Kindergarten in Northern Minnesota
Spring 1979
Six years old

“Teacher comin’! Teacher comin’!”

A bunch of kids run back to their seats, giggling. I do not need to run anywhere because I did as I was told. Mrs. Roberson said to stay in our seats and finish our work, so I did. Becky never does. Now neither does Suzy.

Suzy used to be my best friend along with Johnny, but he is not old enough for kindergarten yet. Ever since Suzy and I started school, now she is mean to me, too. She used to only be mean when the big kids were around, but Becky must have told everybody how she and her older brother chase me through the woods and wreck my forts. A bunch of the big brothers in our neighborhood are mean. Somebody for sure spilled the beans about what they call me.

Now my classmates sing it at me.

Harty-Farty.

They make fart noises when I sit down. They say I stink even though I do-so NOT, and they blame their farts on me, so now other kids do not want to sit next to me anymore. They move their chairs with their noses plugged, saying, “Peee-ew!”

Now Becky is standing behind me, sniffing at the air and saying it again. Suzy and Kimberly and Tony and Dan have been taking turns darting close to sniff and then run with grossed-out noises. Becky has stolen a couple of those pills that make your teeth red until you brush them with toothpaste. The icky pinkish gunk shows every time she says, “Eeeeeew!”

Thank God Mrs. Roberson will be back. “Soon,” she said, but it is never soon enough for me. It will be okay once the teacher is here. They do not dare to call me mean names and tease me when an adult is around.

When Mrs. Roberson’s clicky heels sound outside the door, I heave a sigh like it’s Goldilocks’ water at bath time. Not too hot. Not too cold. This is just right. My shoulders have been hunched up to my ears since she left, but now I can finally relax, so I reach for the green crayon.

I am almost done coloring my page. I only have the grass and the sky left. I bet Becky has not even started. I hope she gets her name on the board. It would serve her right. She is a big troublemaker. She gets the other kids to make trouble, too, because she is bigger and meaner. And louder. Her voice hurts my ears and she knows it. She loves to yell with her mouth two millimeters from my ear.

But with our teacher back, she is finally quiet and far away.

She still keeps flashing her yucky red teeth at the other kids to make them laugh. Now she is making pink drool down her chin. I think that is a better reason to say, “Eeeew,” than my smell. I know I do not stink. She is just being mean. My parents quit smoking last year, and I take a bath every day. I also use Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific, which it does, and that’s the truth. Thhhhpt.

Our teacher has her back turned, so she does not see the drool. She only snaps, “Quiet! Do your work,” at the giggling. They shush, but they do not do their work.

I do. Coloring is one of my favorite things in the whole wide world. Even on nice days, I would rather lie on the soft living room carpet and play with crayons and markers and paper and stickers instead of the other kids.

Mrs. Roberson circles around our table, looking over our shoulders. She says things like, “Very good,” and “The sky should be blue, not purple,” and “Try to stay inside the lines.” She gives me a, “Very nice,” so I beam and draw a sun up in the corner above the smiling kitty.

I colored him orange like the tiny one I saved from the rain, even though he clawed my arm and neck. He was only scared. He shivered and snuggled into me once Mommy got a towel to wrap around him. Eventually, he purred.

I named him The Great and Powerful Pumpkin, but I called him Pumpkin the Purr for short.

I miss that kitten. I cried for days when the Petersons came to take him away. I wanted him to be mine, but I am not allowed to have pets except caterpillars that turn into butterflies and fireflies that glow in my jar. Even those I have to release, because insects were not made for jars.

Mrs. Roberson does not leave us alone for the rest of the morning, and I am glad. At last, the lunchtime bell sounds. We only go to school for half the day. They make us eat in the lunchroom, which I hate, and they make us stay for recess on the playground, which I love.

Well, usually I love it, because I get to play with my in-school best friend, Christine. I do not get to sit with her at a table or stand near her in line because my name begins with H-is-for-Hart, and hers begins with Z-is-for-Zimmerman. When I am with Christine, the other kids do not pick on me as often.

Unfortunately, she rides the bus and I am a walker. That walk home is often the worst part of my whole day, so I heave more sighs of relief the second I can squeak inside my own house.

After we put all the crayons and markers and paper and scissors away, we line up at the coat rack. Even though it is springtime, it is still very cool outside, so I cannot wear my red jacket yet. I still have to wear the blue one Mommy made from Daddy’s old Air Force coat. This one is almost too small for me. I love its shiny buttons, but it is made of wool. I do NOT like the way it itches. Even through my shirts! I have to wear a sweater to keep it from itching, but it still scratches me around the neck and the wrists. Soon it will be too small, so I will get to have a new winter—

“Hurry up now! Stop daydreaming.” Mrs. Roberson grabs me by the shoulders and yanks me around to face her. She is wearing her scrunchy-face as she jerks my coat closed and buttons it for me, even though I know perfectly well how to button my own coat. “We don’t have all day to wait for you, Poky Little Puppy.”

Somebody laughs behind me. Somebody else makes doggie noises.

I love the Poky Little Puppy. He is my favorite of all those five dogs, but I do NOT like that story.1

I am not allowed to have my own dog, but I do have a little stuffed puppy. His name is Flop-Ears, and I let him be as poky as he wants. We sniff and seek and search and discover all sorts of things that other puppies walk right past. We smell and hear and feel and see things that other kids try to say are not there. Adults, too.

But I know.

And Flop-Ears knows.

“If you don’t hurry up,” Mrs. Roberson snips down her nose at me, “your mommy won’t let you have any dessert, and then won’t you feel sorry for yourself?”

No.

I will NOT feel sorry for myself.

My mommy always lets me have dessert no matter how poky I am or how many things I stop to look at or how many questions I have. Sometimes she is the one asking me the questions or pointing out things to look at and she always shares her dessert with me, so there.

Mrs. Roberson hates my questions so I have stopped asking her. She always huffs and rolls her eyes and talks at me down her nose. Her nose reminds me of Miss Gulch from The Wizard of Oz. When our teacher is cross, she even sounds like Miss Gulch. Her head pokes toward us as her eyes go squinty like the Wicked Witch of the West. I think she would look very good with a broom and a tall, pointy hat and—

She grabs my shoulders again and shoves me back into line. “Come on now, Poky. Let’s get a move on so we can all eat lunch sometime this century. All right, class, have a very good afternoon.”

My eyes go squinty, too, but more like Toto as I glare at her sideways. I say what we are supposed to: “Have a very good afternoon, Teacher.” But I say it grumbly and growly. I want to bite her leg.

As we file out of the room, it starts like it always does in the woods and by the fence on the playground and all the way home—all the places where there are no adults to scold mean kids. First from behind me, sing-songy and very quietly: “Poky Little Puppy….Poky Little Puppy…” Other kids laugh and glance back at me. They also glance at Mrs. Roberson, nervous. When she does not make the sing-songer stop, they join in.

My shoulders hunch up again. I grab my bag close to my chest. When I pass under Mrs. Roberson’s nose, I see that she is smiling her, “Very good,” smile.

She is laughing too, and she looks more like the Wicked Witch than ever. My classmates keep singing her new name at me. I think being like the Poky Little Puppy is a super-duper wonderful thing. They do not. They sing it through lunch and they sing it through recess, up and down the slides, up and down the jungle gym, roly-poly, tumble-bumble, pell-mell.

On the way home, with no teachers to stop them, they do not only sing. Once we reach the road that leads away from the school, they dance around me—one, two, three, four—pulling my hair and pushing my shoulders and jabbing at me like Flying Monkeys. They follow me the whole way home until I finally escape into my house.

The next day, they sing it when they see me and they sing it in the bathroom and they sing it in the gym when it is my turn for jumprope.

“Teacher comin’!” might still send them scurrying back to their seats to do their work, but it never stops them teasing me anymore. Now they do not even hide their fart noises in class.

There is something mean in our teacher’s eyes, even when she is smiling.

Sometimes especially when she is smiling.

I think she secretly likes it when they call me “Farty.”

That summer, after I had escaped Mrs. Roberson’s class, I started stealing my voice.

In scraps and shards, I snatched it back from the Witch’s Castle, sealing whatever I could salvage inside a waterproof Zippak. I locked my voice inside the old, rusty lunchbox I found, and hid it behind the bars of the culvert that opened upon my favorite stream.

I didn’t even trust it inside my own bedroom.

All my gazillion questions, curiosities, observations, musings…my sorrows, fears, wishes, prayers…my angers…my precious “NO” and my “don’t you dares”…my alarms and alerts when the things people said didn’t match what was in their eyes and their hands…and especially my outrage—my rage that brewed like a volcano with a hurricane trapped inside its heart…

I quietly stole back the voice that would express these things. Once I’d salvaged it, I carried it deep underground where I poured it all out into my secret passion: fiction.2

More like I dredged it up from my steaming guts and vomited it across the page.

This was the first:

There were many, many, many other things I dared not write down.

Words can be read, after all, when they are found by other people’s eyes.

So at first, I did not commit them to paper and ink. (I was also only six when this started, so I required far greater vocabulary and sentence structure to do full and satisfactory justice to my dreams, my desires, my greatest fears, and my angsty teeth-gnashing.)

Night after night, when I lay alone in the dark, my head became a cauldron of stories. Burble, bubble, roil with trouble. For decades, I never breathed a word about them to anybody. Particularly when I acquired new hormones and an interest in boys.

Ahem.

To this day, this is still how I brew up even my hugest, most complex fictional series. The world-building, plot lines, and character arcs get stored in databases and labyrinthine libraries of notes, but the initial sparks always come to me just as I’m falling asleep or waking up.

In my tall tales, my characters could do things I was too afraid to do. They could have things that were beyond my reach. They could say things that I never dared—not if I wanted to remain a nice person. A good person. As close to a socially acceptable person as somebody like me could ever get. I could run social experiments with them, and not have to reap the consequences of these actions I longed to take. My characters could live the audacious life of which I only dreamed, and still get a happily-ever-after.

And yes.

To this day, my tales are full of monsters, misfits, and magical pools. Waterfalls, warriors and wild, wily witches.3

Twisted History & Myth

Fantasy Fiction: Steamy, gory tales of soul-searching & love. Gladiators, gods & myths galore. Mermaids, mind-messers, minotaurs, more. Storytelling creative process.

By Alexx Hart

And no.

The witches are not always the villains.

Okay, fine. We’re not always the antagonists of the tale.

© 2020 Hartebeast

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Something new you’ll be seeing on my posts like clockwork from now on. I’ve had an outside patron donation profile/online tip jar for even longer than I’ve been on Substack. We writers have been asking and suggesting and showing potential models and touting mutual benefits for years about denying readers the ability to monetarily say, “Wow, this rocked, thank you!” outside of a subscription. Considering what I write and for whom (TBI, disability, PTSD, neurospice, etc.) I appeal to a lot of people who can’t afford paid subscriptions to their favorite writers.

I am one of them.

This is why I do not paywall any of my writing. This is my Pay It Forward to everybody who has generously helped me through these things. It’s also why, although I have the paid subscription option on, you’ll see in the “what you’ll get” descriptions, this is more of a “support the artist” type of subscription, rather than the “here’s all the special stuff paid supporters are purchasing with their subscription” model. Because my disabilities and creative rhythms run completely contrary to indefinitely sustaining Things I’ve Promised for month after month after year after decade.

As such, a lot of people who might pay for extra perks also won’t be interested in a subscription here.

But a one-off, “Whoa, that rocked and I want this writer to know!” or “I wish I could afford a subscription because I love this writing, but I did just stumble into a little extra money so this is how I want to express my appreciation and thanks,” button would be so convenient on both the reader and writer side.

Because for a disabled person with a negative income who got ousted from receiving disability assistance by a G-man arithmetic loophole, even a couple bucks makes a difference!

🙏🥰🙏

When I first started writing here, it was widely broadcasted that adding external links to tipping sites was a major no-no.

But now I see that the times, they are a-changin’. Thus, so am I. Here is my patron donation page and tip jar, if you dig what I do around here and are so generously inclined:

Make it rain for the caffeine train!

Wait, you don’t know Tia & Tony Castaway? You don’t know what’s inside the Starcase Tia carries everywhere? You don’t know Escape to Witch Mountain? Here’s a taste of a crucial film from the VHS collection of my earliest years:

Spring 1980
7 years old

I am one of Mr. Bridger’s favorite students he has ever had in his whole life. He told me so. He is not supposed to say stuff like that, but he told me and now I am telling you but shh! You cannot tell anybody.

He is my favorite teacher ever, and I will say that very loudly to anyone and everyone everywhere. I have only had two teachers before this year—my Catechism teacher who is very nice but her answers only make me want to scowl and ask more questions, and my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Gulch. (Her real name is Mrs. Roberson but she has a big nose that I think would look very good in green, and she is not nice at all. She reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the West).

I am so glad to be in first grade now with Mr. Bridger! He likes me so much that he comes over sometimes for dinner with me and my parents. This is my favorite time with him, because I get to talk to him.

Really talk.

He does not talk to me like I am a baby. He just talks to me. He certainly does not ignore me at the dinner table. My parents talk to me, too, especially my mom. But at big family meals, I have to sit way down at the Little Kids’ Table or eat outside. I am one of the youngest, so my older cousins do not talk to me much. When I do pipe up, they look at me like I just answered in Jawa-speak so I mostly zip it.

Any time there is a big table with a lot of people, for sure I am getting ignored or looked at like I am weird.

Sometimes it is best to be ignored.

I had a best friend in my class during kindergarten, but Christine moved away at the end of last year and I have not made a new one since. At least when school ends for the day I can find Johnny, my best-best friend of all time, anywhere.

But he only started kindergarten this year, so we cannot sit together in the lunchroom. That big table full of my classmates is about the worst thing in the whole wide world. If they are not being mean, all they want to talk about is kid-stuff.

I like the kid stuff.

Ice-skating, roller-skating, sledding, snowman building, fort building, Lego building, sand castle building, frog hunting, fishing, hide-and-seeking, tag and race-games. Riding stupid bikes that I cannot make stay up. I do not like to go swimming either because I shiver too hard, and I almost drowned in my cousins’ pool. I like to color and read and play school, but nobody likes to play school the way I like to play school, so it is more hours of being in boring-school, just without Mr. Bridger to make everybody play nice. All the girls like to play baby-dolls, too, but I do not. Star Wars Men and Rockstar Dawn Dolls are way better, but those are store-bought toys so I don’t have any of my own.

My Forest Lake cousins have Trolls. The older girls made houses out of shoeboxes and sewing scraps. I do not like the Trolls much, except to put them on top of a pencil and scootchie it super fast between my hands to make their hair go poof! So they let me play with Gunga. He is black and rubber and reminds me of Bigfoot. He is my favorite, even though he had his arms ripped off, and half of his bottom lip has been torn. It hangs off his big, huge, screaming mouth. He has super long toes, and I love to squish them into the squish-toe carpet.

When you dig in his toes and slide his feet back and forth across that yummy purple fabric that covers the bottom of the living room shoebox, it goes “brrt-brrt…brrt-brrt…brrt-brrt.” It is the coolest feeling. I love to slide my fingers across it, too, and make it go “brrt.” I could probably “brrt” it for hours, but then we would never get to play-pretend anything, so I use Gunga’s big, long, curl-toes to squish it whenever he walks across the room. (Or I get to “brrt” it whenever somebody has to pee.)

I wish I had a whole dress made of that squish-toe fabric, like Anne does. She is the oldest of all the cousins, and it was her scraps that made the carpet. If I had a dress made of squish-toe, I could “brrt” myself all day!1

My cousin Jill has fancy dresses, too. Fancy-dancey dresses. She is the youngest girl, and she started dance when she was three. I wish I could be a real dancer. I play Solid Gold Dancer all the time, but it is not the same as having a real dance teacher in a real dance school.2

There are all sorts of other things I want to talk about, but only Mommy, her best friend, and Mr. Bridger talk to me about those things.

Things like…why can we never see God? I can hear Him, and there was that burning bush with Moses, so if He can come down from Heaven in a burning bush, and He is everywhere, all the time, then why does He never come visit anybody in a way that we can see Him anymore? Why does He never come sit with me when I am alone on the playground? He knows everything, so why does He let the other kids pick on me and follow me home in a circling shark-pack? Why will he not burn the bushes when they hunt me in the woods?

Man, all it would take is one torched bush and one thunder-voice of saying their names and they would run screaming for home to hide under their covers forever! They would never pick on me again, and then God and I could skip the rest of the way home with our arms linked like Dorothy and the Scarecrow.

Scarecrow: because He definitely has a heart and the noive, and I doubt He has a brain. He does not need a brain. He IS a big ol’ brain—knows everything always everywhere—so we could dance and skip and sing and laugh, and I could ask Him all my million-billion questions and He could answer them all.

But He doesn’t.

Things like…how many stars are there, and how long would it take to get to the farthest one? How deep is the deepest part of the ocean, and is Atlantis really down there? Are there monsters down there? Are there really monsters in my closet and why do they always disappear the second my parents turn on the lights and look? Where do they go? Nobody knows.

I bet God knows.

But He is not telling.

WHYYY?

Do the angels know? Why can we never see them either? I can feel them. I can hear them. I know they are there so why can I not see them? Do they watch me while I am peeing? Worse—do they watch me while I am going Number Two, and do they know who made that super huge pile of doo-doo behind the Williams’ house right next to the rhubarb patch? Because that was not a doggie-doo. It was not rabbit pellets or deer dookie and it definitely was not a bear pile. It was not buried like kitty-poo that gets all gross and smeary in my sandbox or when they use Mommy’s planter garden.

So who did it?

Suzy and Johnny and I discovered it last summer. It was a weird yellowish-brown color, and it was shaped like one of those swirly-whirly cones at Dairy Queen. We kept coming back all summer to stare at it, and every month, it was a little crustier and a little smaller. I wonder if it will still be there when the snow melts. I cannot wait to sneak over and see.

It. Was. HUGE.

Somebody really must have had to go bad. I wonder if they got locked out of the house and had to run around the corner. But nobody is owning up to it. I bet the angels know who did it. I bet God knows, too, and if any of Them would just come down and hang out, I could ask, but no. No burning bush. No glowy angel wings. Zilch.

And nobody will tell me why.

“Because.”

“Because” is not good enough for me.

There are so many things I want to ask so many people, but when I ask other kids, they look at me like I have fallen off my Mommy’s rocking chair and bonked my head kablooey. When I ask adults, some of them look at me that way, too. Others try to explain things, but they eventually huff about how many other questions their answers make me want to ask, and some of them even get mad, so I have just stopped asking.

Not Mr. Bridger.

When we are at dinner, he asks me about all sorts of things and he actually listens to my answers.

That is important. The listening.

So many adults ask you things, but they do NOT listen to what you say. I hate that. Why do they ask if they do not want to know? They do-too NOT want to know how school is going for me. Not really. They only want to know how many classes I got As in and which activities I got ribbons for. They do not want to know the rest, so I have stopped telling them that, too.

I just tell them, “Fine.” Or “Good.”

And that is good enough for them.

I hate that.

Which is why I love when Mr. Bridger comes over for dinner. During class, he gives me lots of extra assignments because otherwise I would be sitting there counting how many tiles are on the ceiling or how many pictures are on the alphabet over the blackboard—and why do they call it a blackboard, anyway?

The blackboard is not black.

It is green.

Except when it is grayish-green from being erased all day, and except in the spot where it is practically white from certain kids’ names getting written on the right side all day with room for plenty of checkmarks. He has to put a lot of checkmarks for the same kids over and over and over, and that means he has to spend more time adding checkmarks than he does answering my questions so I do not ask him the million-billion things I want to know during school.

I wait until our special dinners.

One of the things I love most about Mr. Bridger is that, when I ask him a question he does not know the answer to, he never gets huffy. He never barks at me. He never tangles up his answers like Christmas lights that were not put away right until nothing he says makes sense at all. He certainly never looks down his nose to say, “Because.”

He puts his elbows up on the table, even though we are not supposed to do that. Well, he does it anyway with his eyebrows all scrunchy. Then he grins at me like I am the strangest little girl he has ever met. But for him that is not a bad thing. For him, “strange” is a super hip thing to be.

“You know,” he says, tilting his head, “I have wondered the exact same thing, and nobody has ever been able to give me an answer either.”

That is one of the many, many, many reasons why he is my favorite teacher.

A few days after our second-to-last dinner with Mr. Bridger.
At the table with only my parents.

I am NOT happy.

In fact, I am the hissiest of hissing cats right now because Mr. Bridger told Mommy and Daddy that he thinks I should skip second and third grade next year. At least second, for sure.

Their eyes went super huge, but not as huge as my heart. Just the thought of getting to jump grades? To no longer have to be in that class with all those kids that hate me? And to not even have to be in class with the grade ahead of mine? Those kids are not much nicer to me than my own classmates, but some of the third-graders are. Johnny’s big sister is in third grade. She is super nice to me. So is Suzy’s big sister. So is Lisa. I bet I could sit with those girls at lunch and they would introduce me to their friends and then I would finally have friends in my own classroom again.

I miss Christine.

I miss Johnny all day until I can find him after school.

It would be so nice to have friends in my actual classroom, but no.

At next week’s dinner with Mr. Bridger, my parents are going to tell him that they do not think I should skip any grades. When they tell me why, I try to convince them, but they just keep shaking their heads. I think Daddy might have let me skip, but Mommy is wearing her No Way Face. “We know you can do the school work,” she says. “That won’t be any problem for you. It’s just…”

Just…

The problem is me getting along with the other kids.

She says that, because I already have enough trouble getting along with the ones in my own class, trying to get along with the ones two years older could be…

Trouble.

“Especially later.”

They keep sharing glances, and I can tell that they have talked about this already so they know exactly what the other one means by that look. I do not understand, because everybody constantly talks about how mature I am for my age. Even Mommy and Daddy.

When I bring that up, she cringes and her brow goes all wrinkly. “There are different kinds of maturity,” she says. “You are absolutely mature for your age. But when your older classmates get to be teenagers, and you are still two years younger, that will make a very big difference.”

“Why?”

She draws in a long breath, shares another of those looks with Daddy, and then sets her shoulders. “Do you remember the day we talked about how babies are made?”

“Yes.”

One day at recess, there was an argument about where babies come from. Some kids talked about a stork, as though babies got delivered in a little knapsack like Christmas presents from Santa. Other kids said that was a big load of swirly, yellowish-brown poo, because they had seen Polaroids—gross Polaroids!—of their little brothers and sisters being born, so I just asked my mom.

Her answer was very clear. She drew pictures and everything, which made sense of what the Polaroid-kids were saying.

“Well,” she explained on the night they told me I was not allowed to skip any grades. She used the same sort of voice as when she had gotten out the little white notepad to draw pictures of penises and vaginas and eggs and sperms. “When kids start becoming teenagers, they go through a thing called puberty. This is the age when kids start growing into their adult bodies, and they start thinking about adult things. All through puberty, their bodies will change so that they will be able to make babies once they’re all grown up. Your body will change, too, but not for a couple years after theirs. So when the kids who are two years older than you hit puberty, but you don’t…”

I stare at her, wide-eyed and unblinking, taking it all in, imagining my changing body. Imagining theirs. Imagining the bodies of the kids who are already teenagers. Yes. Their bodies are changing. And not just how tall they are.

