Try Putting Your Dissociation On Display

Sam Herschel Wein

under machines, behind doors, deep

in the dark—I was good at hide and seek

as a kid. I’ve dissociated

through entire weekends, weeks, my childhood.

I’ve stared at the computer screen

the tv screen

the Instagram feed so long I thought my brain lost

its curvy paths, spongy turns, turned

to mush. I found a picture of myself from

years ago at a weekend artist residency at a farm

with a bunch of straight writers and

realized I don’t have a single recollection

from the entire weekend. “Oh, your brain took CARE

of that for you” my friend says when I bring it up.

My brain is my best hiding place, even if I appear

present, look presentable.

I’m trying a new thing. Turtle-Sam.

Hunched in a bunch on the floor. Arms and legs

dribble out my lump of a body, curled.

Curling. In a flattened ball.

At the laundromat. At

the gelateria.

In the parking lot outside the Dollar Tree.

A visual, sensational, mental disconnect,

but this time, I’ll show you. I’ll let you all see me,

puddles and legs and

hungry hair.

My body. Its shell.

I’m used to hiding in my brain.

but no one has ever been able to see.

Now, I’m on my back, little arms flailing,

my eyes, wild and searching

Interview by C. VanWinkle

Hi Sam.

Hello.

Can you start by describing what it was that you responded to?

I got this image, which was this person with this shawl thing over themselves. I’m actually not sure what they were covering themselves with, but they were covered with something. And they were in the squatting position with their hands and feet coming out. What I first did when I saw it was imagine myself in that position. I had this idea to get in my body about what that position meant. I would go out in the world and do it in public all over the place. That idea is what inspired the poem that I wrote in response to the piece. I didn’t end up actually doing it, though, which I think is okay. I’ve done very silly things in my life plenty of times. I don’t feel like I needed to actually follow through with it to know what it’s like to have everyone stare at you doing something strange in public.

You’ve done that enough that you can imagine it?

I know what that’s like.

Do you remember your first impression? How did you feel about this image when you saw it?

I do remember being like, This is a turtle. Which directly leads to the piece that I wrote. I noticed immediately that it looked photoshopped in the background and I thought, This person is doing this at home but imagining doing this in the wild, which is essentially what I did as well. I remember thinking a lot about what the material that they were covered with was. And I was very drawn to the body shape. I loved the continuation of the arms into the legs. They look like they’re almost one line. I’ve been living with a roommate who’s a dancer and a movement artist for many years. A lot of their work emulates different animals, and we like to talk about that a lot, just the playfulness of being in and out of your body the same time. That resonated with me as well.

You said that you imagined assuming this position in different places but didn’t actually go out and do it. Did you Turtle up at home?

I did. Just once. But that was all I needed! I feel like I put myself into this position naturally sometimes, just in a state of moving around in my life. This is not a position I am unfamiliar with; let’s just say that. You know, during our last year and a half of this global crisis, it was very easy to feel like I was just a blob of empty capitalist working space in my apartment. And so I tried to figure out different stretches and shapes and things that I could do with my body to remind myself: You are a person, you have a body, you and the rest of the world are going through this horrendously traumatic thing that you have no control over and you just need to survive and get through it as best you can. I feel like a lot of us developed different ailments or pains during this last year, because we were in positions we weren’t used to and we weren’t moving the same way.

What happened next, between physically turtling up and having a piece written?

I had the image up and I was free writing in a notebook. I came up with the title first, which I don’t usually do. But I was thinking about all the ways that I have dissociated in my body but still been able to perform being normal. You know? I was thinking about what it means to turn that performance off and be like, I’m not doing well and everyone is going to know about it! Which is sort of where the piece came from. It’s this idea of being extremely honest about times when you don’t feel good, or when something happens that throws you off and you can’t figure out what to do with it in that moment. I wrote a draft of the piece that was significantly less good than this final draft. I actually spent a lot of time editing. I always do a few rounds of edits, but with this one I spent hours tinkering in a way that I don’t usually do.

I really wanted to be devoted to this idea of being this turtle-self, having a shell, which is funny because the poem is also about taking off your shell and people seeing you. So it is this weird duality. But also the shape! Putting yourself in this shape is a very strange thing to do in a public place. It does draw lots of attention, right? I don’t know, I was sort of wrestling with what it means to be vulnerable with attention brought to you versus what it means to be vulnerable just with yourself. So there were a lot of ideas swirling in my head. I think the reason I edited this poem so much was because I really had too many ideas for what it was trying to do and I needed to bring it in a little bit.

