How to Get Out of Freeze in Any Situation (a manual)

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It’s late and my lights are making the ceiling glow pink and orange. I want to post a list of sessions. You want us to write. You say, “Why don’t you write about how Freeze and Laughter are the same, as phases of Stemless?”

I absolutely do not want to do this.

This is like the fifth thing you’ve suggested in the past few days that I absolutely do not want to do. My resistance is a big wall. Writing this post would be a small thing, but it’s connected to big things somehow. You should stop telling me what to do. But I can’t go to war. I have to get out of this carefully.

“That is not my post,” I say. “I don’t connect with that. I barely understand that.”

The past few days flash neon… Me, angry at the kitchen table, telling you now I’ll have to move money from savings. (Not true– a thrashing lash-out from insecurity.) Me, hours before, sitting with my eyes shut, lightly shaking and barely able to follow my breath. Me, on the laptop in a practice call, staring stiffly, unable to pull a single Jenga cube of what to do – my guts, brain, shimmer-fear arms, heart, mind: locked. I’m to blame. The world is closing in. I need to get away from all the shaming eyes. So many are inside me.

“Oh!” you say. “Let’s talk about it.”

I can see you won’t be stopped. I try to be okay with this.

“A bind, which most would recognize as a freeze,” you begin, “is a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don't’ situation. It's too complex, and knotted. But this complexity can also be intricacy. Nothing needs to change for this switch to occur. The difference is just: are you under it? Are you identified with the thing that is inside it, or under it, or behind it?

“If you have space around it, then the emotions will be WOW and laughter. You can laugh, like, ‘The shit that I get up to!’"

You are excited and smiling as you talk. You are beautiful and alive.

I hate you.

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