Origins...
A whole month early, then three days late.
As of now, this is an empty page.
I’m enjoying the feeling. It tingles of anticipation, of potentiality, and of my own expectations + preconceived notions of what this space wants to be.
Deeper than the tingles though, there is presence.
Oh, how delicious the emptiness of pure presence is.
Let’s enjoy it for a moment…
Hello! Welcome. I’m thrilled you’re here. I fervently hope you enjoy reading these little letters and musings as much as I plan to enjoy writing them.
I sit here contemplating how to best commemorate the beginning of this venture. How best to honour the initial strokes made on a blank canvass.
It only makes sense, I think, to begin with the story of how I came to be. My beginnings. My initial strokes on the blank canvass of consciousness.
What follows, here, is a gratuitously autobiographical account of my Origins.
One month early, then three days late.
My name is Leila. I came into this world on Bundjalung country, in the land now called the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, Australia. I was born to parents who were heartily in love with the idea of love, but had never touched upon love itself at the time I was born.
I think they assumed I would fix them. That the joy of new life would heal the spiritual hole they’d learned to carry. How many other Eldest Daughters are charged with the same responsibility?
My arrival Earth-side was planned for the beginning of July, but I was determined to arrive on my own time, and not a moment later.
I began kicking my way out of my mother in the very early hours of June the fourth. Had my journey into Personhood gone smoothly, I would have shared a birthday with my maternal grandmother. I mustn’t have liked that idea very much, because I squirmed and screamed and tangled myself in deadly traps of umbilical cords and sinew for days. I writhed and fought, refusing to be pulled out of my mother via forceps, until she succumbed to having me sliced out of her. I took my first breath at 2:14am, on June the seventh.
At the time, my name was undecided. But my father caught me in his arms, and the moment he looked into my face he declared that my name was to be Madeline.
(Honestly, I think I dodged a bullet here. I cannot imagine what my life would have been like had I been born a Cancerian. As someone with absolutely zero water in my entire chart, I get sleepy and wibbly whenever the moon goes into Water, and every time I think to myself, “holy fuck, do Water Signs just live like this??”
Said with love and reverence to all Water Signs everywhere obviously. But I’ll keep my Gemini Sun / Aquarius Moon / Aries Rising and the most bone-dry chart you ever did see, thanks ;)
I realise I’m now coming up to the bit where it would make sense for me to make some reference to my childhood.
I would LOVE to be able to give you a detailed account of precisely everything that happened. Because I’m sure a lot of it was very interesting, and dare I say, educational.
But the truth is, I have little to no memory of my childhood, at all. It’s as though it’s been erased from my body’s understanding of existence. I get flashes sometimes, when I’m in deep meditation, and I’ve been able to piece together most of it from accounts of my life that other people have told me.
None of it really feels like “me” though. I have the sense that I need to talk about my own life in the third person. Interesting the way our nervous systems will protect us from trauma, hey.
Side note: I promised myself I wouldn’t slip into “teacher mode” in this one too much, but I do need to say here that if you’re someone with really intense complex trauma, not being able to remember anything IS NOT A SIGN THAT IT DIDN’T HAPPEN, OR THAT YOU’RE EXAGGERATING. This is what our brains and bodies do IN RESPONSE to trauma. If anything, it validates you. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
What I do know…
I lived in a little town called Fairy Hill. I figured it was thusly named because it was populated with lots of fairies. Our house backed onto farmlands. I would jump the fence and run through the forests looking for old cow skulls and snake skins, and chase the moon towards the horizon. It got me in trouble, a lot.
I once accidentally let out a herd of cattle. I stumbled across them, they chased me, it was very frightening, I was exhilarated, I ran back towards the house and left the gate open. The cows ran down the street.
I would leave offerings for the fairies in the little divots made by the roots of trees. They would speak to me often. I to them.
I had an imaginary friend. He was a rat, and his name was Tickle. I later found out that I was born in the year of the Rat. Ah, the poetry of consciousness.
I had a cosy nook in a tree with a low-hanging branch. I would swing myself up into the tree and read there.