“Puberty is a very different kind of maturity,” she says. “It’s a confusing enough time as it is. I don’t think that would be a good idea for you.”

I huff and I puff and I argue, but I cannot blow down the house of my parents’ decision.

Mr. Bridger only comes over for dinner one more time, right before the end of the school year. When my parents tell him their decision, he does not even try to talk them out of it.

After we finish eating, he hugs me goodbye and says he will see me in the morning for class. I am very sad. I only have nine more days with him. I wish he could be my teacher forever, but I have to have a new one next year.

In second grade.

Still with my same class.

I hate that.

I wish I had a Starcase. I wish I had a big brother I could talk to in my mind. I hear him every night. After my parents tuck me in and turn out the light, he talks to me from the other side of the room, but talking in your mind to big brothers you do not have is only play-pretend. I wish I could levitate a baseball glove with my brain, squeeze it into a fist, and punch the lights out of any kids who pick on me. Unfortunately, I have not figured out how to do that yet, and even if I could, I agree with Tia. That is not nice at all.

I wish nobody had to punch anybody’s lights out.

I wish we could all just be nice to each other and help each other and love each other.

Why do they not like to do that? Why do they think it is fun to be mean? To call names and laugh? To throw spiders on you and wreck your forts and beat you up?

I wish I could escape to Witch Mountain, or at least escape the second and third grades. I wish I could go to school with kids who want to know the answers to all my questions and learn what I want to learn. I wish somebody would teach me how to jump a hundred feet in the air or fly a Winnebago across all the lands and lakes so I can see every one of them. I wish I could visit all the stars. I wish I had a map that would show me that I am not a freak. That I am not a weirdo. That I am simply an extraterrestrial who had to flee her dying planet and crash-landed here. I wish my big brother would sneak over in the middle of the night, grab my hand, and that we could…

Knowing what I know about myself now, I am certain that my parents’ instincts were solid. My mom in particular just…KNEW, even though we had no actual name for it. “Gifted.” That was the best anybody could come up with, and that was a loaded term. It was also an incomplete one, so I’m grateful that they held fast to their decision.3

Because even though I was continually bored in class and had to find ways to challenge myself if my teachers didn’t, even though there were ways in which I remained an adult mini-me in a little kid’s body and have always been called “an old soul,” when it came to interpersonal maturity, there were so many ways that I even lagged behind my own classmates.4

There are ways that, even after half a century navigating a meatsuit, I still don’t get it.5

In high school, when I started thinking about where I wanted to go to college, I knew immediately what I wanted. It was what I’d always wanted, since my youngest years. I wanted to go to an acting school in New York City or Los Angeles.

My parents didn’t forbid me, but they did present as many deterrents as possible for my decision-making process. One of them was, of course, out-of-state tuition, which they assured me we could not afford. I would have to go on a scholarship even if I stayed in Minnesota.

But there were other things they kept hinting at. Stronger arguments that concerned them more than money. They didn’t come right out and say it, just like my mother hadn’t said, “When those boys in the class of ’89 reach puberty and you’re still an eleven-year-old girl with abysmal social skills and a cluelessly naive, gullible nature, I do not want to have to send your father to school to sit beside you, armed with a big ol’ double-barrel and his growliest glower. When all those older girls start having boys-on-the-brain, I do not want you to socially drown more than you already do with your own peers. Or worse, to obliviously tag along with them.”

My parents had similar concerns with me going to college a half-continent away. “We just…if anything happens to you, we won’t be there to help you.”

My mom kept saying this over and over, and I was so starry-eyed about how awesome it would be to finally escape my hometown of Hell that I couldn’t fathom what she was getting at. What could possibly go so wrong? I would be fine. I was gifted. I was on track to be Valedictorian. I was All-State this and champion that and first-place yada and honors blada.

Uhhhh…yeah. I was also autistic with ADHD and C-PTSD, and we couldn’t have known any of that in the 1970s. Heck, Vietnam Vets were having to battle for the PTSD to be acknowledged as a legit thing, so brainiac, artistic, athletic kids in “wholesome” small towns with loving parents? No way.

Not autism either. Where I grew up, it wasn’t even mentioned until the ‘80s and the only thing we heard about it was Rainman. In our minds, I was the opposite of that. Being “gifted” meant that I should have been set up to knock everything I attempted out of the park with barely the bat of a lash. Even my classmates voted me “Most Likely To Succeed.”

And yet.

My parents just…KNEW. And they stuck to their guns. I went to college less than an hour away from my hometown, where it took four months and two days for a particular “anything” to happen to me.

Good thing the two people who love me more than anyone in the world were only forty-three minutes away, and they have always had my back.

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© 2026 Hartebeast

Related Posts:

But then this reeking morass of a shit-pit got exposed.

If it isn’t obvious by the title and subtitle of this piece what we’ll be covering today, then I don’t know what else I can say as a warning. If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about when I say “rape academy” then simply enter those two words into your preferred search engine and dive on in. Then dive deeper. And once more for good measure.

And if you’re gonna stick around for this story but you don’t know the following movie scene from the old school Interview With the Vampire, then I need you to. I need you to hear Claudia say these things. I need the image of this child’s face carved deep into your mind. Beautiful. Ethereal. Twisted in rage with her fucking fangs bared as she demands to know what she needs to know.

Because in reality, this is no child.

This is a fully grown woman eternally trapped inside a cage, bound at the age she was when it happened to her. We all have these pieces inside us.1 Sometimes they’re bright-eyed and remind us how we once loved to play. Sometimes they’re silent and sad. Sometimes they’re wiser than we would ever imagine.

Sometimes they’re frothing, fanged and ferocious. More than a little precocious, as they hide corpses in their closets.

Let’s fuckin’ dance.

Do you know what RAINN is?

It stands for Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. In case you or somebody you know needs it:

Call 800.656.HOPE (4673)

Chat at RAINN.org/hotline

Text “HOPE” to 64673

I needed it. From before I had the ability to peep, “Help!” But it didn’t exist in the 70s. Do you know how this organization was formed? Here. I’ll let Tori Amos tell you herself:

In 2020, I had nine months of death-dreams. Every night. Every nap. Over and over and over, almost always the same dream: Trying and trying and trying to figure out a complex, cosmic maze-game—to figure out how not to die, and failing every time, only to fall back asleep and do it all over again.2 Eventually, other scenarios and terrors seeped in to plague me. One time it was the American Nazi Obergruppenführer John Smith. He hunted me like an animal through the woods and tried to assassinate me.

You see, I was gearing up to spill some very sensitive intel on my old blog, and these are state secrets you just do NOT did NOT talk about around here. Old secrets. Nasty. Secrets from when I was very young.

I wound up having to call the Suicide Hotline that year. The only time I’ve ever needed to.

988 Helpline - call, text, chat, website.

One might be inspired to attribute my mental breakdown to simple Covid isolation. I’m sure that didn’t help.

Actually, I had a super delayed reaction to the sudden silence and solitude compared to most people I talked to and heard about. At first, it hit me like the most shocking wave of relief I’d ever experienced from lifelong sensory overload. Then the sudden cessation of all community interaction showed me just how toxic most of my relationships were. Next, I gained—for the first time in my life—the ability to truly hear only myself.

• What I think.

• What I feel.

• What I need.

• What I want.

Without anybody else’s coercion, correction, condescension, gaslighting, guilting, shaming, manipulation or criticism.

At long last, Covid gave me one final gift. Since the world was losing its shit, they figured out that trauma therapy should not only be available and affordable for the rich & powerful.

Things started cracking open inside me. It was good. No. It was freakin’ great! Painful. Sometimes excruciating, sure. But ultimately it was phenomenal. It gave me back pieces of myself too long rattling in the locked closets of my dungeon with a muzzle and a choke-chain on. Eventually, it gave me back memories I’d repressed since I was old enough to need a changing table.

I’d glimpsed them here and there throughout the years. Shoved them back down when The Professionals convinced me those images didn’t mean what I thought they meant. Mulled on them in silence, knowing in depths of me that they meant exactly what I suspected until the oldy, moldering strong-boxes of memory finally spilled open.

“Whaaaaat? That’s impossible. You can’t remember something from that young! This is just your imagination.”

Well, I’m sure my brain does what brains do,3 and that there are pieces it’s had to fill in because that was half a century ago and I was too young to really comprehend what was happening in any sort of conscious way I can speak about today.

AND.

There are really clear mental snapshots and movie clips amidst these scenes. They look and feel like broken mirror shards, which is how all my repressed memories feel when I get them back.

Seeing as how I have crib-memories and barely-toddling memories that have been confirmed many, many, many years later by photographs and conversations with my parents, I’m going to believe the Very Tiny Girl who carries The Very Big Book inside me. She almost never opens that thing. She almost never speaks. She usually just stares at me with her Very Big Eyes while clutching that book close to her chest.

One of the only things she’s ever said to me: “I have a book.”

Yes, babygirl. Yes, you do. And it is a mighty big book.

Greeeeat.

And now I have a filked ear-worm IN mah head:

🎶 She’s got big book.
🎶 Mighty big book.
🎶 SUCH a big book.
🎶 Let’s take a look.

Journal: 3/24/21
48 years old
Minutes after the EMDR session that showed my initial trauma therapist that I needed a practitioner with a much heftier certification and experience.4

…So then we went back in and, just like in Harry Potter, when Tom Riddle‘s closet had things rattling in it after he had stolen from other kids and Dumbledore was able to discern it, my laundry basket started rattling and shaking and calling all of this attention to it in the same way.

Because I was hiding so much from [my parents], and yet there was this desperate part of me that wished they knew. Wished I could tell them but I didn’t dare. I was afraid I would be even in more trouble. And I was afraid that if they really, really knew everything that had happened… Well I was afraid that that would make me unlovable.

But I needed them to know so badly…

A few hours later…

I just woke up from a nap. Long hard nap. About an hour and a half. EMDR always kicks my ass. I keep hearing the enraged voice of Claudia from Interview With the Vampire.

“Which one of you did it!”

I see this smiling, laughing baby girl on a changing table. Big male hands. She doesn’t stay laughing for long. I see it all from the inside and from above at the same time. I feel it all with exacting clarity but…yet it’s very far away.

I start poking at the memory. Questioning. My mind seeks and seeks and seeks and seeks. Makes accusations.

“Which one of you did it?!?!”

It’s like a scab that’s not quite healed but it itches. It’s like you want to pick it off but you know if you do it’ll bleed. Because it’s not ready to fall off yet. You start prying up the edges and the whole center of it pulls and hurts when you pry at it because you would actually have to rip it off and then it would be bleed and get infected and scar even worse. So you leave it alone. But you still keep looking at those edges that you’ve pried up. And you want to just fling it off. Because it keeps itching.

When I woke up, it was that 5 o’clock sunlight. Evening. Goldish. But red-tinged from my curtains. Blood red fabric. And fire orange. It does those things to the light. Things that bring me straight back there. I guess I really only slept for an hour, because the last half hour was not quite awake/not quite asleep. Images. And that itching at the back of my mind. It’s right there. I need to rip it open. I need to know.

And I don’t really want to.

“DID YOU DO IT TO ME?!”

I see us all in our highchairs. See my food. Feel it in my hands and on my face. Three of us. One of us is screeching and fussing. Not crying and mad, just really loud and demanding attention. The other is covered in Spaghetti-Os but I think that’s filler. I think that’s a photo from a different day. Over at the neighbor’s house.

I’m the eldest of us. And now I’m pissy and squirmy, fussing too, because I need to be changed. She is frazzled. Her hair is all frizzy and her eyes are wild around the edges. More filler—the Calgon Take Me Away commercial. She’s got all three of us, plus her own older kids and the three others from next door. Babies to middle-elementary age. They’re all in and out. But it’s lunchtime so they’re in. Everybody running around. The oldest girl trying to help. Everybody yelling and everybody needing to be fed.

Now I need to be changed but to take me out of the high chair and leave the other two in the kitchen…she’ll have to take their food away or come back to it probably all over the ceiling. When I see this in her face, my adult’s mind understands what that look is. At the same time, in my infant’s mind I don’t register that. I only know that I’m sitting in my own poop and I do NOT like it.

He strolls by.

No, not him.

Somebody else. Similar look, build, coloring. But slicker. Black hair, black goatee, dark, glinting eyes, a grin that spreads wider than it really should. He’s always reminded me of the devil from all those cartoons. This guy does even more so. Were they related? Or is that my mind protecting me from the reality of his identity because I could never accuse her dad of something like that without absolute proof of KNOWING it was him and so my psyche has made up some external predatory man to fill in the blanks?

No clue. Doesn’t really matter. His identity isn’t what’s important. There is no identity that could possibly make this okay. All that matters is what he did and what it did to us.

Was this an uncle? A family friend? Is this why she was so mean? Because she lived with it all the time? And with her big brothers who were also mean? The two girls of that family were younger than the boys. She was born a few months after I was. Her sister wasn’t born yet—a few years younger than we were.

I will have to cut so much of this but fuck it. This journal is for me.

Well, whoever he is, he looks like the quintessential devil.

I see him stroll by the kitchen and he flashes that smile too many men give when they see women overwhelmed doing “women’s work.” Patronizing. Condescending. I fucking hate that smile.

My infant’s mind doesn’t register it. I only hear him chuckle over all the yelling and my own fussing. See him come in, smile, nod at us. Got your hands full there, his smile says. His mouth moves. So does hers. She gestures at us as she speaks in raggedy tones, and that sparks his gaze. My adult’s mind understands what this means. This new smile says that he can totally take some of the load off her plate because he’s a nice guy like that.

I’ve seen that smile a gazillion times in countless different faces.

He is not a nice guy and he is not doing it for her. He is wearing a “nice guy” mask over his devil-face because he sees an opportunity.

I know this now.

Back then I only felt big, unfamiliar hands around me hauling me out of the high chair. Held high and bounced close to an unfamiliar face. Yucky breath. Stale cigarette smoke and something salty. Pungent. Is that why I hate the scent of Funyuns? Unfamiliar voice chuckling and cooing calming things at me. Entertaining things. Bounce-bounce-coo-laugh. Squirm. Oh-hush-hush.

We go to the back of the house. Into the right room. I get put on the right table. Yes. This is right. This is what I need. But it took too long so now I’m pissed off and squalling because…

I don’t have all the sensations. I don’t know if it’s warm poop. Cold poop. I doubt it could be cold if it’s next to my body. Could it be caked already? Is it squarshy under my butt? I dunno. I only know it’s not merely pee.

Whatever.

It all gets drowned out by what happens next. Those sensations I do have in stark, unmistakable detail. Jumper unsnapped. Hands on my ankles. Lifting up my butt.

This is right. This is what is supposed to happen when you’re sitting in poo.

Cloth opening. Skin bared. Diaper swiping down me. Swiping the poo away. And FLUMPH. Full, wet, heavy diaper in the pail. Red pail. Plastic. Like the kind you take along when you bring kids to the beach. Cheery. Poo is gone. And the itch. Soft, cool wet on my skin. Nice. I stop screeching. Stop crying. Tickle-tickle on my belly. Laughy-coo-sounds. Nice guy sounds. I laugh, too. He keeps wiping me. Scalloped curtain valance. Hazy slant of sunbeams. Shadows and pines.

That house was always so dark. Dark wooden panels. Rich, dusty tones of wallpaper. Golden-kissed. Their house faced a completely different direction from ours. Our big front windows faced south. Lots of bright sunlight. This one faced west and had all those tall, thick trees so their light was completely different. Such pretty colors in their house. Lots of nicknacks and interesting stuff to look at inside ornate, carved shelves built into the walls.

But their lighting sucked. Warm bulbs. Soft and yellowish. Low light. Very little natural sunlight and none of it direct.

Shadows.

Always shadows in that house.

And in that fucking backyard.

The boys terrorized us when they found us back there. Chased us off. Probably so they could smoke in the shed. Sneak beers or booze. The adults held a lot of neighborhood parties in that backyard. Devil Guy went to some of them. Lotta smoke. Lotta booze.

No party today. Normal day. Afternoon. Smoky breath and smoky fingers anyway. Yuck. He hums as he works. Still wiping me. Still. I squirm. Want down. Big hands pushing my legs out. No kick. Lay still now so he can finish. Wiping when I’m already clean. More cooing. Extra time. Still. That fucking thumb instead of a cloth. A little circle.

I want to puke.

He’s not laughing now. Just “nice guy” face smiling down at me and “nice guy” words being used but a big, nasty, fanged thing leering down at me from the back of his eyes. Back there where nobody else could see it if they strolled by the open door and looked in at us from the hallway. Even if they came into the room and watched him.

That thing does the laughing for him, and it’s hungry.

Lunchtime, don’tcha know.

Is my nausea part of the memory? Or is that the adult in me reliving this, now with full understanding of what’s happening? Both? I only know that I want to puke as he circles his thumb on my infant fucking clit. Sliding in a little. Pushing. Too big. Screeching. Thrashing. Huge hand gripping both my ankles like a vise. And that casual, innocent “just changin’ the baby” grin. Some “oh, it’s all right, there-there” noises and louder humming. “Innocent” humming. Whistle-while-you-work-type humming.

The boys wander in. Still really young that day. They would have ranged from three years old to…eight? Nine? Not into smokes or booze yet. Well. Maybe that one. And that one. Devil Guy teaches them how to handle a defenseless female with his slick smile and his triumphant, instructive laugh.

Is that why I despise thick, black mustaches?

He cinches both my ankles in one hand. Lifts up my butt. Like you do. But this time, he yanks me completely off the changing table. Head swinging. All my weight by my ankles. Jumper flopping down over my face. Hahaha. Poked and prodded. A bladed hand. Fingertips rapid-fire. Smack smack smack smack smack smack smack! Not just on the butt. Smacked on the belly. Smacked on the pubic bone. Smacked on the nipples. Because it’s so damn hilarious. Ha-fucking-ha. Me crying. And that way of getting too close into somebody’s face to jeer, “Oh, waaaaah!” And then more coo-coo-coo and laughing.

Such a delighted laugh. Not cruel. Not nasty and snide in an overt way. That’s all tucked back like the glint in his eyes.

I understand now. That would have been an auditory red-alert, even from out in the hectic kitchen. You don’t laugh cruelly at babies. You tease them and coo and cajole them out of their tantrum because they sat in their poo for too long and they’re still hungry because poopy-time interrupted food-time so nothing is going to console them until they’ve cried themselves out and probably had a nap so you tease them. You give them other sensory things to focus on. He’s oh-so-fucking delighted to smack my “widdle tushie.” My “cute widdle tushie.” Such a “cute, sweet, widdle tushie-wushie!”

Motherfucker.

I’m filling in his words now from a time when I didn’t know what those were. That’s okay. With that tone and that sing-song and that look, you know damn well what kind of shit he’s saying.

I want to claw his eyeballs straight out of his motherfucking skull.

I want to go kitten-rabid all over the front of him and rip out his throat with my teeth.

Four sets of eyes peer up over the table. Exchanging looks. Laughing. Because that’s what you do when the instructive adult is laughing.

There is a safety pin.

After my parents had paid all their bills, they had five dollars left at the end of every month so there certainly wouldn’t have been any store-bought, throwaway diapers to crinkle as they went FLUMPH into a sealable trash can.

Nope, there were soft, white cloths and big safety pins with cheery, plastic heads. There was a diaper pail that you carry to the toilet and the sink before you throw that shit into the washing machine.

I can still feel the jabbing. Stabbing. Scraping. Not enough for blood. Not enough to break skin. No, no, that’s another red-alert. All in the places where a little teeter-toddling girl might have scraped herself on any number of things. Fall down go boom. Crawl over Lego. Maybe I even had scrapes already.

Convenient.

Fucker.

Is this why I was so terrified of needles? Most kids are. But is this why I sometimes had such violent reactions to them that nurses and my mom could barely hold me down? Why sometimes they had to give up, then sneak up on me later?

I screech and thrash so hard that—

“Ope! Oopsie-whoopsie.” Head-shaking and tongue-clicking and “see you what you made me do” noises. But “that’s all right” and “I know you didn’t mean to” noises. Is my mind filling in blanks again? Certainly. I don’t have those words either. But I know that tone. Voice and gaze soft with “I know honey-sweetie-kins” and “there-there” and “stupid little bitch-in-the-making” behind it. The claw-swipe of hatred, way back there in the eye-flash. “Stupid little cunt” type flashes. “Take that, you little twat” type flashes.

Later.

Bolder.

Right there in front of other adults now. Toddling across the floor. Trying to walk. Unsteady. Being bumped and nudged and poked with a finger because it’s so hi-fuckin-larious. Fall down go boom. Fump-fump-fump of a heavy palm on my butt—

Excuse me. My upraised cute widdle tushie.

And everybody laughs.

Ha-fucking-ha.

Tickle-tickle-coochie-coo.

Overly familiar fuck-stain. (We have a secret between us, after all. Remember? Shh.)

“WHICH ONE OF YOU FUCKING DID IT?!”

My mind keeps seeking-seeking-seeking. Like in a movie when they run a facial recognition program.

Searching…

Searching…

It’s all right there. Hidden within The Matrix’s code. Do I really want to know? In most ways I don’t. The search goes on. Finds more data. Not a name. Not the face under the devil-mask. Just more sensation.

Was it a pencil? A marker? Plenty of those around in the kid room. He held my ankles so I couldn’t kick. Inserting just to see how far it’ll go. Fingertips rubbing just to see what it’ll do. Laughter. Instructive to four pairs of round, impressionable eyes. And “shhhh!” One big secret. Wink-wink-nudge-nudge. Just between us boys. (and me—shh.) A covert, sneaky laugh behind Teacher’s back, “Oooh-hoo-hoooo!!” Like Spivey from Dances With Wolves.

Boys watching. Absorbing. Learning. Variant expressions of understanding. All laughing too because you’re supposed to laugh. Malleable. I mean, it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s funny to make her screech and thrash away and cry and wince and scream. And that fucking coo-tone, telling me I’m “just fine.” I’m “not hurt, ohhhh, it doesn’t hurt one widdle bit.” That “it’s not a big deal so calm down and I’m not doing anything to hurt you” tone.

But there is snide laughter in the back of his voice because he knows exactly how to get away with everything he’s done to me. Everything he will do.

And he fucking does.

You see, I have another very different type of memory about this motherfucker. I was older. Big enough to run by then. Just not big enough to run away. Definitely not big enough to fight him off.

He didn’t let the boys watch that day.

He didn’t let anybody watch.

He just locked the door and did what he had learned to do, at however young he had been taught that he could get away with it.

This is the song. After hearing it for the first time in 1997, I could not listen to it again for many, many years. When I was first introduced to Tori Amos, I was only a few months out from getting back repressed memories from my freshman year of college where I was bound, raped and assaulted in a number of different ways by somebody who said he loved me. The really old incidents like today’s story would not come back for decades more. Be warned. This is a guillotine of a song.

This is why we need new modeling.

The older girl who lived in this house, the one who was my age, was one of the cruelest girls I knew. I loved her. She was my friend for a time. She was adventurous, outrageous, gorgeous. Cruel. Probably because this is where she lived. She once told me, decades later, that she has almost no memory of her childhood.

I believe her.

I wonder what her brothers remember.

I wonder what was done to them.

