Adventures du jour!
During yoga, I found a way to release a bunch of the muscles in the basket of the hips, that made it feel like I was holding a steel ball in there, that I could roll around. With tree pose, one hip was still pretty ooky, but with the other one it was easy to hold and adjust the pose. I could feel a wobble coming, adjust, and re-adjust without falling, by monitoring that imaginary ball.
Mr. Assassin was walking with me but not talking with me, definitely the character closest to the surface. It was definitely a “thinking by walking” morning for both of us.
A bunch I’m still processing, but feeling better. I think the closest I can get to what had me upset yesterday was angry trauma barfing. There’s trauma barfing (“HEY guess what I just remembered in a particular way that means I’m ready to accept that it happened if not to know how to cope”) and then there’s angry trauma barfing (“BURN IT. BURN IT ALL”).
I struggle to feel, and express, anger, either on the small scale or the world-burning scale. Having to write a character who feels a world-burning level of anger is not comfortable. Both sides of my spine from neck to tail felt like spatchcocked chicken this morning, the knot is back in my neck, solar plexus and chest are tight, everything’s crackling and popping, and my hands and feet keep falling asleep. Headaches, no nausea, a raw throat like I’ve been screaming.
But I’m also feeling much more energetic, lighter, ironically more at ease. I also feel more confident, which is nice if kind of scary at this point. In some ways I’m kind of scared of myself. I feel like I’m not just my own worst enemy, but the entire world’s worst enemy sometimes, too.
I was reminded yesterday of being brought up Catholic and how different people use it for different (and weird) things. One of those things is to pray for the end of the world, with no real success but with clear intention that gets reflected in things like politics and family dynamics.
The last time I saw my grandmother, she told me that I needed to help her pray for the end of the world.
It was just after my uncle’s funeral, at which she showed no grief for her son’s untimely death, and said that he was better off where he was because he couldn’t take care of himself here on earth–despite the fact that he had been her caregiver for years. The priest who came to give the funeral prayed for the end of the world, and she and my grandfather joined him in doing so. But it was that last comment the following day, where she tried to pressure me into doing the same, that tipped me over the edge. I stopped visiting her after that, even though she was one of my favorite people when I was a child. I went back for her funeral, but that was to support everyone else.
I refuse to pray for the end of the world. But I know how to do it, if that makes sense. That kind of prayer adds a kind of poison to the world. Nothing is real, nothing matters, everything is just an illusion and therefore it doesn’t matter what awful things you do in order to please the great and divine creator.
I hate that I was brought up to be an engine of faith for an essentially corrupt purpose. But I *am* an engine of faith. I believe in things so strongly that I survived 20 years with my ex, even though pretty much all of it was based on lies. That’s a feature, by the way, not a bug, of that belief system.
My answer is to half-ass use tools of belief from so many different systems that something like free will emerges. Terry Pratchett talks about there not being one iota of justice in the universe, and the importance therefore of believing in it; I feel the same about a lot of different ideal things. I gladly believe the holy shit out of many different good but essentially non-existent things because I believe it helps change the world (the same way you can train an AI not to be quite so racist, at least for a little while, maybe).
Dealing with this stuff in the story means confronting the part of me that still wants to burn it all down, with extreme prejudice if possible.
I know people who can handle it with what seems like ease (maybe because they don’t believe they can do it, or maybe because they just have that spiritual capacity), but it’s tearing the crap out of me. The harder I fight control, the more I become controlled, because I want to burn down the things that control me. And that just leads me back to burning. Bottling things up seems to have given me jet fuel for a soul sometimes, too, so that’s probably not the answer either.
I did listen to a bunch of a friend’s book yesterday and was greatly comforted by it; I was avoiding it because I knew it would be dark and I was worried that it would set me off even worse. Turns out it was like drinking coffee when you have ADD and you’re so spun up that stimulants make you slow down.
One more day without praying for the end of the world, and (for once) without denying that part of me wants to do so. I’ll get through it.
Today I’m working on cute things on Midjourney, asking for screen art for a hypothetical video game about compassion and death. I’m also listening to a call by the people running Midjourney, too, in order to find out what the systems are for asking for changes and get more familiar with what they’re trying to do. The guy in charge (I need to look up his real name; all I can see is his screen name) sounds a bit unhinged, but in a pleasantly relatable way: he’s talking about how he wants to change the world and not hand it over to assholes, and how he hopes AI can help do that.
Quote from the call: “Okay, the world is bigger than me. And I am okay with that.”