We had a strangling oak. She had pulled together the skeletons of seven seperate fig trees. It had created a hollow at the base of a magickal tree with seven trunks. Before I knew what rituals were or the magickal significance of the place, I felt it, and I would ritualise it each time the full moon appeared in the opening above. I sang to it. I danced. I chanted in languages I learned from the spirits of the trees. I was a Weird Kid.
My mother was an addict. She is one, still. She tried her best, but she’d never learned to love.
I was first diagnosed with clinical depression when I was seven years old. The youngest case the doctor had ever seen.
I was a deeply solitary child. I was never lonely, until I learned that I should have been lonely. When I was small, I had no one. When I was a little older, I cycled through groups of friends every year. I never landed anywhere.
My younger brother arrived when I was two. He’s my dearest friend.
That’s all I know, really.
Everything else is gone, now.
I carry the spirit of little Madeline with me still. She paves my way, with little glimpses. A sage little Wonder Child giggling along in the Dark, the bobbing light of a dim lantern.
To this day, I still spend upwards of ten hours every week playing on the swings.
The Interesting Bits…
I believe in a strong topic sentence. So I’ll say here that this little section is where the juice lives. ;)
When I was sixteen, I was hit by a truck travelling at about 83 km/h ( 52 miles, for my American friends).
My body was utterly shattered. All of the bones on my right side were broken. The skin on my left side was scraped off. My left ear came away from my skull, swinging like a door on a hinge. When my head hit the ground, it smashed my skull above my left frontal lobe, causing a massive haemorrhage.
I was rushed to hospital. I fell into a coma. Priests came and gave me Last Rites. I slipped away. For a little while, I was dead.
And then, to literally everyone’s shock, including all of the clever White Coats who had done Everything They Could, my brain re-absorbed the blood from my haemorrhage. I came back.
Battered, broken, feeble, and as-yet unable to read or talk, but alive.
The integration of that experience on my spirit and psyche is still ongoing. I couldn’t face it at all for many, many years afterwards. Standing at the primordial gates of the Once And Eternal Void is no small thing. You might be thinking, “I’ve tripped pretty hard on some high quality psychedelics. I reckon I get it”, and look. Me too. And I promise, it’s not the same.
Rehabilitation was, as you can imagine, fucking gruelling. I’d always been praised for being very clever, so having to learn again how to read and write and talk was incredibly humbling (read: deeply fucking humiliating) for me.
Luckily, it all came back pretty quickly. I didn’t have to endure that particular bruise to my ego for too long.
More luckily still, from my then-fragile ego’s perspective, the neuropsychiatrist who was overseeing my case found me to be in the ninety-ninth percentile in creativity and intelligence.
“It’s official now, I’m a genius. I’m not going to take any shit from anyone ever again,” I remember thinking at the time.
The danger I didn’t foresee at the time was that the injuries done to my mind and spirit as a result of being raised by an addict with her own disordered eating habits had already taken root, and were, even then, well and truly festering.
I didn’t notice just how submerged I already was in my anorexia, until that accident stripped my of my mobility.
Before the accident, I was still in that budding stage of a crippling eating disorder where everyone in your life affirms and rewards you for your “discipline”. I was running every day, already counting calories and restricting, but from the outside it looked like a “health kick”. Any fellow survivors of eating disorders will know exactly what I’m talking about here.
The bit where you still have agency over your mind, where recovery is still possible, and you’re not pulled back. You’re in fact pushed further in.
Years later, once I had recovered, contemplating that fact helped to really radicalise me.
With the loss of my mobility and autonomy after the accident, my physical recovery already being so tenuous, my eating disorder moved very quickly from “budding”, to “full-blown, catastrophic, irreparable, deadly”.
It was a very, very dark time. I’ll spare you the details here. Not because I carry any shame, but because a lot of it I can’t remember, and the parts I do recall are… highly unpleasant, and potentially extremely triggering.
And aside from being triggering as hell, having an eating disorder is just… boring. There’s literally nothing on your mind except arbitrary calculations of in vs out. It’s like living inside of a dull grey mist, nothing but vast and ominous emptiness around you, running at full tilt, no idea of where you’re going, but you know that if you stop running even for a moment, you’ll die.
