All the Horrible Girliness

A disturbing number of people emailed me, concerned about my anxiety. I felt the warm fuzzies. My problem is, sometimes I let a serious entry hang around too long on the top of the blog. After a few days, it's customary to assume that I'm hanging from a rafter somewhere.

I still have trouble sleeping, though less when I exercise. Too much jing means awake time, in the quiet hours when there's nothing to distract from the monsters under the bed.

So I've been better. Doing my kickboxing classes (Steven Quadros teaches a kickass, silly class), plus tonight I went down to my apartment's little gym and put in 35 minutes on the eliptical thing. I spent the day feeling weird: I took a long ass nap from 7:00 a.m. to about noon, I didn't wash my hair, I wore jeans on a hot day, so I was a grump on that tip. But then we went to Tilly's and I tried on some stuff that reminded me that I'm thin with big nursing tits now, and I felt very SAMUS, DESTROYER OF WORLDS. My little workout was awesome. I still felt very SAMUS but also, in all the exertion, I achieved a nice balance. I remembered that working out often has little to do with sculpting the body. It's about creating a stillness in my mind.

One of the things my psychiatrist asked me about, ten years ago, was "racing thoughts." It surprised me to hear that not everyone's mind went from subject to subject within seconds, and on Lithium, I had one thought at a time for six months. It was incredible. After I went off the medication, my thoughts raced again, but I had also started working out, and for those grueling thirty to sixty minutes, things got quiet in my skull. I was better about it back then. I worked out every day without fail for months, even if it was a short walk. But back then, I was fighting a lot of ugly mind shit and I needed to be disciplined to get out of it.

I'm better now, but I've been letting the darkness come, and forgetting all the tools in my belt. There's so much to be said for exercise, water, vitamins, and clean eating.

***

It was more than a year ago that I wrote in this blog that I was on my way to Colorado to visit family, and now I'm gearing up to go again. I'll be there from Wednesday to Sunday. I've had some anxiety about being around my parents and the evil extendeds, but last night I gnawed on those worries like an old piece of saltwater taffy. It felt familiar and easy, to think about that old crap, instead of worrying about my son getting to grow all the way up, and I kind of had fun brewing up insults and imagining slapping the shit out of Evil Aunt. Not that either of those things will ever happen, but boy, they're great fantasies.

posted by Samus @ 10:51 PM