Exhibit A: The trapezius.
I was looking up more exercises having to do with the tight spots I’ve identified and ran into material about the trapezius muscle, which I knew about vaguely but didn’t really grok. (It’s a pair of muscles that run from the bottom of your skull to just below the bra strap.)
These muscles, or the traps, are kind of wing shaped. I keep looking at illustrations of them and going, “This is disturbing.” They look like an alien life form that has landed in the middle of your back.
I slept on that info yesterday, then woke up in a weird mood. I went out for yoga and couldn’t find my “energy” at first–it wasn’t above, parallel, behind, in front of me–where was it? For the first time in a long time, it was inside my body, in the traps.
I messed around with stretching and manipulating the muscle and the energy. It’s gonna take some practice. What really blows my mind is knowing that it’s all one or two muscles involved. Like, if I do a side bend and start with my head leaning to the side, I can feel the tug all the way down at the spine around the bottom of my rib cage.
Here’s the thing: when it’s tense, I can’t stand up straight, my back hurts, I get tired quickly. If I stand up and give it permission to “let go” of the tense spots, I stand up straighter, the pain lowers (it doesn’t go away entirely, because stuff is probably strained), breathing is easier, etc. And, more importantly, I feel “in” my own body and in control of it, rather than like something outside me is pulling puppet strings, or I am outside my body pulling puppet strings. (It varies.)
As a teen, I got yelled at a fair bit about how I could never stand up straight; my mom through an utter shit fit once in the middle of a guilt-trip session when I told her I could stand up just fine when I wasn’t anywhere near her. The harder I tried to force myself to comply, the less I was able to stand up straight, because “trying” means tensing up–and hunching over.
I don’t think she was really conscious of why she did it. The goal was to make me hold all the negative feelings she couldn’t handle on her own, I think; she’s struggled with back pain all her life, as far as I can tell, and her own mother was a similar source of emotional dumping and abuse.
At any rate, it felt nice to be inside my own body this morning. I showed Ray and she said it looked weird when I relaxed it.
Anybody who tries to tell me “it just comes from hunching over your keyboard all day” is gonna get bumped off the list of people who can see this, by the way. I get out an exercise just fine, thanks.
My path to this was:
–General yoga tolerance and awareness, including playing with “energy.”
–Lots of walks.
–Dealing with emotional b.s. using a variety of techniques, including praying, minor witchcrafty things, and shamanism.
–Backbends over foam roller.
–Focused stretches for upper back.
–Adding side bends.
–Going back to therapy.
I’ve been working on getting rid of or at least gathering understanding about the pain in my back, and coming to understand that it goes along with my emotional state, for years if not decades. I don’t think doing either emotional or physical work alone would have let me find this spot.–Maybe someone else, though.
TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR ALL THE ICK FROM HERE ON OUT…..
ANYWAY, out on the walk I ran into the same lady by the pond from a few weeks ago, and she told me all kinds of stories about the duck drama. I just stood there and listened. It was a lot of blood, guts, darkness, and human fuckery, including poison and cannibalism.
The short version is that assholes drop off ducks at the pond on a regular basis, both post-Easter ducks and bred ducks for meat. Post-Easter ducks are bad enough, but the bred ducks apparently get raised by people, then released onto the pond when they’re big enough to fend for themselves. These are domestic ducks, so they don’t just fly off. The people dumping the ducks eventually come back and capture a few ducks now and then and butcher them for meat.
Well, about a year ago in October, people started dumping off traumatized male ducks that were so awful that they literally raped the local female ducks to death (they’d submerge their heads underwater and not let them up), and then lined up to rape them some more. They ate each other. One of the “ladies” in the neighborhood said, “Well, I heard these domestic ducks are an invasive species and should be treated like rats” and started poisoning them (THE FUCK). The city stepped in and killed like 40+ of them, because they were terrorizing the neighborhood and pooping on things, and people complained.
The lady I was speaking to was understandably upset. She’d been caring for the ducks for a while, and they often came to lay eggs in her yard (which she would take away from the ducks so they didn’t overrun the neighborhood, which ALSO pissed off the poison lady, because “those are their children” (!!!).
Ah, yes, the sanctity of life, until it’s in your own back yard.
Anyway, some of the invasive ducks bred successfully with the local matriarch duck (this is a thing apparently), who raised these giant-ass ducks bred for meat with the same care she raised the rest of her ducklings, and now if you look at the ducks in the pond, you can see that some of the ducks are monster-duck sized, not able to fly but still hanging tight with their cousins, less fucked up by humanity’s meddling. If you see a pic of a duck float by on my timeline, you can see three large but not ginormous ducks, and one duck that was like the size of a smallish border collie.
DONE WITH TRIGGERY STUFF
Writing stuff: I feel like there’s not enough going on and people are just talking to each other as I write–but when I go back and read what I wrote, it’s all people gathering clues, forging relationships (or breaking them), flirting with each other, exploring terrain that I can use later for action scenes, defining the conditions for success and failure in the story.
The opening of the story defined the main characters; this section of the story is defining the community around them. I think.
I’m not used to writing anything this long. It feels like it’s taking forever; I’m used to writing a lot faster, but I’m trying to keep the reader in mind as I write and that’s new to me, at least on this level. I should hit page 250 later today (fingers crossed). I knew, but didn’t want to know, that I wasn’t writing a book so much as writing an entire damn series, but I have to admit that I’m probably around the 25% mark here. I want this to go in around 5 sections, split up by time. I’m not going to publish anything until I’m done, though, because the mystery aspect of the story means I may need to backfill some clues. I’m probably going to publish this serially first; I have enough control now that I can build hooks and cliffhangers on each scene, no matter how low-key the scene may seem. Pretty smug about that! But I’m not going to make any solid plans until I’m done.