Adventures du jour!
On days like this, I often imagine that there’s a bowl of liquid in my mind, a bowl that gets jostled when I confront the unexpected or unpleasant. It’s sloshing around at the moment. I am upset, but not overset.
I got some good writing done last night on the assignment story, but not a lot of it. I wrote stuff that felt like it should have been thrown away for not advancing the plot. Also it feels like it horks up the pacing. But it’s a hardboiled short story, and this class has been all about writing more of EXACTLY this type of thing. Plus the character is corrupt and unpleasant and I’m not sure I want to be in his head right now.
I left the new material in.
This morning I got up and ran into a bunch of people posting about AI art and how the situation was black and white, either one direction or the other. “It’s ethical.” It’s unethical.” “Can’t you see why the other side is WRONG?”
It upsets me to be in the middle of this (I’m constantly waiting for either side to start screaming at me, because WOW the things people are saying sound abusive), but I also know I’m not walking away from it, either.
Most people have little idea of how AI works or how intertwined it already is in their lives, or how many toes have already been stepped on or the damage that has been done. Or the good, either. *I* barely know, and I’ve been trying to keep on top of this since around 2015 or so because of a ghostwriting project.
At any rate, the whole messy situation at least gives me insight into my unlikable, corrupt character from the story. Sometimes when what you have are messy choices, you pick the messier choice so you can be there when the sausage gets made. At least I don’t have to go where *he* does.
Yoga this morning: squats are humming along nicely. Lunges, not so much. My knees are spectacularly unstable. I’ve started using a chair to help with balance while I’m building stability.
Dropping the hips went well again today, both during yoga and the walk. It still feels weird. I dropped my hips during tree pose, which made me fall down but gave me insight: holding my hips “up” and stiffly takes the responsibility for stability away from my knees and ankles. Releasing my hips “down” and loosely made me step out of the pose completely and be unable to get back into it.
It feels like there’s a metaphor in there somewhere about how it’s easy to confuse feeling insecure and hanging on ever more tightly, and feeling secure and knowing that you’ll be fine if you wobble and fall and have to get up again.
I’d say it was ironic that today was full of things that challenged my sense of security–the same day that I was learning how to embrace a physical sense of security, but it just seems inevitable to run into pushback against change at this point.
Trying to repair something = being reminded why I let it get broken in the first place.
From Yoga Anatomy:
“It is also important to distinguish between _stretch_ and _lengthen._ If _stretch_ implies a particular quality of sensation in your muscle, then it is not interchangeable with _lengthen._ It is possible to lengthen a muscle without a stretching sensation–most of us do it all the time. … If our goal is to increase the functional length of a muscle, seeking the sensation of stretch might have the opposite effect. More pulling generates more sensation, not necessarily more length.”
BUH. I’m not even grasping this. How do you lengthen without stretching, then? How do you succeed without trying harder and harder until it feels like you’re going to snap? But my brain won’t take no more along that line without a sleep in the middle somewhere.
After I got back from the walk and took a shower, I went to do laundry and got triggered by something minor that nevertheless had my heart racing for a couple of hours. And then after that I tried to get on the call with my psych doc, and everything on the bureaucratic side had gone pear-shaped and the doc wanted me to pay 3x the usual amount, even though nothing had changed on my end. And I wouldn’t. Then she wanted me to talk to the insurance company about it. And I won’t. She was saying that it was because I hadn’t “paid my deductible.” And that’s not how my insurance is set up. I have a copay for specialists. It applies whether or not my deductible is paid out.
I don’t know what’s going on. I just know that it sounds like bullshit, just as I was getting ready to go off therapy. I feel like she’s trying to take advantage of me, at the same time I want to believe that she couldn’t possibly be doing so. Probably stuff isn’t working on her end and it’s just easier to shove the problem onto my lap than to deal with it on hers. But I hate that, too.
After mom and my ex, anytime something like this comes up, anytime people act in complex ways that look like they might be attacking me or treating me with disrespect, I have to deal with a flare of suspicion and anger. It doesn’t matter what the real situation is: just a split second of “maybe they’re going to hurt me somehow” and I’m gone.
It’s exhausting. Every time it comes up, I have to go through One More Case of Unpicking Bullshit so I can take responsibility for my own reactions.
People have their own lives and priorities. People who aren’t assholes generally don’t mean me harm. Feeling justified and “right” is what assholes and insecure people do, because they can’t tolerate feeling “wrong.” The rest of us learn to deal with the world not being black and white and try to hold ourselves to ethical standards first. We should still take necessary actions to defend ourselves from assholes. But that’s what boundaries are for.
Owning my reactions means not getting to feel “right” about triggery situations–because there’s always a certain level of shame for losing control, when you own your reactions–but it does mean getting to make measured choices and to reclaim myself from stress. I’m *always* happier in the long run.
So I’m gonna give her a day or two before I try to talk to her. If I have to leave her practice, no matter whose “fault” it was, then I do. Ditto Ray. I’ll cope, even if I have to bitch about it. I don’t have to bend over backward to fix the situation. I don’t have to behave with unassailable rectitude in order to draw boundaries. The situation can just be broken. Then again, if I’m wrong then I’ll suck it up.
I can’t see anything clearly now, but I’ve done this before.
So:
The liquid in my bowl is sloshing around today. My apologies in advance if I say something rude. I hope you take it a little easier on yourself today, and give yourself a little space between you sense of self and your reactions.
Unless you’re dealing with known predators/trolls/assholes, of course. Then feel free to swing for the bleachers.