How to Stay Vulnerable by Em Readman
Content Warning: This work contains comments on trauma responses and references violence
How to Stay Vulnerable
1. Relax Your Shoulders
Often, we hold tension without realising it. Be conscious of your body, and let it go. Do you feel better now?
No matter how I stretch, it doesn’t go away. The ache feels lived in, tired fabric on an old armchair, a sensation that was familiar and worn-down to the threads. My shoulder blades hold firm, always tense, always vigilant. My jaw clicks, too. My mother tells me to go to the chiropractor. When I lie on the massage table, I tense at their hands on my body. I do not like how she tests my resistance, right side and then left, how she finds the knots under my skin. She asks about what happened. I do not tell her, but I don’t have to. The body remembers what it has been taught, she says. It doesn’t resist, it learns, that’s what it’s supposed to do. The receptionist is nice as she fumbles with my health cards. The water cooler is broken.
2. Try Exercise
Physical exercise is great for mental health. Sometimes we just need a good breath of fresh air. Did that help?
It’s cool out on the water and my life vest is heavy. The embankment of the river is swathed with tall trees that speckle the light all the way down. I push the kayak, garish orange, out into the water and paddle. It’s been three months now. I paddle out to where I can no longer see the sand and grit on the riverbed. The river is 20 metres deep in parts. Once, my father took my sister and I out on the river to hunt mud crabs, got the boat stuck on a sandbank. I remember looking to the shore, thinking about whether I could swim the channel with my baby sister to get away from the yelling. When I am out on the water, I always wonder how many shopping trolleys I have passed over. How many cameras, or beer bottles, or licences; how many wedding rings? I want to dive down and collect them all, wear them on pruned fingers, the rings of people who had a crack at the good fight. The kayak wobbles as a tinny speeds past, the riders poking through the crab pots they’ve dredged up. It’s nice to be back out on the water. I look back to the shore, see my sister waving me in.
3. Stop Nail Biting
You might be chewing your nails because you’re stressed. Can you bring yourself to stop?
I start again as I wait in traffic on the Oateson Skyline. I count the time with the radio news cycles. I sit with the station on low and it crackles when I hit the black spot. At the standstill, in my third wait at this light, I run out of things to tether myself to this moment. I let myself slip back, and back. There is a hangnail on my ring finger, and I bite. It hurts, bleeds a little, but there is no salt in this wound. I always trick myself, thinking that I can make my fingernails smooth again if I just keep biting, keep scraping. Later, when I coast through a yellow that I shouldn’t have, I jerk back into my body. My chewed fingers snag at the thread of my best silky skirt. When I get to work, I ask my manager for a bandaid.
4. Make An Appointment
Going to the dentist is important for oral hygiene. You have some cavities. Do you floss regularly?
My dentist looks like my mother. Milk-white teeth, kind cheeks, blond hair. I’ve come in because the clicking in my jaw won’t go away. I’ve put my appointment off for a year. I sit on the chair and she cups my face with her hands. Open. Close. Open. Close. Open, she says. The bones grate against each other with an audible pop. She mutters to her assistant about prolonged tension, tells her a series of numbers I don’t understand. Close. She probes to see what caused it. I tell her the clicking is because I have tension in my jaw and she clarifies. What’s causing the tension? She looks right through me, the way my mother does. I don’t have the words in my back pocket, the speech isn’t ready yet. My jaw tenses and clicks, giving me away. My chin wobbles as she listens.
5. Call On Your Relatives
It’s great to keep in touch with friends and family. Do you know what’s happening with your family?
The ceremony is beautiful. My mother wore a sage wedding dress and walked herself down the aisle. I like the man she has married, and the woman she has become with him. My sister and I weep, silently, sat next to our new brothers. Neither of us likes to cry, to be seen crying. During the ceremony I read prose from The Sea Accepts All Rivers. My voice cracks and I let it, there is no one to hide from here. I look up to see the bougainvilleas my stepfather tends to bloom along the south wall, swaying. After, my sister waves me over and we cling to one another in the aisle, sharing in the same pain. For us, it is an end to a time in our lives where we saw the man before him, our father, rot in front of us. It’s the opposite feeling to grief, but it hurts all the same. For my mother and her partner, this is the beginning of many years together. We toast to the occasion, their union, and our survival. I fly home on Tuesday.
