Process

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Cleaning Up The Mess

kimberleen

There are probably a gizillion posts on wellness and water and breathing and yoga and and and and…..etc. I wonder how many of them are actually rooted in justice? I have another website you know called Kimberley K. Stone. Super easy it’s my legal name and yet even that is complicated. Now that is definitely content for at least one book. I promise you I’ve got an interesting story. One day when I finally sit down to write it you will be absolutely fascintated. Today and right now and for the forseeable future is not that day. Today I’m just doing me best like everybody else to keeping my head above water, my nostrils out of the mud, remembering to breath and being grateful for having a moment of gratitude for any of it.

Once again if you have known me for a while you probably also know, that I am constantly reassessing my alignment, my progress and my intent. For the last few years my work has quite distinctly been focused on the The Life Doula. Even though my first career was in curatorship and community activism I rarely talk about it or rarely take and interest in it. Please don’t talk to me about art, these days I find it utterly dull and have done for a very long time, sad but true.

An Honours in Post-Colonial Theory in Scottish Art put me firmly on a decolonising approach to art curatorship. Which largely means embodying de-centering white voices or for the advance practicioner non-indiginous voices. So yes, my decolonising curatorial practices basically ended my career. You are welcome.

This practice of post-colonial and decolonised curatorial practice can now easily be defined for me as Radical Curatorship. Which I am now having to both reexamine and revisist. What I realise is that in my curatorial practice I went silent without ever explaining why this was part of a process many years ago that didn’t have social media at it’s center. Now after my experience at the COP15 which I talk about in my previous post ‘Getting Back on the Band Wagon’ I have decided to take up the reigns on the decolonisation process again as what I might identify as a Liberation Educator. Quite simply because few of the things that I advocate for in my silence are actually being heard at all. That I need to be more expliity in what I know and what I stand for. I do this knowing that white centering is a thing. However in a systemically traumatised system I have to affirm that very few of the pale males in power are listening to marginalised voices of any hue. It was both heartening and distrubing to realise how white women still sat at the center of the dissemination of power of a global institution that was both Eurocentric and majority white. I don’t think I even have the capacity to begin to unravel how these are the best terms that I can use in this moment to describe what I witnessed. These terms are so very far from adequite in my quest to unravel the role of language in the creation of systemic trauma.

So for these reason’s I have now decide that it is entirely appropriate for The Life Doula as a brand to center the issues that are critical for ecojustice at this time. Centering ecojustice is the easiest way to get white people to listen. The lowest common denominator and right now that will just have to do. Of course ecojustice can’t happen if we don’t take into account all the other factors like women’s rights, decolonisation, indigenous rights, anti-racism and a wellbeing economy. So that is where we or in this particular instance I begin.

The other thing that I would like to add is that when I returned to the UK in 2019 I was somewhat emboldened by Extinction Rebellion of which I am a member if loseley. Their sign off on all their letters and communications is love and rage. It started to get me thinking about a powerful message that I could use as a sign of on my communications, especailly when working under my own name, Kimberley K. Stone, that unperpinned the ideas of Radical Curatorship. It became very clear very fast. My sign off is Beauty & Justice. I hope that we will find some here, in this life time for everybody.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Getting Back on the Band Wagon

kimberleen

What exactly does band wagon mean anyway? I like to think that it’s representative of some travelling Troubadours having and extistential crisis about there musical service to the Queen and literally having to leave the band wagon.

Anyways as some of you will have noticed and been aware that I have been what you might call away. However the truth is, is that I have been at capacity. Working with trauma is not easy. Working with ecojustice, women, indigenous rights, anti racism, decolonisation, a wellbeing economy and trauma work is tough. It takes a lot of emotional capacity to be involved in such things and sometimes I just don’t have it. Worse than that I consider blogging and writing to be a wellness practice. So you can only imagine where I have been and that feels sad for me. Of course nobody wants to hear about a trauma workers dwindiling capacity or about what now seems to be the cyclical nature of my compassion fatigue. That compassion fatigue is real or that priortising wellness in all area of your life can be challenging especialli while caring for others. I have at least stop saying that my life is busy and instead saying my life is full and my life is rich, meaningful and full.

