One of my favorite movies is World War Z. (Z for zombies.) It’s a zombie apocalypse film I like to turn to when I suddenly get the urge to watch zombies moving really fast and climbing all over each other like homicidal ants. You know that feeling? I’ve viewed it over a dozen times at this point, once or twice a year.
(BTW, this movie is 11 years old, so I’ll proceed without worrying about spoilers.)
It stars Brad Pitt as a retired UN investigator. These guys go into war zones and collect evidence of human rights violations for the UN to use in prosecutions of war criminals. So you can imagine he’s had some experience with mortal danger. And from the dialogue early in the movie, the stress of the job eventually pushed him to retire and fry up pancakes for his daughters instead.
When the zombie apocalypse rolls into his home town of Philadelphia, Brad is soon contacted by a government friend who tasks Brad with finding the first person infected with the zombie virus. (I’m going to continue to call the character Brad plays by the actor’s name, because neither one is real to me so it doesn’t matter if I conflate the two.) The hope is that scientists can create a vaccine from the origin of the zombie virus. (How? I don’t ask too many questions and neither should you. I just enjoy the movie. You’ll like it, too, probably. Unless you find Brad Pitt annoying. I don’t really have a lot of feelings about the man myself. He’s okay. He’s had some good roles, many of his performances carried largely by great scripts and excellent supporting actors. But I have no problem with that. My favorite actor is Nicolas Cage, actually, and maybe I will write about him in another post. But I think I may have already blogged about my love for Nicolas Cage. . . .)
So! A little bit more set up before I get to the pièce de résistance.
Philadelphia becomes overrun by zombies the same moment Brad and his family come face to face with the zombies for the first time. They manage to escape in an abandoned RV, but end up stuck in New Jersey. Brad’s government friend, Thierry, promises to send a helicopter to evacuate him and his family from somewhere in NJ early the next morning. (Thierry is a great name. I think he’s Sudanese. Maybe Haitian. Anyway, he’s got a French name and he’s Black. Which means he or his family probably have ties to a country that used to be a French colony. My mind wanders like this about the characters after seeing them so often.) Brad and his wife (who is excellently cast, by the way, and by “excellently cast” I mean not absurdly young compared to Brad, who was 50 at the time of the movie’s release) have to get themselves and their two daughters somewhere they can hide until morning in a New Jersey that has lost its mind. People are panicking into inhumanity, understandably.
Brad and his family get taken in by a Hispanic family taking refuge in their home in some apartment building. As morning approaches, they need to make their way up to the roof of the building so that they can get picked up by the helicopter promised by Thierry. But the hallways and stairwells of the building are full of zombies. It’s going to be a treacherous journey to reach the rescue site. Brad attempts to persuade the man and woman, who have a young son, to come with them. He tells them what he used to do for a living, and while he negotiated war zones as his job, he learned a very important lesson: that the people who lived were the ones who kept moving. Those who tried to stick it out at home or hide, died.
And this is when Brad says the words that I’ve carried around with me like a talisman since I saw this movie over a decade ago: “Movement is life.”
***
I have turned those words over in my mind regularly like a small stone, polished smooth and shiny by my brain. It sits there in my mind’s pocket, ready when I want it.
At first it was just a good a line by the screenwriter, a line that Brad lives out in the film. Brad never stops moving in World War Z. (When does he eat? Or defecate? The only thing I ever see this man consume in the movie is a can of soda right near the end.) He’s in a car in Philly in the first 10 minutes. Then he’s driving an RV, then running into a grocery store in New Jersey, then running into an apartment building, then running for the helicopter, then landing on a US navy aircraft carrier sailing in the middle of the ocean, then flying to South Korea, then riding a bike in the dark and the rain to get back on the plane in South Korea, then driving around Jerusalem, then running to catch another plane in Jerusalem, then flying to Wales, somehow surviving a plane crash in Wales, then walking to a WHO facility, then running inside the WHO building, then, finally, arriving by boat to an island off Canada to be reunited with his family. I mean, the man never stops moving in this movie. And he lives! And, guess what? Brad figures out how to defeat the zombies. And it’s not cheesy.
Over the years, Brad’s line to the terrified parents of that little boy in their small apartment has stepped out of the screen and into my life.
When I’ve gotten stuck with despair, fear, exhaustion, guilt, shame, etc., I would put an imaginary hand in my mind’s pocket and touch that small, polished stone. And I would start moving again.
It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now what that movement looks like. It could be taking out the garbage, vacuuming (because the floors can never be too clean for someone who grew up in an East Asian household), calling my mom, raking leaves, singing along to a song then ending up dancing sometimes.
Dancing, by the way, is the best of the bunch, because it involves creative embodied movement, movement that is an end in itself rather than in service of achieving some other end. You can’t engage your imagination for creativity’s sake while despairing or fearing or crippling yourself with shame. You have to put that hot pile of shit down in order to interpret the music and move your booty in a meaningful way. It feels fantastic, often in spite of yourself. Also, and this is important, the trick to making it work is to put down beside that first hot pile of shit, any self-consciousness you might be burdened with. That shit is hot and stinking, too. You might as well since you’re up.
Whatever I choose, I move. Movement is life, movement is life, movement is life.
***
There’s a manager in me (if you know the therapeutic modality of Internal Family System, IFS, you will be familiar with the term) who tells me to move. Get up. Get up!
The dissociative state I get into when I don’t feel good is the freeze state I learned to assume long ago when I would become emotionally overwhelmed as a kid. I couldn’t fight and I couldn’t flee. So I froze. It turned and continues to turn my mind and body to stone. I feel nothing and I think nothing. I don’t know where I go. All I know is I can’t feel my body and my mind stops thinking.
