Movement stuff…shifting identities, first via movement, then via the multiverse…using movement to fix exhaustion
Adventures du jour!
Today’s post is super-nerdy movement stuff and not much else! You’ve been warned.
Conscious mind: I have stuff to do! Writing fiction! Class! Letters! Stuff!
The rest of whatever goes on in there: HUH. You’re going to hear yourself writing fragments of this post inside your head, on loop, until you get it written down.
Conscious mind: Okay, so let’s do this! What’s the first sentence?
The rest of me: …
Thanks, rest of my mind, for bailing on doing the task you were handling so easily not FIVE MINUTES AGO.
Anyway, here’s my conscious mind’s attempt at writing it all down, which I feel is completely unfair. If it’s so easy, subconscious, YOU DO IT!
…
So after being transformed by anger the other day, I had to do some recovery stuff and it led in a weird direction. I ended up coughing up some unexpected insights and wanted to note them down.–Once I internalize something, it’s hard for me to pull it back out and put words to it. When I try to explain what it felt like to first learn something, I usually end up going, “I don’t know? Do the thing? Everyone does the thing? Right?”
I have to get REALLY good at something before I can explain it again, after those first few moments pass. It’s like waking up from a dream where you can’t remember the dream but you know at some level it changed your attitude, and therefore the course of your day.
As nearly as I can remember, it went like this:
–A couple of days ago, I decided to do some dancing before bed so I could sleep. You’d think this would make me too spun up to sleep, but no. It feels like the caffeine thing for ADD, where I need a certain level of something in my brain before I can settle down. Stimulants provide me what I need to rest.
–While dancing, I found another thing to do with my torso. The second I figured it out, I went, “I’m going to hurt tomorrow.” This proved to be the case. Ow.
–So I’ve been working on moving my focus of attention different places throughout my body, also outside it. If you’ve ever done tai chi and moved the ball of energy around, it’s the same type of thing, just faster and while you’re falling, because dancing is all about losing your balance on purpose.
–This particular thing was awareness on the bra band area, but the inside of the ribs at the back. Two spots, one on either side of the spine. If you’re interested in trying something like this, I personally started out with my hip crests and trying to move them, one at a time, up/down, forward/backward, side to side, and in various circles. I did the same thing with those spots on the inside of my ribs, plus a few other directions.
–The weird thing is that if the two spots are close together, I feel feminine, but if they’re further apart, I feel very masculine, like straight-white-boy masculine. It felt VERY weird to be able to control that on purpose.
–Some of the differences: Different center of gravity. Different sense whether things were “up” or “down,” for example, in feminine mode if I lower an arm, it falls, but if I’m in masculine mode, I have to push it or it flops; in feminine mode, if I raise an arm, it floats, but if I’m in masculine mode, I have to push it or it flops. (Both sets of movement come from the center of gravity and don’t really take more or less overall energy, per se. They can both be fast or slow, forceful or gentle.)
–Wow this made me admire Christopher Walken’s performance in Weapon of Choice even more. I took some video of myself dancing part of the song just now. I can see the difference in my own movement when I shift into masculine mode (all the flopping around, ugh). Bu I also go, “He doesn’t even LOOK like he’s controlling that.” I love it when I get an insight that unlocks appreciation of cool stuff. But ehhhh I’m not gonna share it.
–Some songs are easier to do in one mode or the other, but others are pretty easy for me to slide back and forth. AC/DC’s Thunderstruck just came on. It is RIDICULOUSLY easy to slide back and forth from masculine/feminine modes. I don’t get it but there it is.
–I have way more control in feminine mode than masculine. I have no idea how to identify any other modes or much in the way of subtleties at this point, other than brief flickers of awareness.
–I danced some Bjork songs and WOW. Bjork is all over the place, even from her earliest solo work. I feel like I should be doing a Bjork song every morning to warm up, because it will cover every imaginable type of movement, intelligence, gender, and life, including fungus and AI. I was unable to dance a couple of her more recent works. I’ll try them again later.
–With the Bjork songs, I had a MASSIVE sense of stretching around either side of the sternum, and, afterwards, a sense of grief. Probably “opening the heart center” stuff, as in yoga.
–When in “masculine” mode, I quickly became tired and felt emptied out, just spiritually exhausted. I expect it was because I am NOT used to moving that way. I also think that moving through the world with a higher center of gravity is generally more tiring, especially if you’re breathing through the tops of your lungs and not your diaphragm. And it may be that walking around with your heart center thrust forward all the time may be a bit wearying, especially if you’re not flexible and it gets locked that way.
–I would hazard a guess that if you were born with a more masculine body (not just cis men, but like if you have PCOS, too) and wanted to access femininity a bit more easily, then putting your feet together, putting your thumbs on some bony part of your hips on either side, then pushing with your thumbs back and forth without moving your feet would do it. But maybe not. I’m just pulling this out of my ass to check up on later.