This is why we need a new Petri dish—the general environment in which this crap survives, brews and eventually thrives.5 We need to create a new inhospitable climate where things like rape academies from the micro to the macro die and go extinct.

And not merely under the umbrella of ownership.

MY wife. MY daughter. MY sister. MY mother.

We’re all yours. And you’re all ours. I’d love to see life’s academy teach us new, healthy ways of how to “be a Man”—a person in those aspects we all carry that are traditionally attributed to Masculinity.

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© 2026 Hartebeast

You think I’m long gone.
You’re just not looking in the right places
You keep hunting for me in
The old spaces
How many breadcrumbs can one person leave
Before it’s just time to
LEAVE

Actually
I think you’re not even looking
That’s cool.
If you passed me on the street
If you shook my hand at a meet-n-greet
I doubt you’d even recognize me
You’d scratch your head
Might say, “You remind me of somebody...
Yeah…somebody long-dead.
I know!
You remind me of that girl.
She used to whirl and twirl
With all her silks and skirts
Unfurled.”

Little known fact:
I still do
Never stopped
Never ever stoppin’
If we danced together
At a place real hoppin’
I doubt you’d know my name
You’d never think to call me
By my name of fame

Do you even know about my infamy?
About the axe and the big, black marker
The muzzle over my ginormous, frothing barker
My oversized middle fingers
And the scent of sulfur that lingers
In my golden hair
Oh, I see.
You’re still looking for me over there
And you?
You never look ‘cause you don’t care

I don’t mind
I recognize myself
She’s still right here
In the embers of the Phoenix’s gaze
Phwoooo!

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© 2026 Hartebeast

April 22, 2019
The writing that earned me a scholarship to a women’s retreat in Spain. Since this one is far less about rhythm & rhyme, and more about the placement of the words on the page, I’m going to give it to you in screenshots, so that even if you’re on your phone, it will hold its shape:

© 2019 Hartebeast

I know I told you that I’d finish the tale about that time I tried to do karaoke not long after Dain Bramage and whiplash stole my ability to sing. I will. But editing it cracked open a whole boatload of stuff I’ve never written about from that first year after my tangle with a drunk driver. It’s good to finally get that stuff cracked open.

But this is part of the repair and rebuild process. Sorting through messy places that still carry the rubble of myself, hunting for salvageable treasures, finding the lost items that are important enough to share with you, and organizing what I really want to say.

That takes time.

And patience.

And it is something that can only be done in solitude.

It’s like those building-size curtains on ancient structures that conceal the scaffoldings and the reconstruction work with life-size images of what it will eventually look like. They splash intrigue-whetting phrases on those curtains like“Coming Soon!” and “Restoration In Progress!” and “Please Excuse Our Mess!”

Not like I don’t have a gazillion other pieces I can share with you today. 😜

MUAH!

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May 5, 2001
28 years old

It’s my turn. The DJ just called my name, so I make my way through the sultry lighting of the bar and up onto the stage. My pulse is up. My palms are damp as I wrap them around the microphone to pull it down to my height. The DJ has to lower the stand from where he raised it when my boyfriend sang. Galen is six-and-a-half feet tall, after all. I am only five-six.

“Thanks,” I say, flashing a grin as though I’m oh-so-casual, ever-so-cool.

The truth is, I haven’t sung at karaoke since college when Mari worked as a DJ. I used to go down and sing with her on the weekends sometimes, hang out with her all night. Man, we used to knock our duets into the cheap seats. Solos, too. Ka-POW! It was one of our things in high school, along with our contest-winning dance duets.

But now I have…

Three of them, in fact. They—

No.

No, I’ll be fine. It’ll be perfectly fine! It hasn’t hurt to sing since those first months after I got rammed into a construction median by a drunk driver. My cervical spine got warped in the impacts, and the innards of my throat got all smushed and smashed by my skull being whipped around like a bowling ball on a chain.1

But I’ve had over five months of healing, and my chiropractor says we’re making great progress with repairing the backwards curve in my neck, as well as the twisting and slipping of my vertebrae, the TMJ, and the bulging disks.

Of course, I haven’t tried to sing again since…

I don’t even remember the last time I tried to sing. I’ve mouse-hummed a little in the kitchen or shower, and that was okay. But full-on singing?

It’s been months.

It hurt too much. In the throat, yes. But more so in the heart. Yet another loss. Actually, no. Yet another theft of something precious. It pissed me off too much every time I tried to sing and was met with the ravaging. Enraged me, really.

But Galen has been on and on about his high school girlfriend and his most recent ex lately. About what amazing singers they are and how he’s always wanted to be with a fellow singer. Front-man extraordinaire, don’tcha know. Guitar player. And a bunch of other instruments. Pro musician. Member of three different bands. Mr. Regional Rockstar.

Yes. He wants a singer with whom to weave glorious musical harmonies. He wants to make love through music, and why wouldn’t he?

I want to make love through music! Always have.

The old me could have.

I’m untrained, but that’s never mattered. He could easily fill in the gaps of the knowledge I’m missing, because it’s another thing he does for a living. He gives private lessons in all sorts of musical pursuits, including singing.

People used to raise the roof over mine.

Heck, I started getting cast in college as a freshman for singing and dancing, and the directors of the theater program at our rival high school once weathered severe flack to have me as the lead in their spring musical. They were doing Cinderella. When I started taking Advanced Placement classes over there because my school was too small to fill them, the theater directors invited me to audition. See, they’d competed against us—and lost—in One Act Play Contest, so they knew what I could do on a stage. But they’d had no idea what I could do when set aflame with music, both in body and voice.

Until the audition.

They cast me as the lead, which started the fur flying. I totally understood why. I wasn’t a card-carrying member of that school, so parents and students raised a ruckus. Then their admin came down on the directors, pressuring them to re-cast the show.

I actually would have been thrilled if they’d done that. The role of Cinderella was way too soprano for me. I mean, yes, I can hit those notes but it is not remotely my primary range. It also didn’t fit my personality. I had been drooling over the parts of the Wicked Step-Mother and the Step-Sisters. Any of those outrageous villain roles with the bawdy singing would have made my day.

No dice.

The directors fought to keep me lark-tweeting in the lead. Their belief in me and the way they went to bat for me melted my heart. Unfortunately, it did my standing in that school no good. Neither did I feel terribly wonderful about that performance. Not only for my nerves when a variety of my detractors lurked in the audience, glaring at me. Not only for my sorrow when some of my favorite cast-mates went from friendly to cool and snippy. But also because that soprano part was uncomfortable.

Man, I could have belted some of those other roles, while hamming it up in a glorious prosthetic nose and garish wig.

But no. I had to be pretty and chirp.

Well, I’m not chirping tonight.

Although I have chosen another musical theater goody-two-shoes role, this one comes equipped with secret cravings to exchange saddle shoes, a poodle skirt, and a sleek ponytail for black leather, ratted-up hair, and painted-on pants. (We don’t know anybody like that around here, noooo…)

Because yes! Tonight I am singing one of my longest-time faves, Hopelessly Devoted To You.

I should be safe with this one. I’ve been singing it since elementary school with my mom accompanying me on piano, or along with the movie on VHS, later to the soundtrack on tape. I can do Sandra Dee. It’s low enough that I can belt most of it, and the high parts are in a register with vowel sounds that don’t strain my pipes.

Heh-heh. I can do Rizzo way better, but the DJ’s book doesn’t have any of her songs. Only this one and You’re the One That I Want.

If I show Galen that I can sing—woo-oo-oo, honey!—maybe I can give him that thing we both yearn for so badly. We could totally get up there and weave our voices in flirty, rockin’ harmony with that duet.

I just have to knock this solo out of the park first.

Then he’ll see.

The slow, moody opener of Hopelessly Devoted twangs through the speakers. My heart gives a hard thump. I draw in a quick, calming breath. Then I open my mouth.

It all goes to hell from the first line.

If you know this song, let me explain where it sits in my throat. That first “heart broken” is at the top of my belting range. I can nail it in a chest voice. But this is the friggin’ opener of the song, yo. Our Sandy is mopey. She is pensive. We are not remotely ready to open up the flood gates and wail about our woe yet, so to stoke the fire of those words down there in my guts, chest and heart, blasting it all up my throat?

Excuse me. NO.

As the song begins, our little bird is croony. Quite moony—

No. Not that moon. That’s a different song. But she is extraordinarily blue as she wanders out to that nighttime porch.

And right there, as I pop up to “heart broken” it is not my heart that breaks. Okay, it’s not my heart that breaks first.

It’s my voice.

The embarrassment and especially the grief come rolling behind it like a snowball prickled with pine needles and snapped-off boughs. My esophagus just doesn’t have enough room to fully open. When I try to push enough air through it to sing those higher notes, it’s like they slam up against a wall I didn’t have the eyeballs to see.

Quite accurate, I suppose. I do still have a backwards cervical curve, and my neck vertebrae are still twisted and warped. Are my disks still bulging? We haven’t done another MRI to know their status. Well, whatever is going on in there, switching from chest voice into head voice is like trying to jam the stick into fifth gear when you’re only driving twelve mile an hour.

My voice cracks and then I’m skidding on vocal ice.

Because what’s going on inside my throat isn’t the only problem.

This isn’t even the asthma that I acquired within the first month after the wreck. That won’t give me trouble until I get to the belting section and realize that I have to suck in breaths way more often than I used to. Unfortunately, I can only siphon in so much air because my diaphragm and the tiny muscles around my abdomen and ribcage got micro-torn. Now taking in that much air feels like ripping open velcro between my ribs. Heaven help me if I have a rib out. Then it stabs me in the back with every full breath.

Swimming underwater sucks. Even trying to time my breathing for a nice, smooth front crawl sucks. Another thing for which I used to win medals: gone. Singing really sucks.

Especially with this slip-sliding around inside my skull as I hunt for the correct note. This isn’t only due to the rearrangement of my throat.

This is also the brain damage.

I’ve never had perfect pitch, but I can hear and feel with excruciating clarity when I’m off. That sensation has always driven me absolutely, stark-raving BONKERS. Alas. Ever since my skull-contents got shaken, stirred, scrambled and bashed against unyielding bone and a car door frame, it’s like I’m singing blind.

I’ve been in this room every day since I was born. It’s the vocal equivalent of my bedroom, so I know where the note is. It’s right there on top of the dresser between the Garfield stuffy and the glass unicorns. But suddenly I’ve been struck blind so I have to pat around, stumbling over furniture legs and bumping my hip on the corner of the desk. Those clear bell tones I’m hunting for are like delicate things my bungling hands knock onto the floor where they shatter. Sometimes I even run face-first into the closet door. Take the doorknob straight in the gut.

Uff!

When I try to aim for that “out of my head” section, it’s even worse.

Yes. Yes, I am out of my head! What was I thinking, giving it a try again for the first time while I’m in public? While sitting at a table with two professional musicians? With Galen’s most recent, “I always wanted to be with a singer,” and “SHE was such an amaaaazing singer,” and “Oh, how amaaaazing our duets were,” ringing in my head louder than the karaoke music? And the gal who is the lead singer in one of his bands. And his most recent ex who “could be a professional singer if she wanted.” All these women he moons and swoons over.

And then there’s me.

Dain Bramaged. Destitute. Disabled. Dancer damaged by a drunk driver, dammit.

Why did I even agree to this?

Because. I AM hopelessly devoted.2

While we were with Freddy at the Chinese restaurant for dinner, Galen’s fortune cookie told him, “Someone will invite you to karaoke.” The guys got a huge kick out of that, and I wanted to fulfill one of Galen’s dreams—a dream I’ve always shared—so I enthusiastically agreed that we should go.

But it’s so much more than that. I might be hopelessly devoted to him, but I remain eternally hope-FULL that someday I will get back everything that was stolen from me by that drunk driver’s crappy decision. More like I’m death-gripping it with my tenacious claws sunk in up to the pads of my never-say-die paws.

I should have waited until I’d healed more. Until I was sure.

I should have told Galen that I was too tired after being out in the crowded restaurant at dinnertime, but that I totally want to go another night. (In the future once I’ve gotten my singing chops back in the privacy of my shower and my kitchen.)

But he’s so frustrated with me. With how often I have to bail amidst public outings or cancel at the last minute. How often I have to tell him, “No, I’m not up for that today.” How often my brain melts from…

Breathing.

Existing in this battered body.

I don’t blame his frustration. Mine could engulf his and eat it for breakfast.

He acts like I do this shit purposely to ruin his fun.

Even so. I should have just battened down the hatches and claimed that my head was killing me. It wouldn’t have been a lie. There is never a single moment when I don’t have a headache, and any loud, crowded place always does my brain in. This bar is even worse than the restaurant. Whirling disco lights. A boatload of people talking over the music. Booming speakers. Piercing, off-key voices of drunks who don’t know how to sing and don’t care.

Crackling, faltering, off-key voices of Dain Bramaged sober dancers who once could sing but now…

Now I’m nothing more than one of those slow-song-chickies who can’t quite hit the notes. Just a little below average.

Mediocre.

Nothin’ but meh.

That’s how I constantly feel when I read Galen’s emails during the week while we’re apart. Those stunted responses hop-skipping around the questions he doesn’t reply to. Then out of nowhere, a remarkably sweet message. He’s so poetic. So romantic. Composer, ya know. Lyricist. He definitely knows how to put his feelings into words.

When he is inspired to.

Sometimes he’ll even message my parents to tell them how much I mean to him. He swears he’s just not an emailer. Of course, he doesn’t want to talk on the phone either. It’s long distance, so I get that. But sometimes that same stuntedness even overtakes our conversations in person. The way he’ll suddenly look at me, and how the energy behind his touch goes dead. There’s just…nothing behind it. It’s mechanical.

Meh.

So often, I feel like his leftovers. Like being with me is better than being alone, but I’m definitely not his dream girl the way he is my dream guy. He obviously cares for me. Goes out of his way to do that all the time. I know that he cares about me. I even trust that he loves me. But you can take care of people and love them in the most altruistic way. In a generalized way.

Deep down, I am terribly afraid that my own boyfriend doesn’t LIKE me all that much.3

Yet every time I say something about it, every time I tell him that I just need to let him go so he can find somebody he truly vibes with, somebody who can naturally fulfill his fantasies and fit better into his world, he sparks to life. The energy returns, along with the affection, the engaging looks and conversations, the warmth. He apologizes for being so burnt out and letting his frustrations seep into our dynamic.

It’s true, he is a workaholic, constantly exhausted, and his life is full of a great deal of stress. It makes sense. What he says. What he swears.

He swears he loves me. He swears that, no-no, I really am the one that he wants. All his actions back that up.

Until they don’t.

Am I the world’s greatest fool? My head really does say to forget him. Until he’s up there, crooning romantic songs for the whole world to see how much he adores me. Until he’s right there, holding my face in his big, string-callused hands as he asks me not to let him go. To just hold on and be patient with him. To know that everything I questioned him about is just the stress of his life. That it has nothing to do with the way he feels for me.

I get that. When my brain melts or when I go through the roof about yet another denial of the medical treatments I desperately need, it has nothing to do with how I feel about him.

He can’t seem to wrap his mind around that, no matter how many times I tell him, “You’re not the one I’m mad at. I’m not yelling AT you. I’m yelling AROUND you about something unrelated.”

So is it the same thing with him, just in a much quieter version?

He is much quieter than I am.

Through the haze of this bar, I chance a glance into his eyes. What I see there drops an awful thud into my guts and tightens my throat even further.

Because in that split-second, I absorb it all. The emotionless expression he’s carved onto the hardened granite of his face. The way he blinks before his mouth curves up like he’s smiling with an encouraging nod—and how he hesitates for half a beat too long before he does it. The way he watches me with such intense, unwavering focus, and yet his eyes say…

Nothing.

But it’s the start of the week. Monday night. For a constantly-booked musician, that’s like saying it’s Friday at 4:00 p.m. He had gigs both Friday and Saturday nights, had a huge rehearsal the next morning, then dropped off his kids at their mom’s which always tears him up. This morning he started right back in with lessons all day, and then worked some more hours repairing instruments at the store.

He’s just tired.

He’s just burnt and a bit glazed out. This has nothing to do with his disappointment over the fact that I can no longer live up to his songbird exes and his dreams of making musical love with me. It has nothing to do with how he feels for me.

Right?

No, it’s nothing. That look doesn’t mean anything. It’s absolutely, positively nothing.

UP NEXT: I finish the mediocre-meh of my song and return to my place beside to the guy who swears he loves me, but who doesn’t like me all that much. Don’t worry. I won’t stay with him forever. And I will start to sing again. It will take me twenty-six years. Whatever, man. My brain and body will do miraculous healing, and then I’ll really start to FLOURISH.

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© 2026 Hartebeast

✨👹✨ The Section of this publication dedicated to LOVE, SEX & SELF-DEFENSE.

✨👹✨ The Table of Contents to all these healing adventures:

In December 2022, WIX forgot who they had once been. They forgot about all those piddly little Everyman backs upon which they had built themselves—actually, they didn’t forget. They just didn’t give a shit anymore. They were rich enough that they didn’t need to, and they wanted to become even richer so…they doubled the price of my website overnight with no warning. They gave me access to all sorts of newfangled bells & whistles—bells I did not want, whistles I had no use for.

I attempted to downgrade my plan.

The site wouldn’t let me. I attempted to contact support and have them help me. They informed me that my site was too big for any of the other cheaper plans. I asked them what was eating up my allotment: the site itself, or the ginormous years of blogging with its gazillion photos.

(Because Instagram had banned me the year before—also overnight and without warning—the moment I started sharing links to that ne’er-do-well blog. So I started migrating my dance, art and nature photos onto the blog instead. As such, there was a good chance that’s where all the bloating of the site was coming from.)

WIX refused to give me this information so I could figure out how to reduce the size enough to downgrade to a plan that a disabled person on a fixed income could still afford.

First, the tech said they didn’t have access to it. (And yet they knew it was so big that it couldn’t be downgraded…) I asked to speak to someone who could give me that information.

Spontaneously, coincidentally, we got disconnected.

I tried again.

The same thing happened.

Spontaneously, coincidentally, my gaskets finally blew. Dams burst. Volcanoes erupted.

I tried one more time to get ahold of a supervisor. On the third spontaneous, coincidental disconnect, I started researching where I could migrate my entire blog.

Lo. I found Substack and here we are. Tell ya what though, I did NOT want to have to migrate six years of obsessive blogging.

I had some people who had read all the old stuff and were chomping at the bit for me to go on. I had some people who had read bits and pieces and were chomping for me to go on. And I had this new space where nobody knew jack squat about me. I also knew that I wanted to segregate out my Elements System and all my art & nature geeking from the NSFW memoir stuff, but so much of it is intertwined that…

Trying to figure out what to put where and where to start and how to not lose my old audience but attract a new one on a completely new platform was…

Well…

It took me a bit of teeth-gnashing, trial, error, deleting, migrating, creating multiple Substack publications that constantly refer back and forth to each other, and deciding not to give a friggin’ fig that it was a tangled, interwoven mess.

The other ship full of my favorite pretty, frolicking toys & tools:

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist

Creation & Innovation. Art & Nature. Curiosity & Play. Experiments with my Dance of Elemental Alchemy and the creative process it spawned. Welcome to Hartebeast Lair!

By Alexx Hart

Around this same time, I’d also just fallen down my stairs, lost a bunch of “friends”, almost asphyxiated in the toxic flood of my house, got my dental infection back, got seizures back, and was being hammered in the Great Triple Whammy of government agencies as they worked to decipher all the Covid malingerers from those of us who are genuinely disabled.

Hence. Crabby, crappy poetry ensued out mah butt. Like it spontaneously, coincidentally does from time to time.

I just found this poem lurking in my drafts file. I wrote it in 2023 as I was trying to figure out how to navigate this whole Substack thing, weather all the (shadow)banning and the loss of great swathes of people from my life as I started unmasking, and start all over with migrating these tales. Totally forgot about it until now. Since I am currently up to my eyelashes in a boatload of wondrous, annoying and miraculous stuff that I’m not ready to write about yet, here ya go.

Don’t know where to start
I’m coming apart
It’s crushing my heart
Down
On the bottom again
Who the hell is a friend
When the fuck will it end
Ground
Me up into dust
So tell me to just
Shut up as you must
As you will
And I still sit here staring at this stupid blinking cursor and if I’m not going to start at the beginning again, all over again, tell it one more time for everybody in the back and y’all who didn’t pay attention the first time or the second but yet you’re the ones who asked me all the dang questions you just didn’t like the answers and you guys over there who definitely didn’t wanna hear it back then and now that we’re on the third time through I can hear your eyes rolling to the backs of your skull so why do I even need to do all this—want to? I dunno.

“Again?”
”You’re still on about all that brain damage stuff?”

Uhhh…Yup.

But I don’t know where to start
It’s like a big shit or fart
Need to puke up a quart
No, pound
Until the seams all bust
’Cause I really can’t trust
’Cause my truster’s all rusty
And brown
Round eighty-three by now brown cow, have you had enough, I sure have and yet there it is BLURP it comes again like a rancid belch but if I’m not gonna start from the start and fart every fart in nice, tidy order—don’t shart!—oops.

Sorry ‘bout that.
Didn’t mean to get that on ya.

I’m just over here spinning in circles, bent over with my hands up behind me.

Bent over with my hands up behind me cinched inside your belt.

We were just about there.
Had renamed all the pricks
And the bitches and dicks
Had laid all the bricks
Except three.

Six fucking years.

Six years of pounding it out
Six years of caulking the grout
Six years of twisting and shouting and whispering while
Touting my tawdry tales
My trout sized
Outsized
Capsized carp.

I don’t wanna start over.
No, no, Miss Red Rover
By Mars or by Jove or by
Dis.
Fuck this.

Dunno where to start
How to fart out my heart
I’m coming apart
Into bits.

So please…

Tell me.

Because the first time I did this, I started with the night a drunk driver rammed me and I told the (censored, glitter-washed, REDACTED) tales of how I leaped tall buildings in a single splat and a bunch of spastic bounds. How I became a world-class dancer on a friggin’ TBI and got named the Poster Girl of Overcoming Rawr—

Unfortunately, all those chunks I had carved and gouged out of the story became sinkholes. They crumbled my walls and undermined my whole world and when I took down the Hollywood Fantasy and replaced it with the truth about that—starting at the beginning again but this time telling it as it really was—the rats fled the boat. Then the Crew abandoned ship. Then even the prisoners in the hold gnawed their arms off and chewed through the hull until all the compartments flooded and I wound up on the bottom of the Atlantic.

But I kept writing.

I kept writing.

I kept writing.

I was just about to fill in some of those holes when now I have to start all over for the third flippin’ time. Some might take that as a sign that I’m meant to keep my mouth shut. That I’m meant to sit on my deck under the pretty trees and put on my pretty costumes and stick to dancing pretty dances and writing pretty poems. To just HashtagSmile. To HashtagKeepPositive.

Some might take that as a sign that I should grab the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written and chuck them all in the trash.

Some might tell me to get a clue and do what people have been telling me to do for years. To give up on dance. To give up on writing. To just fucking give it up already and accept that I’m a disabled wreck and a worthless eater and a parasite so I should crawl off into the shadows where my unsightly self will finally stop disturbing waters and rocking boats and making people squirm.

