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From Yena Sharma Purmasir’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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On Being the Support Beam in My Family’s House: Holding the World Throughout Loss by Yena Sharma Purmasir

Here is a memory: I come home from school and the apartment is dark. My father’s wheelchair is empty, facing his bed. He is on the floor. His forehead is bleeding. I am six years old. I help him up, which involves putting my arms around him and repeatedly saying that he is okay, that everything is okay. My father is strong. I know this because there is no way I have the strength to lift him back into his wheelchair. But he does. I am just a beam supporting the house. I get a damp paper towel and wipe his forehead. He is quiet, his whole body slumped down. I call my mom at work, tell her that I got home from school and Daddy fell down but he’s okay and I helped him and I only have spelling homework tonight, so I’m going to go watch some TV now. As a young child, I was incredibly close to my father. I loved spending time with him, especially when it was just the two of us. Those few hours after school — when my mom was at work and my brother was at daycare — brought me tremendous joy. My father would watch Sailor Moon with me, a plate of cookies between us. He would show me how to use the computer. I would tell him about my day. Those were on the good days. On the bad days, my father would be at the hospital, sometimes for weeks on end. I would think about him all day at school. I would imagine his loneliness, his dislike of hospital food, and his total loss of control. On those afternoons, I would go to a friend’s house, do my homework, and wait for my mother to pick me up. The day my father was in the car accident, I was at a friend’s house, eating healthy after-school snacks and fiddling with his Sega game console. When my mother came to get me, she was crying — a vulnerability I had never seen from her before. I was terrified on the way to the hospital for that first time. I was five years old — everything I knew about hospitals and accidents and broken bodies came from glimpses of TV dramas, the kind of shows I should have been too young to watch. But my father was fine. Or, he wasn’t fine — his body was a series of breaks, wrapped in plaster, stitched up and swollen. He looked hurt, but he also seemed happy. He joked with us. He made me laugh. My father could always make me laugh. I saw him cry exactly once, in the middle of the night. He was talking to my mom -- it was a tender moment between the two of them. I remember climbing onto his lap, and I told him to be brave. He wiped his face and hugged me. According to my mother, I’ve always had a pleasant disposition. Apparently, as a toddler, I only had a tantrum once. After seeing a friend of mine fling herself on the floor, kicking and screaming, tears running down her face, I thought about adopting her dramatic insistence for myself. It worked for her. It did not work for me. I never tried again. I was a happy child, quiet but friendly. I never broke down in school, I didn’t sulk, I wasn’t envious of other children. There was no reason to be angry — life was complicated, but it was also good. Every week, my family would share a Cadbury chocolate bar, rationing four square pieces. I remember this tradition as the sweetest, purest thing. In the evenings, I would rub my father’s back. My little hands worked on his knots — he seemed to bend like the letter C, all curvature. I used to rub lotion on his leg, paying special attention to the bolts of his metal brace embedded in his skin. A few years later, that leg would be amputated. When we saw him after that surgery, my father asked us what kind of animal his stump looked like. I thought a dog. My little brother thought maybe a pony. A few months later, he had an operation that involved removing skin from his chest to take out his decade old pacemaker, completely irrelevant to the plethora of issues that came from the accident, but even more serious. It was one of the more invasive surgeries that he endured. The scar was huge, the size of a steak, with the pink and white layers exposed. My mom couldn’t bear to look at it. Neither could my father’s sister. I was seven years old. I said I could do it. One of our neighbors, a lovely nurse, came to check on my father daily. I was her assistant, changing his dressing and cleaning the wound. He winced through the whole process. Once, he tried to tell me that I had already cleaned it. It started off as a joke, but then he became irritable. He wheeled himself away from me. I had to coax him to sit still, to let me peel off the medical tape and gauze. It hurt him, the wound, and maybe the fact that I was the one looking at it. The day my father died was the second time I saw my mother cry. In the days and weeks and months that followed that moment, when the strongest force of nature in my life suddenly lost steam, everything changed. The kids in my class had written sympathy cards to me and my brother, and every single one of them insisted that I had to take care of my mother, because she needed me, and because she could die too. I don’t remember the exact point in time when I became so close to my mother. Just that one day, she was the person who knew me best, the voice on the phone when I came home, the body on the sofa as I watched Seinfeld reruns, a bag of jalapeño chips sitting between us. And I worried about her just as I had worried about my father, imagining her developing loneliness and unfurling nightmare. While my mother never asked me to rub her back and I never found her crumpled on our living room floor, I still felt that same overwhelming responsibility. It’s wonderful to be needed, to be given a sense of purpose. In the adult world, where young people so often become background noise, and living metaphors for innocence void of personhood, I was given the space and agency to participate in my family tragedy. I had a role and a function. But, in taking care of my father, and later my mother, I also gave up the ability to be more than caring — to be anything else but happy. The truth is, after my father died, I was furious and sad and scared. My entire world had shifted, as though the roof caved in. I was eight years old — it should’ve been okay for me to feel those things. Someone should have seen that storm growing inside me and asked me to let it out. But no one did, and I locked a lot of those thoughts away. In fact, writing was the only space that allowed me total freedom of expression, serving as powerful medium in my life. But it has limits. Creative autobiographical content is still treated as content, still seen as separate from reality. When I first started writing, teachers thought I was innovative and resilient, not lonely or unhappy. Here is another memory: I break my arm and it hurts. It’s a hairline fracture, so on a scale of pain, it’s not the worst. I have no reference point because this is my first big injury. But I’m afraid to talk about how it aches, how it itches in the cast. My father recognizes this. He tells me that my pain is real. And that it’s okay to say that it hurts. That it doesn’t make him feel bad. My arm is broken and it’s supposed to hurt. Just because he has more broken bones than I do, it doesn’t change the fact that my arm is broken. He tells me this. When he’s done, I say, Daddy, my arm hurts. Loss is complicated. Sometimes, I mourn my father’s life because there is so much he didn’t get to do. Towards the end of his life, he talked about going back home to South Africa. But he couldn’t travel, not in his precarious condition. He never saw his children graduate from elementary school or high school or college. He never got to celebrate his 20 year wedding anniversary. I mourn these never’s from his perspective, because he once had a perspective — because he was a person with hopes and dreams and goals, so many of which were never realized. But sometimes, I mourn the loss of these things from the other perspective — from mine, from my brother’s, from my mother’s. There are things we each lost, parts of our lives that will always be incomplete. For the three of us, some of these things are the same. We all lost the simplicity of splitting a Cadbury bar four ways. But some of our pains are more specific, and they go unshared. My mother lost her life partner. I lost my favorite grown-up. If pain and suffering are essential parts of life, then love and care help us endure. Loving my parents has changed me, has made me stronger. Maybe I did lift up my father that day, I don't know. My mother has changed, too. In the years of my father’s absence, she has begun to take life less seriously. Now, her laughter inspires my laughter. We’ve adopted parts of my father — his strengths and weaknesses, his easy sense of humor, his overpowering obstinance. We give up these roles and then reclaim them as our own. Not all is lost. Some part of our old family, our old time, is still here. Some part of us survived.

