I'm going to shaboom shaboom's for awhile

taking a break to see what shakes out.
thanks for reading.
s

updated, more carnage

last weekend my area in PA had the earliest snowfall on record. while it wasn't huge by any means, because all the leaves are still on all the trees (did you know 'sylvania' means trees btw?) it weighted the branches down and in some areas it literally looks like a hurricane touched down. I had a moderate amount, but luckily I have a lot of land and the trees are far away from the house. HOWEVER, since I live in the land of shotguns and cornfields, my power and cable lines are not buried but strung across the yard and road to the main source. A branch took down the cable line immediately, though oddly it being on my lawn and through a tree didn't take away my cable or Internet. at first.

inside the house, shit started blowing up, and I started freaking out. the first thing I noticed was a burning smell last weekend, one of my surge protectors went to ash. major appliances went on the fritz, lights started flickering, and strange things would happen like use the toaster and the rest of the kitchen went black (and no toasting either). I started sleeping with a fire extinguisher and flashlight. I assumed that when the cable guys came back all the flickering would end.

Natch, I was wrong. Friday night, there are two loud bangs and the lights start going even nuttier. while I waited for my dad to arrive, I went full freak out and unplugged everything in the house trying to figure out where the burning smell was coming from (2 more surge protectors, RIP).

my dad pulled the breaker (which I couldn't get to if I wanted) and we stayed up waiting in vain for the power company to show up, going through nearly a box of shabbat candles and my collections of hurricane lamps and LED lanterns (I'm totally, totally paranoid about this stuff and blackouts are very common out here).

Today everything is finally back to normal (mostly, kinda), but there is just nothing worse than feeling so helpless and vulnerable and trapped because of being disabled. I bugged out last night thinking I heard something, and I mean full on bug out. I have not been that freaked since I thought the FBI had surrounded my house and I was screaming "HOOVER!!!" something about the missing warren commission papers (surgery recovery, massive opiates, massive pain, isolation). Tonight I'm hoping not to sleep in my clothes, that seems like a good goal.

I'd like to write more about this vulnerability thing I've got since the injury, but I'm too fried to say much more. Anyone who has tried to contact me this week, the lack of wattage killed my phone at times, so you know, you might need to call again.

Total household carnage:
refrigerator - twice, currently dead (toast, ramen, and dry cereal since friday)
dryer
2 modems (surge protected)
3 surge protectors
1 lamp (surge protected)
1 cable line
1 power line
wireless headset
what is left of my sanity
*garage door opener (thankfully not the one my car is in)
*alarm clock

Really a tiny little adventure for most people, but limiting factors and my general overriding sense of vulnerability made it kinda big for me. The flashlight and fire extinguisher will forever be next to my bed.

city

city
Originally uploaded by sarah may scott

I made this on 9/11/09 for my own remembrance of that terrible day and the days that followed.

Reader email

Reader email:

I've noticed a recurring theme in your artwork:

Is this intentional or coincidental? Obviously, it could be either. Those forest roads make for beautiful shots. However, a human subject is always featured, not unlike that great collage you made (which, by the way, I was happy to hear is the glue and paper kind--I assumed such).

I had told you that I'm drawn to work that deals with the relationship of the individual over and against society, so I'm intrigued by how your life experience seems to affect your work so directly. When I read your blog and look at your photostream, they complement one another so perfectly. So, when I read about the limitations you deal with due to your injury/pain management/struggles with depression, and then see work involving a human (yourself or other) on a path with dense forest on either side, maybe (in my interpretation) representing a journey with few options for deviation, I'm intrigued. But seriously, I'm not trying to psychoanalyze; I'm just interested in inspiration/motivation.


I've simply been impressed with your level of introspection in your blog lately, especially the piece on the Henry Louis Gates arrest and your personal reflections relating to it. Your writing made me reflect on some of my experiences regarding race relations and how people interact with one, whom they view as being "other." And as introspective as your writing is, so more so is your photography. I think you offer a lot to people who are dealing with isolating issues and find it difficult to be reflective or who have no outlet to express their experiences.

Of course, I realize that I probably wouldn't even be writing to you unless your work spoke to something within me in a particular way, like your "ink blot" theory above. I should probably be introspective or psychoanalytical about that fact.

