LITERALLY LISA

Did you watch Nolan’s Odyssey and come away wanting to write an english essay?

I felt like I could draw so many parallels and connections from Greek myth to the world around me. With friends, I felt I had already yapped away about my takeaways from the film. Yet I was still left with this insatiable appetite to explore greek myth as conduits for storytelling and introspections…

There’s a reason why these stories endure and are still relevant centuries later. They explore and map out the human experience, natural paradoxes and the conflicts we deal with no matter how great or small.

An invitation for introspection: Pick a figure or story from Greek mythology whose current situation or central tension vaguely mirrors a theme in your life right now. Write: “If I am currently living the myth of [Name], the ___ I am navigating is…”.

Use it as a mind dump, that’s all mine is.

Cassandra’s paradox and living with Endo/Adeno

For background, there is this famous Greek myth about Cassandra’s Paradox. Cassandra was favoured by Apollo, god of prophecy. He took a special liking to her and offered her the gift of foresight, which she accepted…however she rejected his advances, and you know, the Greeks wrote imperfect gods. Apollo’s ego is hurt and he’s very offended, but divine gifts cannot be revoked, so he spits in Cassandra’s mouth. The result of which is Cassandra has these vivid, whole-body premonitions, but no one believes her tongue. she smells blood in the air before violence ensues. she tries to warn the city of Troy before it is taken, but no one believes her. And mockingly, she’s remembered as the Trojan woman who had these premonitions of the tragedy before it unfolded.

The way I relate to Cassandra’s curse…is that sometimes when it seems to me that I have absolute clarity about myself, about life, about what is coming next; I am so misunderstood…I relate to the PHYSICALITY of Cassandra’s foresight, my body will hold this heaviness way before the twisted pain hits and travels through me. Broadly when my internal environment screams these truths at me…That is when I feel so far removed from my external environment, isolated in my experience.

That is the funny thing about perspective. You open your eyes and the camera starts rolling and it follows you around. No one else shares this point of view, this perspective. When I was a baby, my mum knew me best. But then you go to nursery, to school, start going on public transport…you grow up and move to a new city. All the stories I have written alone, the stories that have been written for me, all the boxes they sit in. How could you have read them all, or looked inside each box.

So over the past couple of years I’ve started tuning into how I feel; and I move closer to clarity. It is this whole body experience, not just the usual symptoms people would assume. I am tuned into the way that I digest food, what makes me feel bloated. I’m in tune with how itchy I feel around different phases of my cycle. I know that my luteal and menstrual phases are not just Physically inhabilitating But also casts a dark cloud over me from the exhaustion and IMBALANCE. when I carry these boxes to the doctors, or when I tell a friend, it feels as though my tongue is cursed. Doctors will mislabel the box with ‘anxiety’ before even looking at the rest. And then the more I speak or write or scream, no one knows my meaning.

And so when I’m so full of thought that I could vomit, when it is practically spilling out…it just never comes out right. I feel trapped within my own mind. I am living in the same confines of Cassandra’s paradox.

I’ve been trapped for so long. When someone I love said to me, “Every woman has a period, why are you different?” Or when doctors said, “Well, some people have painful periods”. Much like Cassandra, I too started believing that I might just be a hypochondriac, it quietened my voice. But that never lasted long as the next month would roll over and the pain would force me back into a clinical chair. It was a relief when someone took me seriously. It was a relief to find ANOMALIES on my MRI, News that does not seem celebratory. this revelation that would put someone’s world on fire actually gave me clarity and validation. I found comfort in this cruel relief, it felt as though my tongue was no longer cursed.

I look at it with a new level of introspection every time I think about this. I go deeper and I do think it’s somewhat freeing to understand that perspective is never what we think it is and that no one will ever be understood as well as they understand themselves.

So once you let go of control of other people’s perspectives and you start living the truth that you know and advocating for yourself… you can coexist with the curse. I don’t think it goes away for us women, unfortunately, but I do know it’s been my best choice. I trust my voice, my body, and my truth.

It might feel like it sometimes, but I won’t be their Cassandra.