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Even if our arms are being pulled to the right and to the left, may we continue to walk forward with our eyes, ears, and hearts fixed straight ahead, like the gaze of a Son who looked to his Father as his arms were pulled to the right and to the left, hands nailed down to a tree, three days away from liberation.

From As You Are by Kaitlyn Dagen

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From Kaitlyn Dagen’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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As You Are by Kaitlyn Dagen

The church sings David Crowder's hymn "Come As You Are” together in worship and I am suddenly overcome with the profound weight of grace in this statement. For me, it’s easy to quickly pawn off these sentiments onto other people: Come as you are, it doesn't matter where you're at, you won't be judged here. I accept you, you are forgiven, you are loved. But this time, as I learn to live amongst the push and pull of both worldly and self-induced double standards, I let this sense of acceptance wash over my own guilt, my own confusion, hurt, pride, fear, and shortcomings. Today, I am the one in desperate need of this reminder. Today, the voices of Fear and Disappointment take my hand and pull me to the left, saying, "Kaitlyn, come this way. It’s safe over here. Your dreams will never come to fruition. You will never be able to make them happen. You have failed. It’s not in you.” I look to the right as my other hand is pulled in the opposite direction, the voices of Pain and Confusion saying, "Yes, Kaitlyn, come this way. You deserved all that has unfolded. Everything you had is now gone — the people, the opportunities, the experiences. You care so much, but for what? Put your guard back up and you won’t get hurt again.” I wrestle as my arms are pulled in both directions. I am bound and unmoving. It can be easy to give in and justify the voices on both sides of this internal argument; to allow them to become a truth about me. Sometimes they mean well. My arms get tired. I long so badly to be free of them. If I'm feeling strong, I might try to stay and fight them off for a while. Yet the more I try to fight them off, the more I have to struggle. But what would happen if I stopped paying attention to these adversaries? That's all they want — attention. If only I would stop struggling, stop giving life to the voices that pull me in multiple directions. I squint my eyes as they catch something straight ahead in the distance. It has been there the whole time, but I have been too distracted to notice. This voice is not a forceful thing; it quietly and patiently beckons us. It’s softer, sweeter. It weeps as it watches the inner struggle against the deceptions that seek to entwine us. Why do I so quickly forget that the real Voice, the real Truth, is straight ahead of me? As I center my gaze upon it, it gently says, "Come as you are, it doesn't matter where you're at, you won't be judged here. I accept you, you are forgiven, you are loved." The grip on my wrists loosen.