Hells, even my astrology yells it at me. “If it’s not working, if you’re meeting resistance you need to let it go.”

Fuck. Off.

Maybe you wanna flee this ship while you still can. Because everybody who asked me what I do to deal with my four six brain traumas - well, okay, some of you genuinely wanted to know but every other place I’ve tried to speak honestly about that has censored and even banned me when I answered.

All those people who asked me where the depth and power of my dancing comes from - ohhhhh, trust me. The answers to that question are not for the faint of heart and they have very little to do with dance technique and who I’ve taken lessons from. Only you three over here on the leaky dinghy legit wanted to know. And you two in the yacht, graciously passing by so you can throw me some food.

🙏🙏🙏

I’m glad you’re here.

You are why I still am, too.

You are the life-savers of this project.

There’s so much. I am so much. So many people say I’m too much. Too bad. Don’t like it? There’s the door, because I’m still gonna…

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© 2023 Hartebeast

Spring 1992
Freshman year of college
Voice & Movement Class
19 years old

Whoa. I am just blown away by Kara’s…can you call that a dance? It’s a class exercise with no music, no voice, all movement inside a purple, knit-jersey dance-sack. Such raw, ferocious—and unapologetic—self-expression she just delivered!

More like the way she just scorched the floor and transformed all the air in this studio into her exhaust fumes as she dance-vomited up half her internal landscape.

My body finally gets into the clapping rhythm, but I can’t get anything out my throat. Not a cheer. Not a whoop. All I can do is stare and stare and stare as my entire neuronal universe is exploded, vaporized, and reconstituted into a cough-syrup purple question mark between my eyes. Could I ever—?

What would happen if I—?

“Alexx.”

My eyes spring open as my head jerks toward Professor Bergeron. It’s my turn?

Ohmygodohmygodohmy—

I force my bugging eyeballs back into their sockets and make their lids resume a normal person’s size. Hauling myself up, I skulk over to the bin of purple sacks. Kara scoots back out to the center of the Marley floor to snag the one she used so she can chuck it with the others, then flashes her brows at me like, Good luck, chica!

I pop my chin and eyebrows at her in return, grinning as though I am a fraction as cool as she is. A micro-fraction as calm. Then I arrive at my doom—I mean, the box. Cool it. Cool it. Just be cool. This will not kill you. It might feel like it will. You might want it to. But it won’t actually kill you.

And heck, what’s the worst thing that could happen? I could slip on that shiny, black vinyl and break my neck? Break my butt? Everybody could point and laugh at me? Call me stupid? Gather around me in a shark-circling pack to jeer, poke, kick and—

That won’t happen.

We’re not in second or fifth or even eighth grade, and Professor Bergeron will not let them. Looking into her eyes, I can see that. At least…I hope that’s what I’m seeing. I have to trust that. Her smile is one of encouragement. I press my lips together and turn the corners upward.

Because that’s what you do.

I rifle through the sacks. There are many different shades of purple, all in that sort of dusty range. None in the shades I love. The fabric itself lends itself to drabness, and the pigments are washed-out variations of plum. Mauve. Mulberry. Eggplant.

I despise how the stretch-knit feels against the skin of my hands.

When I was really little, my mom made me royal purple pants with a white top from this stuff. It was all the rage in the ‘70s. So was rickrack. She used the most amazing glittery trim in variegated purple, gold, hot pink, and rusty brown to adorn the neckline and sleeves.

That outfit was awesome.

Out of the scraps, Mom made a matching set in miniature for my Mandy doll. I loved that outfit!

Until I walked into school with it for the first time. Only poor kids wore hand-made clothes from clearance fabric. Only dorks wore stretch-knit from neck to ankle. Only icky people liked purple.

Purple was my favorite color back then. Purple like the neighbors’ house two doors down. Purple like all those glorious flowers that dotted the hillside deep in the woods where I used to slink off and play by myself, away from the terrorizers of the neighborhood. The johnny-jump-ups that my grandfather despised and battled even more ferociously than the dandelions were purple. I adored those flowers like I adored the sunny dandelions, but they were both the bane of my family’s perfect green lawns.

In my earliest days of kindergarten, I got teased for announcing that my favorite color was purple, just like I got teased for wearing that beloved jersey-knit outfit my mom had made with such love.

Well, no matter what anybody said, I still cherished that outfit. Still wore it to bits. It got me jeered at and hen-pecked with cruel fingers plucking at my sleeves, scratching at my precious glittery rickrack.

But I wouldn’t stop wearing it.

Now the feel of that fabric makes my skin crawl as I paw through the bin of sacks in search of the one that calls to me. These shades of purple are not royal. Not violet. Not lavender. Not even close. I love my purples with more blue than red, or else I like them vibrant. Like purple-aflame.

These are more like somebody added rust-brown to the blue instead of red.

Or maybe it’s just the muck of my life painting “ick” over this entire experience.

I finally feel it. This one. It’s one of the darkest shades, hedging into a midnight purple. Purr-fect. Well, as close to purr-fect as this is gonna get. Since it’s the darkest one, hopefully they won’t be able to see ME inside here.

I carry the hateful sack into the center of the floor and start climbing into it. What the heck am I going to do? What the heck is going to come out of me? Once I’m in there, the horrible reality stretches out before me in a deeply rutted dirt track that leads unswervingly to my grim fate.

Because I can still see through this fabric.

The distinctive shape of my instructor perches upon the window ledge, her silhouette backed by sunlight. Below her, all the shapes of my classmates sprawl across the floor, arrayed in clumps and rickrack lines, some against the wall, some not. They sit there waiting for me to begin, so I stall a little, pretend that I’m still working my way inside. Just getting situated in here, yup, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Bullshit.

I’m bullshit.

I don’t know what to do. My classmates all stretched the fabric so I give it a try. Yup. It’s stretchy. A fair bit of resistance, but it gives way. Until I get to the limits of my reach. There it collapses my fingers into fists because it’s at the bounds of its give. I push against it somewhere else, this time with a purposefully clenched hand. Huh. My fist can make a dent better than fragile fingers. When they’re open and poking, it reminds me of the Aliens movies. Having to push through the gunk.

Gross.

It’s really fucking suffocating in here.

I push harder to make some room, try to get some airflow. I suddenly regret my decision to face the fully enclosed side instead of leaving the slit at my front. I’d thought it would be so much better. That I wouldn’t be able to see anybody out there and therefore, I would feel less inhibited. Less in the fishbowl.

I hate the fishbowl.

I hate this class.

I hate this fabric and I hate this hue.

Better than all the other purples in that bin, but it’s still icky. It’s all icky. I’m icky in here and I just want fucking OUT but I have an amoeba to make and molasses to drip and I don’t have Dominic’s strength and stretch. I don’t have Swan Carla’s grace or Gazelle Gail’s elegant lines.

I’m just me.

Stupid, dorky, dummmmb ol’ me with a million stupid ideas that nobody in this building appreciates because I haven’t been trained in dance since I was three like my cousin or since I was five like my she-ro Mary, our ballet superstar senior. I haven’t been trained in how to do any of this until five months ago, and nothing I do here ever seems to be good enough.

Nothing is ever good enough anywhere!

Either that or it’s way too freaking much.

Thank the diabolical dance gods for pixie Kara’s amoeba-tantrum and punching fists. I don’t go that far. I don’t have the guts to go that far. But I do grab that hateful fabric in both of my hands and twist. Ohhhhh, that feels good!

Yeah, it really is like wringing out the most despised dishrag on the planet.

Closing my eyes so I can’t catch the slightest hint of how anybody reacts to what I do, I twist the jersey around my arms with all my strength. The resistance is glorious. I keep twisting and stretching and I wonder if I can strain the viscous, purple shit so hard it fucking RIPS!

I need everything torn open and if anybody doesn’t like what comes spilling out, they can just get the fuck outta the way. FLEE, MOTHERFUCKERS! FLEEEEEEEEEE! Run and hide from my purple-puketastic deluge or I’ll drown your asses with how fucking awesome purple is!

YES! I fucking love purple!

YES! I fucking love my stretch-knit, clearance-fabric outfit even though I don’t really like how the jersey-knit feels on my skin.

I DON’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS!

Because my Mommy sewed it for me and she made it with love and she took her very, very precious and limited funds to buy one fucking package of glitter-rific purple-and-gold rickrack to decorate it, and do you remember that purple and gold are for ROYALTY, you fucking six-year-old assholes?!

YES! I fucking love the cute little animal-and-flower appliquéd patches my Mommy sewed onto my jeans because I haven’t outgrown them yet, but I crawl around in the woods and get into everything so I’ve worn holes through them and now they are the cutest thing EVER with all their decorations that nobody else has in the world and fuck you if you’re jealous because your Mommy threw your favorite jeans away instead of caring enough about them to patch them and THAT’S NOT MY FUCKING FAULT!

Inside that midnight-purple shroud, I keep my fists clenched around the fabric—that is, whenever I’m not clawing at it. I keep my eyelids clenched shut as tightly as they’ll go and let my body whip and whip and whip AND WHIP! It’s a thousand motherfucking torso-tastic renditions of WAX OFF. WAX OFF! WAX THE FUCK OFFFFFFFFFFF! Over and over and over and that’s the only goddamn motion my body wants to do right now so I fucking let it!

Until it’s done.

I pant a few times.

Suddenly, before I can stop them, all my limbs explode out from my core. I punch because I don’t wanna snap off my fingers. Then the claws burst up from my fists and PRRRRRRRRESSSSSSSSSSS outward.

They poke.

They stab.

It is good.

I slice and dice against the Alien slime coating my face and clogging my airways. I’ll claw my way out of here eventually but right now this fabric is my safety net.

If I can’t see them, they won’t know I’m here.
Dance like nobody’s watchin’!
Doin’ the Safety Dance…

Hah, since nobody can see me in here and I can’t see them, it’s just like all those hours I spent hiding under the ferns or burrowing deep inside my snow cave under the twenty-foot mountain plowed up at the end of our driveway. They’ll never fucking find me in here so I can dance how I wanna! I can leave those jerks behind…1

Eventually my limbs stretch out and I’m actually dancing in here. Swaying and swerving, curling and curving, swirling my head all around. I spin and spin and spin and spin beneath the sunbeams that flicker through the thick foliage of my glorious forest hideout until finally I’m done with it.

Both my fists give one last triumphant punch against everything that was weighing down upon me. It all shatters into a bazillion pieces. As I stand there with my spine erect and my head up high and my chest thrown open, each of those fucking shards plummets through the firestorm radiating out from me. I have become the Unconquerable Sun, and they are vaporized into dust.

One last nostril-snort sends them blowing away.

…

Yeah.

…

Yeah, I’m done.

That’s it. That’s all I have to say about that.

After drawing in a refreshing breath (as refreshing as it can get inside this purple shroud full of Me-On-Overdrive-Scent), I exhale more slowly. Open my eyes to—

Oh!

Wow. I’d had no idea I was all the way over here. I’m not quite near the wall, but definitely off-center and faced nearly sideways toward the double doors of the storage closet that houses all the classroom props.

Props like the box of purple stretch-knit sacks.

When my arms collapse to my sides and I claw my way free of the fabric, my classmates greet me with applause. Now that it all comes back to weigh upon me—the reality of this studio and this class and my teacher’s scrutiny and these people who just witnessed everything I did—the blood rushes through my skull. It’s so loud I can’t quite hear if they’re clapping politely because that’s what is expected or if they are enthusiastic or—

“That was really great,” Professor Bergeron says. “It was good to see you truly let go. But don’t lose track of where your audience is.”

“Oh.” Is my face a glowing brand? My gaze drops, and I wish all that black Marley was a porto-hole that could swallow me forever. I scurry to the bin so I can shuck my purple sack once and for all. “Yeah,” I mumble. “I uh…had my eyes shut so I could…”

She nods. Smiles. “I could tell.”

Grrrrreat.

Fan-flippin’-tastic.

I’m sure everybody else could tell, too.

As I trudge toward my classmates, I want to curl up and die. Nobody else really says much. Some cast me encouraging grins, and others are just shocked. No surprise there I’m usually super reserved in this studio.

At least Dominic cranks open his mouth to raise his fist with a hair-metal, “Hell, yeah, girl!” He lifts up his hand for me to high-five. It’s the only thing that saves me, because I want to hurl myself into the heap of of purple sacks and burrow to the very bottom, never to be seen again.

But then, as my butt hits the unyielding floor that refuses to let me dive, burrow or hide anywhere beneath it, Professor Bergeron says something that will take me many years to truly and fully draw inside myself so it can work its magic.

“Next time.”

That’s what she says as as she gives suggestions on how to orient so that I can free free enough to completely take the chain off my movements and expression yet maintain awareness of where my audience is, how to show off the best angles so I can take everybody with me on my journey.

For many years after that day, I chronically pushed this memory to the dungeon of my mind in embarrassment. Mortification, really. Yet there it remained, working in the undercarriage like a virus-in-reverse. Year after year after decade, it kept chipping away at my poisoned self-image—that un-fun-house mirror through which I had been conditioned to view myself.

Now I see this moment for what it is.

Three monumental triumphs.

The first was simply allowing myself to explore what was inside me, down there in the dark, reeking depths where I had caged it, tried to starve it, tried to annihilate it and (thankfully) couldn’t.

The second was to let out what I discovered in a productive way. To let myself be a beginner, and to make a huge, artsy mess with it.

That was the kicker, because I made art all the time. But I almost never let anybody see it.

And no. Sharing it with other people in its raw fledgling state didn’t kill me off.

But the biggest triumph? In spite of how mortified I was by what I had done where other people could witness it…

I did have a next time.

And another and another and another until I could allow myself to express who I am beneath my most societally palatable layers. Eventually, I started to enjoy what I create no matter if it earns me a standing ovation, the gong and the cane yoinking me off a stage I have offended (cough: Instagram!), or the chirping from the Crickets of Meh in the lonely night.

That is the eternal quest that I approach from a myriad different directions, using a ginormous range of tools and toys.

Whenever I find things I don’t like, I do question, “Is this something I truly dislike and want to change? Or is that opinion nothing but a warped reflection through somebody else’s eyes?”

If it’s the former…well, I’m the only one who can do something about that, aren’t I?

And if it’s the latter…POIK! It can be flicked off my shoulder into the trash bin. I don’t need to fucking explain myself to anybody.

Because, baby, I was:

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© 2025 Hartebeast

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I hate this class.

It’s technically not a dance class. Basic Voice and Movement is part of my Theater Major, designed to teach we actors how to use our bodies and voices as vehicles for our “truest depths of expression.” For the voice part we grunt, groan, hum, click our tongues, huff and blow houses down, make high-pitched squeals and sighs that fall into growls.

It all feels very affected and melodramatic, rather than being some sort of genuine expression of what’s inside us.

Okay, maybe I’m the affected, melodramatic one, because nobody would ever want to hear what I have roiling and broiling in my truest depths. No way, man! Nobody would ever want me to let it all fly out of my mouth. If they knew what really lives in here…what festers and rots and slinks and claws…

I HATE this class.

Like…I cannot express to you the white-hot rage that these exercises ignite inside me.

I feel stupid.

No.

Stupid doesn’t even begin to cut it.

Every time we have to make those noises—especially if we have to make them when I can’t hide behind the cacophony of my classmates throwing themselves into this stuff with all their overly theatrical gusto—it reminds me of when my piddly podunk theater group in my K-12 school triumphed over the swanky, prestigious high school from the Big City who won One Act Play Contest every year. After the awards were handed out—when they received second place after years of total domination—one of the lead players literally threw himself into a snowbank, crying, “I am so distraught!” All his friends squawked and clucked and waved hands to cool his face.

Those kids all did warmups backstage before the contest, and they sounded just like the stuff we do in this class. Looked like it, too.

Now I have to do it.

For fuck’s sake.

Do you know how many years I spent obliterating every shred of theatricality from my entire being so I wouldn’t get attacked in the hallways or the locker room or the bathroom? Making these sounds and these faces dredges up every sneer, every shove, every trip and smack and poke and kick from before I entered kindergarten until I acquired my first big, tall, popular jock-boyfriend and they finally didn’t dare touch me. My mind echoes with every sing-songy bastardization of my stupid-wupid name and that seven-year-old donkey-bray. “HAHHH-ha! You’re so dummmmb! Alex-Walex Harty-Farty! Alex-Walex Harty-Shart!”

At least sometimes we’re allowed to stay fucking silent and just say it through our bodies. But even then…

When it’s just natural body language, I’m pretty okay. Facial expressions, gestures, postures. I’ve been perfecting the mimicry of those for as long as I can remember. But then we get to the overblown facial antics. They are the physical manifestations of all those gorilla-grunts, bear-growls, and yes, donkey brays. Do you know how long I’ve tried to smash my facial expressions down into some semblance of what most humans consider “normal”? I’m a friggin’ walking, talking cartoon character! And now you want me to do these things, to set it all free, but NOT be a Loony Toons character in the flesh?

How is this “natural”?

Then there are all the unnatural shapes. The movement quality and energetic flow-exercises designed to evoke a response.

Yeah, I’ve got a response for ya.

Check out this gesture!

Today our professor has brought out a bin filled with cough-syrup-purple, stretch-knit jersey sacks.1 Each sack has a slitted opening. We are to climb inside, envelop ourselves inside it, and then…

Well, then we’re expected to “just move.”

“Whatever comes out in the moment.”

“Just express.”

Just?

JUST EXPRESS?!

There is no music here. Somehow, we’re supposed to reach inside ourselves, rummage around in there, and see what we find that is “asking to be expressed.” Asking? Nuh-uh! Not a snowflake’s chance in Hell. That shit is constantly in demand of being repressed, never expressed! Nobody wants to see that shit on a stage. I sure as hell don’t wanna show it to anybody. But somehow we’re supposed to use all those shapes and body language gestures we’ve been practicing this semester to convey what’s inside us to the rest of the class.

Flippin’ joy.

I don’t know what to say to these people.

I had been sooooo looking forward to finally getting to take a class with Professor Bergeron. She teaches all the jazz and tap classes, which I will not get to start until I’m a flippin’ junior. Don’t get me wrong, I love my ballet teacher.

Okay, I try to love my ballet teacher.

She’s an amazing dancer. A great teacher. But I can feel how much she really does not love teaching me. I started so late in this game, compared to all the swans and gazelles around me. I’ve never had formal training, but I can tell already. I am NOT a ballet dancer. I don’t know what I am, but I’m not that.

Even my ballet teacher reiterated everything I’ve been trying to do with my stupid face for my whole stupid life. We were doing this super fun, explosive combo in Ballet II. It was linear and powerful enough that I really felt like I was starting to get it. It started to flow. After six years of cheerleading and being an athlete? All this soft, flowy, flitty stuff makes me feel like I’m wearing concrete galoshes and a cape made of bricks.

Some of the expressions she tries not to let me see assure me that I look like it, too. And then she said it. “Dance with your body, not your face!”

Yup.

Loony-Tunes Lexx strikes again.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m super glad they made us start with Ballet. It’s good for me. Really good. It’s been fixing my crappy posture from eighteen years slinking around in That Fucking Town, hoping that nobody noticed me, because—ooooh, when they notice me, it’s rarely a good thing. Ballet also gives me the basic dance foundation that I never got to learn as a kid.

So many of my classmates did. Even the guys in the Theater Department. So many of them studied dance when they were young, as well as doing all these ridiculous Voice and Movement exercises. This stuff is old hat to so many of my classmates. Their sounds flow from wide-open throats. Their expressions ebb and ripple across their unhindered faces. Their movements never doubt. Never hesitate. Never hold back for fear of enticing the school of sharks into mauling.

I am very afraid that I’m going to be mauled in this class.

Dominic Ledbetter is up right now. I have a terrible crush on him. I know, I know. I have a boyfriend. I would never cheat on Martin, not even for Dreamboat Dominic. Oh, but Nick is so beautiful in motion. He’s a sophomore. Black curly hair, dark expressive eyes, the sweetest smile. He’s always sweet to me. He’s sweet to everybody, and dang, can he move! Such extension and freedom and power. He makes that purple sack look like grape jelly in motion.

Delectable grape jelly.

More like purple molasses when he balances on the ball of one foot and arcs over with one leg and both arms stretching all that jersey out in every direction. Then he free-falls, flowing to the ground in a smooth tumble that keeps rolling and rolling until an arm slams on the dance floor.

He curls into a purple ball. Inside the sack, he becomes an amoeba. One hand snakes out of the slit. His serpentine arm gestures and wafts in the air, and then—ZWOOP! It disappears.

The sack ripples again. Now he is purple mercury across the floor. In a moment that reminds us all what a delightful ham he is, he busts into The Caterpillar inside that sack. We all laugh and cheer, and then he’s on his back. He arches into a backbend and pours himself upright to blast off again, and I have no idea how he doesn’t kill himself with his feet encased in that cloth on the marley floor but there he is.

Alive.

So fucking alive!

What comes rocketing out of him is purest joy.

If I opened up my floodgates, that is not what would come rocketing out of me. (Okay, it’s not only what would come out of me.)

He ends in the most triumphant pose ever. His body is an X inside that sack, with the tips of his fingers poking ridged scallops of “YES!” over his head.

Silence.

He exhales, and the sack recedes into a semi-guy-shaped lump. As we go crazy in applause, he wriggles his way out through the slit to reveal all his sweaty, red-faced, hair-rumpled gorgeousness. After taking a bow, he wads up the sack and tosses it in the pile.

As he flumps down with his high-fiving friends, my eyes shift away. I have no idea how I will be capable of doing anything like that. Or like the elegant shapes Ballet Swan Carla made. Or like Gazelle Gail’s creative flow. Both of them are comfortable with our requirement to take Ballet—have obviously studied dance for years. Even Raymond who is a big weight room jock with a resonant voice made to fill theaters—he’s not a dancer, but he put on that sack and flexed around in it, slamming palms on the floor, stomping and pushing his feet into the jersey like a slo-mo kick. His laughter rumbled out even when he lost his balance, and we all laughed with him.

With.

Not at.

A lot of the dancers in this university snicker and snort at me, chuckling behind their hands because I’m such an ungainly newb compared to all of them who have been doing this kind of stuff since grade school.

We didn’t have anything like formal theater training, much less dance anywhere near my hometown, and I’m suddenly very, very afraid that I’m about to choke.

I’m even more afraid that I won’t.

That they’ll see it in the shapes my body makes. They’ll know by the choices I make when there is no music coming from outside me to direct my expressions. Fully covered head-to-toe, how much of ME is this purple sack going to reveal?

Thank goodness it’s not my turn yet.

Kara Marlon goes next. She’s a tiny, spunky pixie with a wild profusion of strawberry-blonde curls and a million freckles. She carries her chosen sack into the center of the floor and plops down to climb inside. She starts her movements down there, too. She grabs ahold of the fabric and twists it like she’s wringing out the most hateful, disobedient dishrag. Her amoeba is not sweet like Dominic’s. It is stabby and crabby. She punches against the fabric, HERE! And then OVER THERE! With a frustrated huff, she claws against it, legs scrabbling alongside the ground like a pissed off bicyclist until she finally gets the jersey into her fists again.