To much social media and in fact media in general advocates for strong boundaries. However where does that leave you when you are dealing with infant children, disabled adults and the elderly. Although I don’t class myself as a carer, so many of us are doing this kind of work. Where we just have to accept that we might need to catch up with our needs late. However we sit in the paradox that if I am well then everybody is better. It’s not always that easy though and people in caring roles are all to aware of this. Dwelling on this thought takes me to the role of land guradians and their now deadly role as land defenders. I have two of these types in my immediate circles the death threats are real, the chronis stress is exhausting and the gas guzzling corprorations that are doign thes things just keep on going. You might want to talk about the extortionate wealth of the oil and gas companies in relations to your own fuel bill. I look at it as extortionate wealth that actively, consciously and legitimately destroys live and lifes on this planet. Hike’s in fuel prices for many of you are inconveint for some, deadly for many.

Then we have to take into account that we live in toxic is a toxic world, compiled of multilayerd toxic systems that impact on nearly every aspect of our live absolutely no one is untouched by this. I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again I beleive that we life and anti-human system and following on from a visit to the COP15 the UN convention on biological diversity I could also say that we now live in an anti-life system. It’s not just about us humans it’s about all the other earthlings too.

I’d like to say that my trip to the the COP15 was inspirational, uplifting, motivational. If you were expecting that I am sorry. All my worst imaginings were confirmed and worsened. I feel like I am now watching “The Don’t Look Up” movement in real life. Let’s be fair though I have always felt that way. Which might have more to do with my compassion fatigue than anything else this February. What happens when you find out that you are right? You see all my life I’ve looked out at the world and it’s madness and wondered it must be me. Why can’t everybody else see this? Why if I point it out does nobody care? Why if I talk about do very few people listen. The truth is I often still feel like that. However this year I feel like I have turned a corner. I don’t need to learn more, or be more, read more books figure more shit out or understand another person’s perspective. I am done. I am done being nice to ecocide advocates. I am done being nice to systemically traumatised people particularly men. I’m done being nice to people that won’t acknowledge and center indignous rights and knowledges as part of their process. I’m done trying to explain why your very vanilla word view is harmful. I’m done trying to cram PhD level knowledge about the decolinisation process into a five minute calls for your convenience, that you are not paying me for because somebody brought it up in board meeting and I am done being nice to those with colonlial inherticances that won’t acknowledge it. I’m done having to explain what a wellbing economy actually looks like when you don’t ascribe to capitalims as the solution. And finally I am done having to explain to people that don’t want to listen that trauma work and the acknowldgement of systemis trauma sit at the center of all that. I also feel like I have said all this before and have failed to stick to my boundaries. I need to be referring people to more books or these blog posts.

I realise now that not writing these blogs is at the source of what is holding me back. The answer always comes through writing, that is what I always find.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Emotional Safety

kimberleen

I am actually a little shocked that I haven’t written about this before. I might even have it teed up as title for this year’s article titles. I do hope that the blogging is fimly back on my weekly to do list. I’ve missed it. Things seem to be settling down again and I am very pleased for that. It gives me and increased sense of emotional safety. I keep saying it like I can’t quite get over it myself it’s been a wild few years. I feel like I have a lot to fill you in on, like I didn’t have enough to do already. Here I am charging through my final thing on the to do list for today before loadshedding hits. I just checked to see if I had written a post about loadshedding too and it also seems not. So loadshedding is now added to the list of article titles for another time too. I am supposed to be writing about emotional safety and I supposed for me writing about emotional safety is where my journey starts with emotional safety.

You see I have a very active mind where the thoughts pile up like a car crash most days. Especially when I haven’t been able to write for ages or power through my to do list. I have to do my upmost to not let the ideas that I have run away with my life and indeed take over my thought processes completely. Writing is a wellness strategy for me. Mainly because there just isn’t enough space in anybody elses life to help me process my thoughts effectively. So I write and because I am then able to process how I feel without having to bother anybody to much. Writing it gives me and increased sense of emotional safety as well as a sense of emotional control. Don’t worry i do have friend I can always reasch out to and a long term therapist too. It’s just writing is my way of managing overload, writing give me clarity.

Emotional safety occurs when we feel safe to express ourselves fully. Which would seem obvious and yet it is not. Too many of us have grown up oppressed and denied our emotional processes leaving us repressed, neglected, isolated and self gaslighting; believing that we are too much, too difficult or complicated. When we are reduced to having to give convenent, emotionally contained one word answers to the very nature of our being it’s difficult to feel heard or even seen. Which can lead to a lot of anxiety, distress and emotional discomfort. Not feeling heard or seen can leave us feeling emotionally unsafe and scared about what we can and can’t say. Growing up and working in spaces where we aren’t able to fully be ourselves affects our ability to relate both safely and authentically and it’s common.

