A good family friend of mine does craniosaccral therapy, midwifery and various other health and healing practices. One time, when I was sharing with her some personal difficulties I was experiencing, she said matter-of-factly, “Oh, you’re having trouble with your throat chakra.” I gave her a quizzical look.
She explained that the throat chakra is the traditional seat of creativity and communication, being a midway point between the brain and the tongue.
The feeling as though one does not have “a voice” can also manifest in physical troubles in the neck and arms. I’ve had a nagging nerve problem in my neck and upper back that first showed up when I was about 13 in the middle of a game of tennis, something even a nerve specialist couldn’t resolve with the help of MRI scans. I would have what I came to call “neck attacks” when a nerve slid uncomfortably and perhaps got pinched, particularly when I was moving my body in a torqued position and applying some pressure, like during a tennis swing, or even while freestyle swimming. Years later I connected the problem to creative and vocal repression, which mounted tension in my neck.
Physical problems can also manifest in the teeth and gums. I’ve always had very healthy teeth, partly due to good genes, but once I was nurturing three babies simultaneously under challenging living conditions, my gums began to deteriorate on the same side of my body with the nerve problem. My healing-specialist friend not only attached this to the throat chakra issue, but also noted that the left side of the body is the “female” side, the one that supposedly “receives,” while the right is the “male” or “giving” side. So her analysis of my situation was that I was not getting what I needed (also a throat chakra issue) and was giving more than I had to offer. Fair enough.
I did my best to address the gum infection while breastfeeding my kids. I was told by a periodontist that I could only treat it properly with medication that would force me to stop breastfeeding. I opted for the longer and less certain form of treatment instead. Another professional later told me that what the periodontist told me was bogus. All the same, it led to a need for a root canal later, or so it seemed, since the problem area was all in one spot in my mouth. While all this was going on it didn’t totally occur to me that finding creative expression would somehow help. Health professionals don’t typically address people’s problems in that kind of holistic way. For them it was about antibiotics.
Just a few months ago I had to have the root canal redone because it was never completed by a previous dentist. We moved before I could have it finished and too many months passed before I got back into the dentist’s chair for it to just be capped with a crown. Having it redone was expensive and time-consuming. Infection had set in again. The dentist wanted to be very careful and thorough and not cover up an infected tooth. I was so frustrated with myself. And around the same time, I stopped blogging.
Only now do I fully realize—or so I fancy—that blogging has been such a vital creative outlet for me, including journalistic blogging.
I went on hiatus with Urban Compass at the start of the summer, wanting to give myself space to travel and have a busy time with my kids, not being pulled in several directions. Grad school was to start for me in the fall (I have begun with just one class this semester), and I wasn’t sure how that would consume my schedule (so far it has been a very light obligation). I felt it would be better to clean the slate and see what my schedule might look like with the priorities arranged a little better.
Blogging daily had begun to feel like an unpleasant chore, a tether, even while I enjoyed it terrifically overall. The sense of owing something to a reading audience could be tough when I was doing it for no compensation, especially when I was, for example, ill or busy with something else. I had a hard time justifying any future in the blogging. I wanted to see what my next steps might be, but when my time was consumed with writing or going to press conferences or editing photos, I could not look very far in the distance to have a picture for what next steps entailed.
There was little time to craft a business plan, or step back and surmise whether a master’s degree could be of some help, or whether I ought to drop it all and just apply for a job somewhere. Blogging felt like busy work, but it was meeting a crucial need for me. I knew that but I was also concerned that maybe it was filling that need in a busy-work kind of way, fogging up the brain space rather than clarifying it. I felt susceptible, at times, to what other people wanted me to do with the blog rather than what I wanted to do with it; this began to feel like an interference in that elusive creative process.
While I may function like a journalist at times, I am essentially a creative person, and I resist being told what to do or how to do it (this is one reason why newsroom work probably doesn’t suit me well).
Sometimes as a show of resistance to feelings of constraint, I entertain the idea of dropping everything to see where it all falls, what’s really important, and how much dropping it all ends up putting other things at risk. (Ask my husband sometime how much fun it is to be married to a person such as me in that regard.) At various critical junctures in my life, I’ve pushed that willingness to drop everything to a brink of some kind or another, and sometimes have managed to get needed attention, and some space to focus on what really matters to me as a result. As I’ve matured, I have gotten slightly better at being less abrupt about managing that process, which is at root about knowing one’s needs and being able to voice them—back to that theme.
Often I wish I weren’t this kind of person. That’s probably a dead-end road. It is hard to accept how rebellious I can be sometimes, but I guess underneath the rebellion or the resistance is something much more tender, which is a need to create and express, and that need can serve a useful function in society. Maybe not one that earns much of a living, but at least something that can make meaning.
My challenge now is to figure out whether going back to blogging will be good for me, and how I can do it in a way that balances my civic interests with my creativity and independent streak as well as a possible economic relevance.
In the meantime, I’m studying the US Constitution for my public policy class; I have a hell of a lot to say about it, and no real vessel to say it all at the moment (is this the right place? I have no idea); and I’m sitting on a ton of ideas about society, government, religion, neighborhoods, law, education, parenting and the arts. If I don’t find a voice for these thoughts and whatnot, all my teeth will probably fall out of my head, my gums will all get infected, and my neck and back will freeze up from nerve atrophy, so I had better get on it.