the great Robin Wall Kimmerer would remind us is governed not by market forces, but by reciprocity where all flourishing is mutual.

For my part, I’m kind of guilty of forgetting that and dwelling stubbornly on the darker facts of existence. That’s something of a tragic adaptation in its own right because I basically know where it started. For me, it started from a place of feeling like the habitual performance of positive or preferred emotions that we’re all socialized with was irreparably fucked up and had failed us all egregiously.

I think I was 25 when I hit this witching hour where I just got fed up with how normalized casual dishonesty and superficiality were everywhere — from conventional small talk to longer conversations with people I’d been on friendly terms with for a long time. I got quite serious — borderline antagonistic sometimes — about making sure everyone I interacted with knew that I’d sworn off bullshit.

Toward the tail-end of my East Coast years, I would get into the elevator on my way into work and people who worked for different organizations, offices, and showrooms on other floors would politely ask how I was doing and I would say, “I reject the premise of the question.” While that sounds pretty icy even to me nowadays, you would be surprised how many people seemed genuinely refreshed to hear somebody go off-script. Very often, they would be curious enough to ask me to say more about that, and once I explained, I could tell some of those people felt liberated in a way. It was another person telling them that they didn’t have to keep saying shit other people expected them to say. I think that perspective was new for a lot of people. So many of us just never consider that we can push back and tell people how we are and aren’t willing to engage. And even though I do think that particular habit of mine was too contrived and a bit flawed in its cynicism, I do think it’s pretty sad that there’s sometimes an insidious, daily violence built into what’s presented as the housebroken way to communicate with people in the world.

If my weird act of resistance helped anybody that really needed some honesty in their life, I think that’s absolutely something to be glad for. But holding that line definitely made me more of a crank than I ever set out to be, and I’m still recovering from it. Once I had sort of made the commitment to radical candor, it’s like I decided that anything positive or remotely sentimental was on the other side of a picket line I refused to cross.

To this day, I seriously struggle with the word happy because in my brain, I’d decided that happiness was inherently disingenuous and at odds with reality. I know I’ve digressed from talking about the smell of coffee and garden hose water here, but the reason it’s all connected in my brain is because my version of waking up and smelling the coffee has meant coming to grips with the fact that not everything about reality is macabre.

I guess the figure of speech we usually reserve for somebody in my situation is “stop and smell the roses.” But it feels appropriate that coffee is the actual thing I may come to associate with a turning point in my historically restrictive relationship with positive feelings and sense perception. My factory settings are such that I operate kind of backasswards from everyone else I know, so it feels only proper that some of last week’s “smell the roses” moments were underwritten by coffee.

More than the wake-up call itself, I have to say the biggest relief of this weird streak of unexpected sensory attacks has been proof that I can be relaxed enough in places where other human beings are to access my sense perception. That’s a new development.

I may never understand all the ins and outs of why parts of my brain have routinely been offline for the better part of my life. But I think part of the problem with being among other human beings I don’t know or have a reason to trust (so, all but an infinitesimal percentage of the human population) is kind of this involuntary hypervigilance and situational awareness. I think it leaves me so preoccupied with navigating what feels like a social minefield all the time that I’ve lacked the bandwidth to enjoy the smell of coffee and garden hose water even if I’ve had hundreds or thousands of experiences with those smells.

The timing of this streak is also uncanny because I’ve recently been introduced to the concept of “healing in public.” It’s something that I came across near the end of an interview Gabriel Teodros did with Arlo Parks as part of KEXP’s “Live on KEXP at Home” performances. If Arlo Parks’s name is unfamiliar, it’s because she’s a pretty young artist out of London, and her first full-length studio album was released just this year. What’s immediately notable about her record, Collapsed in Sunbeams, is how conspicuously specific and personal all the songs are. It was something that Gabriel asked her about, and this is where the conversation went from there:

AP: I think the act of writing about something…kind of allows you to slow down and really think about it and break it up into sections rather than having it revolve in your mind constantly. That’s why I write music—because it helps me work through things.

GT: It’s felt. I call it healing in public. When you’re healing yourself, it helps other people as well.

AP: I really like that. That’s a lovely phrase.

That bit of the conversation landed with special force because I’ve recently been reflecting on how I’ve gotten into a rhythm of writing more or less explicitly about healing and recovery for what feels like every month since August. It’s not anything I ever set out to do consciously, but I suppose over time, it’s where I’ve felt I have the most to learn and say that makes sense to share publicly. I think any kind of creative person who’s gone down this road in their own life probably feels a bit of a responsibility to share at least some of their journey with other people if they can — not to commodify their pain or trauma, but because we really mean it when we say if it helps even a single person in their own recovery, it would be worth the effort.

That whole phenomenon is fascinating to me because it’s taking the kind of suffering, processing, and earned understanding that’s usually part of a solitary endeavor and making it a public resource. That right there — that interpretation of healing in public — feels necessary and familiar for me at this point. But there’s still an element of separation there for those of us who aren’t performers that prevents it all from feeling too raw, intimate, and vulnerable. I think that boundary has actually been essential to my own growth and healing though. There’s something extremely safe and supportive about being able to find the perspective you need in private, at your own pace, and sometimes through a highly analog process of discovery that has a conversational quality. I know that quality is why I gravitated toward books, film, and music beginning in my teens to feel less lonely and work through ideas when I didn’t really have people in my life that I could discuss more esoteric shit with.

It seems like there’s an extension of this idea of healing in public that feels akin to this sensory attack streak of late, and maybe explains the shock factor of it. Nobody prepared me for these glimpses into what it feels like to be in public, experiencing something that suggests that, just maybe, in some ways, some healing has happened. Maybe this is discovering the extent to which I’ve already healed, in public. And if that’s the case, of course that’s going to catch me off guard because “public” is the domain I’ve long associated with habitual dishonesty, if not outright threats.

It’s one thing to have sources of private, self-paced affirmation, clarity, or just the general sense that you’re getting better. It’s quite another to experience it spontaneously, in places where other humans might hear you holler or weep in response to it all in broad daylight. The latter is new territory to me, but I guess both forms of healing in public are part of recovery.