A lot of my work with emotionally safety has specifically grown out of working with women and specifically women of colour in past-apartheid south africa. Women of all colours have been and continue to silence as part of the legacy of apartheid. However men too also feel can feel societaly impacted by this kind of silencing, having to maintain gender sterotypes that are embued with toxic masculinity that only account for one emotion anger. If you are trying to understand emotional saftey and how it impacts you I would suggest that you take the time to explore your own emotional landscape. How many emotions do you feel capable of feeling, sharing and expressing, especailly in the company of others. Do feel able to tell people that you are feeling sad, angry or depressed? Or do you think that showing emotion is a sign of weakness and emotionality a source or personal shame? Once again it’s common to feel this way and it’s isn’t something you choudl feel alone with.

The way to creating emotional safety is to quite simply allow yourself to feel your feelings, you’re entitled to your feelings and whatismore it is good for your health. What can’t be expressed gets repressed and held in the body and can eventually make you physically sick if not properly addressed. The way through difficult emotions is to find friends and form relationships with people who do make you feel safe. That allow you speak and not only speak; speak all the way to the end. It really is that simple and it’s one of the reason that talk therapies can be so successful. Often we just don’t have the right people to talk to. To share our lives and our problems with. If you don’t feel that you have anybody that you can talk to whoo might share your world view of work through your stuff with it is almost certainly time to get a new friends group. Creating emotional safety is really easy once you find the right people who are willing to listen. More than this you will develop healthier relationships where you to can become a reliable person to hear someone out. At first it can feel really challenging to reach out and it might feel painful if you don’t make the right connection straight away. it might be hard but it absolutely worth. After all humans are both social and emotional creatures and we need healthy interdependent relationship to both survive and thrive in this world.

If you are interested in exlporing your emotionas further you can vist my ko-fi shop for some inspiration.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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The Great Reset

kimberleen

Happy Chinese New Year, where does the time go? And the years only run faster as you get older. After all time is not linear as I sit here on this particular upward spiral of the current Kimberley incarnation.

The good news is that I am back in Observatory, Cape Town the bad news is that I don’t know how long for. There is no doubt it has been and interesting few years and my achievements far outway my misadventures, which seem to have been rather few for an unconsensual nomad. Except of course that I ended up in entirely the wrong country one early morning last year; it all worked out in the end, with surprising ease.

This year it seems I have come back to the start of my journey in an unexpected and complete full circle moment, living only three streets away from my old address. It’s been interesting to be back with some old faces and new venues, the pandemic certainly seems to have taken it’s toll here. So many businesses shut down it makes me glad of all the photos I have of the old Observatory that I first knew. Observatory now seems more transient that I first considered, then I ask the question; where in the world hasn’t undergone a radical shift in the last three years? Who in the world hasn’t undergone a radical change? The world is changing and we change with it. Life is change.

This year I start in the aftermath of my life choices trying to find a clear way forward. All I really know for sure is that I have four Trauma Doula Preparation Courses to run this year and whole load of admin to catch up on. The nomadic lifestyle probably seems fantabulous, exciting and liberating if you believe the social media slide show. The truth is I am exhausted and desperately in need of some radical rest combined with some high speed digital decluttering.

Of course I am supposed to be a source of wild inspirations and deep insight that going to get yout through the next twelve months cycle of everything that you ever wanted. You can achieve anything that you want to. You can be anything that you want to and as somebody who has managed to do ten years of work during a pandemic I can assure you that all things are possible. I’ve seen things that I could never have imagined and had experiences that have moved me beyond my wildest fantasies. When it all comes down to it I am still just me. I still have the same dreams and aspirations I always have. To have a good life, near the beach. It’s simple. Keep it simple. There is magic everywhere. Especially in Cape Town. It’s good to be home in the Mother City.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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How To Contribute To Planetary Shift

kimberleen

It’s all about frequency. In the case of the Cape Town water crisis that surrounded the frequency of visits to the bathroom. In your case, it’s probably not going to be that hard to master. Not drinking water in the middle of a drought. Think happy thoughts. Yeah, that’s a bit fucked up coming from a trauma-informed practitioner… Of course planetary shift isn’t all about positivity and solution-focused mentality. In fact, these days planetary shift for those of us willing to face terror face on is all about the climate emergency. Like other things you may think what has the climate emergency got to do with trauma? Where I have to invert the question, why do you think it doesn’t.