I did fine yesterday morning, got a bunch of writing done, did grocery shopping, went out for a belated walk and…THE MUSCLE ACHES SETTLED IN. They were rough, and not just physically. Physical pain is something I can usually shut off if I have to. But at the same time I just felt emotionally devastated. The grief behind the stuff I was angry about hit me; every failure from the last week or so jumped on its tailcoats and crowded in. I took a bath with epsom salts and ate a bag of pickle ranch chips, chatted with friends but felt flat.
Someone posted a thing about how people who are neurodivergent were likely the hunters of the tribe, rather than the gatherers. The thought felt off until I went, “I’m not a mammoth hunter I’m a persistence tracker,” and that made sense. Another person posted a thing about how ADHD/autistic people crave certain types of movement, for example exercise, picking, or stimming, because their brains are using the side products of the movement to build neurotransmitters. I’ll have to look into that more, but on the off chance it would help, I got up and danced a few songs.
Sure enough, after like three songs I stopped tearing myself up. I was still grieving–what, I’m not entirely sure–but I could settle enough to go to bed.
I did some “comfort food” reading and watching; interestingly, I needed both light things and dark things in order to be comforted. Someone reached out, too. It was a “blink and you’ll miss it” thing, but it was enough to finally knock me out.
ZONK.
Slept like a rock, woke up in the middle of the night feeling like someone was nagging me to drink water, drank some water, went back to sleep, woke up feeling like I’d been talking to someone again.
This morning, I got up and found that I’d had a bit of discontinuity of self. Not surprising given the number of new things I’ve learned and grown into lately. I wasn’t particularly upset about it. It was different than usual, though. I didn’t feel like I’d died and had to start my character from a save point, but like I’d been booted over from one multiverse to another, with only veerrrrrry slight differences. For example, I looked at myself in the mirror after I got dressed and went, “Whose fucking clothes are these? These aren’t my clothes. Who even picked these out? GAH.”
They are, of course, my clothes. I remember getting them.
Then: “Ugh, boobs again. One of THOSE universes.”
And of course it’s not like I don’t have this same body every day. But I don’t feel like I’ve misplaced anything or anyone mentally, though, which is nice.*
I did yoga and decided to try holding a plank, for the first time in a while (I’ve been doing other things), and it was easy to hold it for ten slow breaths, where before I would sink down wanting to die after five much shorter ones. My hands and feet feel different (hands broader, feet narrower). No knot at the neck, hips only slightly misaligned. Went out for a walk and did fine; the sore knee is still sore but I’m able to protect it as long as I remember to slow down when it feels loose. I climbed down a ditch and some of the smaller muscles around the knees were annoyed about it, because I’d tired them out already. I took pictures and didn’t have to think about how to do it. Usually when I hit a discontinuity, taking pictures is one of those things I have to figure out all over again. Not today.
Got home, danced a few things, tried to get some fiction written–kept hearing this blog post in my head instead of my characters.
So here we are. I’m not sure there’s any real point to today’s post other than to say, “People are weird and I wanted to document my weirdness so I could look back at it later for patterns.” But maybe it’ll resonate.
Drink some water, whine at me if you need someone at the other end of the line, maybe try doing your movement thing if you’re having trouble falling asleep. BIG HUGS. That’s all, I guess. I hope it’s enough.
*Total side note. When I travel, I usually don’t have trouble falling asleep in a new place, as long as the bed’s decent, I’m not too hot/cold, AND there are no freaking Mariachi bands. One time in Vegas on Fremont Street there was a MARIACHI band playing over the speakers and I just could NOT sleep. Hip hop? New country? 80s hard rock? EDM? NO PROBLEM! But Mariachis?!–I mean, they sounded cute? But no sleep.
I think falling asleep easily is another “persistence tracker” thing. I’m not a sentry for the home cave, so if nothing is actively chewing on me I’m fine.
…
A short clip (30 seconds) of Florida birdsong.
I ended up feeling exhausted most of the day yesterday, and almost skipped posting the pictures I took. I’m so glad I put that off until today. This mat was outside, in a ditch, surrounded by trash. And it was STILL accurate.
I can’t tell you how clever I feel at being able to get Midjourney to recreate this art style, from the Borderlands video game. There are issues. But if I try to roll the video game name as part of the prompt, I don’t get the right style, because there’s a forthcoming movie and the movie style has overtaken the original video game style. In addition to which, while the video game claims to be a space Western, according to Midjourney it is not: it’s a redneck cyberpunk.
This means I can now roll styles more accurately than people who “cheat” and use the names of the people/intellectual properties involved, AND I can now roll the style more accurately than the marketers do.
Take that, Bembridge Scholars!