I was struck by the idea of displaying dissociation. That suggests that you’re performing a lack of performance or expressing an inability to express. That really struck me. Is that something that you had thought about or written about before?

It’s something I’ve been toying with. I’ve been in therapy for enough years that I feel like I’m ready to try to write about my mental health, you know? So that is sort of a newer journey that I’m on right now. It is a weird thing to write about your brain turning itself off and your anxiety enveloping you. These things are so convoluted and it’s hard to figure out a way to express that. They’re so cerebral and also very physical, really in your brain and your body. Recently, I’ve been reading Shira Erlichman’s book “Odes To Lithium”, and I think a lot about the opening poem of that book. She’s at a doctor’s office and she’s like, “It feels like there are snakes in my arms.” And the doctor is like, “Do you really think there are snakes in your arms?” And she’s like, “I’M USING A METAPHOR HERE! COME ON!” It’s this idea that expressing something about your mental health in a way like that can turn on you so quickly. Dissociation is something that I think a lot of people go through, but in different levels and wavelengths. That can look like watching TV or scrolling Instagram or playing video games. It can also just look like staring at a wall. You know, it takes a lot of different forms. So I’m processing how much I forcibly turn my brain off because I’m overwhelmed. I’ve been trying to figure out where that’s coming from and also what it means that I need to do that so much.

I think that’s why this piece is very relatable. Is it 100% autobiographical and you’re just expressing yourself in this poem, or is there a narrator who is somehow not you? You did name drop yourself.

Turtle-Sam! I’m really bad at writing poems from other narrators. They’re almost entirely all me. I want to write some projects that are not so based on my own life. I’m just not there yet. That’s just who I am right now and it’s in all of my writing. I’m trying to write fiction that’s really just my life. And I’m like, Why am I like this? But I’m just like this right now and that is what it is!

How important was it to you to integrate the source material? Did you necessarily want to stick close to something specifically turtley?

I don’t write from prompts very much. And this is a project that is prompt-based. So I was like, Sam you gotta stick to it! I think it took me a while to write my first draft because I had to decide what I had to say about the image. I had to really think about it for a full week, if not a week and a half, before I could write something down about it. But I also just move at a slow pace with my art. So I had to emotionally process the image for a week and a half before I could respond to it in any way.

Is there anything else that I didn’t ask you about that you’d like to touch on?

I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this project because I’ve been thinking a lot about different artists communicating with each other through different mediums. I think this was a really great exercise.

And also, I think there has been a lot to process. Not only have we had to manage our brains through the global pandemic, but also I’ve been processing stuff from my childhood and about a lot of the different traumatic times of my life. I think the pandemic just forced me to have to reckon with that in a lot of ways. For a lot of people, it was an opening into a lot of other things in our psyches that we’ve been needing to deal with. We’re kind of stuck, right? Being locked in. You either can really ignore yourself or you are forced to deal with yourself. I think that’s why the pandemic will impact ourselves and our art so much, because it made us all spend really focused time on ourselves that we weren’t expecting to spend. And I was the kind of person who had plans with friends like four to six days a week in a way that was really social. I’m an extrovert, but also it was a bit like over-busyness to keep myself going. So I was in my house for a year and a half and had to slow down in a way that I wasn’t expecting to. So I do think this piece comes from that and a lot of the pieces I make will come from what I had to learn about myself while I was in my house. Every day.

Okay, last question: Do you have any advice for someone else who is doing this project for the first time?

I think that I am a person who has collaborated with artists a lot, and I think that my art being in the same conversation as other art is incredible. I think that helped me a lot with this and I would say to just collaborate as much as you can with other people. I’ve collaboratively written poems and essays with people, made installations and art events, made poems to other people’s dance. I think the more that I’m using my writing to connect me with other people and make art with other people, the stronger my work is becoming. I saw this process as doing that as well. Even though I didn’t get to meet the person and work with them directly, we were still really collaborating. So collaborate more and collaborate across genres and in different disciplines and all kinds of crazy shit.

You know, that is exactly what we are about!

Call Number: C52VA | C53PP.heTry

 Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a Chicago-based poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. Their second chapbook, GESUNDHEIT!, a collaboration with Chen Chen, was part of the 2019-2020 Glass Poetry Press Series. He co-founded and edits Underblong. Recent work can be found in The Adroit Journal, Shenandoah, and Sundog Lit, among others.