In fact much of what I do would say quite the oppostie. It’s time to dance with the shadow after all we a planet of contrast. Night, Day, Ocean, Land, Hot, Cold, Wet, Dry we live in a planetary space of polariastion and we have done for billions of years. Yes you and all your previous layers of evolution. It’s nothing to do with polarisation it’s about being able to accept the polarisation within you. I know you probably want to hear that contributing to planetary shift might be all about swimming with dolphins, meditating on mountains and of course running off to Bali. However what are you doing to feel better? That is all there is to it? What makes you feel good without increasing the Carbon footprint? (I truly do wonder for the world when I consider this (it’s really easy stop flying)).

What if you just sat down for a bit, without screen time, with the radio off and your phone deep underwater somewhere? What would happen then? How long would it take for someone to turn up at your door? Like seriously? Good experiment in a global pandemic. Have we got compassion fatigue yet? Fuck knows, it’s exhausting just maintaining our own space right now. By space I mean immediate space I mean in the physical realms. Brush your hair, make your bed, wash your clothes, stay sane that kind of thing. I managed to tidy my room today. That’s correct not the house. My room. That’s where I am at how about you?

You see we set our goals high (at least I do) and think that we can bring about planetary shift through a forced kind of militancy. Even if it’s just by holding our daily routines in place. We are told to dream big, aim higher or get out of our own way. Often. The last few years have been a roler coaster ride of what you should be doing for yourself, your community and for the planet. Including getting vaccianted and not questioning our right to bodily autonomy. In the next few weeks and years we will be encouraged to support Ukraine, the way we did Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan when none fo those situations have been fully resolved to this day. Nor have the victims received the indepth trauma care required.

For over a decade now I’ve been watching Life Coaches, Spiritual Advisors and Gurus all dish out there advise as to what the meaning of life is. How to be happier? How to manage anxiety? How to identify high functioning depression? Explaining that addiction is emotional numbing. What I’ve learned? Is that most of these forms of personal development are directly related to how you participate in the capitalist system. What can you consume to make you feel better? Who knew that learning to breath properly is actually a chargeable product? You’d think someone would just help you breath? Especailly at a time were being able to breath is a critical life skill to tackle a respiratory virus. It appears not. Which leaves me personally with a lot of questions? Where is the collective human consciousness when we are charging people to improve their breathing. Just saying? How low have we sunk in our ability thrive if the most basic of human needs at the center of a global crisis still falls within the bounds of chargeable product? Very few coaches that I have encountered have ever truly got to the core of our human issues. Most of them are just tiptoing around healing fads to figure out how to profit. People might talk about slowing down for personal well-being without mentioning the benefits of local community living. People might talk about creating heartbased frequencies without explaining how to apply them in a practical level. How do we generate loving environments when our vibe is based on being handed the perfect coffee.

More than this how do we address the seemingly perverse approaches of most western societies to promote an experimental vaccine with unknown health risks over access to clean air, clean water, sufficient personal space and a healthy diet? We are told to breath in, the air is poisonous. We are told to control our thoughts when the world is playing mindgames. It’s hard to practice wellness and even safety in a word the practices harm withour consequences. We are told to maintain our frequency as disregulated light workers attempting to avoid pain. t’s hard to practice wellness and even safety in a world that practices harm without consequences. We live in a traumagenic world. Where each individual act that we take ripples outward with untold consequences, in unseen spaces that don’t apply to us. My current macbook (which I am using now) was created through exploitative extractive economies that benefit from human right violations. Yet I continue to use it and remain an Apple customer. I am complicit in the toxic systems that I attempt to disrupt.

I have often heard the wiccan wisdom “Do as you will and harm no one” As I travel through this life this simple suggestion for a living way forward is far more complex than many might imagine. After all “Salad is murder”. Never has this become more clear than with the growing interest in plant medicine and never has it been so misunderstood. The modern homo sapien thinks that plant medicine is a consumptive process that does not allow for the consent of the plant medicine. There has also grown to be an outsourcing of intution that goes with it. “My guides” strikes huge alarm bells from the get go. What guide exactly? I mean exactly? And are you sure that this isn’t the plant talking to you? You see going inwards can be an avoidence of what is, much like alcohol consumption or an over eager stoner.

I don’t think it’s any great news to explain that over the last eighteen months many of us have been going through a ‘shamanic’ breakthrough. Yes, the world is fucked. Yes, we all knew about it. Yes, we have all been complicit in it. Yes, everything is connected. No, that doesn’t mean you feel perpetual joy and wonder. Actually your ‘spiritual’ awakening is about becoming clear; you’ve got a shit tonne of work to do. Yes, you have a calling. Yes, that calling is to find your purpose. I know right? Who knew it was that simple? More than this you need to stick to your guns. Stay comitted, even when it is hard to stay motivated.

