Got a couch!…Struggling with sadness…feeling the multiverse…meditation heuristic
Adventures du jour!
A friend from Colorado is coming over today! So I’m doing this now because I know I’ll forget things if I do it later.
We got a couch! I went to Ikea and got one, performing a minor magic ritual where I invoked my powers of Tetris and got all the pieces shoved in the back of the Tesla without taking anything out of a box. Ray put the whole thing together, growling at me when I tried to help–except with a couple of zippers that were being stubborn. Then we piled it with a ton of cushions, stuffed animals, blankets, and ourselves.
I keep eyeballing it: is that a couch? Really? Or is it some sort of…trap?
That was Friday. On Saturday, we went to the DnD movie, Honor Among Thieves, and really enjoyed it. It was fluffy and light and didn’t take itself seriously, and yet didn’t quite wander into farce. I rather liked it and expect to like it even more upon rewatch.
But.
I got home and sat down to write afterwards, and my heart broke. As much as I love going places with Ray, being a divorced person in Florida wasn’t where I expected to be by now (although honestly I thought I’d be dead by now). I realize that going to the same movie with the ex would have been FRAUGHT with all sorts of drama and would have had to be paid for, in one way or another. I briefly wondered if I missed him, decided I really, really didn’t. But I did miss having at least the illusion of companionship to sit next to in a movie theater and make injokes with.
I think I’ve been struggling against sadness and depression this week without really knowing it. Not the kind that drags you down and makes you numb, but the kind where either you deal with The Thing or it takes all your energy.
I tried to deal with The Thing by writing fiction and weaving it in with the characters. That helped and probably made the story richer. Good.
But Sunday I ended up falling further from sadness and into depression. (“What? Am I not dealing with The Thing? I’m dealing with The Thing! I cried! Don’t do this to me!”) I sat in front of the keyboard and couldn’t write fiction. I tried to do my classwork and just felt sick at heart. There was no juice. Music didn’t sound like music anymore. Bad sign.
I wasn’t numb and unable to act, though, so I used my remaining ability to make decisions to fall back to a previously prepared position, which I used to do a LOT: climb in the bathtub and wallow in a) tears, and b) someone else’s creative work. I used to read a lot of horror novels that way. Yesterday I did Yuri on Ice; I got a bunch of character stuff out of it, now that I have the eyes to see it (due to a Kris & Dean class I’m in the middle of). Watch an episode, cry, watch another episode, etc. Eventually I got cried out, although I never did feel right. I tried dancing and I could only get about halfway to the right state of mind, then had to stop. Which just made me sadder.
I went to bed exhausted (but at least not actually full-blown depressed). I woke up this morning feeling like I’d been talking to someone and laughing (pleasant). I thought it was over–but as soon as I got up I was twitchy and headachy and felt like I should push away from people so I wouldn’t hurt them; also like I was complaining too much and people would not want to be around me so I might as well not say anything anyway. (I had been doing this Saturday, too, just not as much.)
At that point, a couple of things came into play:
–I read a post by a friend who said that her big success was not taking her anxious, jangly mood (I forget how she said it; I may have misinterpreted) out on the people around her.
–I remembered a conversation with a different friend about how migraines are a complex, permanent neurological condition, and realized I was doing not-a-migraine stuff, feeling like just before getting hit with a visual aura.
Aha. This wasn’t just mind stuff, but mind-and-body stuff, and getting past the mind stuff wouldn’t necessarily fix the body stuff.
I got out for my walk, hoping it would help. It didn’t. I got twitchier and twitchier. I wanted to shut down, to do whatever it took to avoid whatever storm was coming.
But my friend! Is coming over! Later today!
I ended up sitting out by the angel statue in one of the parks I like and meditating without doing the usual pose.–I know a lot people with ADHD are like, “Hah! Meditating! Not for me,” but it’s my suspicion that ADHD’ers are better at it than most people, IF they do it. As far as I can tell, the “goal” is to clear your mind by forcing yourself to become Spectacularly Bored. And nobody can get bored like someone with ADHD.
