Amy Liptrop : Personal Geology : struggles with embodiment

I am constantly moved and impressed by the efforts of others to express their lives, experiences, worlds and struggles.  And when that writer is on a similar path of addiction recovery, my attention and interest is even more actively engaged.  I am nearly finished Amy Liptrop’s biography The Outrun that I got from the cart of my local library thinking it was fiction.  It was one of those happenstance moments.  The following excerpt comes from a chapter in which she struggles to make sense of her own addiction in parallel with her father’s experience of manic depression.

As I see it she in this book she is engaged in a process of struggling with splits and seeking re-embodiment, moving home to the native island she was born to make  relationship with nature as part of her own recovery, tracking elusive birds and making journeys into wilderness that she draw upon powerfully in her writing.  She feels the need to keep moving due to the energy she carries from earlier vibrational imprints and struggles to make sense of anxiety using her own form of shock therapy which is some kind of powerful repeat or metaphor for what her father endured.

In this extract she draws connections between the inner and outer worlds, something I so often seem to do in my own mind.    Hopefully this will speak to others and I am aware that Amy has her own blog when I find the link to it, I will provide it here.

In grandiose moments, high on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology.  My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night.  A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates.  When I blink, the sun flickers, my breath pushes clouds across the sky and waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart.  Lightening strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there’s an earth quake.  The island’s headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers.  My lovers are tectonic plates and stone cathedrals.

When I am in motion, I am at ease, able to move forward mentally as well as physically.  I use walking and swimming to calm my churning thoughts.  My sea swims are important in relieving the non specific low anxiety that I often feel.   The cold water shocks me out of any mental stress – my body has something more immediate to deal with.  In this way swimming is a mild form of the ECT Dad was given.