So really what I am saying is how about you combine you self-medicating with some community building. How do we do that? How do we contribute to planetary shift when so much of our world is dictated to us through the back rooms of power? I have to stay connected. Not online, out there in the ‘real’ world. Breath the air, clean the air you have. Drink the water, find your nearest fresh water supply is. Stand on the ground, find some a patch of earth that has a complete biome, that hasn’t been curated into being by some town planners idea of green space. When we begin to look at personal wellbeing indepthy we begin to appreciate that much of it is caught up in our living and working environments that are not designed to foster wellbeing either. We are beginning to realise that we cannot buy our way of a planet with finite resources. Nor can we avoid the consequences of living in a unified planetary field. The smoke of the Amazonian fires cross the atlantic and end up in southern Africa. Climatic changes that occur over the Atlantic, as a result, create hurricanes that wipe out the Southern States of the USA. Everything is connected. The dilusion that we have any control at all is a big one. Yet freakishly self-control is pimped as a superwork, when medical textbook might say the opposite, especially in relation to trauma.

Its easy to believe that planting a million trees is the way forward. Its also easy to get caught up in the well being or some poor unfortunately orangtuan. The things is what I know for sure is that whatever you think the problem is. It is never very far away. You don’t have to get on an intercontinental flight in order to make a difference. Begin where you are. Begin with yourself. You see so many of us are coming from a space of spiritual lack as much as physical lack. That we don’t know where to belong, what to stand for and more importantly who will stand with us. We only have to turn to Jerry McGuire to learn how little most people are moved by or inspired into change. Most of us are just looking for a safe base from which we can view tha madness. Until the madness comes for us. If you are reading this I trust that you are already all to aware of what a precarious point in humanity we exist in. This weeek alone I have heard of terms such as the end of civilisation, and the end of history as Vladimer Putin plays power games with his nuclear deterent. In such times many of us are asked to examine what really matters? We are asked to examing how we feel. And for many people that can look very different too.

In order to contribute to planetary shift we have to begin to appreciate that if it is about frequency. You get clear on what you want to create, whether it’s a clean room or a happy life. That means finding out what makes you happy is the most important part of that calling. More than this finding a team of people who are going to support you in that mission is paramount. Find your thing, then you’ll find your people. You need to have people that share in that dream that are working to create it. We cannot get there alone. I don’t know if you noticed it’s fucking crazy out there. Masks on, masks off, pandemic or plandeminc, anti-vaxers vs the anti-human, fake news vs your own inteliigence. Our whole world is being held in relief to be questioned, dismantled, weaponised and if needs be detonated. Lucky the UN have already outlawed nuclear weapons. Has anybody told Boris? The buzz word for the last year or two has been polarisation. It’s not something that I buy into.

Purpose and meaning are now touted as cure all approaches. Paolo Nutini to has been weighing on my mind “Nobody can give you the power to rise.” So that’s where the fuck are you in your life? Where do you want to be? Are we moving forward? And yet that may be part of it. However, is what are you doing making you feel better? That is all there is to it? What makes you feel good without increasing the Carbon footprint?

This article was written to accompany the Trauma Wise Circle by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Visa Anxiety

kimberleen

Honestly, there are a million and one things to be fucked up about and I really think that we need to be far more accepting of this. More than this I wish people would fuck off with their breathing exercises from time to time. Sometimes we really do have a million and one reasons why we feel stuck or brain dead and out of it or my personal favourite brain fog. If there is anything that the last few years has taught me is that my mind is in full working order. All that overthinking must demonstrate something. Except of course the mind, the brain and the body hold some very different properties. In Today one of my more recent blog posts I talked about being a COVID refugee. I literally ended up hanging out in Namibia for nine months. In case you didn’t know already nine months is three months short of a year. It’s really long time to end up somewhere that you didn’t expect, writing a master’s, watching the death toll rise and trying not to figure out what to do next; other than stay sane. It’s a funny thing all those insidious thoughts that turn into a backdrop of feeling. It’s quite a thing really the backdrop of feeling that makes up our emotional landscapes and how sometimes they seem to entrap us. When really it’s just a pushed down unspoken about thoughts that seem to be controlling our world. Needless to say, I’ve added COVID Refugee to the list of books that I need to write.