Then she strrrrrrrrretches it one direction! Collapses. She strrrrrrretches it another way! Collapses. She curls into the most miserable ball for a little bit. There is some jerking of her rounded purple spine reminiscent of silent sobbing, and then FLOP! Onto her back in the most petulant teenager fit of “whatEVER.” She lays there for awhile.

Lays there a little longer. I’m not…quite…sure…if we’re supposed to clap yet? Nobody does.

Eventually, one of her feet starts bouncing in the air—more aggravation. Another FLOP and she lands on her hands and knees, starts crawling and stretch-slinking around the floor like some hacked-off purple tigress on the prowl for something to pounce and maul. Then she is a blob, jerking and squirming like the cough-syrup hairball the tigress hacked up.

At last, she flops face down, throws a very realistic tantrum with her whole body and not a shred of voice except the air that escapes her lungs. Then she lays there. Again.

We all wait. Again.

Finally, she claws and scrapes and writhes her way to the slit, then claws and scrapes and writhes that purple sack off her body as though it is the most restrictive thing she can no longer tolerate. She surges to her feet, glares at the wad of fabric, then boots it away and stomps off the floor for one last FLOP—right there next to her screaming, clapping, kissing friends.

I can barely put my hands together. Pretty sure my jaw is in my lap.

I am just blown away.

My body finally gets into the clapping rhythm, but I can’t get anything out my throat. All I can do is stare and stare and stare as my entire neuronal universe is exploded, vaporized, and reconstituted into a cough-syrup purple question mark between my eyes. Could I ever—?

What would happen if I—?

“Alexx.”

My eyes spring open as my head jerks toward Professor Bergeron.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod! It’s my turn?

I feel like I’ve swallowed a bug.

UP NEXT: I choose a purple sack and take my turn IN THE FISHBOWL

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We’ve just entered ELEMENTAL METAL over on Tinkerings. This is the Domain of the Persona—the masks we wear, and our truest faces. Our truest voices and the lies we tell—to ourselves and to the rest of the world. This is the Realm of Martial Movement & Mindset. It is the place from which we communicate and connect, where we cherish and protect. In this Element we explore ANGER and the boundaries that this emotion is asking us to erect, versus the BRAVERY that is required to put them up in the first place, much less defend them.

Some of us need even more Bravery to simply express the truth of who we are.

This is one of the many gifts that martial arts gave me. So did dance. And music. And writing. And…

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist

Creation & Innovation. Art & Nature. Curiosity & Play. Experiments with my Dance of Elemental Alchemy and the creative process it spawned. Welcome to Hartebeast Lair!

By Alexx Hart

© 2025 Hartebeast

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Table of Contents for all my dance adventures:

Some of what I was trying to hide during my Freshman Year:

WABI-SABI: This mindset cherishes the beauty of asymmetry, imperfection and flaws. It includes the Japanese art of transforming broken things into beauty, like Kintsugi, “golden joinery,” which repairs broken pottery—not with an adhesive that is designed to disguise the cracks as much as possible—but rather, with veins of gold or silver to highlight and beautify the places of shatter and repair.1

Spring 1998
25 years old

The candlelight casts eerie shadows on my face. Behind me, the water rushes into the bathtub, drowning out all other sound. It’s a big clawfoot tub, my favorite kind. I’ve always wanted one of these.

I’ve always wanted a great many things that were out of my reach.

But here in Colorado Springs—my new home for the past half-year—I am beginning to wonder how I can change that. After all, I now dwell beneath a towering mountain in the quiet refuge of a house whose backyard is a faerie tale garden with lanterns hanging from the trees, tiki torches alight upon stone pathways, a small labyrinth made from local river rocks, and a sandbox that has been transformed into a spot for Zen.

Out in the living room, my two roommates curl up together watching a movie that doesn’t interest me. In the hush of my solitude, it comes stealing in as always to settle on my shoulders: the yearning so deep it aches.

For a place where I feet at home.

For the ability to take a full breath anywhere other than in the woods, alone.

For comfort in my own skin.

For the ability to look into the mirror, meet my own eyes, and not hate the person staring back at me. Why have I always hated her?

Hated myself.

The last time I tried to look at myself—truly LOOK—I destroyed the mirror. It was my parents’ bathroom mirror. I hurled a brush straight into my own face.2 After the crashing was done, I thirsted to take those broken shards and gouge out the veins in my wrists. Jab them into my throat. Lash my face to ribbons the way my reflection had splintered when brush impacted glass.

I don’t understand it. I mean, I do. I’ve gotten some of the memories back, so I’m beginning to comprehend some of the reasons, especially the ones from that day I broke the mirror, but it still doesn’t fully explain it. This feeling is as old as I have memory.

I have wanted to destroy that girl I see in the glass my entire life.

What crime could a toddler have possibly committed to warrant that kind of hatred?

But the shadows have done something to my reflection tonight. Altered the face. She no longer looks like me. My severe lines have softened. The skin tone is bathed in the golden glow of the candles. Warmer. More luminous. The shadows cancel out much of my face. I am all cheeks and nose and forehead.

And eyes.

They draw me in. Something back there, way back behind the portcullis and the archers, behind the glint of cutting humor and sequined costumes…from somewhere inside the secreted depths of the garden that blooms at the center of me…SHE beckons. An inviting murmur. A little crook of a finger, gesturing, “Come here. Come closer.”

I lean over the sink. Close to the mirror now. Searching. Seeking. Delving. Reaching. Who are you? I ask her.

You know who I am, she hums in return. Almost a growling purr.

I draw back, teeth gritted, eyes slitted. No. I really don’t.

She says nothing more, just smiles with her lips pressed tight against all the secrets that could flood out. What pours forth, instead, is all imagery.

I am transported back to Cimarron, the store where I traipsed from sparkling rack to rack behind my first belly dance teacher. Clothes for elegant ladies. Sensual women. Powerful women. I am only nineteen in that store—and a naive nineteen at that. The beautiful printed paper bag opens. Into it disappears a velvet bustier, along with a gold chain belt, a-tinkle with charms. My teacher hands the bag to me. They are mine now. These elegant, sensual things.3

Powerful things.

Now she shows me the squirrel that climbed on me in the woods when I was seven. He ate nuts from my hand because I was still and kind, and because there in his habitat, I belonged. I had simply become part of his home.

Then that sweet, hopping sparrow taking a bath in the pool of rainwater still left on the sidewalk. When I knelt down, he jumped into my cupped hands.4

All the butterflies and dragonflies and sewing needles that dance about my hair and leave kisses on my skin.

Next, she shows me that moment when my opponent’s shield and weapon both dropped in acknowledgement of the sniping blow I had delivered to his helmet. Zip-zig-zag into range and CLANG! Rocked his brains, then gone. The slump of his shoulders. The big, grudging grin behind the bars of his face-grill. The little shake of the head. “Well struck, milord.”

And my reply—my first word to him: “Lady.”

His dumbfounded stare. “I…beg pardon?”

My formal bow and salute. “Lady.”

“Um…oh.” His ringing brains had to rearrange everything he had assumed about the armored individual kicking his ass in a pickup fight. His deeper bow, and my own big grin behind the black-and-red helmet that showed nothing but my eyes.

Those eyes stare back at me in the mirror. Full of remembrance, they are alight with that same intensity. The same hunger and fire. Ignition. Something has woken up back there, and it isn’t remotely tame. It is not nice.

Minnesota Nice, don’tcha know?

Fuck that.

To my surprise, it is also deeply, sublimely sweet. I can feel that from out here.

My hands press against the mirror as I lean even closer, delve even farther into those brownish nebulas that reveal the depths of me. There are flecks of green in my eyes. And rays of gold. I make damp imprints on the glass with my palms. Make mist with my breath.

Who ARE you?

SHE smiles back, lips still sealed tight over teeth that I am quite certain have elongated into fangs, if she cared to show them. She winks.

YES.

That’s all she answers.

My lips are slightly open. Slack with wonder. A little anxious. What am I doing? What is this? Breath shallowly panting in and out, steaming up the bottom of the glass. Huge eyes. Mine: amazed. Hers: opening and opening and opening to me like the black hole at the center of the glowing, golden-brown ring of my right eye.

Gravity.

I’m falling in and in and in, where I am gently, blissfully torn apart. All those jagged shards of me, disjointed and glued together with various weak substances that never allow a true seal. Never really fill the cracks.

It’s hard to play the game with a broken cup…

I leak out of myself, spilling over everything I touch, but as the event horizon of her gaze rends me to pieces and draws me in, scrapes the dried glue-gunk off my edges and shines up the glazing of my outsides, fuses me back together, I discover that this skin is incredibly comfortable.

There in every crack: gold.

• ✨ Gold like this candlelight.

• ✨ Gold like the radiating rays in the dark of my eyes.

• ✨ Gold like the tinkling charms on that chain belt I sewed beneath the velvet cups that cradled my breasts in my first belly dance costume.

• ✨ Gold like the myriad coins that jingle around my hips when I dance.

• ✨ Gold like the sunlight that flickered in through the leaves enshrouding me from the world whenever I burrowed into the woods for safekeeping.

• ✨ And gold like the phoenix that arises from the heart of a flaming sun—the coat-of-arms I painted upon my shield while battling big bruisers and small-to-midsize badasses.

The story of me was all there in the eyes of SHE as I waited for the bathtub to fill, and that’s where I found it.

• ✨ Safety.

• ✨ Belonging.

• ✨ Comfort.

• ✨ Home.

How could I have forgotten so easily?

I’d discovered it a few years ago. (What is it about drawing luxurious baths for myself?) But then I dropped it somewhere along the path, and it all shattered. Apparently, SHE had picked up the pieces behind me, storing them in the tiny pirate chest that sits on my dresser until the moment when I was ready to glue them back together.

As I turn away from the mirror, my fingers leave a streak through the fog that coats the glass. I climb into the tub—gasp in rapture at the water’s searing embrace. Slowly, gradually, I edge my way down until all but my face is submerged. Clawfoot tubs are great for that.

Closing my eyes, I open that treasure chest and examine what she left inside for me to find. Piece by jagged piece, I glue it all together. Some of those shards cut my hands and I bleed into the bath. The water washes the wounds clean. SHE washes the water. Whenever I find any small holes where there are chunks missing, I fill them in with the golden lacquer.

This time, I swallow that cup whole, so I won’t drop it the next time I find myself lost and overwhelmed.

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© 2020 Hartebeast

“It’s hard to play with a broken cup.” - A fictional piece I had written just a few months before.

No bleep, there I was, at the coffee shop.

Stood up.

Okay, not exactly stood up. I don’t normally attend my writer group’s social Meetup on Saturdays, but I had a spare weekend, awoke early, and was inspired for some coffee-juiced shit-shootery with my writer-buds. So I threw on some clothes and beelined down to The Hive, only a few minutes late.

Nobody was there.

Fast-forward fifteen minutes and I learn that our fearless leader had cancelled the meeting because of a completely understandable dog trauma. Since I’m not one of her normal Saturday people, she hadn’t thought to text me. So there I was, a caffeinated shiftless drifter, all dressed up downtown.

Then I heard it.

The Voice.

Say wuuut?

I did NOT wanna go to the Farmer’s Market. Not because I don’t like it. I just wasn’t in the mood for crowds. I’d wanted my peeps and some introverted geeky goodness in a reclusive hub in my familiar setting. I didn’t want the weekend herd with their kids and their dogs and—

Ears: Flat.
Pout: Engaged.

Fiiiiiine.

So I went. This will be good for you, I assured myself. Break you out of your homebody hermit-crab reclusive ruts. Yeah. Yeah! See? It’s not so bad. It’s not so—

Ears: Flatter.

When I’m in homebody mode, when my nervous system and especially my bashed brains are touchy and twitchy, I do NOT like dodging dogs and capering around kids and—

And the God-Rays shone down upon a corner booth as the angelic choir burst into a glorious, “AHHHH...”

The sign on the booth: Neurological-Based Chiropractic Care.

Say WUUUUT?!

I blinked. Blinked again. Some kids had to caper around me this time. I just stood there, gawking.

Neurology and chiro in the same booth?

Swiftly, determinedly, I stalked past the booth with my mind a-grumble. I’ll never be able to afford a full battery of new chiropractic. I bet it’s the expensive kind. Guaranteed they won’t take Medicaid. Plus, they’ll probably demand new X-rays—

Eyelids: slits.
Eyeballs: death rays.

I know, I know! My spine progress is stalled out and plateaued and my body is becoming really hissed off since I’ve been forcing my neck and spine to weather traditional rack-and-crack again in the wake of the Knee Incident because Upper Cervical can’t do squat for putting my knee back into place and I can’t afford to do both kinds of treatments. I’m STILL freakin’ waiting to see if Voc. Rehab is going to be able to help me launch this darn online school and right now I have even less income than—

Huff-snort.

FIIIIIIIIINE.

Stomp-stomp-stomp.

“Hi. Nice to meet you. Yes, sure, hook me up to your fancy nerve-meter, why not? Let’s do this thing! Let the healing begin!”

Blink?

Blink again.

Huh.

Yup. That’s an exact picture of my spine on that green-orange-and-red meter.

Not only was I looking at the spine I knew too well, I was looking at my spine on that particular day with a more-than-usual level of left-side pain in the neck—NOT my usual M.O.

Deep Roots. That’s the name of this health center?1

Okaaaaay...you have my attention.2

The $40 special for a full round of X-rays from skull to hip, including range-of-motion shots, got my attention more so. Yeah, take mah money! It would be worth it just to know if my years of Upper Cervical had made any bloody progress. Plus, I hadn’t seen any images of my spine except my neck since 2000 after my tangle with the drunk driver.3

When I saw the current state of my spine, I was slightly shocked. Not at all surprised at the state of my vertebrae, because those were the things I could feel every moment of every day, and had been complaining about for two decades.

The shock came from how clearly you could actually SEE it.

First, in case you’re not accustomed to looking at spinal X-rays, this is from the poster that lives in my the majority of the chiropractic offices I’ve ever been in:

These are some of mine on the first day, September 16, 2019. Since I’d progressed past a merely straight neck and have bone degeneration, I was in Phase III:

When I got a load of the trauma-induced scoliosis I could see from across the room, my first thought was, “Any fucking questions? Can you hear me now?!” Because I didn’t have scoliosis before my first car wreck. When I saw my neck, I was actually pleased. At least Upper Cervical Chiropractic had restored part of my backwards curve.4

After pulling up my range-of-motion X-rays to show me, my doc came back to the stationary shot and placed a clear sheet on top of it, outlining the alignment of the vertebrae in black marker. Then he laid the sheet over the motion shots to show the subluxations. (Where my vertebrae are misaligned and not moving properly.)

Black is where my vertebrae sat when I was looking straight ahead; blue is where they sat when I tilted my head forward and back. In a healthy spine, we should have seen blue outlines on both sides of my original placement, but my neck just didn’t move that way anymore.

As you can see, most of my vertebrae only worked in one direction, and several weren’t moving anywhere.

Fine. Let’s blow this craptastic pattern up! Because you know what comes next after Phase III degeneration, right?

• Posture collapse

• Surgery

• Lifelong drugs that don’t even—

My new doc was surprised to see how happy I was upon witnessing the state of my neck. Oh, trust me, I’d rather know about what is going on with my body, and have scientific proof of what I experience and complain about all the time, right there in stark red, white, black and blue.

He cringed when he said, “Yeah, when I pulled up your X-rays over the weekend, I thought at first that I had the wrong patient. But no, it was you. This is the kind of degeneration you’d expect to see in someone thirty years older.”

Yes. I know.

I feel it every second of every day.

“Do you have any questions before we start this conversation?” he asked.

“In fact, I do,” I said, leaning forward to look him straight in the eye. “I bet I can tell you exactly what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me that I need to come and see you three times a week for about three months. After that, maybe we can go down to one-to-two times a week, and eventually, depending on how I take to it, I might be able to go onto maintenance as needed, but with the degree of injury I’ve sustained and the length of time I’ve been dealing with this, I’m probably looking at a lifetime maintenance of at least once a month. Probably best if I come see you once a week.”

He stares at me as though I have just whisked the words directly from his mouth.

I shrug. “What I want to know is this. Why should I spend all this money to do this full battery of restorative appointments AGAIN? Because my body simply doesn’t hold. The two times I’ve been on the dime of car insurance and been able to come in more than once a month, it never sticks. If money was no object, I could come in here for the rest of my life and have you shove my vertebrae back into alignment every three days or so, because that’s how long it usually takes for my neck to pop back out. Sometimes it’s more like three hours, but you don’t take Medicaid and I’m on disability, so money is an extreme issue. And so? Why should I put myself into debt like that?”

And so…he told me.

Before each adjustment, I would do three different kinds of spinal mobility exercises to get everything warmed up. (“Coincidentally” I also do these motions in qigong and tai chi, as well as my dance practice. Hmmm…fascinating.) After the adjustment, he would have me hang in some neck traction.

Then at home, in order to augment the treatments, he would have me lie on the floor for twenty minutes every day with my neck propped up on a specially designed foam device to restore the natural cervical curve. It’s called a Denneroll.5

Last, he gave a description of the instrument he uses for adjustments, the Integrator (a chiropractic device that actually has FDA approval) and its Torque Release Technique. This procedure sounded eerily familiar.6

~From the website: What we do at Deep Roots Health Center to get phenomenal results7

…it’s a little bit different than what you would typically think of when you go to a normal chiropractor. because we do something called TRT, which is torque release technique, it’s neurological based chiropractic care. And what that means is there’s actually no manual popping, clicking, or cracking that occurs with my adjustment.

…it’s all really, really specific done with an instrument where I can actually get down to the millimeter as far as where I need to adjust. So what’s so cool about that is I’m working directly with the nervous system. Which is of course, the system that controls every other system in the body.

…we work directly with the nervous system, stimulating those nerves and changing the frequency of the nerves with the adjustments. That’s a little different than the manual adjusting…

So the way that this technique works specifically is it changes the frequency of the nerve with every single adjustment that we do.

…it’s kind of like tuning the strings on a guitar. So if you have a guitar and it’s out of tune, the strings are going to be at the wrong tension, right? They’re not going to play the right note when you pluck that string. Well, what we do is very similar when we get that spinal cord tuned up and we get that nervous system working properly…

…that’s the basics. When we affect the nervous system directly, we actually change the tension or the torsion on the spinal cord and with the neurology in that region, which completely changes the signals that the brain is sending out through those nerves, to all the different cells, organs, and tissues of the body.

The words he used sounded like the first time I’d ever heard Bowen Therapy described. You remember the impact that Bowen had on me, right? Oh, you missed that one? Here ya go:

Long story short: Bowen Therapy is the revolutionary technique that made the difference between having my MD tell me that I would never be a professional dancer again and catapulting onto the international scene after snarling, “Watch me.”

Well, after new injuries to my brain, spine, hips and the resultant knee injury, I’m at it again. Healing. Clawing my way back up from the Underworld. Neuro-Chiropractic is integral to my ability to keep doing what I was told I would never be able to do again, what supposedly should not be possible. But I’m under the care of a doctor who lives by the motto “Expect Miracles.”

In following those God-Rays and hearkening to the choir, I do.

And I keep getting them.

Year after year after decade.

Alas, in 2022, I fell down my stairs because my stuff doesn’t always work right anymore. I landed on the back of my head, acquiring a new concussion and whiplash. I also hit the bottom stair one inch away from my tailbone, undoing all that progress we’d made on my hips and low back.

BUT!

I keep going back, week after week. I had to do a new intensive battery of appointments for a little bit there during the initial recovery, but quickly returned to maintenance mode. My body remembered the new alignment it had started to be able to hold for longer and longer periods, so it didn’t take nearly as long to get back to where we had been before the tumble.

Not long before that re-injury, the spot that had been finally starting to realign was my center back where my vertebrae take that sharp jag. It was the last section willing to move. Of course. The body is a natural prioritizing machine, and its primary spinal foundation is in the neck and hips.

In 2023, my new dental team also realigned my jaw after twenty-three years of diagnosed, but unaddressed TMJ.8 Amidst that treatment, my neck healing went into overdrive. This greatly reduced my seizures, in addition to accelerating my spinal healing and stabilizing my hips even further.

Which meant that my body could finally get back to addressing the center point of my scoliosis.

Last summer, I did an amazing two-day workshop with my tai chi/qigong instructors. We did spinal wave after spinal wave, and at one point I could actually feel my body bust through the 2.5 decades of scar tissue that had been wadded up around those vertebrae in the middle of my back. As we moved, the glorious tearing sensation continued down through my lumbar range.

I hadn’t been able to move my mid-to-low back and my ribcage like that since 2000! Such a relief!

My body kinda freaked out after that. I was so astounded and elated—euphoric, really—that I got a little happy with myself. The next day, I danced and did martial training for several hours, not realizing that I was dealing with atrophied muscles I hadn’t had access to since I was twenty-eight. DUH.

Needless to say, I am now more gently recovering from a back injury in a spot I’m not used to healing.

Ahem.

(Jackass. You’d think I would know these things by now. But…well…this had never happened before!)

So…no bleep, here I am.

• Continuing realignment of my hips and spine.

• Continuing repair of my knee after blessedly having surgery a year ago.

• Continuing realignment of my cervical vertebrae.

  • Massive reduction of my seizures and increased flow of blood, cerebrospinal fluid and nerve pathways to and from my brain.

  • I’m having to re-learn how to swallow food and drink.

  • The muscles in my throat also have to re-learn how to hold my esophagus off my ever-curving vertebrae while I sleep so I don’t suffocate by the collapse of my airway with gravity as I relax. (I have to sleep on my back due to the neck and hip injuries.)

  • I have, in the past few months, very suddenly gotten back my ability to sing on-key and with full resonance inside my throat! I’d lost that in the big car wreck, both from brain damage and everything that happened to my neck, diaphragm, and ribcage.

  • I’m also starting to be able to choreograph again—and actually memorize what I’ve created!

  • I’m memorizing bass guitar lines, too. (Yes. If you missed it, I have finally started to learn the instrument I’ve wanted to play since 1998 when I fell for a bassist and realized just how important the bass line is to my dancing and my love of music. That’s a story. We’ll get to that.) But that’s the easy one. I’ve never really lost my ability to memorize basic musical ebbs and flows.

  • The more damaged channel is the verbal channel that got so munched when my head slammed into the car door frame. But now I’m starting to be able to memorize lyrics again!!!! I can’t tell you how massive this is. Before my first car wreck, I was a memorization machine. After decades, it’s finally starting to come back.

  • Equally massive? Uh…apparently I’m also a drummer. Who knew! (I did. Something I’ve wanted since about 1987: to learn how to play a trap set. This is also a story.) The sheer mass of cross-hemisphere multitasking required to pull off this feat of eight-tentacled acrobatics has been beyond me since my brains got shaken and stirred, and my right-side motor strip was damaged.

  • Well…it’s happening.

• So is dance.

• So is martial arts.

• Again.

• So are a bazillion other things long-lost since that fateful Winter Solstice night on the freeway. Things I have lost over and over, and had to relearn after each re-injury. Things I’ve always wanted to learn and experience, but didn’t dare risk the neurological and physiological fallout that would come down on my head if I pushed any further.

• But I can push now. Carefully.

This is why one of my primary symbols is The Phoenix.

Yes.

I do.

And I’m receiving them.

