The Basement
That Held Everything
CHAPTER 5 — The Small Scissor Cuts
I’d learned movement meant disruption.
Accommodation offered safety.
I’d learned movement meant pain.
Staying became a virtue.
I’d learned movement threatens connection.
So it was natural for me to suppress my desires as an act of love.
Those small scissor cuts inflicted wounds.
But not so substantial that they overrode the comfort of familiarity and the safety of staying.
Eventually, comfort and security could no longer entrap my spirit.
During separation, as I sat with the inner conflicts of divorce, I had a dream.
A beautiful, gilded cage.
Hanging in a spacious, sunlit room.
The bird flapped about inside, moving restlessly.
The chirp was not a bird's song.
But a signal of distress.
I processed it with my therapist after.
In speaking the dream out loud, I realized, a bird can live for years inside a beautiful cage and still dream of migration.
And as I turned my attention inwards during the years of hermitage, I also realized my complaint wasn’t against the cage.
My heart was yearning for the shape of the sky.
The day before writing this chapter, I’d finished the review and edits of the Prologue and Chapters one through three of this book.
After finishing Chapter Four, I got on my scooter and drove the forty-five minutes to see my Đông Y, a practitioner of traditional Vietnamese medicine.
He welcomed me as usual and told me to go lie down and rest.
It was really hot, and I said it to him.
He’s usually the one to voice the heat.
But today was especially hot.
I walked to my regular treatment bed.
As I was about to lie down, he came and stopped me, placing a pillowcase on the thin, straw mat, “This will protect your skin from rubbing against the rough mat.”
I thanked him.
As I settled, he stood at the head rails, holding my head to make his assessment.
I said, “Uncle, my mind and emotions are good but my neck, shoulders, back and hips are all sore. What’s going on?”
“That’s very good,” he said almost too exuberantly.
“That means you are in tune with mother nature,” he continued cheerily, as if to punctuate what he said with a congratulations to me.
His excitement surprised me.
I laughed, “That’s a new one.”
He laughed with me and explained, “The weather has shifted recently. Your body is responding to the weather shift. That means you are in tune with mother nature. A person who is not sensitive to her environment would not register the changes and remain stiff. Stiffness leads to premature death.”
That landed.
“That’s such a different way of looking at it,” I said.
We were both silent as he made some adjustments to my head and temple.
“So then I must correct the impact of mother nature’s influence? How do I do that?”
“I will help make the corrections and adjustments for you.”
Relief.
I relaxed and closed my eyes.
For so much of my life, my sensitivity was a problem that needed to be managed better.
Growing up, I was scolded often for being too emotional.
In married life, it became a constant source of frustration for my spouse.
Through their eyes, sensitivity complicated things.
It revealed what others preferred to ignore.
It challenged an ideal of toughness.
So I became flawed.
Weak.
Dramatic.
Too much.
But underneath those cuts was simply a system responding to the surrounding weather.
My sensitivity only appeared problematic in environments that valued predictability over responsiveness.
Smooth operation.
Everyone follows the same path.
For years, I learned to become less sensitive so I could function on the surface.
I needed to avoid moving so deeply.
What the years of hermitage taught me was not less sensitivity.
But better attunement.
Not armoring.
But better support.
Not becoming unaffected.
But learning how to recover, recalibrate, and trust my responsiveness.
What had been considered a defect by others was actually a capacity requiring stewardship.
His words landed there.
Someone else had recognized it.
The relief I felt went much deeper than, “Oh, he’s going to take care of my body.”
It was a long exhale supporting the work of deconstruction over the years.
I had done much of it on my own.
And in a little clinic off a rural highway, someone else recognized what I had spent years learning to recognize in myself.
Yes, I must do the work.
But I don’t have to do it alone anymore.
I’d learned in writing The House of Everything Stays that I was good at repair.
I was good at tending to my wounds after the infliction.
I was still learning what I later called The Quiet Season in The House of Everything Stays, when I was processing love’s activation: how to take care of and protect myself in the moment.
Before the cut lands, self-agency prevents the mark.
It leaves the pair of scissors in the other’s hand and walks away.
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CONTENTS
PROLOGUE — THE VOW
PART I — THE BEAT
CHAPTER 1 — Workplace Dysfunction
CHAPTER 2 — The Night I Was Born
CHAPTER 3 — The Wrong Direction
PART II — THE COST OF ACCOMMODATION
CHAPTER 4 — Just Do It and Escape Later
CHAPTER 5 — The Small Scissor Cuts
CHAPTER 6 — Becoming Useful
PART III — THE THEATRE
CHAPTER 7 — The Manual
CHAPTER 8 — Masks
CHAPTER 9 — The Children Watching
PART IV — OPPOSITION
CHAPTER 10 — Ruining the Beat
CHAPTER 11 — The Drum
CHAPTER 12 — The Exhaustion of Fighting
PART V - LEAVING THE THEATRE
CHAPTER 13 — You Can Put It Down
CHAPTER 14 — The Hermit Years
CHAPTER 15 — A Seat At the Table
EPILOGUE — SHE WAS ALWAYS LISTENING