It was an intense yet homely time in the desert. That played out like a beautiful groundhog day tapestry that you really had to live through. You see life in many ways could not have been more simple, more straightforward or even better catered for, it’s just that for obvious reasons I was stressed under pressure and to my realisation now, quite freaked out. It turns out much to my surprise that certainty offers quite a remarkable toolset for wellbeing. One that I wasn’t sure that I needed until now. It will come as no surprise to many of you that I live with quite high levels of uncertainty and have done for years. At least now my work is legally allowed. You think I’m kidding when I say that. What if I told you I am not. What if you have been working covertly for years? Few people get to truly understand what it is to be an immigrant and even worse a refugee. Someone with no connections and nowhere else to be. And what do we do we put out big girl panties on and do our best to full adult. It’s nothing less than terrifying to live such precarious situations where just one thing has to go wrong and your whole way of life is under threat. More than this that your life is under threat.

We live in interesting times. A pandemic, The fall of occupied Afghanistan and now this whole thing with Russia. Borders are very important things for reasons that few people want to talk about. Borders are about control and thus adversely about certainty. You see I see the world differently. I see the world through the lens of trauma. There were no fences in Southern Africa before Jan Van Riebeek arrived. That’s what the oral history says. Yet modern humans spend their time policing and creating borders, boundary lines and systems of control. Systems of control that have nothing to do with nature. Systems that are alien. I wonder sometimes what have we learned? What is the climate emergency here to teach us? As I watched South African sand become Nambian sand through a wire border fence. Who gets to decide who it belongs to or indeed why it has to belong to anybody at all? It gets me to thinking about territories. How far we can walk? How far do we need to travel in order to survive? It feels like we should be thinking about land very differently. I’m feeling about land very differently and why we need those one hundred and ninety-five stamps in our passport. What is that separates us other than an arbitrary colonialist line drawn straight across the desert?

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Just Start

kimberleen

It feels good to be here again. Writing. Writing what I want. Finding my way back to the blank screen only to find that it brings a refreshing calmness and healthy jolt that I have been away for a long time. WordPress has changed its layout again and I’m worried what challenges that might bring me in putting this article together. I really do wish I could have gotten to you sooner. It feels like a revisitation. However, I have been stuck. Stuck in an internal maelstrom for quite a while which has only just realised me to some slightly more gentle water rapids. The long and short answer is that I have been waiting on a visa as well as waiting on the opportunity to move. Even though I have been applying for visas in what is now close to a decade there are few that can describe the chronic anxiety of the state, that I have yet to master. So there it is my anxiety got the better of me and hopefully, that lets you off the hook too.

So I am here back in Mkhanda here to complete what I didn’t finish the first time around. I think really what has really spinning me out is how complex my life is as well as the work that I do. I wonder what you must all think as look at me going through this process which is my life that is all about trauma, when I can’t tell you exactly what I am working with because it is bound by confidentiality. Maybe at this point, I should probably be referring you to my other website which is also deeply neglected. Make you wonder why I have them at all if I am just going to ignore them. It makes me feel like an errand mother. However, that’s life sometimes we have to juggle. Something that seems negligible one week is critical the next as we attempt not to rock the boat from running from one task to another. That’s where my life has been at and although I have been very well looked after over the last several months, sometimes we just have to accept the innings we have and play from there.

Part of me wants to make promises or tell you what I will do next or even more about where I am in terms of work and who I am working with. the things is that belongs on the other website and maybe that just tells me where my next piece of writing should lead me.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Today

kimberleen

Just for today, it feels like a powerful moment to interrupt the months-long silence for those of you that had been following or at the very least keeping an eye on this blog. To say hello! Do you remember me I exist and yes I am still out here working on the things that I had been consistently writing about in this blog? To be honest I am largely just a little disappointed that I was not able to keep up with the thing that I had to write and the format by which I had planned for this year to keep writing them. More than that that I dropped out of any kind of posting at all. I had managed to maintain quite a stint to be fair. Right now I am in Windhoek, Namibia, an exotic location I know. The reasons and answers of how did I get here are far too long, winding and existential than I will ever be able to explain here. What I can say is that for right now I am COVID refugee where I was once a love migrant and things are a lot better than they might read. I am very happy to be where I am. I am safe and I also feel safe. Which if you’ve been following my streams of thought for any length of time you will know is of the utmost importance to me as it should be. I have been here in, Namibia since the 18th of May 2021 will be here I imagine for several more weeks to come, which I am also happy about. The reason why I am telling you this is this means I will finally have time to catch up on content I needed and wanted to produce for this website and all you healing humans out there. However, there is no way around it, though I may be trauma-informed the contents of my head and the strategy for creating content here is currently far from organised in what I can only describe as a backwards-facing action plan.