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From Orooj-e-Zafar’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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From Orooj-e-Zafar’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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Redefining Self-Care by Orooj-e-Zafar

The therapist stares into a space a little beyond my ear as she asks me if I indulge in self-destructive behavior. I focus my attention on figuring out the etiology of her crossed eyes. She never faces the window, so she could be photosensitive, but she likes the light – the curtains are always drawn. “Yes,” I state, matter-of-factly. She scoffs, snickers. I assume the joke is a plane rattling right above my head. My scars itch. She scribbles in her notebook. I zone out again but keep up appearances. I doubt she can see anything I want her to see. Sessions later, after helping me understand why I felt the need to end my life around my birthday every year, she callously called my propensities “the most cowardly thing a person could do.” I came back home feeling like a gutted fish still acclimatizing to the atmosphere. When I first reached out to a friend for help, they met me with, “It’s all in your head.”  I remember the rage I felt when the therapist said we would be working on how I react to my circumstances in a healthier manner. After being taken under the broken wings of various forms of abuse, being conditioned and groomed to cater to very specific needs for nearly twenty-one years, I was devastated that I still had more change to grow through. That’s when the feeling of helplessness regarding my situation hit me. It was hard enough seeking professional help in a society which functions and prides itself on its mental health taboos. Now, I was at the therapist’s office, sweating frustration on a couch only to recondition myself, and my abusers would still squint at the sun, not paying for the ways they rewired my brain. In neuroscience, a postulation for the mechanics of memory suggests that a specific pattern of neuronal pathways get activated when you recall something enough times. The more times you are put in a situation to recall a fact or event, the quicker you are able to recall it without going through every motion necessary to do so. It is a bit like that with trauma as well; once you have experienced a similar horrible situation enough times, you needn’t go through all the motions to remember and register the incident to experience a complete, potent sympathetic response. Some days, I can trace the cortisol erosion in my brain substance. It shows in the littlest of ways — staying in bed to avoid responsibility as long as my attendance in school doesn’t suffer too much, keeping quiet and zoning out when my friends get tied up in conversation, listening to my music to have an excuse to space out during day-to-day activities. The more time I spent with myself in dissociation, the more realizations I had about myself. Most of them were debilitating, particularly one where I began seeing all of the emotionally-stunted parts of me as a five-year-old version of myself. The most traumatic experiences occurred as a child, so the parts of me that still responded to criticism and threats like a child needed something I never quite received: love and patience. I had repressed so much of my trauma — hid it where no one could lay a finger on it — so anytime failure would hit me, I could pry the traumatized five-year-old from underneath the rug and do unto it what had been done unto me. For example, I frequently held my breath when I was a child, every time things were tough at home. When things began taking a turn for the worse, my attempts became more violent, emotionally and physically. For the longest time, shame was all I felt. One of the strongest realizations I had was in noticing how much of my self-worth depended on the ways that others perceived my intelligence. This explained my lack of motivation when mentors assumed I was dumb or not worth their time. This part of me only gave its best where it was appreciated – a skill that I now try to extend everywhere else in my life. In only a few weeks of therapy, I was able to significantly counter a lifetime of trauma because of this emotional resilience. This actually proved to be detrimental to me. In my particular case, my functionality made everyone around me take my resilience for granted. To others, I only lived to serve the purpose of a fallen-angel-in-need-of-saving narrative, or to never move from my pedestal where I inspired them from. The metaphoric and literal bruises on my body looked like skin now; there was no plain reason to complain – supposedly, I functioned better than anyone around me. Anytime I faltered, cried, or showed any semblance of humanness, people often responded with, “But look at how much you’ve accomplished. Look at what you have made of your life after all of this.” In response to this, I often found myself asking, “Why should I have had to?” Healing is in no way a one-size-fits-all scenario; it is a deeply personal, life-long journey – one that requires more patience than I was conditioned to have. My entire self-worth used to depend on what I could do with my intelligence and how fast I could do it. Cultivating a mindfulness practice helped me slow down, and changed the way I saw my dissociation. For the longest time, my methods of hurting myself included unconsciously allowing myself into situations of abuse similar to the kind I experienced earlier on.  Those circumstances were the only thing my warped idea of love could convince itself to deserve. While stress definitely destroys your body in horrible ways, it always starts out meaning well – as catecholamines release in your bloodstream, your body prepares for battle with primed muscles and a strong, beating heart while your rising oxytocin levels help you reach out to your loved ones for help, all to help you survive and thrive in a stressful situation – but when this becomes excessive and without proper check, people start getting hurt, similar to the tactics of many misguided covert childhood abusers. My dissociation had always been self-protective, but at some point, it became detrimental to my mind and body. So much of the time, when we aren’t mindful, we are the most hurtful people to ourselves, abusing ourselves in the same ways we once were treated. Now, when I find myself retreating, I ask myself, “What about this situation is making me return to this safe space? What does this remind my body of?” There are weeks when I feel more like a victim than a survivor. I have a love-hate relationship with my resilience; surviving has made me live with a weight I am sure I cannot carry most days. But surviving also allowed me to retell this story the way it was meant to be: with my voice. My words. My autonomy. There are days when all the strength I can muster barely gets me out the door, only to slam my way back in. But amidst all of this, there are moments when my mind is quieter than it has been for the longest time, taking in each stimulus without over-analyzing it out of existence. Moments when everything around me is not a threat – when my muscles needn’t stay stern and primed, where my toes uncurl and my chest expands fully; and in those moments, I can swear that it lasts longer than the times before it.