My stuff to get into that state involves not moving, counting breaths (nothing special with those), and sticking with the boredom instead of daydreaming. I count breaths on my fingers: thumb under pinkie finger, ten breaths, thumb moves between ring and pinkie, ten breaths. So fifty breaths a cycle, which for me works out to about five minutes, ten breaths a minute. It usually takes me about five minutes, maybe ten, to get to where *I* want to go.
If I don’t count, I get lost in daydreams. I’ve done the thing where you start over whenever you catch yourself being distracted, but I got obsessed with the process of that and didn’t get anywhere. So now I just count. Your mileage may vary.
Anyway, it took forty minutes this morning.
The first part of it, everything gets worse. I’m not bored, I just feel stupid and depressed and self-conscious, like people are staring at me and judging. The nervousness and twitchiness turn into shakiness and a headache. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna have a visual aura.
Then I get uncomfortable. This is good! I’m sitting on a cement wall with my knees up to my chest, while clutching my keys and water bottle. I put everything down, take off my hat and hairtie, and sit a little more loosely. Still balanced so I won’t fall off the wall.
I’m still twitchy and headachy, but I’ve backed down from shakiness. I sit there and think about The Thing, cry a bit, end up thinking about the way it sometimes feels like I live in a multiverse and can feel all the worst and best outcomes, the ones that don’t or won’t happen, all the time.–I laughed when I went to Everything Everywhere All at Once. Just so. From what I’m learning lately, I suspect that might be a dyslexia and dyslexia-adjacent thing. I take it for granted most of the time; it’s shocking to me that everyone doesn’t have this “place” in their head that contains all possible outcomes, motivations, chances, etc. I get, intellectually, that not everyone stands in front of a display of jelly at the grocery store, going, “But if I get the cheap grape jelly, I will never like those stupid cocktail weenies with the catsup/jelly recipe, no matter how much Ray likes the cheap grape jelly, so I will have always been a disappointment in the jelly department.” (Please note, grape jelly was never her favorite.)
Part of the reason I struggle to make decisions is that it feels like the universe hangs in balance every time. I’ve gotten *really* good at coming up with heuristics to help me navigate reality quickly. Here’s my jelly stack: chokecherry, something really weird or unusual, sour cherry, raspberry, bitter marmalade, regular marmalade. The Bonne Maman brand if there’s no other brands that I haven’t already tried. Here’s my asshole stack: challenge to see if they’re assholes, gauge level of assholeness and conditions under which they will asshole, offer them three chances to agree to disagree and/or coexist somehow, purge from social media, purge from email, purge from life. There’s always a chance to reassess.
So I mourn a couple of timelines, ones that happened and ones that won’t, find that I’ve lost track of the breath count, check my hand for the breath count (I was somewhere in the 30s), started at 31, and keep going.
The world looks sharper (good!), with the edges of the leaves around me having different colors from the thickness of the leaves and the way they curved in the light. I watch ants exploring the wall for a while, still counting.
Another two fifty-counts, and suddenly I curl forward, stretch my spine tight in a spiral, released, then got up.
My conscious brain went, “Are we done? Do we feel better? How do we tell if we’re done?” I ignored it and walked home, sat down to write this, and here we are.
I’m still twitchy. Music sounds like music. I’m dancing in my chair. My sinuses hurt. I’m getting ready to pick up food things for the visit. I’m excited about it.
I don’t want to stay at a place where pushing other people away so I don’t hurt them is my victory for the day. That place IS a victory, when you can’t get there consistently. But I’ve been getting there consistently for a while. Time to move on.
Tentative heuristic (not that heuristics aren’t inherently tentative): Feeling like I want to push people away involves enough mental drama that I may need to meditate. Next time, I’ll try it sooner.
Yay! I can’t wait!
…
Someone lost their Captain America toy.—Cap has always struck me as the most alien of all possible natural-born Americans. I really like this shot.
One of the Drag Queen Jesuses. They all turned out kinda adorable.