I started today by using debt management as an analogy for how I feel about my life, my to-do list and cleaning up my mess. That you should pay off all the smallest debts first and dedicate the excess money it frees up towards the bigger debts. Even with this approach to tackling the to-do list it still feels overwhelming as I can’t figure out exactly where is the best place to focus my energy. Though I am very aware that I have significant debt (if not the biggest debt and thus deficit of attention owed) here. This is, to say the least anxiety-inducing as this work and you are both crucial to my path forward and the development of this work. So what the hell happened?

What I can tell you is that a Master of Research in Human Geography; Spaces, Politics & Ecologies has been struck off the list officially today. So I can now put some fancy letters behind my name. I’m now Kimberley K Stone BA Hons MRes. Pah! Just like that, I did it. I achieved a dream. The inconsistency here is the price I had to pay for it and I apologise for that. I do hope to do much better in the future and in fact, I am going to have to.

I always like to remind my readers that I too am traumatised and hope that it offers you some semblance of sanity, in this truly chaotic world. That we are all deeply flawed and what can be impossible to express is at these times totally understandable. ‘Netflix and chill’ has become shorthand for “I just can’t”. At least the entertainment seems to be of slightly better quality than other dystopian carnations. Where exactly do we go to escape from escapism? So yes they say consistency is key to anything and mostly everything that you want to be good at. That turning up is enough. So here I am turning up again. I’m sad I was away from home for so long but I’m here now I’m back and I’m always doing my best to show up, sometimes though, that isn’t always possible. Please forgive me

Yes, life after trauma can feel like time travel as we literally just try and get our shit together, whether that is mentally, emotionally or physically, never mind organised. When a trauma bomb has arrived it can feel like our whole bodies are wading through electric treacle that overstimulates, overwhelms and can leave us numb. It’s hard to find ourselves. Hard to feel ourselves. Hard to hear ourselves. And most often hardest to embody everything that we truly feel and would rather have or be instead. So I’m back to one day at a time while stuck in seventh gear.

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The Human Life

kimberleen

I wrote out notes for this talk well over three years ago and hadn’t put together that I should make a blog post out of these things. To be honest I can’t really remember what I was talking about. I suspect that it was something to do witht the human life span or even human life cycles hah I wonder if I still have the write up to do the facebook events…

I do and they’ve helped immensely. When I first was working on the marketing for The Life Doula I had the tagline ’embrace the seasons of life’. As someone with CPTSD I tell you I am talking about far greater life cycles than those of the widely accepted things more Dantes Inferno, The Divine Comedy and The Nine Circle of Heaven rather than that of Mother, Maiden and Crone. Life cycles in all their forms and nuances are critical to how we develop as humans. From conception to birth we are now beginning to understand that even the seemingly ‘invisible’ start of a new life can have major repercussions as to how our future will unfold. Given that I spend much of my time discussing childhood trauma we only have to watch your average shit television series to understand how our parental relationship through childhood can fuck you up for life.

It’s only a matter of common sense that you might want to consider what you want to manifest over the course of the rest of your life. No big deal right? Of course all the Life Coaches will tell you to write it down. Get clear on your goals and manifest what you want. That bit’s easy isn’t it? Big house, nice care, freedom to travel. The thing is if you are reading this blog. My blog you didn’t turn up here cause life is going well. Maybe is was a car crash, maybe it was the shit corporate job that you kept you replicating the same shit patterns or oh no…that relationship. You can spend your whole life going round in the same circle. Which is very profoundly different from cycling upwards into new possibilities. Do you know what those possibilities are? So many of us are caught in unsatisfying life cycles because we are limited by our own imaginations or even worse the expectations of other people. Fuck that.

Yes, it’s good to know what you want out of your future. Yes, it’s good that have dreams. What’s really amazing is if that looks totally different to everybody else around you.

I have to be honest here. I came to the game late. I haven’t achieved everything I hoped to. Yet at the same time I have achieved far more than I could have ever imagined. Simoultaniously my biggest challenges was getting onto my own path. What’s really interesting that the chaellges I had getting on to my own path were everything to do with systemic trauma. The coming to terms with systemic trauma has been a huge growth point in my figuring out what I want to bring to the world.