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From Richelle Kota’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross: Growing Up With Religion As My Third Parent by Richelle Kota

At first my knees bruised and then they calloused. Prayer on bended knee was tricky for me when I was young. I never understood humbling myself in front of a god that was supposed to love me unconditionally, but I arched my back in silence just like everyone else and waited for the love of jesus christ to fill me. We went to church if we were well to ask god to continue to bless us with good health, and we went when we were sick so god could heal us. As it was, Sunday mornings meant regrets that turned into repentance, communion grape juice stains I would not bother to clean, and unwritten rules I could not challenge. Initially, religion terrified me, but I held fast to it when I was young — a time when I was so full of honesty and fear. Once, my mother asked me if I wanted to be saved during our daily bible study. In our family, being saved meant accepting jesus into my heart so he could change me, fill me with love, and somehow make me better. But — I already liked the way I was. I remember etching memorized verses on the headboard of my bed at age ten. “Not today,” I remember saying. I remember going to Christian camp and how the separation of boys and girls sexualized us before we even knew what sex was. But my parents told me it would make me a better person. It would make me a better Christian. It would make god love me more. I still didn’t know why god was dissatisfied with me, and I was still confused about how love worked. My mother sat across from me and softly placed her hand on my leg. I tried to look away, but she found my eyes. She spoke softly, but with fervor: “If you don’t get saved, you are going to go to hell for eternity.” The fear of the fiery pits of hell kept me awake that night. The thought consumed me. My heart was already full of love for my family and friends, but the next day I squeezed jesus in there, too. Just to be safe. I was four years old. There was so much, and then all of a sudden, there was nothing. There was nothing for me but hurt I didn’t have enough hands to hold, and etched verses I was ashamed to scratch out. I could not unsee this upbringing even though I tied a blindfold on the past. A couple of years ago, I heard a cover Sufjan Stevens did of an old gospel song, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, and I found myself singing along to every word. They did not mean anything more to me than old rituals I was still wading in, but it touched some small part of me that wasn’t still drowning. It was like a phantom pain and sorrow of sleepless nights I spent wondering if I died, where I would go. Now, as an adult, I am still searching for the mystical and trying to reconcile the relationship I have with the universe, but the guilt of my childhood never seems to fade. For me, there is seldom shade in the shadow of the cross. The sun of religion has always and will always scorch me. I have sunburns that have never healed and I have scars that will never go away. When a Christian hymn begins, there is no doubt I will murmur along to the chorus, feeling parts of me that I thought had long disappeared. But then I hear the voices of those who condemn me and I feel shame, because, like a long lost parent, religion will always hold me and remind me that it was there to watch me grow up, even if I do not want it to.

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From Vasna Ahsan’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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my mother dreams of apples and honey and receives them the next day; my father watches the super bowl on t.v. -- with washing machine sounds faintly filling up the corners of this home. these words feel too tender to write when one is sinking in nostalgia yet consumed with the idea of loss. golden bangles lay around my wrists and i think about aligning with my warrior; regardless of structure or space or those sorts of definitive things and my body says, ‘yes, it is time to shed this old skin -- patterns and all.' and when i wonder why it took so long, i remember that the stars will align and then realign when they will, and when they do, that patience is still a virtue.