That being said, I love this photo:


Unless viewing big, and even then, it's hard to see that
your image is an exposure trick, so it looks like you and
the trees are intertwined. My first take was that it speaks
to your hiddenness/confinement. Now I think it means that
you're emerging. Just my interpretation...

four years

Today is the day, four years ago, that I became paralyzed. I believe around this time my father had arrived, and was sobbing while the doctor explained to him, though never to me, that I would require a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I was lucky to be alive at all that day, though for a long time I wasn't sure I considered it good luck.

Each year that goes by I take some manner of mental inventory and wonder if any of it matters. I've been dealing with severe depression for a few months now, getting slightly better here and there, but overall is continues to fester.

All I can really say about today is that it is filled with a lot of grief and self-doubt.

Where are you going, where have you been, does it even matter?

'86'd

I used to work for this restaurant company at their "classy" establishment. After work, I would spend what I made in the basement bar, where my boyfriend worked and I think everyone knew I was dealing with something pretty horrific. Or maybe they were just used to taciturn women gluing themselves to bar stools, hard to really know who knew what anymore. But among restaurant employees, this was standard practice for any level of crisis. Crisis wasn't much more than an awesome excuse to go on a massive bender and behave destructively. That's family in the restaurant world.

I liked being in the dirty basement bar with the predominate male vibe, a place where I was right at home. The men in my family take taciturn to record levels, and so I was right at home, drinking my face off, and being, well, kinda ignored. Mostly the staff knew I shouldn't be bothered by the hoards of drunken men, so they generally would step in before I would have to say a word. I had my one drinking buddy, Cruise, a smart, shy guy who for reasons I still don't really know, was always up, at any hour, to sit next to me at the bar for hours of drinking and silence. I miss him, when we did talk, he was a really good man and I truly liked him, as much as I could like anyone being as self-centered as I was back then.

But true to my nature back then, I managed to get myself kicked out plenty of times, or cause trouble in other ways. Actually, now I remember, my older brother was working there for awhile until he met his future wife and morphed into a new person. The times I wasn't taciturn, I could also be the life of the party and attract plenty of men who were not my boyfriend. Of course, one of them had to be another bartender there, and while J never said a word to me about it, I think he came close to using his black belt on this guy the next day. Good thing he didn't, because after a marathon make out session walking back to said bartender's apartment, we get into the living room and all he has are these really low beach folding chairs, which immediately buckled. I decided it was time to go home and off I went, as I always did, on my "walkabout" (get way to drunk, sneak out), before anything worth killingbill over happened.

I wanted to feel loved and safe so desperately, but my heart was so crushed, and since I couldn't tell anyone why I was so insane, I could never get very close even though I tried and tried. There was this one guy, T, shit, another bartender, who had just broken up with his fiance and was on the get-drunk-and-be-crazy ride too. We had about the most perfect relationship for both of us at that time, which was we'd both be out getting drunk and crazy and sexy with anyone we wanted, but closing time we'd meet up and go back to his place. We both needed someone to hold through the pain, someone who wasn't going to ask anything in return, it was the most either of us could muster with our broken hearts. It was totally out in the open too, he used to tell, christ-ah, the other bartenders that I had the best tits in the joint, and I would turn bright red and they would laugh. He called them "orgasmic melons".

My behavior continued to decline, and soon I started getting kicked out of the bar I had set up a second home in. The details are hazy, but the bass player for the band got into it with me for reasons I to this day have no idea why, so I poured a beer on his head. 86'd for that one, though I was semi-legend the next day among the staff. I knew it was my rage getting out of control, and was horrified at the prospect of burning a bridge to my main source of comfort (the only bridge I cared about at the time). Another time I fell over backwards off my bar stool, though I don't think it was the first or only time, I just can't remember anymore. It was always something back then.

The reality is that I wanted to '86 myself in the most passive-aggressive way possible. I felt this deep, dark, ugly need to destroy what was good in my life, in myself, as this twisted way to feel all the pain I had stuffed away for years and years. If anyone ever tried to talk me off the ledge, I would be infuriated because they didn't understand. That was my excuse for all my behavior, that no one knew what it was to be me, what it was to have pain so deep that destroying yourself was the only way to deal with it.

I used to look back and feel so much anger at myself for behaving so foolishly, even though it was years until the patterns would truly cease, but these days I understand that it was the only way I knew how to deal. My childhood was one that you held it all inside, you didn't talk about it, you knew to pretend it never happened. I didn't know how to ask for help or even how to receive it. The only thing I knew was that I wasn't going to be ignored anymore, my pain was going to exist and exist and exist because I was so full of rage over the unfairness of life and I had no idea how to deal with it.

