I recently got to tour a new world. I met a story designer who invited me to his studio to see a demo of the metaverse he’s building. Even in 2D, it was elaborate and gorgeous — a tropical island full of impossible outcroppings, floating stages, glass towers, jeweled palaces, lush gardens, subterranean catacombs, bustling commercial markets, and endless adventures to choose from. The story designer builds worlds for a living, and he’s incredibly good at it, obviously. It was thrilling to see a futuristic version of the Choose Your Own Adventure books I was obsessed with as a kid.
In a way, I’ve been building my own world, lately. I started EMDR therapy after a bad breakup forced me to find a way to cope with the gut-punch of grief firing in every nerve in my body and brain. EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing; through bilateral stimulation, it aims to help reprocess traumatic memories and alleviate the distress associated with them — which is a clinical way of saying it’s meant to help your brain get unstuck from horrific things you can’t shake. Things that are ruining your life without you knowing it. That’s how I feel about it, at any rate.
The first step of EMDR is history-taking. You go alllll the way back, back to before you were born, even. Do you have info about what happened to your mom or dad or grandparents before you were born? Do you know about anything that happened when you were in utero? What do you know about your birth? The first weeks of your life? The first couple of years? My therapist led me through every detail I could recall. (It might sound goofy, but the results have been undeniable for me.)
I remembered being a tiny kid on Cape Cod, when my Dad was working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. We lived in a white clapboard house in Falmouth that had a huge garden with a rope swing and a rabbit hutch, and there was a six-foot-long blue shark carcass that Dad had brought back from a research trip to the Sargasso Sea for my sister to dissect. It was her 12th birthday present, I think. I could see the shafts of sunlight angling through the trees in the garden, and the tangle of blackberry bushes at the bottom of the hill leading up to the nearest neighbor’s house. It was a surprisingly clear memory; I thought I could even smell the shark drying in the sun.
We mapped out my childhood, sorting through happinesses, sorrows, and scary things, moving carefully so as not to disturb anything — just remembering stuff, like, when I was eight, I ran away from home for a whole day, and no one came looking for me because nobody noticed I was gone. Tell me you’re an ‘80s kid without telling me you’re an ‘80s kid, right?! We examined each piece of time in my life, cataloging significant events, celebrations, scars, and wounds. I say “piece of time” instead of year, because the mapping wasn’t linear — it was more of an outlining, with a circling of the spaces that contained flashes of pain, and slumbering things in sunken places.
My parents had a globe in the living room when I was a kid; I used to lie on my side with my chin propped in one hand, spinning it for hours, memorizing all the places I’d visit someday. Poring over charts with the skipper of the boat I worked on in Alaska (best job of my life!) helped me understand my Dad and sister’s pull to explore the wonders of the ocean. Now, after skidding to the crumbling edge of my own psyche, I’m ready to venture into uncharted territory.
I know this whole map metaphor might sound overblown, but I can’t stop thinking about it. World building. Creating spaces to hold things. Excavating the rotten, and the poisonous. There’s a swath of my psyche that’s basically a Superfund site — not without reason. I’m remediating the shit out of it.
Plenty of fucked-up memories are popping up as I go; some of them are funny, thank god — like when, a few weeks after our friend Nicole was killed, my boyfriend and I ventured out to a party. It was in an industrial loft somewhere in Brooklyn, we got there late, everyone was partying, the music was thumping, and this girl ran up to me and screamed into my ear: “Oh, my god, hiiii! I could never remember your name, but now I know you, you’re that tragic girl whose friend got shot!” That one sank deep. There was the man who presented me with a photo of his dead dog’s body arranged across a copy of the New York Post with Nicole’s photo on the cover, scattered with rose petals. “I want you to know I understand your loss,” he said to me. “My dog died yesterday.” That was actually funny, even at the time.
I remember having to grieve Nicole publicly, the sick, twisty feeling of not knowing how to do it in a way that would be seen, and reported on, as perfectly appropriate. I remember standing next to Nicole’s fiancé when he was accosted in a New York courtroom at the trial for the kid who shot her, by an ancient, well-known reporter who reeked of Scotch and cigarette smoke, asking why he wasn’t advocating for the death penalty and wheezing that we were “disrespecting her memory.”
People get weird with trauma. Those who haven’t experienced big, crazy shit often think they know how they’d handle it. Sometimes they have contempt for folks who are broken, and doing their best. My recent ex told me that, whenever people asked him about me, he’d “omit my struggles with grief and alcohol.” I’m grateful to have finally realized that his kind of erasure is part of the sickness.
My story designer friend’s metaverse inspired me to think of my newly mapped inner world as a limitless container that can hold everything — every brittle shard that I’m made up of. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, and I’m excited about the possibilities of this unfamiliar realm. I’m also tired, in a way that tells me this EMDR shit is working — the way you’re tired after moving out of a fifth-floor walkup apartment, or shoveling your parents’ entire driveway at Thanksgiving.
I’m bone tired. And that’s good. It takes a lot of energy to build a new world.
Much love, and thank you all for your support and subscriptions. I’m working on audio, and more frequent posts for paid subscribers. Stay tuned. - MJ ❤️
Always so beautiful and moving, MaryJane. And I love your spatial, world-building metaphors. When I was getting divorced, I started dreaming about navigating strange architecture. You’re building a whole new psychic architecture!
The world builder!