Eating disorders are famously tricky to recover from. They’re unique, in that in a lot of ways, they’re an addiction. But unlike any other addictive substance, you cannot simply remove yourself from potentially triggering situations until you get your head and spirit back.
It’s much easier to quit drinking when you can cut alcohol out of your life completely until the injuries that caused the urges to drink have had a chance to heal. Or at the very least, scab over.
Can’t do that with eating disorders. Because you have to eat, every day, forever, because of Being An Alive Human reasons.
I’m a sober alcoholic now, and the only way I can describe it is by thinking about what coming into sobriety would have been like for me if three times a day, every day, I had to lock myself in a room with other alcoholics who were binge drinking, fill my lungs with the scent of it, have everyone around me urging me to drink, and still say no.
Three times a day, every day, forever.
I don’t reckon I would have gotten sober if that was the case.
When I’m asked about recovering from anorexia, I always say that to pull yourself back from an eating disorder is like planning a high-stakes prison heist, in a maximum security facility, where the entire plan hinges on the warden sneezing at precisely the right moment.
Truly, so much of it is luck.
Luck, and in my case, womb work and cyclical consciousness philosophy.
Mother Wounds (what a cliche, I know)…
(artist unknown)
Eldest daughters with alcoholic mothers writing memoir-type pieces absolutely saturate the internet. I don’t think I need to share too much into the nitty gritties of that, it can be read about in many places, by many authors much wiser and more poignant than I.
The takeaway from my own little adventure through the gritty terrain of this wound is that I now fervently believe that all mothers, everywhere, no matter what, are loving their children as fiercely as they can, in the only ways they know how.
(Logically, I know that this probably isn’t true. I know that truly spiteful people probably do exist. One could argue that even in these cases, spite and vengeance and jealousy are the only ways that those mothers ever learned how to love. For me, this isn’t so much about truth. It’s about the fact that choosing to have this lens through which to view my own mother, and mothers everywhere, makes my world a much more peaceful and liveable place.)
The car accident and my subsequent very rapid descent into the ravenous clutches of anorexia broke my mother, utterly.
She had nothing to hold her through the intensity of that time. She had learned no means or methods of self-resourcing, and she’d never built any kind of support network for herself.
She was adrift, grieving, paralysed by the Mother/Daughter dynamic that should have been, and bone-shatteringly angry.
Our relationship soured quickly. It’s core was already rotted. Our intertwined pain overcame us.
What began as emotional neglect and a good ol’ fashioned role-reversal of the parent-child dynamic; quickly morphed into vengeful outbursts, overt shaming, prolonged + extreme gaslighting, and violence.
It exploded one day. She was bellowing. I was wailing. She stormed off into her room, locking the door behind her. I begged and pleaded through the keyhole for her to hear me. I later learned that she’d put on noise cancelling headphones and blasted Tchaikovsky, drowning me out.
I had a bone to pick with Tchaikovsky for a number of years after that.
I left that afternoon in extreme distress, seeking solace from a friend.
I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see or speak to her again for eight years.
Upon my return to the house the following morning, having sufficiently cooled off from the previous night, I found everything I owned strewn about in the front yard, the house empty, and the locks changed.
I was seventeen, still actively recovering from a traumatic brain injury, my body still rehabilitating, my eating disorder barely under control, and I found myself suddenly sleeping on the street.
I sprinted gleefully into the waiting arms of alcoholism then.
My mother’s parting gift.
Uprooted…
The time I spent sleeping rough is a wild blur.
Again, there’s not a lot of it that I remember. Because I was extremely traumatised, sure, but also because I spent almost a decade in varying states of quite-to-blackout drunk.
I remember I had a little trolley. The kind you pull along behind you using a clunky lever. Everything I owned and needed was in there. I remember I used to sing, and play the ukulele, busking for food and money.
I fell in love with a boy who lived on the Gold Coast, almost two hours away by bus. He looked like 90s Johnny Depp, and he played the blues. He was a ridiculously talented guitarist, and even more so on the harmonica. He had a strong tongue ;)
I’d get on the bus at 3 in the morning, arrive at the Gold Coast as the sun was rising. We’d play on the beach and debate heartily about existentialist philosophy together (he was reading Jean Paul Satre on a bench when I met him. I had to stop and introduce myself. Seventeen year old me fell head-over-heels in love with that boy right then and there).
