The Black Lodge
Going through it to understand it
Before you continue reading, go back to this post and tell me what you’re reading and writing right now. I really want to know, and it only takes a sec.
NOTE: discussion of sexual assault, eating disorders, etc etc
I watched Twin Peaks for the first time when I was in my early twenties. I’d come home to Olympia in February, after my first season on the hotshots and a trip to Central America with my then boyfriend and his brother that ended up being a terrible time.
I came home early, leaving my boyfriend in Costa Rica. While we’d been traveling I’d sunk deep into my eating disorder and bought Valium at a local pharmacy in order to numb myself to the smothering invisibility I felt, traveling with the two men and their own agendas.
Back home, I stayed in my teenaged bedroom. My mom, stepdad and I moved to Olympia when I was sixteen. I resisted the move, and was plunked down at Capitol High School mid-school year, in 1996. It was terrible. I was a mess already, and looked straight past the lovely and kind softball player assigned to show me around, homing in on the kids who stood outside near the concrete barriers, smoking cigarettes and weed.
Those were my people, I thought. And they were. But none of us had our best interests at heart. By the end of the school year I’d been sexually assaulted at a party. I used LSD almost every day, turning my life into someone else’s life, so I could endure being called a slut and whore by my peers, who, like me, were convinced I’d asked for it.
Back in that bedroom, where I’d spent many sleepless nights waiting for my high to wear off so I could fall asleep, I lay in bed eating Costco baguettes slathered with butter and jam and watching Twin Peaks, which I’d rented, in VHS form, from the local Blockbuster.
I didn’t know what I was getting into— that I was starting a relationship with a director (David Lynch) and a text (Twin Peaks), or that I’d watch the series several times over, often to remind myself of the Pacific Northwest, and the mysteriousness of life. I couldn’t believe it when my mom told me that my great-aunt, a republican who lived in Dallas, had been obsessed with the series when it aired on prime time in the nineties, or that the series had been cancelled despite its popularity.
The show didn’t pull me out of my depression, but its depraved and long-suffering characters helped me feel less alone. Alongside that, the narrative arcs, and the background narrative of the Black Lodge, animism, dark mysteriousness, and philosophy helped me see what could be possible through narrative. That an artist could appeal to mass audiences while also speaking to those who wanted to dive deeper.
Recently I listened to the podcast Thresholds, hosted by Jordan Kisner. On one of the latest episodes, Jordan interviewed Elissa Washuta, whose most recent book, White Magic, explores sobriety, relationships, and Seattle (amongst many, many other things).
I loved Elissa’s book and read it while I was making the decision to leave Seattle, a city changing rapidly, and a city that’s integral to my very being.
On Thresholds, Elissa talked about essays as a pathway to healing and discovery. I love the way she incorporates gaming into her writing, too.
She also talks about going through the Black Lodge—
“a place of pure terror, where the soul is cleansed…and you need to face it with perfect courage in order to come out whole. That felt to me like something that I was doing. I knew that I was facing something that was keeping me in these cycles of relationship frustration and earlier, years earlier, relationship violence…the relationship cycles had been going on for a long time. And I knew there was something I wasn’t seeing, I wasn’t able to face yet, that I felt the essay was really going to get me closer to.”
In a way, my laying in bed and watching Twin Peaks, in a house I took for granted, a house where I am no longer present, and will never be present again, I was also looking for answers. I had turned away from a man with whom my relationship was toxic, but, at 22, didn’t know where else to look for answers.
But I did know to keep looking.
Now, in my early forties, I understand that answers aren’t what I am seeking, but instead I seek understanding. Understanding myself and others. And beyond understanding, acceptance.
An essay can provide that. Though we may not find an answer at the end of an essay (I think my favorite essays resist answering anything), an essay lets us look at something from many angles. In writing, and in not writing, we consider the subject.
In the Thresholds interview, Elissa also talks about how important not writing was to her writing. I’ve talked about this a lot here. I call it gathering. I think of gathering as a kind of presence: looking. But not looking for. Looking at. Observing. And seeing what presents itself.
As I ready to leave Seattle, my hometown, or the closest thing to it, I gather. I know I won’t be back, except to visit.
Seattle has been my Black Lodge. The site of my mother’s suicide, and the place I came to feel her essence, which resides in the brick streets of the Pike Place Market and the hills of Leschi. I have had to be here, looking at all my past selves as well as the legacy she left me.
At times, it has felt like the world was speaking to me backwards. Like I was deciphering a code. Then I realized there is no code, and nothing means anything unless I imbue it with such.
The places that used to hold potent energy, that used to cue dissociation, are merely places now.
That energy is mine, or it is no longer mine. I can release it and let it disperse into formlessness before it reforms itself.
I recall that old bedroom, the tall cedar trees outside. My stepfather; my mother. Their hands on me. The way they taught me I was nothing, and then asked me why I thought I was nothing.
One of them has been gone from this earth for over twelve years. The other is a ghost in my my life.
But I am still here, and learning.
And writing about it.