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© 2021 Hartebeast - with updates 2025

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR MY WHOLE TBI AND BODILY INJURY RECOVERY ADVENTURE:

I also hadn’t yet learned that one of the rarer side effects of the antidepressant my doctor had prescribed for me was increased depression, mood volatility, and suicidal thoughts—all of which stabilized when I stopped taking it.1

If you need to look away today, I don’t mind. Or once I start cussing, (uncontrollable profanity: yet another lovely TBI symptom)2 you can scroll past this first section and skip to the good stuff. Because even though this was one of the lowest moments in my initial car wreck recovery, my decision to stick it out awhile longer led me to nothing short of a miracle.

I don’t have the kind of training necessary to advise about this kind of stuff. These people do:

• SUICIDE & CRISIS LIFELINE: 988

• Or if you don’t like that one: FIND A HELP LINE

“YOU’LL NEVER BE A DANCER AGAIN.”

Late Winter 2002
29 years old

“Well,” my doc says with an uninterested shrug, “there’s nothing else that can be done for you, if you’re not willing to take heavier pain killers.”

I stare him down.

No. I am absolutely not willing to live the rest of my life on heavier, addictive pain killers. Especially not when there are perfectly good therapies available that could heal the root causes of my injuries, instead of throwing drugs at me to shut up my symptoms. More like to shut me up, because my chronic migraines and every freaking dance move I do from skull to sacrum are exercises in flinching, wincing, and gritting my teeth in a grin while pretending I’m not in excruciating pain. Simply sitting or standing is painful, and I refuse to believe that this is as good as it’s ever gonna get.

Unfortunately, he refuses to help me take on my car insurance company so that I might finally gain consistent and productive access to the few therapies they would approve. They’ve been consistently axing my care since month four.

Now, my main doctor is just sick of me in his office, so he tells me, “You’re simply going to have to face the facts that you’ll never be a professional dancer again.” As he gives me an expectant stare, no doubt awaiting my kowtowing and chastened compliance, he’s leaning so far back in his chair that I’m surprised he doesn’t topple toes-over-nose. The classic buff of a thumbnail would look good on him right about now.

I wordlessly leave his office and stalk through the parking lot in a rage.

For more than a year since a drunk driver slammed my brain into my skull and my head into the car door frame after playing yo-yo with my spine, I have become hyper-aware of how little control I have over that emotion.

My anger is a train barreling down a mountainside with no breaks, and if I don’t get lucky enough to notice when I’m merely irritated so I can cease all aggravating stimuli, there is no stopping it. I watch this crazy-train as if from outside myself, horrified and unable to get ahold of it as it steam-chugs me straight into my most hellacious self.

My neuropsychologist has explained that this is the combination of the damage to my frontal lobe and left temporal lobe that makes it so difficult to stop the Rage Thang once it gets ignited.3

Today, this conversation is not a spark on the constant tinder of my shitstorm—excuse me, my life.

It’s fucking napalm.

I get into my car, slam the door, and yank the seatbelt. Whrrrrrr-CLUNK. I use so much force that the belt halts almost in its cradle—practically tears my arm out of its socket. I growl and yank again. Whrrr-CLUNK. WHRRR-CLUNK!

Yanking and yanking and yanking and yanking and YANKING and YANKING against that immovable fucking belt is like heroin! And then the SCREAMING! The infuriated roar that has been building since my crock-of-a-doc tossed off that uncaring shrug finally rockets up my throat to explode all over the dashboard. My fists bash the steering wheel so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t cave in like the stove burner that day last year when I opened one too many denial-of-medical-care notices in the mail.

I was making hot apple cider that day. I had a gallon of juice with a bunch of spices heating on my stove. I tried to hold it together after dropping the last notification on the table. That letter informed me that my car insurance company was cutting my massage therapy while my back was still spasming so badly that my physical therapist couldn’t get anywhere with me. She wrote letters to my insurance adjustor, to my doc, to everybody. Didn’t matter.

So as I stood over the pot with the steam rising up into my face, my guts became tied to the cider. Or perhaps the cider was tied to me, because the first bubble burbled to the surface.

Time to turn it down.

I didn’t.

Another bubble surfaced and then another, and before I could stop it my white-knuckled hands were around the brassy handles and that whole huge pot was slamming up and down on the MOTHERFUCKING BURNER, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Cider and spices and bile and RAAAAGE splashed all over the ceiling and the stove and the floor and me. I was lucky it didn’t scald my face off.

Later, when I cleaned up the mess, I saw that the burner was warped. Pretty much how I felt inside.

Pretty much how I feel in my car, parked in my doctor’s lot on this cold, sunny afternoon. You just don’t TELL a dancer that she’ll never dance again.

Those words transform into my very breath. They become my life’s motto in an instant.

OK, they will become my motto, because I still can’t get that fucking seatbelt around my fucking warped body! When I focus hard enough to slowly…oh-so-goddamn-carefully—am I being gentle enough for your delicate ass?—get the thing out of its slot and clicked at my hip, I start the fucking car and I get out onto the fucking road.

I am in no condition to drive and I don’t even realize it.

At this point, I have lost the ability to self-assess and come up with any accurate notion of my mental state, emotional state, or capacity to safely operate heavy machinery amidst other vehicles on the road. Apparently this is another issue caused by my bashed-n-smashed frontal lobe and my shaken-n-stirred right parietal lobe—the loss of self-monitoring.4

They should have never okayed my driving clearance two months after my wreck. But they did, so I have no clue that I’ve just become as dangerous on the road as the drunk that did this to me.

I pull out.

At least I don’t peel out.

The overpass on Cimarron where it spans I-25 is approaching. A few exits up lives the bridge that SHE almost rammed me off of. I am always and forever aware of that precise location. No matter what I’m doing, no matter where I am. I can be dead asleep and my body will bolt upright because it knows exactly where the Uintah exit is. My entire life is nothing but one big Wheel of Fortune revolving around that single moment in time.

Hmmm…

If I jerk the steering wheel at just the right moment, I wonder if I could actually finish the job and send this car through the ledge off the overpass. It’s not a concrete construction median with that perfectly engineered curvature designed to prevent rollovers by people who crash into them.

People like me.

Excuse me. People who get rammed into them by drunk drivers.

You shoulda seen it, man. What a wondrous feat of engineering! Worked perfectly. Screeeeee around on two wheels until ka-BLAM! Skull into door frame. At least it kept me alive.

Do pardon me. It kept me breathing. Joyest of non-car-flipping joys.

But this median is a plain concrete ledge. If I accelerate enough, could I blast through it?

Doubtful.

Could I get it to flip my car? Could some big-ass truck ram me over the edge where I can just explode into a gazillion pieces and never have to feel a moment of this pain or the split-second obliteration of everything I ever wanted to do with my life? Please? Can I finally just be fucking done with all of this?

Not supposed to say things like that.

Not supposed to even think them.

No, no. I need to be GRATEFUL! I need to OMMMM with a beatific smile and give thanks for this BLESSING of still breathing because anything else is “feeling sorry for ourselves,” and we can never, ever, NEVER do that, woe and wahhhhhh.

The support group for Mothers Against Drunk Driving has stopped doing me any good. All those hours having to keep my infernal lips clamped with a choke-chain around my throat because I’m surrounded by the grieving bereaved. I get it. Which is why I try to zip it. But that does me no good. In fact, having to muzzle my true thoughts and feelings so I don’t cause these other people pain is starting to damage me instead.

But there’s no funding to offer us separate groups, so I don’t ever get to speak honestly about MY freaking bereavement—the person I have lost, and the impact drunk driving has had on MY life.

We few fang-gnashing, bile-spewing survivors constantly have to stuff it—and can I tell you how difficult that is for somebody with Think-It-Say-It-Syndrome? Somedays I literally cannot keep my every thought from spewing out my gob, especially when I’m tired or emotional, which is…like…

Always.

I hear that losing my filter is yet another lovely symptom of frontal and temporal lobe damage.5

Because what I really want to say is, “I wish she would have just fucking finished me off because what’s left of my ‘life’? THIS IS NOT LIVING. This is just the bullshit of keeping my spirit attached to this twisted, warped body nobody can tell me how to heal so I can enjoy a smidge of my time here in this stupid flesh-and-bone existence, and get back to actually being worthy of the air and food and water I consume and fart back out. All I am now is a big, fat consumer of resources and an expeller of excrement.”6

Interpret that in every way you possibly can.

And now I’ll never be a dancer again?!

So I wonder and fantasize and drool over the notion of hitting that concrete barrier so hard I blast through it and am incinerated in a conflagration befitting everything raging inside me.

But only for a few seconds.

Thankfully, my stupid PTDS-laden brain slams other more horrific realities through my mind. Apparently it still has the capacity to do rapid C3PO assessments, because it starts spewing figures at me in his metal-rific voice.

“The odds of successfully catapulting through the barrier are 1,234,567.890-to-one. Your vehicle weighs approximately 2,456.789 pounds, therefore, at this speed and trajectory it will most likely do a spectacular rendition of a stone skipped on water, and careen into that blue sedan with the mother and her two children. Deviating from your present course in your legally assigned lane would be ill advised at this time.”

Me: 🔥😡🔥

How is it possible that this entire exchange has occurred in the fifty feet before the overpass?

Time doesn’t work right in my head anymore.

But Threepio does.

(For which I am actually grateful. Super grateful.)

Even so, my lips splatter a barrage of profane acid all over the windshield as I gun the 🤬🤬🤬 accelerator over the 🤬🤬🤬 bridge, increasing my speed to a whopping 34 MPH—oooooooooh! (I was always rule-following non-speeder before the wreck, but now I’m a notorious scaredy-cat granny-driver.)

(It’s the best I got. Bite me.)

In the end, it’s always empathy that saves my ass. The notion of the individual who would find my bloated, blackening, fly-ridden carcass hanging from the ceiling and the pain it would inflict upon the people who love me. The damage I would cause to whoever discovered my floated, bloated, blood-drained carcass in the tub, and the crushing meteor my suicide would crash into my parents’ lives.

The damage I would heap upon some other person innocently driving along the road while I got behind the wheel impaired like this.

That means I don’t get to barrel for the exit of my shitstorm life. Not yet. I have to stick this out a while longer.

I pull the goddamn car over and bash the motherfucking steering wheel a little fucking more.

Finally have a good, hard goddamn cry.

Eventually wipe the freaking snot and tears away.

I granny-drive myself home and curl up with the covers over my head. My black cat, Spider-Biter, molds himself around my pounding skull like a vibrating hat of love. Dart, my tiger-striped, lynx-eared baby, nudges in behind my knees so I can bawl some more.

BOWEN THERAPY.

Thankfully, I am as tenacious as a weed, so somehow I am randomly, coincidentally led to a new massage therapist. (Hahahaha! Coincidentally. That’s cute. Have I mentioned that I am one of Synchronicity’s favored faerie godchildren? She constantly nudges me—occasionally boots me where She needs me to be.)

After going over my intake paperwork, Vicki Lim tells me that she can and totally will do therapeutic or relaxing massage for me. However, considering the type of injuries I have and the plateau my healing has been stuck at for nearly a year, she says that she has a revolutionary suggestion for me.

She calls it Bowen Therapy.7

It’s an Australian technique I’ve never heard of. She describes the process. By doing these weird little moves, touching this spot here, swiping a finger across that spot there and pressing this point here, it (apparently) sends a signal to the brain. “Hey. Yo. Look here.”

And so the brain (reportedly) does, at which times it performs its own C3P0 assessments and replies, “Well, bless my buttons. That muscle is in a chronic holding pattern and this one is no longer doing its job and that bone is out of alignment as a result and, oh dear. What ever is it doing to the nervous system? Atrocious. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

So (evidently) Mr. Brain goes about rerouting pain patterns and restoring muscle function to its original design. The body (supposedly) gets booted out of the holding, protective ruts to which it has become accustomed and voila! Miraculous healing (allegedly) ensues.

I raise one eyebrow at her explanation. Uh-huh…oh, really. Woooow. “Well, that sounds…”

Whackadoo.

Woo-woo.

Like a whole bunch of hooey placebo snake-oil that I have no money to waste on.

“Interesting,” I finally manage to deliver, while straining against the choke-chain on my dagger-sharp Think-It Say-It tongue. At least I manage not to cough out, “Bullshit!” like the proper Gen-Xer I am.

She smiles at me like she’s seen this reaction many times before. “Well, if you’d like, I can do the standard therapeutic massage and then, at the very end, I’ll show you a Bowen technique. You can see if you like it, and if you do, we can schedule the first series.”

“Sure,” I say through the toothy hood-grill of my smile. Great. Whatever floats your boat.

She does the massage. It is heavenly torture for an hour. At the end, she has me get dressed so she can do the Bowen whacka-woo-doo and I can drag my noodle-licious carcass to my infernal vehicle to drive home.

Wait a second. She’s going to do this technique while I’m fully dressed? Well, all righty then…? Whatever.

“What’s still bothering you the most after the massage?” she asks.

After a quick body scan, it is obvious. That darn right shoulder is still winging out. Anytime I sit down in a chair that has a back to it, my scapula gouges with this feeling like nails on the chalkboard. Just inside the shoulder blade is the electro-zappy spot that Vicki, like every massage therapist I’ve had since the wreck, can barely touch without sending me sproinging onto the ceiling, yowling and shivering with my cat-claws dug in.

That’s the injury I choose.

She sits me on the edge of the massage table. Touches a spot here, swipes a finger across a spot there. Grasps my right arm and pushes it across my body, then moves it back out. Bonks her fist on the outside of my elbow.

My other eyebrow raises. No, the left one. What in THE petrified dookie?

I try really hard not to let my thoughts flash across my face, but my eyes reflexively roll ceiling-ward. I pretend I’m fascinated by the crown molding. I keep my face placid and cud-chewy. Whatever blows your hair back, babe.

She sets my arm back down at my side. Now it’s time for me to bake for a few minutes. Apparently this gives the brain time to assess and get to work. So we chit. We chat. We laugh about something banal.

The electro-spot inside my shoulder blade itches. Nails on the chalkboard. Ugh! My shoulder jerks. My head twitches to the side a few times from the spasming in my neck. I grunt. Then my shoulder moves as if from within. Forward…up…back around and…twitch-twitch…

CLUNK.

My eyes shoot open.

My right shoulder is sitting where it belongs! No massage therapist, chiropractor, reiki healer, or acupuncturist has ever been able to put that thing into its natural home!

I look at it just to make sure. Not like I can see it, but…yeah, it’s totally in place. I gawk at her. Her lips are closed as though around a most satisfying canary she’s about to gulp down. Her eyes broadcast, “See? Told ya.”

“What the—? It’s— I’m— You just—”

Best I got.

She chuckles in confirmation.

I doubt I need to tell you my decision about which therapeutic technique I asked her to use for the entirety of my next appointment. And all the appointments for the next few years. Screw this massage torture-for-an-hour crap.

Besides, Bowen was cheaper because it doesn’t require nearly the physical output that massage does. Considering that I had to pay for it on my own dime, that was crucial for getting me consistent enough care that it could actually help me. As it turns out, Bowen was also 1,234,567.890 times more effective on my body than massage.

(Okay, I’m being a Threepio over-exaggerator here, but you get the point.)

Within months, Bowen Therapy is what finally got me dancing again without knives of agony stabbing me from neck to butt, when too many other people who had given up all hope farted out pessimistic assessments.

They obviously didn’t know me very well, and they didn’t know how much Synchronicity loves me.

“WATCH ME.”

June 2002

Below is the first major stage performance I did after my first big car wreck. Sure, this dance was my triumphant return, as well as the first time I used the name “Isidora” onstage, instead of only at Medieval reenactment events. It was also my next level of deviation into fusion dance.

But this piece was so much more than that.

It was my deepest bow of gratitude to the Divine Source that had booted me into the Underworld, then led me back out again, transformed. After all, I had requested this back in October 2000 when I created a dance that bravely (foolishly? naively, for sure) proclaimed that I “wanted to understand the meaning of life.”8

Hoooo, boy. Careful whatcha wish for, girlie.

Because the Divine took me seriously.

Two months later, a drunk driver rammed me into a construction median, forcing me off the path I’d been on, and into an irreplaceable journey I wouldn’t give up, even if I could wave a magic wand and take away all my pain and suffering from it.

No way. I love my life, and I love who I have become as a result.

This was my first dance of gratitude and adoration.

O Goddess of Fortune
Like the moon
You are ever-changing
Ever waxing
And waning;
Hateful life
First oppresses
And then soothes
As it fancies;
Poverty
And power
It melts them like ice…

~O Fortuna from Carmina Burana by Carl Orloff

God is Great.

God, I love You…I love You…I love You…

O, light of my life, take my hand…
O, light of my life, take my hand…

God…God…God…

🙏💗🙏

~From Dub Yalil by Natacha Atlas

PLEASE NOTE: I didn’t experience a level of healing that took me back to my pre-crash state. In addition to permanent brain damage, I still had trauma-induced scoliosis, a reverse-curve in my neck, and lopsided hips. Bowen simply afforded me the ability to dance and return to martial arts on those injuries.

I would need another miraculous discovery to start actually moving bones back to where they belong—and to be able to hold them in place. We covered the first step in UPPER CERVICAL CHIROPRACTIC. Then I discovered NEURO-CHIROPRACTIC, which started realigning my spine and greatly reduced my seizures.

The other imperative factor came from finally shifting from trying to claw my way back to Who I Was Before into Acceptance of Who I Had Become. This changed my dancing. It changed my writing. It changed everything. But that is a topic all unto itself, and one that is an ever-evolving journey.

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The Table of Contents navigation for this whole journey of TBI and Bodily Injury Recovery

April 2005
32 years old

…I stand before the mirror in the changing stall of a martial arts training facility—a dojo—with my eyes on the floor. I’ve put on the loose white pants and matching white top. I’ve knotted the little ties that keep the crossed lapel in place. Finally, I draw in a deep breath and dare to look at my reflection.

All my hair stands up on the back of my neck. My eyes go huge. I don’t know where to file this in my mind. This uniform is the iconic image of all-too-familiar figures I grew up with.

—Bruce Lee
—Chuck Norris
—Daniel LaRusso

But I am no Karate Kid. I am 32 years old.

I may as well be twelve. Fourteen. Seven. Nineteen.

My heart races, four parts terror and six parts exhilaration. I’m wearing a karate uniform. ME!

In college I was engaged to a brilliant young man who was a Shotokan black belt, a state champion and a sensei, so it’s not like I don’t know what a gi is. But I never dreamed I would be dressed in one.

Okay, fine. I’ve dreamed about it since I was a kid, but it’s taken half a dozen friends more than a decade to convince me to put one on.

Before my thrill-to-terror ratio can think about flip-flopping, I turn my back on the mirror, and I enter the dojo.

My instructor is waiting for me in a similar outfit, except his pants are black. So is his belt. The one he carries is white, folded round and round itself. After removing the two rubber bands that hold it in place, he uncoils it and comes to stand before me, belt draped ceremoniously across his palms.

I look up at him and gulp.

He is tall and stern with a chest like a barrel and arms like oxen. This is not the Sensei of the dojo. This is “only” one of the most highly ranked students.

“Only.” Hah.

This man could snap me in half with his huge meathooks. Could probably decapitate me with a flick of his steely gaze. In the way he moves, in the calm hum of his energy and the coiled efficiency in his every breath, I can tell already. He knows how to handle a situation.

And yet, there is no menace in his expression. No gorilla-puffed ego-strutting. Just a simple take-no-shit directness that calms my every nerve.

I do really well with take-no-shit directness.

He looks straight into my eyes and says, “I will show you the proper way to tie this today. This is the single time anyone will ever put a belt on you. After this, you will only ever do it for yourself.“

With my mouth pressed tightly closed, I dip my head.

He places the center of the belt against my belly and wraps it around me, drawing the ends to the front. He then tucks, tugs, and ties so that that the loose lengths hang down evenly from the knot at my navel.

We both stare at those dangling ends for a moment.

They hang down past my knees.

His hard façade suddenly cracks, and he shrugs up a shoulder. “Well, I guess it was intended for somebody quite a bit bigger than you are. That’s all right. You’re not going to trip on them, so let’s get started.“

Squashing my chortle down inside my throat, I dip my head again and follow him to the edge of the main floor.

He puts his feet together, toes nearly touching the mat. His bladed hands press against the sides of his thighs as he hinges at the hips. His eyes remain focused on where he’s going: out to the center of that sacred space where he turns to face me. He nods at the mat in front of his feet and makes a beckoning gesture.

Modeling his movements, I come to stand before him. There he recites the Creed, which he has me echo, phrase by phrase. These words are inspiring and foreign, yet intrinsically familiar. They resonate with the most important things I’ve always believed in.

• Improvement of mind and body.

• Understanding of others.

• Understanding of ourselves.

• Self-discipline.

• Serenity.

• Patience.

• Honor.

I love the way these vows feel in my mouth. They are as comfortable as this cotton uniform.

I intend to use what I learn in class constructively and defensively, to help myself and my fellow person, and to never be abusive or offensive.

Isn’t this the very root of why I never fought back?

Beyond the fears of getting in trouble or getting my ass kicked if I’d tried to defend myself and failed, isn’t this ultimately what has always stayed my hand? The fear of becoming what had caused me so much harm. Because I have never been taught to fight. In fact, that had been strictly forbidden in my upbringing. I had been taught to turn the other cheek like a good Catholic girl. I had been taught to be nice like a good Minnesota girl. I didn’t have any big brothers encouraging me or whaling on me. No big sisters either, so any attempt I would have ever made to fight back would have been nothing but an explosion of blind, pent-up rage.

That was the last thing I would have ever wanted to unleash on anybody.

As it occurs to me that I am about to learn the arts of self-defense in a system that espouses the principles and codes of conduct that dwell at the core of me, I know already: I have made one of the best decisions of my life.

After we do a few exercises to warm up, my instructor shows me some stances that are similar to positions I’ve been doing for years in dance. They just have different names.

• Square Horse.

• Cat Stance.

• Closed Cat.

Then he puts one foot back, bends his knees, and lifts his hands in an unmistakable gesture.

My pulse thuds again. My stomach flip-flops. Once more, my eyes go huge and my teeth lock together. I don’t need him to say the words. I already know what stance that is. All my limbs and my racing heart are mortified at the thought of so much as putting my body into that position, much less using it.

And that is exactly why I’m here.

“This,“ he says, “is Fighting Stance.”

After less than two months of training, I asked my Sensei and two of his top Black Belts, including my main instructor, to help me edit my letter to the slimy Hollywood show producer who had spurred me onto this path to begin with.

Not only did I make the resignation of my position as head choreographer and performer official, pulling my dancers from the show along with me, but I also demanded $1000 as payment for the services I had rendered, and the show expenses I had paid out of my own pocket. I detailed the reasons why I was leaving—the horrible and unprofessional conditions he had subjected us to over and over throughout the production of that show, in spite of my insistence against them.

Last, I made it clear that he should cease his slanderous accusations that I had quit the show because I’d “had a breakdown,” unless he wanted to take it up in court. There’s a vast difference between stress-induced seizures from violation of my health stipulations that I had laid out since day one, versus the kind of breakdown he was describing to anyone who would listen.