When I started The Life Doula five years ago now I literally didn’t have the language for what I do. Everybody was telling me to niche and I could barely find a way to describe trauma, let alone understand that is what I was dealing with. I was so unsure of myself. How could this be it when everyone else was just ploughing on, on getting people focused on their goals, even though most goals were destroying the planet. Anyways what I was saying back then in a very roundabout way is that your life is important. It has value way beyond that which you might have ascribed to it or even the people around you. Pay attention to it. You’ve got anything up to 125 years to do some really cool stuff. What’s stopping you?

This article was written to accompany the Trauma Wise Circle by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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A Fun Day Half-Writing Things

kimberleen

I’ve been struggling to write for a few months. The slow numbing of being non-creative brought brain fog and blocks. The brick wall of non-creativity turned into a mountain of boulders. As I tried to understand where my mojo had gone I was not doing too well. I had been incredibly consistent with my writing for over a year even under very trying circumstances. With high motivation to stay committed. Get things done and create ‘good’ content for you my clients and followers. Yet I just crumbled.

I’m sure I should probably be writing a backdated update for the end of 2020 right now. To create some kind of context for my creative commitment. Cause if you don’t follow my Instagram or Facebook you probably have no idea what is actually going on in my life. Cause you know I can be a bit cagy about telling the whole truth and rightly so. The main news is that I’ve been doing a Masters and I am working on my dissertation which is a lot less troubling to me than you might think.

I’ve got over 101 half written blog posts waiting to be published. I’ve just created about four more, with a poor attempt at tackling the backlog. My clarity isn’t shit hot at the moment and that makes it hard for me to move through the subjects I’ve outlined. Guess what? That means that there is something that needs to be healed there. This means I now have another blog post to write about the particular process. I’ve got timelines collapsing everywhere at the moment. Luckily last year someone explained to me that I only have to keep up. Who am I keeping up with exactly? I’m not sure I am capable of even keeping up with myself never mind the divine flow of the universe or the will of the ancestors. The thing is as well I don’t just crack out a lot of these ‘posts/articles/blogs/ there a process to create in and of themselves that involve and initial writing, an abandoning, a returning a revising and publishing. You see we think so many of these things are so easy. That we just wack it out without too much thinking. However, it isn’t as simple a that especially when your typing is poor and dyslexia has a huge role to play in how you present everything. The good news is that the crippling perfectionism and the imploding anxiety that accompany it are at bay… Though I’m getting a bit pissed of that Grammarly seems to be on strike from all my social media platforms, even though I just reinstalled it.

When I started writing keeping this blog ‘process’ as part of The Life Doula offering I promised myself that I wouldn’t restrict myself. That whatever I felt like writing I would and that no matter what I wrote as long as it was vaguely decipherable I would post it. That I wouldn’t force myself to make word counts or even have a subject matter that I would let whatever was pouring out of me fill the page conscious, unconscious, repetitive, boring and with lots of spelling mistakes. This was partial because I knew that ‘journaling or blogging kept me sane and that pressure killed me. So there we have it forced crystalline consciousness there as I have diligently wrote myself through many life crises without having to call to many people out in the process. These last few years I’ve been working thorugh themes and even writing my way through course I am creating as a way to multitask. It’s nice to be productive but I also need to be creative beyond forced labour. Of course I’m passionate abotu what I do. Sometimes it’s good to keep it mixed up a bit.

I swear it’s going to be an exhilarating series of books when it’s written. It’s just that now is not the time. What I have seen by totally neglecting my blog writing in a multiple way is that once again I have neglected my creative need. All work and no play makes Kimberley a very dull girl. Indeed that is where I have been at for several months. I literally replied to an email from a very old and good friend with thanks, I’m busy. It’s a bit fucked up, isn’t it? While I have forced myself through the last few months with a very clear mantra. I want to be left alone. I want to be left afuckinglone.

The truth is I want to be left alone to think feel and write, to explore to plan and to find away forward that supports and liberates me and overworking is not part of that. Some how even after years of self management my people pleasing gets in the way. No I can’t do that seems to be at the center of my periodical collapse. So here I am back at the center worshiping at the altar that is me. Wanting to know what do a truly need this time round to sustain myself. The quick answer to that right now if a finished masters; a complete disseration. It might feel like this is distraction therapy when actually it is something far better it’s nurturance. So I’m sorry if I let you down with my inconsitant writing habit I was doing my best to find my way back to me.

What I have also found interesting is that becasue I have stopped posting to my blog that my viewer numbers have collpased. I wonder what it means when I felt I creating so much value. I really am learning that valuing yourself is the key to being valued. Just like that I hit the 500 word limit.

I need to keep it moving…