Self Possession Ritual
You vs. the horrors of the sludge
Yesterday, I got out of the sludge. For the past week I'd been sleeping 14 hours a day, sleeping in until the late afternoon and still taking long naps. I didn't want to do any of the things I thought I’d want to do; I didn’t want to do anything. The personal to-do list I made before coming home the holidays had things I thought would be intrinsically motivating: finish reading a book I started a year and a half ago, learn to play River on piano, see my estranged chiropractor about my jaw. I barely started the list. When I tried to do anything other than rest and think, it felt like shadow-wrestling in a self-tightening knot. This started as a journal entry, and it is here a record for the future, when I can’t remember how to emerge from the sludge, when I need to.
So the night before last, or early morning on the 27th, I was up until 6:30 in the morning. I’d slept until 2pm the day before, Boxing Day. I was on a band meeting/life update group call, and then improvising on the keyboard, recording bits of it in Ableton. I couldn’t sleep.
I’ve turned to synths before, in moments of insomnia. Opening a sandbox to build a world designed for the particular night. After more than an hour, building loops of sound, I usually put myself into a trance.
After a couple hours of playing random notes over my loop, at 6, I tried journalling. Reading those pages back, I remember thinking I might try to stay up another 12 hours, plan to sleep at 6pm. I wanted to get back to going to sleep early, waking up in the dark to be the only one awake for a few hours. It had worked for me for a couple weeks vacation I had in the summer, but I couldn’t seem to find that groove again.
Somehow I fell asleep, and I woke up at 12:30. I had to teach guitar, a rare one-off in-person lesson. I felt like I was on another planet, as if the world was still a dream for the first hour I was awake. I had a half-caf coffee, since I’m recently off the daily coffee routine. I went to see my student, we restrung an old guitar a family member gave to him and looked at four chord pop songs.
When I got home, I had a message about a temp job I’d applied for to respond to, and I felt a sense of urgency that I hadn’t tasted in weeks. After I responded to the message, I had the email-answering inertia to sort out the rest of my inbox. I remembered I have a concert to organize, and professors to email about courses. Once I started, I got more work done than I’d even thought about doing in the past week. I went to sleep at 8pm, and woke up at 5 today.
My assessment of what changed. I’d been trying to create a surrogate purpose for myself. I’d made this fun to-do list before I went home, and create little daily tasks for myself to mimic my usual life. I ride my bike to campus most days, so I’d ride my parents’ stationary bike daily, etc.. But there was no foundation to it, because I didn’t feel any of it mattered in the greater scheme of life. I tried to convince myself that it did, learned that I couldn’t. Or maybe I could have, if I tried longer, or through some other method of internal argument, but it turned out that the easier thing to do was to do something that I actually felt mattered enough to be worth the energy. And maybe the hardest part is knowing what that is, or being able to find it when it’s lost in the knot of threads of paths to take. You know it when you see it, but how do you look for it?
Two summers ago, I saw a show at the Edmonton Fringe called Self Possession: “Maybe we travel with ghosts every day and you're ready for a DIY exorcism..... Self Possession--part confessional/ritual/ghost story: a new work from Clara Cazimi”. It was an intimate one woman show, in a black box downtown venue. The audience was seated in 3 rows of folding chairs in a semicircle around the artist and their box of relevant artefacts, which they took out one by one as they told the story. It started with a small relational abandonment, reminiscent of the opening of Midsommar, which led to a hike, which led to a spiritual possession in the woods. The speaker described the way they regained sovereignty, trials of self possession, ending with an exercise that engaged the audience.
I felt possessed by an endless cyclical blur, and I decided it was time to come back to myself. Staying up at night is a ritualistic time-space. So to me is journalling, and improvisation with sound. This is what a self possession ritual is to me.
Inspired substack debut!!