That's part of the reason the Al-Anon stuff spoke so strongly to me, especially the parts about living my life truthfully, though that's something I've been working on for the past year. Saying I'm sorry, admitting when I'm wrong, asserting myself, all the things mature adults are supposed to do. It nearly killed me to face a lot of it, but facing all these awful parts of me and living through it are the main reason why I'm finally starting to feel at peace with myself, and maybe even start to love myself.

It will be four years on the 29th, and while I'm proud of my emotional progress, I know I have a long way to go towards building a life again. I want to work, I want a child, I'd like to have more friends that I can actually relate to, I want it all despite my limitations. I'd like to contribute to society with my photographs, maybe even build some manner of journalistic career. Can't believe I just put that in writing, but there it is. I've stopped trying to picture how it will all happen, for once, I'm just going to let it.

For the first time in my life
I let myself be held
Like a big old baby
I surrender
To your charity

Smog

view pic larger On Black

PTSD

I pulled in to the pain clinic today, when I realized for the first time in the two years since I've been going there, that it shares a driveway and is directly across from the place where the big giant thing happened that about killed me when I was 20. And I wasn't even there when it happened, nor did I find out until some days had passed. That day, when I found out about what had taken place, what had been taking place for so long, I lost a part of myself that I don't suppose I'll ever get back, and began a long descent into a very deep, dark place that all but obliterated my life as I knew it.

The shock of it was more than I could take, it was as if every single thing I thought I knew about the world, everything I took to be true, had been a lie. I was, after a single phone call, a fool for believing the world to be truthful at face value. I was shattered in a million shards that I couldn't, I just couldn't let go of for so long, because I wanted, needed, to feel the fury and see the blood. But at the time, I couldn't, because I was needed to help clean up the mess, and it was a mess that soon came to involve me too in unimaginable ways.

I couldn't tell anyone, not my friends, not my teammates, not my therapists, not any of my professors even the one who begged to know so he and his wife could help. Mostly people assumed that I was going insane because my parents were getting divorced, but that had no bearing on the situation. That was actually a good thing that was long overdue. But it left me to be the hero, the leader, the role I had always assumed for as long as I can remember.

Depressed beyond belief, I kept on functioning, or at least trying. I would steel myself to clean up whatever mess had cropped up, and then I would go back to my apartment and fall apart. I stopped going to hockey practice after falling apart in the middle of one session, and I never returned and no one knew why for many years. Most probably never did find out.

When things started to level out was right around the time I turned 21, and it was as ugly as you can imagine, but probably uglier. All I wanted to do was forget and feel some sort of comfort, and alcohol was an easy way to do it since I was working in a bar at the time. Escape soon morphed into utter and total self-destruction, and bit by bit I set about destroying my life.

I lost most of my friends, though there are still some that remain. I burned bridges and danced in the flames, laughing and crying at the farce of it all. I didn't know what mattered or who mattered anymore, and as the sadness lifted the rage began that would burn on and on and on for years to come.

As time passed, things inevitably became less severe, but it was always there, just waiting for any show of weakness to break through. I survived, but carried this bitter pill of victim hood with me for a long time, which I later realized stretched back much farther than this particular incident. The incident was just the proverbial straw that unleashed all the pent-up trauma of my childhood, though it took another 10+ years until I fully believed it.

I managed to build a life for myself anyway, wishing when I moved to NYC that I would leave it all behind. I faked it with everything I had during those years, though I can't say it was all roses by any means, but I managed to move forward and that seemed like the most important thing at the time.

By the time I got to Philly, I really started to actually make a life for myself. I still had my slip-ups, and was far from realizing all the al-anon symptoms that I've just started to scratch the surface on, but somehow I felt free from it all for the first time in a very long time. I felt like I might just be okay sometime soon if I could just go back to who I used to be. I really did feel good about myself. I was committed to healing all those old wounds.

In the midst of all this, and I'm skipping a lot of stuff here, was when I got hurt. Some of my friends said if I hadn't had the previous year of healing, I wouldn't have been able to survive emotionally, and I think they are right. I can't believe it's been over ten years, that I could actually be going to this site over and over and not make the association, but I know there is a lot from that period that I somehow blocked out of my memory. I guess that's the trauma part of it, that need to forget so deeply because if you didn't, you might not have survived. I know there's a lot more stuffed in this brain of mine that hasn't surfaced yet, but I have a feeling it's going to soon. I think, or at least I'm hoping like hell, that I'll be ready for it.