From Reclaiming Your Version of Mystical by Vasna Ahsan

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Reclaiming Your Version of Mystical by Vasna Ahsan

My mother sent me a text message a few weeks ago saying that she was worried about me. When I asked her why, she said that her parents and grandparents came to her in a dream, and that my soul was in need of saving. She said that they told her only she could save me, and that the only way she could do this was from heaven. She continued to tell me that she was worried about me, and that there were consequences for indulging in “sinful” things. Then, she asked me to come home. ​When I received these text messages from my mother, my heart sunk. A part of me believed her. Maybe my soul was dry, I thought — maybe, I was sick, and somehow needed saving. I wondered if my soul was truly a dark and wretched thing, quenching for thirst. ​ I immediately felt a panic that reflected my mother’s, as well as an overwhelming sense of being responsible for her worry. Along with feeling victimized, I also felt worried for my mother’s life — since she had a tendency to threaten her own life, I was afraid of my mother’s insinuation that the only way for her to help me was through her own departure. After my initial break down, I began to recognize patterns of fear that were developed over my lifetime. I am a first generation American. My religious upbringing, in a way, instilled a belief system in me based on the binary of Good and Evil. I was raised Zoroastrian, a religion which originated in Iran, reported to be the world’s oldest monotheistic belief system. With this ancient culture comes a lot of myth and superstition, that to this day much of the community still believes: “If you put your left shoe on before the right, you will have bad luck.” “If you keep turning the lights on and off, you will attract evil spirits.” “If you are on your period, you cannot attend any funerals or ceremonies.” “If you walk under trees at night, spirits will get in your hair.” “If you ride your bike outside when it’s windy, the wind will send spirits to take you away.” Every time I accidentally put my left shoe on first, I felt off. Every time the lights flickered, I thought a spirit was in my presence. Every time I walked under the trees at night, I thought about what my mother used to tell me, and I imagined some dark being getting tangled into my hair and coming home with me. And sometimes, I believed that my dreams (as well as my mother’s) were prophecies. Looking back, I recall memories of fear that were instilled in me from generations of fear-based ideology — influenced not only by religion, but also by European colonialism, political hxstory, and societal standing. I believed everything my mother told me when I was younger, and that created both a fear and an awe of the mystical. Now, what is mystical has become so vast and sweet to me, and I am able to  see what my mother expresses through those beliefs. Her dream expressed her worry for me — growing up in a high crime area of Pakistan, in an era of violence, my grandparents also instilled a lot of fear in my mother as a child. She was not even allowed to walk outside by herself. To detach from the immediate fear that filled me, I had to step back and see my mother’s humanness. I do not have to fear what she is afraid of — I may have an array of fears and superstitions to consciously battle, but I know that they cannot consume me. Unlearning smells of rejection and forgetting, and sometimes completely rejecting something that has hurt you is a response that stems from fear. The rejection of a belief may even bring about feelings of shame that you had ever believed it in the first place. Rejecting the mysticism I believed in from such an early age did not feel right to me. Sometimes, “unlearning” is just a simpler way for describing the process of understanding, accepting, choosing, and reclaiming. I only came to understand my irrational fears when I noticed and accepted them — when I realized that these fears have been learned intergenerationally. I didn’t see the point in blaming my fears on the people I inherited these internalized beliefs from. I was only able to reject the instilled superstitions I had by accepting the mystical qualities of life — synchronicities exist, life is magical, vibrations are real, and sometimes my tarot spreads get Too Real. I decided to choose to emanate light rather than fear and anxiety when it came to the spiritual aspects of life; and in this way, I reclaimed the mystical as my own.

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From Erin Moran’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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From Erin Moran’s new post on the Recenter Press blog.

You can read the full article here!

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“wake up,” said my hands to my throat, (my tired hands and dirty fingernails to my raw, pink throat) "wake up." so my throat coughed awake my lungs and my lungs blew awake my heart and my heart shook awake my legs and my legs -- sun- burnt and speckled -- helped feet find the floor and carried my hands outside to the garden, to dirty themselves with something other than the oils in your hair.

From Notches by Erin Moran

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Please return the scar on my back. Back when my hair was blonde and green with chlorine, it served as a reminder of the boy who broke my bones before anyone broke my heart, so you claimed it as a tag complete with washing instructions: dry-clean only. Now you paste it on straight spines while you count their notches and search for the sleepy lavender potion that makes them crooked. Please return the scar on my back. It doesn't belong to you anymore.

From Notches by Erin Moran