Gladys the starfish woman

a short flash essay on surviving the cruelty of life

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. I have been consuming the horrible news lately and I wake up obsessing over what might happen. Recently in somatic therapy I had an experience that mirrored some parts work so I decided to write a short little piece on it. Much love to everyone in the throes of trying to figure out how to be in our bodies while holding witness to what we can. I don’t have any answers, but I am trying to listen to my body and she keeps telling me that whatever I take in has to be processed. Every single bit of it.

Gladys is an old chain-smoking starfish woman who lives in my intestines. She tries to tell me, whenever I will listen to her, that I need to slow my roll. The steady diet of horrible news, the hours of imagining the suffering of others, the constant hyper vigilance all ends up in her corner of my body. She takes a drag and squints at me, knowing there is a 50/50 chance I will listen. She is tough as old boots and she isn’t going anywhere. She wants me to survive. She wants me to be mothered. She wants the ocean itself to rock me to sleep. She knows that deep in my guts I am still a small child desperately wishing the world was less cruel and who decided to do something about it. She knows I am blood vessels and aching muscles and strong hips and shoulders. She knows I am just one person, when I myself sometimes forget this. She smokes and she sometimes turns into a creature who can’t be bothered by the noise and who needs to feel the rhythm of the waves. Gladys is a survivor, and she pulls me back into the shore when I get lost in the ocean of sadness that is our world. It’s not that she doesn’t want me to care. It’s that sometimes the caring about others to the point where it hurts me is just repeating the patterns. The patterns I learned to live with when I was small and defenseless. She is the grandmother I never had, the neighbors I always did, a stoic lighthouse deep within my core. Together we will get through this, she says. But you gotta slow your roll. She’s only one starfish woman, after all, and she’s still working on soothing the little child inside of me who is terrified that no one is coming to help us. Her voice is raspy and I somehow believe her when she tells me that we show up for each other. All of us, all the parts inside, working together. And that’s what we do in the world as well.

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