I’d been expelled from my high school by this point. Well, not “expelled” so much, because at private schools they don’t “expel” you, they very politely but firmly ask you to leave, or else.
We had all the time in the world, he and I. We were going to see it all together.
I spent most of my time with him, coming back to the Northern Rivers for the little part time job I’d managed to haggle my way into two evenings a week.
For my eighteenth birthday, he made me a bottle of signature tequila. As in, he made it. It tasted like cinnamon and ash and the smell of dust at sunset after a very warm day. We played poker that night. He ran out of chips, so he bet his silk-lined brown blazer. I was bluffing, but I won.
I have that blazer still. I wear it often. It brings me good fortune, and the fondness of a hazy lost love.
The actual sleeping in the actual outdoors bit was, on paper, uncomfortable. At times it was very cold, other times it was very frightening. I was very lucky to have the Gold Coast Boy to go to on the weekends, and luckier still that I found a refuge house after only a couple of months.
I know for my nervous system it must have been a deeply unsettling time.
But my only emotional memory of that period in my life is total, unabridged, full-body glee.
I was beyond ecstatic to be free of my mother, and free of the tumult of our forever-enmeshed pain.
That time is up there with the happiest I’ve ever been, actually.
The refuge house I found was as you’d expect. It was run-down, cheap as chips, and populated by some of the most eccentric characters you can imagine.
I loved it there, enormously. It was my first experience of living in a house with other people, and feeling properly safe.
One of my housemates there was a Koori man (the Koori people are indigenous to the land in the far south of what is now called New South Wales), who would regularly regale me with delightfully paced and exciting tales of his life as a Comedy Drag Queen in the King’s Cross of the 80s.
He is, to this day, the funniest person I’ve ever met. His command of timing and tone and weird quirky body movements are unmatched by anyone I’ve seen in Sydney’s comedy scene since. It makes me wonder what it used to be like in the 80s and 90s. How wild it must have been.
(some King’s Cross Queens in the 80s looking fierce as fuck)
On one such afternoon, telling one such story, we were steadily making our way through one of those bottles of vodka you can buy at Aldi that are essentially pure rocket fuel.
I was completely hammered, laughing fit to crack all my ribs, tears streaming down my face, and I decided that Sydney sounded like a fun place to be.
The next morning, I woke to discover notifications on my phone reminding me that my flight to Sydney was leaving soon. I couldn’t remember booking the ticket, but off I went.
I couldn’t afford the fee to check any luggage, so I wore every single item of clothing I owned on the plane. I landed in the Big Smoke, with absolutely no idea where I was going, where I was going to live, how I was going to survive, or what the fuck to do.
I owe my life (maybe literally) to the very old acquaintance I hadn’t spoken to in 5 years at that point, who graciously allowed me their couch to rest my head while I got my shit together.
Getting that phone call would have been bizarre. I never really asked, we quickly lost touch again when I found a more permanent place to stay. I regret that, now.
I grieved for my mother, deeply.
I was still too angry and far too wounded to connect with her, but I felt her anguish as though it was a dull weight pressed against my chest, constantly.
Drinking helped to numb it, at least for a while. Eventually though I became an angry drunk. All the hurt I was trying to numb came pouring out to the surface, bursting out of me in stinging hot waves like puss from a boil.
I had a strong sense that if I was going to have any hope of surviving, I needed to find some way of coming into peace with this injured part of me.
Knowing it wasn’t safe yet for me to reach out to Mum directly, I oriented instead towards our maternal lineage.
My father had given me my first name, and my mother had decided upon my middle name.
Leila.
After my great-grandmother.
Brilliant pianist, poet, suffragette, and (we don’t know this for sure, but our family has hand-written letters from around the right time) a secret Lover of Mark Twain.
Very young, naive, wounded, and lost, I longed to honour if not my mother in person, then at least the women we both came from.
I adopted Leila’s name, then, and I’ve been Leila ever since.
My awakening began.
❤️❤️❤️