That wasn’t my first rodeo with someone trying to use my disabilities to destroy my reputation and livelihood because I had stood up to them, but this time I wasn’t fresh off a new brain injury. Neither was I isolated from losing the majority of my friends, students, and gigs to the smear campaign, and I wasn’t already embroiled in a double nightmare of a civil and criminal suit against a drunk driver.1

This time, I was in fighting condition.

I had over four years of recovery under my belt, plus a husband, friends, a flourishing dance community, respect in the regional community at large, and I had just acquired new mentors to teach me how to defend myself. They all stood at my back as I mailed that certified manilla envelope with shaking hands and a queasy gut.

My ex-producer ignored me.

Once.

After writing a second communication outlining precisely which legal channels I would use to pursue the matter, I received a check in the mail within two days.

I put that money toward the second big theater show I produced with My Girls.

July 2005
32 years old

It’s my first belt test. I’m transitioning from White to Gold. For this chart I have had to learn the basic stances, hand strikes, kicks, and blocks, as well as five self-defense techniques and their variations.

There are only four adults testing tonight. The rest are children. As a White Belt in the Adult Beginner Class, I’m not used to standing toward the front of the line that rings the mat. Usually I’m way over on the far right end, or if it’s a really full class, I start out around the corner where the Little Dragons fidget today.

The youngest girl is only four, a tiny blonde thing with huge brown eyes. Her hair is tied up into pigtails, the kind I always coveted when I was that age.

Who would I have been if I’d started martial arts that young?

When I was that age, I was just as blonde as she is.

As I watch this little girl, my every episode of bullying, violence, abuse, and squirming capitulation rolls through my mind. But then I imagine each conclusion that would have been altered by the existence of that Little Dragon belt and everything beneath it. Everything ahead of it. The hours, the years, the sweat and blood and tears—so different from the kind shed while being a perpetual victim.

An eerie sensation rushes through me.

I am standing here, the fourth adult in line, yet I am simultaneously down at the end—and I am 3 feet tall. I’m wearing my 70s boy-haircut and I am staring up at all the instructors like they’re giants. In the forms of every girl standing between me and that Little Dragon, I can feel myself. The nine-year-old Orange Belt. The pair of six-year-old Green Belts. The thirteen-year-old Blue Belt.

And thirty-two-year-old me.

By embarking on this quest, I’ve shifted something. Not just the trajectory of my future life from this moment forward. They say time is not the linear thing we imagine it to be. By standing here in this white belt, about to elevate it to gold, I am performing Alchemy.

In making kintsugi of myself, I transform the cracks of my foundation into seams of gold.2

I repair my damaged spine with steel.

I calm my skittish heart that beats with the pulse of prey. I teach it to pump steadily.

I finally learn how to stand my ground.

In this very moment, I am rewriting my own history.

My conscious mind understands: I cannot go back and change anything that happened in my childhood. But something inside me understands on a deeper, more instinctual level that by doing this, I am altering everything about my past.

I don’t yet know how.

I don’t fully understand how that is even possible.

I only know with utter certainty that this is so.

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© 2020 Hartebeast

You can read along on the original post HERE.

This is PART 1. And yes. It’s the actual crash. Be warned. I don’t pull punches with this thing.

I also made a dance video about this one.

Links to all my writing, videos, shenanigans and the dancing in question can be found on my website:

HarteBeast.com

© 2025 Hartebeast

You can read along on the original post HERE.

I also made a dance video about the song that was eerily playing when this happened. It was Magic Shadow Show by Zaza.

Here is PART 2.

Links to all my writing, videos, shenanigans and the dancing in question can be found on my website:

HarteBeast.com

© 2025 Hartebeast

He’s cast me in the role of Kali, the Indian Goddess of Destruction (among other things).1 This has been a good exploration for me, as I haven’t danced with Her in many years. Even before I was hired as the primary choreographer for this multimedia variety show, that fiercer, fanged side of me had already been stirring again, rustling in the undergrowth.

Play with me... She whispers.

It’s been too long. I haven’t picked up a weapon except my dance sword since I hung up my armor and stopped doing Medieval reenactment six years ago. Not for lack of desire. I miss training like I’d miss a limb. Something just isn’t right without it in my life.

Granted, I left that society and had been thinking about getting into karate shortly before a drunk driver rammed me into a construction median, so martial combat was far beyond my reach for quite a few years. Then, once I regained the physical capacity to seek out a new type of training, I was just a little busy re-learning how to dance. How to read. How to speak while there was any sort of ambient noise. How to play finger cymbals while dancing.

Okay, let’s face it. How to clap on the friggin’ beat, much less return to that caliber of cymbal-clanging performing-monkey multitasking.

But now that restoring dance and basic functionality doesn’t gobble up the majority of my time and energy, and now that I can stay awake for more than four hours at a time pretty consistently, I can feel that old familiar pull toward the combative arts.

When I left the SCA, part of my decision revolved around how much my dance career was taking off, so although I ache every day and especially every night for setting my body into motion to live music under the stars around a bonfire, I have no reason to miss dance. Dance is my world.

But here with Kali whispering sweet-everythings across my sword and into my limbs, into my spine, into my gaze and breath, I remember what gutted me the most about leaving the SCA.

Learning to wield weapons and prevent others from wielding theirs against me.

Setting sword to music tides me over. I love the music for the sword dance in this show. I’ve got it mostly choreographed and will soon teach it to my students, six of whom are performing with me in this multi-art, fusion extravaganza designed by a producer/director who moved here from Los Angeles.

I can’t flippin’ wait!

Two weeks later…

We’re doing a photo shoot today, so Our Producer can start working on the advertisements. He prefers the blue-skinned rendition of Kali over all others, so he’s brought in his airbrushing machine to spray my body. Since my students aren’t being spray-painted, the pair who can make the shoot have a later call-time than I do.

By the time they arrive, we’re almost done making me blue.

From the corner of my eye, I see it. When they walk in to find me standing there in nothing but a thong, they recoil in shock.

I smile, remembering my own awkwardness with nudity at their age—they’re only eighteen and nineteen.2 Doing theater for so many years cured me of that, given how often cast members of any gender stripped down together backstage for quick costume changes.

In the hopes of setting my students’ minds at ease, I greet them like normal and launch into a casual conversation about the concept of the photo shoot. Their replies suggest that they’re taking it all in stride.

Groovy.

But then, when I about-face for the spraying of my left side, I can finally and fully see their expressions. Not when they look at me. They’re fine with me.

It’s when they glance at Our Producer that everything tightens. Contracts. They exchange sidelong looks with each other, flick their eyes back at him. Whenever he speaks to them, they squash their scowls into tense flickers of a smile, then go back to their pale-faced, round-eyed, teeth-clenched scrutiny.

My guts thrum in warning.

Because now I can’t un-notice it.

I also can’t un-feel it inside myself.

Their expressions scream everything that I have been stuffing down inside me for the last forty-five minutes. It’s just theater, it’s just theater, it’s just theater, I croon to my hackle-raised, alarm-clanging Inner Growler. I’ve had this on repeat to myself, over and over. It’s just art. It’s okay. It’s just art.

I am absolutely certain that Our Producer would give me the same assurances, probably in the same words, if I’d expressed any misgivings about being almost naked in front of him.

I have never been completely sold on this tall, toothy-grinned, Hollywood slickster, and now I see it in my students’ eyes. They are really not sold on him, on being here, and on watching him spray my body with blue paint.

Nudity is nothing to be ashamed of, my Inner Rebel reminds me. The prudes and priests and pinchy-faced pricks were all wrong when they bombarded you with that crap from the moment you were born. The human body is nothing to be ashamed of. My body is nothing to be ashamed of. And what if we WERE doing some sort of sexy photo shoot? Sex is not shameful. But we’re not even doing that. We just don’t want paint lines underneath my little dance top, and I can’t very well spray myself.

And yet…

Why didn’t he have his assistant paint you? my Inner Growler growls back.

I glance over at the assistant. She’s over at the desk, clacking away on the keyboard.

See? Because she’s doing her job. Now calm down and do yours.

A lifetime of unpleasant interactions descends upon me in a millisecond.

Don’t be such a prude.
So immature.
So unprofessional.
So uptight.
You’re always so tense about everything!
Just relax.
Take a chill-pill.
You need a valium.
Don’t take everything so seriously!

I lift my chin and pull my hair back tighter so Our Producer can get behind my ear. My guts have been churning since about ten minutes into this paint adventure. Now that I’ve given my hackles full license to convey their unrestrained bristle, my paranoia has kicked into overdrive.

Yeah? Well, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Or in this case, perv on you.

See what I mean? Sheesh! You are such a psycho-spaz. You think everybody’s out to get you.

I can hear the classic retort now. If I voiced my concerns, I would be lambasted for being the unprofessional, immature one. Wellllll, if you think this is pervy instead of an important part of being professional, that says more about you than it does about me.

And yet, I only know what I feel in my guts.

It’s not in the way he looks at me. It’s not really even the way he speaks to me. It’s definitely not in any of the words he says. He doesn’t make any inappropriate touches with his hands or even incidental body parts brushing mine.

But it’s there.

Seedy.

Lascivious.

A subtle thread of his energy oozes around me. He doesn’t stand overly close, but the part of him that’s invisible to the naked eye does. As he takes advantage of the visual scrutiny required to cover all my skin with the paint, that part of him runs tentacled hands up my torso, around my bare breasts, across my collar bones to breathe down my neck.

That part of him has fangs, too, and he’s been glutting himself.

But what can I say about that? I can’t prove it.

And you know you. You’ve got such an overactive imagination.
So theatrical.
Hyper-sensitive.
Drama-queen.
Psycho.
Crazy.
REE! REE! REE!

And nudity IS commonplace in theater and body art. I DO legitimately need to be stripped down for this effect to look right. His assistant has been here with us the whole time. She even comes over to help whenever needed. She hasn’t batted a single eye, hesitated, or exchanged alarmed glances with me.

Nothing.

Not once.

Maybe I truly am being paranoid, given my history of abuse, molestation, and sexual assault. Maybe my imagination really is running away with me. The girls are very young. Maybe we’re all overreacting…

And yet.

My body KNOWS what’s happening to it.

Not to my skin. To all the fine little hairs dancing in my intimate energy field, and to everything deeper than my flesh. I’ve been body-painted before, by males and females, and it NEVER felt like this.

As my students go into the back room to put their costumes on, they toss matching looks back at me, as if reluctant to leave me out here with him. I answer with an easy smile.

Reassuring.

I don’t want to scare them.

But there’s a piece of me that doesn’t want them to leave either.

That piece is my own innocent nineteen-year-old, still there inside me. And yes. She is as scared for me as they are. Another piece is an even more guileless thirteen. And the four-year-old.

Those little girls inside me don’t want my students to leave.

But we’re almost done with the body painting. Just a little more of my lower left leg, and finally I can cover up my tits-n-bits with the costume.

Alas. During the photo shoot, the tentacles multiply. We’re all fully dressed now, but my students still squirm. They put on the Professional Face, just like I do, cooperating with Our Producer’s instructions. Nothing lewd or suggestive. He doesn’t ask us to pose in any way that I would be hesitant to show my parents.

Even so, when we head into the back room, all three of us are very quiet as we dress in our street clothes and leave. Out on the sidewalk under the street lights next to our cars, we arrange the schedules for our next rehearsal.

We don’t say a word about the body painting or the photo shoot.

Energetically and in our huge-eyed gazes, we are a flock of wing-flapping, feather-ruffled, squawkers: What the fuck was that! I don’t ever want to do that again! Yeah, me neither! I don’t like this anymore! Please don’t ever make me do this again! Okay, fuck this, we’re OUT!

It’s not only me and my two students who have this conversation in our looks and everything we don’t say. It’s me and them and every little girl inside us, screaming and frothing at the mouth.

I’m the one in charge here.

I’m supposed to be the responsible adult.

The teacher.

I just taught my students, all right. I taught them to suck it up. I taught them that the Show Must Go On, no matter what. I taught them how to spackle on the smiley, placid-sacrificial-cow-face for the sake of “professionalism.” You wanna talk about cows?

After returning home, I hunch in the dark on my couch with a couple candles lit, fuming. Shaking. Queasy. This is how I always get when I think about fighting back. Standing up and saying something I know is doing to piss people off.

Don’t rock the boat.
Don’t borrow trouble.
Don’t kick the hornets’ nest.
Don’t make waves.
If I don’t move, they won’t see me.

Blowing out the candles, I slink to bed and pull the covers over my head.

The next morning, the rage is still there. Actually, it’s amplified. Silly him, he shouldn’t have cast me as Kali. She has been working on me all night. Her sword is meant to destroy that which no longer serves.

• Being a doormat.

• Being a Nice Girl.

• Being everybody’s punching bag.

• Being a blowup doll that guys feel entitled to grope.

• Even if it it’s only with their eyes and their energy.

• Staying silent when I should speak up.

• Letting untrustworthy people get close enough to harm me.

• Letting untrustworthy people anywhere near my students.

• Letting bosses and other larger or older or stronger people encroach, nudge up, touch, drape arms, give the eyes, run the leers up and down, make the innuendos, and generally tentacle me because they can get away with it.

I always have.

Can’t prove the Curious Case of Tentacles in a court of law beyond a shadow of a doubt? Better keep your mouth shut. Can’t prove what I sense? Shhhh. Can’t prove what my guts are screaming? Zip it.

And yet.

Something has shifted inside me. Today, I no longer give two reeking piles.

These things no longer serve. Their heads require lopping. It was bad enough when I let him do to me.

My beautiful, innocent, precious little sisters—my dance-daughters—and I will NEVER again let anybody make them squirm like that and get away with it. I will never model this shrinking, fawning, placating, Nice Girl bullshit ever again. I will never take that crap without standing up, placing one hand on my scabbard as I wrap the other around the hilt of my sword, and growl with unyielding clarity, “NO, YOU WILL NOT.”

Not on my fucking watch.

All the little girls inside me beg to be included in that vow, so I drape my big ole claw-armed paws around their shoulders and I take them with me. We march into the kitchen. I pull out the hefty phonebook. I thump it down on the desk and flip through pages until I come to the category of Martial Arts. Raising my chin, I close my eyes and I ask.

Show me.

Guide me.

Where?

My pointer-finger lands on the phonebook. I open my eyes.

Huh.

Apparently I’m going to learn something called Kempo.3

Two days later

I stand before the mirror in the changing stall of a martial arts training facility—a dojo—with my eyes on the floor. I’ve put on the loose white pants and matching white top. I’ve knotted the little ties that keep the crossed lapel in place. Finally, I draw in a deep breath and dare to look at my reflection.

All my hair stands up on the back of my neck. My eyes go huge. I don’t know where to file this in my mind. This uniform is the iconic image of all-too-familiar figures I grew up with.

• Bruce Lee

• Chuck Norris

• Daniel LaRusso

But I am no Karate Kid. I am 32 years old.

I may as well be twelve. Fourteen. Seven. Nineteen.

My heart races, four parts terror and six parts exhilaration. I’m wearing a karate uniform. ME!

In college I was engaged to a brilliant young man who was a Shotokan black belt, a state champion and a sensei, so it’s not like I don’t know what a gi is. But I never dreamed I would be dressed in one.

Okay, fine. I’ve dreamed about it since I was a kid, but it’s taken half a dozen friends more than a decade to convince me to put one on.

Before my thrill-to-terror ratio can think about flip-flopping, I turn my back on the mirror, and I enter the dojo.

UP NEXT: KARATE KIDS - I and all my inner little girls put on a white belt for the first time. This will alter the trajectory of my whole life. It also changes my history.

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RELATED POSTS:

You can read along—and yes, hear both of those songs I mentioned—on the original post HERE.

Links to all my writing, videos, shenanigans and the dancing in question can be found on my website:

HarteBeast.com

© 2025 Hartebeast

👹 WARNING: we’re not pulling punches today. Not with predators. Not with jerks. And especially not with my bullshit psychological ruts that allow them to keep shark-circling in my happy, shiny, artsy-fartsy lagoon.

👹 Consider yourself warned before you venture into these here waters.

👹 Yarrrr!

Continued from:
—THE SHOW MUST GO ON - The Hookah Bar Incident that eventually led to knee surgery
—MR. SIDEMOUNT - I can’t stop telling guys NO, therefore they can’t seem to stop damaging my body

Quick recap if you’re new around here:

May 18, 2019
46 years old

How in the heck did I get here with my knee packed in ice? As I wait for my chiropractor to get back from vacation, praying that he’ll have time to squeeze me in for an emergency appointment, I make a flow chart to answer that most baffling question. Then I start analyzing it.

So how in the BLEEP did I get here?

Oh.

That’s how.

• Getting rammed into a construction median by a drunk driver damaged my brain, spine and hips. (The hip bone’s connected to the…)

• The second rear-ending that re-injured everything listed above, and also strained my knees.

• That assault because she thought I was screwing her husband. (I wasn’t.)

• That other assault because he knew my knees weren’t quite healed and he was mad at me. (I had told him NO.)

• That other assault by Mr. Sidemount.

• Hmmmmm…

• Methinks there be a pattern here…

Let Us Investigate, Precious.

When Mr. Sidemount tore my neck and shoulders apart after I shut down his inappropriate come-on in the middle of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, my spine warped again, which pulled my pelvis back out of place. Boom, hip injury.

But it was healing. Everything was healing. Again.

Until that night at the hookah bar.

• After the owner shut my performance music off mid-song and started playing his.

• After he stabbed NEXT on his playlist two minutes into the song he picked because he hated my costume and dancing.

• After he stabbed NEXT only forty seconds into that song.

• When I learned that my “friend” had sent me to that show, swearing that she’d told him what kind of dancing I do and that I wouldn’t be wearing the sparkly, slinky costume of a traditional nightclub dancer.

• She hadn’t told him jack-squat.

Any one of those moments would have provided a suitable reason for me to politely and firmly exit that crappy situation—to employ everything I’ve ever been taught about self-defense, self-value, self-protection, self-love.

But just because you’ve been taught something and understand the concept cerebrally doesn’t mean that you’ll execute it flawlessly when it comes time to use it once you’ve gone live in the stressful situation.

Theme song of my life.

Blah.

• I should have left that dojo when I was a Purple Belt (the belt just before Brown)—the day he looked me straight in the eye and lied to cover his ass.

  • I knew in my guts that he was lying. I just couldn’t prove it.

  • Yet.

  • Confirmation would come a few years later when he finally admitted it.

• I should have walked—no. sprinted—the first time he grabbed my wrist like that and torqued. He looked me straight in the eye and lied, too. Oh, how affronted he was that I would accuse him of hyperextending my elbow purposely because he walked into the dojo mad at me for something that had nothing to do with martial arts.

  • I fucking KNEW.

  • But I couldn’t prove it.

  • Yet.

So I let them all convince me that I was being paranoid. That accidents happen. That they’d known him longer than I did and were certain that he didn’t have it in him to do something so vindictive.

Wrong.

He eventually confirmed my gut instincts, too, the day he laughed at my conflict resolution strategies, then threatened me with far worse.

By then it was too late.

Just like with Mr. Sidemount.

• I should have refused to work with him in BJJ, in light of our past personal history.

  • But we were in a public space.

  • (Like that has ever stopped any of them before.)

Plus, he wasn’t Mr. Sidemount yet. He was just a fellow student I’d worked with enthusiastically and productively since I’d first arrived in that dojo. But then I put my foot down about a bunch of bullshit he had pulled while we were boinking, so he had discarded me like the sock that is so nasty it’s not even worth the energy to wash.

Afterwards, he had seemed to remain professional with me, like I was with him. He had seemed to be fine with simply going our separate ways except when we happened to run across each other in class.

Seemed.

• When he came onto me in that icky, creepy voice while he had me pinned beneath him on the mat, I should have shrimped out from under him, told my instructor I needed to talk to him in private, and made a stink right then and there. And if Coach didn’t boot him for such inappropriate conduct, I should have walked out the flippin’ door.

• I mean that in the broadest sense, not just for that day.

• But that place was my home-away-from-home.

  • Alas. He had been surreptitiously setting up the Smear Campaign for months, and I have enough learning issues, disabilities, injuries, and eccentricities that I was already branded as “crazy.”

  • “Weak.”

  • “Broken.”

  • “A pain in the butt to teach” because in spite of my issues I refuse to stop trying to learn how to defend myself on the body I have instead of the one I had in my twenties and thirties.

  • I was afraid to add “tattle-tale” to that list.

  • “Boat-rocker.”

  • “Drama Queen.”

  • “Paranoid.”

• The second they believed Mr. Sidemount over me, I should have left peel-out rubber-burns in that parking lot.

  • But “quitters are weak.”

  • “Can’t hack it.”

  • “Aren’t REEEAL martial artists.”

  • Prove that “females don’t belong in martial arts.”

  • “Neither do the disabled.”

  • “Neither does anybody over forty.”

• Plus, I was still operating under the naive, idealistic faith that all I had to do to combat his smear campaign was continue to be my best self, and then they’d see the difference between us.

Good one.

Mr. Sidemount had gotten to tell his side first, and he’d already been laying the charges to blast my rep to smithereens in the months before he assaulted me, so this incident was chalked up to “a training accident” and I wound up “confirming that I was crazy.”

“Unstable.”

“Damaged.”

“Drama Queen.”

“Weak Can’t Hack It Wussy Pussy.”

But I had KNOWN what I was seeing in his eyes just before he did it, and now I know him well enough to be certain.

• Neither was what she did to my knees.

• Neither was what he did to my elbow.

• And the other elbow.

• Neither was what he did to my knee.

• Neither was what he did to my skull, my neck, and the entire trajectory of my life with one double-punch of his fist.

• Neither was what the drunk driver did when she climbed into her car wasted, turned the ignition, and hit the gas, then hit me.

• Neither was what the druggie did when she climbed into her car high, turned the ignition, and the hit the gas, then hit me.

• Neither was what he did with his dick and my asshole—oopsie-woopsie! Harharhar. Wrong hole there, sorreeeey…

Yeah, go fuck yourself with your “oopsie-woopsie” and your glinting malevolence, way back there in the depths of your gaze as it laughs at me, salivates over my pain, and feeds.

• I should have gotten out of his shower right then and there, put my clothes back on, and walked out, telling him to lose my phone number forever.

  • But I had wet hair and no hat, and it was January in Minnesota.

  • I was wearing a short dress and high heels from a party, and had gotten chilled to the bone on the way over.

  • I was slightly more than buzzed on two wine coolers, brandy-new drinker that I was.

  • Upon my arrival, he was already pretty loaded from being at his own New Year’s party.

  • (If I made a stink and tried to leave, would he let me?)

  • (They don’t always let you leave once you’re nekkid and they’re hard.)

  • (shhhh…if I don’t move, he won’t see me. just smile. be nice.)

  • (if we be nice to them, they be nice to us. yes, precious.)

  • Yeahhhh, he really did mean it when he said he was sorry—that it was an accident. Right?

  • RIGHT?!

Because all I had to do was look beyond the surface smile. Which I did. He was laughing at me, too. Leering. Drooling. Questioning: will you let me push you this way? How about this? Can I get away with that? Yes? Yummy.

I saw all of that right there, glinting in the back of his eyes. I pretty much can’t NOT see this stuff, so I knew it in my guts. I FUCKING KNEW.

• But I couldn’t prove it.

• Yet.