Symptoms of dissociation for me include: pooping in my pants, peeing in my pants (these scatological symptoms, by the way, are very common for those who dissociate; so I’m not just mentioning them for childish humor points) forgetting the stories or blogs I’ve written (e.g. have I already written a blog post about Nicolas Cage? I think so? [shrug]), inability to recall chunks of my life before marriage and babies, screaming, yelling, hiding out in my closet, to name a few.
The only way I can get awareness back into my body and my mind is to start moving. My manager doesn’t wait for me to feel like it. Because I never will. The movement comes first; the desire to move second. Once the desire returns, I know I’ve returned to myself.
***
I remember being in an early session with “Annette”, my first therapist. I was telling her about my then husband telling me that he has wanted a divorce for the past 10 years of our 12 year marriage. Later he would tell me he wanted to divorce me for the past 8 years. Later still he would stay it was for the past 6 years.
Once I was done venting, she asked me how I felt. Wasn’t it obvious? Then she asked me where I felt those feelings in my body.
I paused for a long time. I had no idea what she was talking about. What did she mean by where I felt my feelings in my body? I . . . feel . . . feelings in my head? Isn’t that how feelings work? Your emotions are in your brain, no?
“I have no idea what you’re asking,” I said.
***
The idea that my body feels my feelings was at first ridiculous and at best dubious. But I was all in with the therapy and I trusted Annette. I was there for whatever she told me to do, willing to try anything, imagine my way into any state. So I really tried to pay attention to my body more, in general, but especially when I was feeling bad.
Sometimes I just made things up to satisfy her. “I guess in my stomach?” But other times I would notice and say, “Actually, I think I feel it in my chest. It feels tight.” And she would be encouraged and ask me for more and I would say, “I suddenly had to take a deep breath like I’d been holding it.” And it would be true. Not only that, I realized that this had happened before. Many times. I have frequently had to take these sudden gulps of air when I got tense, as if my body just realized that it wasn’t getting enough oxygen. For fucks sake breathe!
That was a year ago. I understand now that feelings actually happen in the body first, long before my conscious brain, my prefrontal cortex, is even aware of it and names it. It goes from my body to my brainstem through my limbic system, and then finally to my cortex that names it as anger, sad, disgust, fear, happy, surprise, or whatever it is.
providing support in more ways than one.
You can get more nuanced with your naming of feelings with the help of an emotion wheel. I got throw pillows with emotion wheels printed on them, one for me and both my kids. My therapist, “Jackie,” recommended it.
They can be handy when I ask them how they’re feeling, and they point to the words that best describes their emotions. It’s interesting to them to see that that they can experience more than one at the same time and helps them experience patience with themselves and their feelings.
It’s great for expanding their vocabulary, their emotional vocabulary, and good for hugging and lower back support.
Because I used to routinely and mindlessly dissociate, I never felt anything from the neck down when I was upset. It’s a nasty little habit. When I dissociate, life keeps happening around me, but I stop moving along with it. My mind and my body split. And in this state of brokenness, I become an inanimate object, a rock. I am dead. And so ending that freeze state of dissociation requires reuniting my body with my mind to bring me back to life again. Movement brings my body back to my mind and my mind back to my body.
“Movement is life” could be a motto for anything that works to strengthen the awareness of my mind-body connection. Things I’ve tried: massage therapy, breathwork, somatic therapy, EMDR, tapping, yoga, meditation. Also, just going to the bathroom when I need to go rather than holding it like some bizarre act of sphincter torture. I don’t get it either, so don’t ask.
***
So I want to briefly mention my experience with yoga. It combines movement with breathwork. I decided to add this to my mental health regimen after reading Bessel van der Kolk’s best selling book, Body Keeps the Score. In it, Dr van der Kolk raves about yoga, having scientifically proven the therapeutic benefits of yoga in healing trauma. I thought it might help me with mine, especially my habit of dissociating.
I went into the studio: the lights were soft and dim, and the instructor had a play list going on the speakers. One of the first songs on the play list as we began the movements was “Strange” by Celeste, a British recording artist. Ever heard it?
The melody moves back and forth from major seventh to minor seventh chords on the piano that give the song a dreamy, melancholic feeling. But the real stand out of the record is Celeste’s vocal stylings. She shifts between full belly, round sounds to breathy, whispered notes, and back again, over and over. It is a perfect interpretation of the strangeness of how people change, the theme of the lyrics. People can seem solid and known one moment, and then diaphanous and unfamiliar the next. It’s exquisite. Such experiences of changes and ruptures in relationships, Celeste seems to say with her lyrics and her voice, leaves you feeling grounded one moment then breathless the next.
Within the first couple of yoga movements, unfamiliar but pleasant, with Celeste crooning in the background, I started to weep. Crying at yoga. OMG. Well . . . this was unexpected, I thought. I had several other thoughts: thank god the lights are dim; what is happening??; and thank god the lights are dim.
I cried a few more times in subsequent sessions. My body was working something out that I neither knew was there nor knew what it was about.
I remember the name of one of the poses that got my body to cry: bird of paradise. I stood there on one leg, somehow holding the rest of myself up and balanced, tears streaming down my face. And all I thought that time was, thank you.
***
Sometimes you find wisdom is strange places like World War Z, with people like Brad. I mean, who would ever associate Brad with wisdom? But there you have it. People are strange. Movies are strange. Yoga is strange.