6. Create a Routine
With some thought and careful planning, you can be headed for adventure sooner than you think. Routines help get you through the day.
The university is bright, lights on in every building, on every floor, emanating from information screens and street lamps. The heritage buildings are washed with warm spotlights as if they are tourist attractions. The walk to my car from my night class, the only class available, is dark. There was a man who pulled up when I parked earlier in the night, asked too many questions. I call the security number that is taped on the out-of-order emergency phone. I walk with the security guard through campus, I thank him for coming out all this way, tell him I’m probably just wasting my energy taking precautions like this. Whether the threat is perceived or real, the fear that you experience is real, he tells me. Don’t hold your keys like that, they’ll rip your hand open if you try to punch someone. I have never had someone legitimise my fear like this. When I get to the street my car is on, he watches me go, get into my car as I see the man from before still sitting in his. I don’t want to take a detour home, but I do anyway, just to be safe.
7. Let Yourself Bruise
Massaging the area of the bruise distracts the pain receptors. Touching a bruise hurts! Why do you keep touching it?
I fall in with a crowd of girls who go to university residential colleges. I’ve known them for years, but I tell them nothing. There is a running joke that I am the heartless one, known for sex but no relationships, no rolling around in navy sheets in the mid-morning. They find it funny and I find it as a means to an end. I am dedicated to my own self-preservation. There were people I loved, longed for in my time with those women as friends. There were people I longed to be vulnerable with. I am meaner than I needed to be so I seemed stronger than I was in those times. We fall out when something awful happened, and I did not trust them enough to tell them. Sometimes I think that I taught them to detach themselves from me, to keep a distance. To trust is to defy, to resist the urge to seal myself off, to be healed enough to say the words. Right now, it seems too deep in the clay that holds these suburbs up to unearth, to resolve. A year later, I nurse a bruise from tripping down some bar steps while out with new friends. They’re good listeners, and they have heard it all.
8. Let Yourself Bruise (II)
Call the doctor if bruising occurs easily or for no apparent reason. What’s hurting you?
In January, I nurse a small magnolia tree into its first bloom. The tree, a gift from my auntie, came with instructions for care. Use a particular mulch and a slow-release fertiliser, and keep it well watered. You shouldn’t need to prune, and if you do, make the cutting after the tree has finished flowering. I move it into a bigger pot on the day I brought in a curbside coffee table, bruising my shin as I hauled it from my car. I fall into a routine with the magnolia tree, watching the bud form, drenching the soil, wiping down the leaves. The bruise clears up, gone in a week after I stop poking at it and use a salve I found in a bottom drawer. I apply it morning and night. The bloom comes and goes, a single brilliant flower, but I keep caring for it long after. It’ll flower again in a few months, so I just have to keep it going through the winter. When it gets big enough I want to plant it in the backyard of my home. Magnolia trees take decades to mature, if well planted and undisturbed, I have moved dozens of times in just two. I want to let it take up roots, but I know that I won’t be here long.
9. Make Your Bed
Making your bed every morning is a simple but beneficial habit. Create a ritual. What do you have to lose?
We watch meat pie westerns, cook dinner, and lie around in my pink sheets in mid-morning. Some nights we walk our housemate’s dog around the block. We share a room, the second room houses two desks and storage boxes with my winter clothes. This is my first home with him, a big house with more room than my old apartment, natural light. It’s been a year in these rooms. It’s been a year exercising trust in this union. The immediate threat of violence has been gone from my life for a long time, but the thrumming heartbeat has stayed, under the ribs. We talk about why I flinch when I know it's safe, we talk about remnants, about muscle memory. It's easier, but it's never easy, he says. I agree. There is something off-putting about ease, having something to lose, having someone who could take but doesn't. I sit in this comfort, let myself get used to the feeling. In the morning, we make the bed together.
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Executive Producers
Sue White
Hayley Scrivenor