• And if you can’t prove it but you make the accusation, you’re “mean.”

• “A drama queen.”

• “Just stirring up trouble.”

• “Paranoid.”

• “Crazy.”

• “Psycho.”

Nine months later, I would be wondering why the heck I was suicidal. Ummmm…those would be the repressed memories, darling. You’ll get those back in four years, in a most unpleasant and violent way, and it’ll blow your whole life apart.

Again.

So that Hookah Bar Incident?

Did my “friend” just thoughtlessly withhold telling the owner what kind of dancer he should expect to come save his bacon that night? Or did she set me up intentionally? Were her actions self-serving and careless, or self-serving and downright malicious?

No clue.

Doesn’t matter.

We have two facts:

• She lied to get what she wanted, and I paid the price for it, not her. So did the owner of the hookah bar. So did everybody in the audience that night.

• This is not the action of a friend.

So now a year-and-a-half later, I’m sitting here with my knee packed in ice, unable to put an ounce of weight on it, and she still dances at that hookah bar.

• The moment my hip ignited into flames during the second song, I should have sashayed my way over to the sound system, stabbed STOP on my phone, and called up my original playlist, saying, “Fuck it. I am not worsening my injury just for a freaking party in a midsize bar full of people who don’t like my dancing anyway.”

• And if he changed my music again, I should have walked out.

• But I didn’t.

• “Quitters are weak.”

  • “Unprofessional.”

  • “Unreliable.”

• “Females are weak.”

  • “Unstable.”

  • “Flakey.”

  • “Flighty.”

  • “Drama queens.”

• “People over 40 are weak.”

  • “Over the hill.”

  • “All washed up.”

  • “Should hang up their dance shoes.”

  • “Get some cats.”

  • “Drink some tea.”

  • “Get the bleep outta the way.”

• “Disabled people are weak.”

  • “Worthless-eaters.”

  • “Need to pull up their bootstraps.”

  • “Need to suck it up.”

  • “Parasites.”

  • “Unreliable.”

  • “Broken.”

  • “Shoddy.”

  • “Don’t deserve to be paid.”

  • “Don’t deserve to breathe air.”

  • “Survival of the fittest, yo.”

• So I tried to back off. I didn’t hit the hip-pops as hard. I made my moves smaller.

• I tried to power it all with my good leg.

• I varied the types of shimmies I did.

• I kept the smile plastered across my grimace of pain for the gazillionth time as I switched to a whole boatload of shoulder shimmies.

Didn’t matter.

It was still:

• a concrete floor

• twenty minutes straight of fast music

• my body with all its injuries

• my legs already fatigued from teaching a shimmy workshop several hours before

• and the kicker: my old People Pleaser, Doormat, Punching Bag, Never Rock the Boat, Never Make A Scene, Suck It Up Buttercup, You Pull Up Those Bootstraps Missy, Never Make Anybody Go Out of Their Way, Never Let Anybody Down, Never Let Them See You Cry or Quit or Wince or Limp or Flinch, Never Say Die Because You Don’t Deserve To Be Loved or Liked or Hired or Paid Money Unless You’re Perfectly, Fabulously, Happy-Horny-Helpful BULLSHIT psychological ruts.

So I danced with everything I had left. Then I gave just a little bit more.

And so.

What’s it going to take?

Will this crap have to kill me before I finally learn the lesson?

It’s already starting to. The condition of my precious brain is proof of that. The destruction of my career and of the career shifts I’d hoped to make as an aging dancer are also proof. Wonderful timing, as we march steadily into another world where being disabled gets you put on the “Needs To Be Exterminated” list.

How bad do things have to get before I stop gaslighting my own instincts because I can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what I KNOW in my guts?

Yet.

And why should I have to stay in a detrimental situation until I can muster up proof that will satisfy other people who are arm-chair-quarterbacking my life and throwing popcorn at me from the cheap seats?

I HAVE proven to myself over and over and over and again that my gut instincts are sound. In fact, whenever I’ve had That Certain Feeling, my instincts have never—NOT ONCE IN MY WHOLE LIFE—been proven unsound.

So when will that sensation finally be enough to send me skidding to a halt and bolting from the premises?

Yes. Thus proving myself a quitter.

How much more damage do I have to “bootstrap and suck up” before I stop calling myself “weak” and “a drama queen who’s just stirring up trouble” whenever my guts scream that someone is being careless with me at best, and possibly malicious?

When will I finally stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they haven’t earned it through longevity of trustworthy interaction? When will I believe that this doesn’t make me:

• “mean”

• “a bad person”

• “closed off to connection”

• “not a team player”

• “stuck up”

• “conceited”

• “elitist”

• “thinks she’s too good for us”

What’s it going to take before I start leaving communities, relationships and situations at the

How much longer before I start valuing myself more than fearing the repercussions of :

• Saying NO

• Standing up for myself

• Making a stink

• Looking like I’m “paranoid and crazy” when I trust what my guts are whispering to me more than I trust what people are flapping from their cake holes?

👹 When will I trust what I SEE lurking in the backs of their eyes?

👹 When will I trust what I FEEL in the way the air vibrates around their bodies?

👹 When will I trust what I HEAR in that niggling voice that tells me someone does not have my best interest at heart?

👹 When will I trust what I SCENT when I’m nose-to-nose with a predator and I fucking KNOW it?

👹 When will I trust the fumes of bile that I TASTE in the back of my throat when I SENSE that I am in danger before I can prove it to anybody outside my body?

I’ll tell you what it will take.

It will take a pandemic that shuts down the world, combined with elderly, immunocompromised parents who decide to go the Isolation Route. It will take my ferocious love of them and my protective nature roaring to the forefront. Since my parents and I are so intimately connected, and since I blessedly had the ability to isolate and still keep eating, I took that route alongside them.

It only took a couple weeks for the relief to hit me like a tsunami.

Having the majority of my human contact yoinked out of my life overnight left me with an overwhelming sense of calm and peace that showed me just how toxic the majority of my relationships were. Even after all those decades of therapy, self-help books, videos, mantras, affirmations, meditations, martial arts classes, and endless work on MyHashtagIssues…

It took a global ass-whupping by a microscopic badass to finally slam it into my dysfunctional brain.

Within a couple months of isolating in my cave, I experienced my nervous system calm down for the first time in my life. As such, I became unwilling to ever again give up that peace just to “keep the peace.”

Within a couple years of hanging out mostly with myself, my arts, nature, and the tiny, ever-dwindling circle of people who genuinely care about me, I finally began to hear my own instincts—not just whispering or screaming from the depths of the dungeon where I had banished them—but blaring like a loudspeaker at the tiniest hints of red-flag. Without the constant static of being surrounded by nay-sayers, “smiling” abusers, and people whose words do not match up with their actions and intentions, the signals sent from my body and psyche became clear.

The more I practice listening to those signals—

—the better I get at it. It’s a work in progress. I’m not remotely perfect at it. I’m actually highly inconsistent. But this is where all that “don’t be a quitter” comes in handy. Because I still find icky pockets where I look back, smack my forehead and groan, “UGH. Did it again.” This will probably be something I train at for the entirety of my life, because this crap started before I even had words.

It actually started while I was being brewed up in my mother’s womb. It started in my father’s ballsack, and was reinforced by the world into which I was born. It started in my grandparents’ blood and in the bones of their great-grandparents.

I’ve been told over and over for decades that the things I do are the kinds of things that bring healing to—not only me and therefore everyone and everything that I come into contact with—but that they heal generational trauma.

Sa-weet!

That is the intention.

I still cause accidental damage. Of course I do, I’m still breathing. Still growing. Still learning.

But it’s way better than it used to be.

Yeah, I should totally hang up my dance shoes, shouldn’t I? Crotchety, washed-up, weak, broken, old hag that I am. ✨ 🖕🤣🖕 ✨

I shot this random improv piece two month after the world shut down in 2020 when silence and solitude descended over my life like a hammer, teaching me how to truly breathe for the first time in my life.

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UP NEXT: How a dance extravaganza’s body painting fiasco finally led me to study martial arts.

© 2025 Hartebeast

THOSE THINGS I DO

Just can’t figure out a way to distill, bottle, and package it for the consumption of anybody else besides myself. Yet. Maybe you’ll come over and play with me. Play with my toys & tools. Help me figure that out? That sounds fun.

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist

Creation & Innovation. Art & Nature. Curiosity & Play. Experiments with my Dance of Elemental Alchemy and the creative process it spawned. Welcome to Hartebeast Lair!

By Alexx Hart

Since Substack wasn’t designed for those of us who write serial fiction or other long-form series, we jerry-rig the threads of our interwoven tapestries in navigation posts like this one, for your ease. I recommend bookmarking this page. Because my stuff really is meant to be read more like a choose-your-own-adventure book, rather than as individual unrelated articles.

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You can also track your reading progress with the app’s nifty e-reader.

Read null in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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In this Table of Contents, I will be compiling all my dancealicious adventures from both this memoir publication, Bella & the Beast, as well as from my art & nature publication, Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist.

My dance journey is one of the things that has been instrumental in my greatest healing, and that healing sets the rhythms of my dance. All my arts, really. Plus, I fuse my martial training and the variety of storytelling forms I pursue into my dancing all the time.

That’s why I have segregated these two publications, so those of you who want to stay with me in the bright, shiny, more SFW lagoon of art & nature can snorkel and splash to your heart’s delight over in Tinkerings.

There you can also explore my Elements System and How To DIY this stuff:

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist

Creation & Innovation. Art & Nature. Curiosity & Play. Experiments with my Dance of Elemental Alchemy and the creative process it spawned. Welcome to Hartebeast Lair!

By Alexx Hart

Bella & the Beast is for those who prefer things full-spectrum and uncensored. Here you can dive as deeply as you wish in your quest to discover the answers to those most frequently asked questions: “How did you learn to dance the way you do?” and “Where did your dance style come from?” and “How can I dance like you do?” Because it often isn’t dance lessons that taught me the things that drop people’s jaws, bring them to ecstatic tears, or propel them onto their feet in standing ovations. (*deep bow*)

It’s my life.

Dance is merely one of the biggest ways in which I navigate it and express what I’ve experienced.

You’ll know which seas we’re sailing by the symbol that bullet-lists each episode:

• ✨ Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist (SFW)

• 👹 Bella & the Beast (potentially NSFW)

This page will be updated as I get all the episodes migrated from Ye Olde Blog, and start in on the stuff I never got to share before moving to Substack. (Any posts that don’t yet have active links are the ones that I’m still working on migrating. Think of them as teasers, yarrrr!)

Ahoy! And welcome aboard.

FAQs & INTROS

• ✨ DANCESTORY - FAQs: Origins & Evolutions

• ✨ WELCOME TO THE PLAYGROUND - Careful. We artists can be dangerous. And healing.

• 👹 DAMSEL TO DANGEROUS: For decades, people have been telling me that I’ll never be a professional dancer again, due to the injuries and assaults I’ve suffered. My response: WATCH ME. 🔥⚔️🔥

  • FAQs: PART 1 and PART 2 of this transformation

  • Dance, storytelling & martial arts have literally saved my life. The interweaving of these passions with art & nature are what has made me who I am. These two videos are an introduction and overview of the kinds of tales that lie within:

• 👹 DANCES WITH SWORDS - FAQs: The lineage of my swords, wielding them, and their place in my dancing.

• ✨ ME & MY BIG SKIRTS - FAQs: Ruffles & Ripples & Spouts, oh my!

• ✨ IT STARTED AS A PERFECTLY INNOCENT DANCE TEACHING SYSTEM. THEN IT SPAWNED - What exactly IS the 5 Elements System in the Alchemist’s Lab? Here’s your gateway.

• 👹 DRAWING ROOM - how dancing the shapes of circles and infinities transforms my life.

THE BASE FOUNDATION

• ✨ THE LURE OF BELLY DANCE - At 19 years old in 1992, I get cast as a “Polynesian Dancer” for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and discover my life’s career. I bleep you not. A Shakespearean play. With Polynesian dancers.

  • 🎧 Audio Version & YouTube Version

• ✨ SOLID GOLD DANCER, BABY! - A dance-nerd is born! In the ‘70s, can you dig it?

  • 🎧 Audio Version & YouTube Version

• ✨ THAT ONE TIME I WAS RAD - Because yes, this nerd can dance. Back to the ‘80s, dude.

  • 🎧 Audio Version & YouTube Version

• 👹 INFILTRATING THE BASE - How the rebel-reject accidentally became a cheerleader.

MY COLLEGIATE TRAINING

• ✨ UGLY DUCKLINGS, SWANS & BIRDS OF DIFFERENT FEATHERS - BellaDancer takes Ballet — finds skirt dancers, Isis wings & Loie Fuller instead.

• ✨ IZZY & ISADORA - DUNCAN THAT IS - one of my most inspirational dance she-roes who helped pioneer Modern Dance

• ✨ *ALSO* A BELLY DANCER: JAZZ DANCE - “She’s not a reeeeal belly dancer. There’s more Jazz in her than anything.” Let’s analyze this.

• ✨ IN SEARCH OF MISSING BLACK MUSES - The shock of learning just how much was omitted from my earliest dance history instruction.

  • ✨ BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, SILLY, SAVVY - In search of The Shimmy’s roots, I discover Josephine Baker. Theater meets dance. Theater was my original major, after all.

  • ✨ CHAIN BREAKER, TREND MAKER, MIND WAKER - Falling in love with La Baker

• ✨ FROM SHIM-SHAM TO SHIMMY - The threads of Tap and Swing Dance in my (and others’) belly dancing

• ✨ THREE GRACES, MANY MUSES: RELAX, BREATHE, FLOW & PLAY - More lessons from Isadora Duncan, and from my cherished students.

• 👹 BRAVE: THOSE EFFING PURPLE DANCE SACKS - That awful day when we had to dance inside those Graham-inspired, stretch-knit, purple sacks.

• 👹 IN THE FISHBOWL - Inside that awful purple sack, my meticulously fortified dam breaks, spilling All The ME onto the stage. In public.

• MARY WIGMAN & EXPRESSIONIST DANCE:

  • ✨ AN EXPRESSION, A SPEAKING OUT - Another of my Early Modern Dance great-grandmothers, and one of the pioneers of Dance Therapy.

  • ✨ SECRETS THAT LIE HIDDEN - When it’s too dangerous to speak the words, that’s why we have dance.

  • ✨ LETTING THE RIVER FLOW - After choke-chaining myself for too long in the wake of attack and censorship, I finally let it all come out. And not only through the silent expression of dance.

  • ✨ THE HUMAN HAND CAN ACTUALLY BLOOM - After years of estrangement, my first belly dance teacher is blown away by all these hands movements she never taught me. Some of them? Nobody else had either. Or…at least…nobody currently in a body…

• 👹 DRAMA QUEEN - In the wake of predatory violence, I am left incapable of playing The Game for my Theater Major. Or…functioning.

• 👹 DRAMA QUEEN 2 - I bail on my Theater Major, but learn a crucial key to great acting. And self-protection.

BABY BELLY DANCER

• ✨ BABY BELLY DANCER - My first belly dance class: sparkly version.

• 👹 THE UNCENSORED VERSION - how my discovery of belly dancing literally saved my life. But in order for that to make sense, we need to go back into some of the deepest, darkest waters in my history. No muck: no lotus.

  • 👹 DYE JOB 1: PINK, GOLD, BERRY BLUSH - I discover the Stairway To Heaven in my freshman dorm room.

  • 👹 DYE JOB 2: PAINT IT BLACK - When everything changed in my freshman year of college.

  • 👹 DYE JOB 3: WINE, BLOOD-RED, TEAL - Darker still. A jock-walking tomboy experiments with femininity. Just don’t drink the wine, Star. Because this Lost Boy is a blood-sucking creature of the night, and he’ll turn you into one, too.

  • 👹 DYE JOB 4: PURPLE, BLACK & BLUE - How a coin & fringed bra saved my life.

  • 👹 BABY BELLADANCER - My first belly dance class uncensored. The truth of why it was so crucial and revolutionary in my life.

• ✨ A TOMBOY’S MOST TENTATIVE SPARKLE - My first belly dance costume

• ✨ IRON WILL: THE MOVIE I WAS ALMOST IN - I become a pro belly dancer instead.

• 👹 BELLY DANCERS SHOULD BE 🔥HAWT!🔥 (don’t you DARE be too hawt.) - I lose my teacher just when I need her most and become that most dastardly of dancers: the 8-week wonder.

• 👹 🔥HAWT!🔥 PART 2: KISMET - I‘m destined to become a dance innovator—by necessity, not by my original choice.

• 👹 THAT TIME I BELLY DANCED FOR MACAULAY CULKIN - Right after he got dropped off a cliff.

• ✨ MAYA: DANCE, DRUMS, DREAMS - I discover Medieval reenactment through the Society of Creative Anachronism, and embark upon my first time dancing around a bonfire beneath the stars with bare feet on the ground and the wind in my hair. (I also start fighting in armor and acquire my first dance sword.)

• 👹 BONFIRE MEETS SHADOW - a dance of enticement around the fire

• 👹 BELLY DANCERS: 🐍luts, Priestesses, H😱🤩chies & G😈ddesses

  • 👹 “NEVER DANCE TO THIS SONG! - It’s About A Prostitute.” And other lies.

  • 👹 “BELLY DANCE IS *NOT* SEXUAL! - It’s Sensual.” And other myths.

  • 👹 “C’MON, YOU’RE A BELLY DANCER! - Of course you want me to cop a feel as I tip you.” And other belly dance classics.

  • 👹 “REEEAL DANCERS DON’T...” - A fighter-jock Duke armchair-lectures me about dance. I nod vacuously. Then I dance.

HEROES, SHE-ROES, VILLAINS & SIDECHICKS

• ✨ ORIENTALIST DREAMS - Following in the footsteps of Ruth St. Denis

• ✨ THE ORIENTALISTS: ORIGINS & INSPIRATIONS - What IS Orientalism? And how it impacted my dancing.

  • 👹 THE GREAT WHITE BELLY DANCER WAR OF 2014 - And how it finally finished off my career.

    • 👹 IF *I’M* NOT WHITE ENOUGH?! - Then yeah, Houston, we have a problem.

    • 👹 IF *I’M* NOT WHITE ENOUGH?! PART 2 - A French Canadian in Colorado vs. Minnesota

    • 👹 WELL, CRAP. NOW I’M TOO WHITE. PART 3 - My CON-fuse-ing search to find home.

• ✨ THE CHARACTERS WHO MADE ME - My most inspiring heroes, she-roes, and some…ahem…protagonists of questionable morals

• ✨ VILLAINS & SIDECHICKS - The other characters who made me

• ✨ MATA HARI: DANCER, COURTESAN, TEMPTRESS, SPY - Also Wife. Mother. Battered Woman. Divorcee when you just didn’t do that.

• ✨ PASSION *IS* PRAYER - Veronica Franco, Ishmael, and the Roots of Eve-il

• ✨ SALOME: DANCE OF THE 7 VEILS - Strippers & Satins & Silks, oh my!

• ✨ SALOME 2 - Vicious temptress! Uh…ancient Shirley Temple?

• ✨ CLEOPATRA’S ROSE - Learning to dance and battle my way back like the nearly-nekkid, dethroned, exiled Queen of the Nile

• ✨ DESCENT TO THE UNDERWORLD - That Inanna & Ereshkigal duet I did with the inestimable Ariellah

BEYOND BELLY DANCING: BECOMING BELLADANCER

• 👹 SURRENDERING TO NOAH’S ARC - the most valuable lesson I learned while revisiting Swing Dance—relax, surrender, flow.

• 👹 ENTER THE DOJO - How a dance extravaganza’s body painting fiasco finally led me to study martial arts.

• ✨ THE SAMURAI SWORD - A balance of Yang & Yin

• ✨ MUTTS, HACKS & BASTARDS: The Creative Brain and being an innovator

• ✨ SPANISH FLARE - The Fire Sign finally gets to study Flamenco and Mexican Folklorico.

• ✨ DANCE WITH YOUR BODY, NOT YOUR FACE! - My ecstatic relief upon discovering the Bollywood sensation, Mahduri Dixit, Queen of the Facial Expression.

• ✨ THE MUSE IN THE MOON - My journey with Lindsey Stirling

TRAVEL, TRIALS, TRAVAILS, TRIUMPHS

• 👹 “AREN’T YOU SPECIAL?” - A disabled, Dain-Bramaged dancer gets invited to share the stage with MegaStars

• 👹 BLAM - MY DANCE WITH A DRUNK DRIVER - On the way home from a show, I get rammed into a construction median.

• 👹 THE DANCER & THE MUSICIAN - Six weeks before my big car wreck, I fall in love while performing at a super-swank, highfalutin’ show where everything goes wrong.

• 👹 RISE…FALL…PHOENIX - I create a dance about “wanting to understand the meaning of Life.” Careful what you wish for.

• 👹 MELTING DOWN LIKE PRIS - While studying Flamenco after my big car wreck, my bashed brains short-circuit. In public. Which taught me the delicate arts of listening to my body’s pleas.

• 👹 THE SHOW MUST GO ON - How I tore my meniscus, then really tore it. Because sometimes old habits die hard.

  • 👹 SHATTER ME - the perfect storm of assault, betrayal, lies, and my old People Pleaser tendencies

  • 👹 THE HOOKAH BAR INCIDENT - in the eye of that storm

  • 👹 SUCK IT UP - ON WITH THE SHOW - On being professional, dependable, reliable & tenacious - to a fault. (a.k.a. being a recovering people pleaser, punching bag, and doormat)

  • 👹 HOW I *SUPER* TORE MY MENISCUS - with one stupid skirt-flick while attempting to put my Dancing the Elements onto video.

• BIRDS OF PARADISE:

  • I’M…TOO SEXY FOR MY COIN BRA - *NOT!* I get cast in a show by a big-name video producer who doesn’t like me, my muscular martial artist body, my costumes, or my dancing.

  • THE BIRDS OF PARADISE AND THE RAVEN - They’re all so gorgeous and glamorous. And then there’s me, tromping & swearing & yukking it up with Tech Krew in the loading dock.

  • IZZY IZ A PIRATE! YARRRR! - When all my disability limitations get violated and my local dance sisters get trampled on, I walk off-stage, leading a dancer mutiny.

  • BEN-GAY & BED-SHAKES - In the few hours between tech rehearsal and makeup call, I can’t sleep because I’m having too many seizures.

  • VELOCITY - During a live video shoot in a packed auditorium, my brain collapses. Then I find a whole new level of thruster tanks inside myself.

  • LOCAL-YOKEL IZ A JOKAL - A talent agent writes an awful review about my performances in that DVD. When the dance she hated most shocks us all by catapulting me into national and then international acclaim, she tries to woo me into hiring her. Hahahahahah…

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Or not.

As someone with multiple disabilities, I am highly inconsistent. That’s not good for algorithms. It’s not good for nurturing many types of relationships.

Even so. I have stopped forcing that. And yeah, I’m super enthusiastic about it, even though I definitely pay for it.

It’s a cost I find preferable to the other.

(Ask me in 25 years how I feel about this choice. I have no idea how it’ll work out longterm but I feel called to go with it, so I do.)

I also put a lot of stuff out into the world before I really feel it’s “ready.”

I feel that this is important.

So I do that, too.

This is why.

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