Kayaking <3…Getting triggered so hard one can’t let oneself know one was triggered…one’s area of care.
Adventures du jour!
I went kayaking on Saturday! I keep feeling like I shouldn’t brag up the winter weather here in Tampa, but I won’t really be able to say anything nice about the weather come summer, so I’ll celebrate it while I got it. Did the river in front of the downtown area, starting up by Armature Works, went about two and a half miles down toward Bayshore Drive, turned around. I managed to time it perfectly so that the tide was coming in while I was going downstream, and had slowed to almost nothing while I was going upstream. By the time I got back, about three hours later, I was more than a little wobbly.
The last few days have been a struggle.
Friday I dug down into an ongoing project and hit a point that I thought would be easy enough, given all the therapy/journaling/whining/drama I’ve poured into that part of my life. It was not. I wrote it easily enough but ended up triggering myself so hard that I couldn’t even let myself know I was triggered.
This is the part of the project I’m calling, “How it was done.” The process has been spanning across two projects, one that’ll eventually be public and the other that’s gonna stay private, and be put into someone else’s hands so I don’t destroy it. (Maybe by the time I’m done I won’t have thoughts of doing so?) I’m breaking down how I got roped in by the ex, the tale that was told and why/how it worked, and so on. The long con. I’ve already spent a fuckton of time writing about the specifics of what happened; this is just the part where I start generalizing to patterns I’ve been through, patterns I’ve seen from other people. The hard part should have been the part that only ever happened to ME, right?
Well, hormones plus getting stuck on fiction plus being sore from doing new stuff with dancing plus this, and I was in such misery on Friday that I couldn’t even let myself know why.
I dragged along all day, trying to figure out how to cope, and found myself going, “I am not saying something, there is something I am not saying.” So I tried putting up various thoughts that I had the impulse not to say on a FB post. That helped and I felt much calmer for a while. Then I hit a wall and just started crying and couldn’t stop. Went to bed, cried some more, woke up, went, “YOU KNOW WHAT?!?” and realized that I’d been triggered, cried some more, realized that I was on the edge of burnout, decided to go kayaking. (I love kayaking, not whitewater but the other kind where you’re basically sledding along the surface of mostly-flat water with a paddle.)
Kayaking helped. I got unstuck on the story, wrote another big chunk on the project, read a timely post by Kris Rush off her Patreon about the problems in your writing being the problems in your life, listened to a bunch of new gothy music with Ray, and moved on.
Out kayaking, I had a discussion with the saltwater about several things and came to the conclusion that I don’t need to change anything major this year. What I’m doing (trying to write this book instead of job hunting) continues to seem objectively foolish, but I can still afford to do so. Being here in Florida feels like the kind of place I need to be right now: sunny yet corrupt and cynical, maybe? I know that rebuilding my physical and mental strength–or building what I never had in the first place–will be a game-changer. Mostly what I wish is that I had a teleporter so I could hop over to Colorado so I can feel like I’m home again for a while, and really, I CAN do that. Airplanes exist.
There’s a part of me that’s still searching around for a purpose for the rest of my life. I thought I’d addressed THAT issue last year, but it now seems as though it might be a recurring question. The modern world is weird; it sometimes feels like we all have roles that we were bred for in a community that no longer exists, like family dogs that can no longer herd sheep.–I’m some sort of human that was bred to go out, do the stupid and/or new thing, survive it due to a particular set of characteristics and talents, then bring that knowledge back for the group to pass it on. I love writing, but it’s not exactly my purpose, just a tool I can use to report back to the community. Creative work, even essays like this, is how people like me get others to swallow something new and/or unpalatable.
So I’m floating around in a kayak yesterday, going:
Who else knows how to not just survive what I have, but break down what I survived, the thought processes behind why it happened the way it did, plus the process of putting yourself back together from the inside, in a way that makes facing it–and recovery has been admittedly unpalatable in soooo many ways–seem like a good idea? So at least there’s a map out there, for those as might find it useful on their way back? And who else can do all this, be wrong, and start over again? And again? And again?
Uh huh huh huh huh.
Definitely not only me, but me, and it would be irresponsible to stop at this point. It is my domain, my area of care.
I’ve been focusing on all the things I’m not, all the things I’m not good at, all the ways I’m not as good as I want to be. And not on the things people have been responding to as being good.
I’ll try to do better. May you have an easier time this year than last, watching over your own area of care.
Onward.
…
“Plurals aren’t usually made with ‘s’ sounds,” a short, counterintuitive video clip I really liked, by Instagrammer Abraham Piper. I love things that are counterintuitive.
Me talking about “moments will be happier,” as I was about to kayak back up from Hillsborough Bay onto the river.
I picked up some black hoop earrings!
This time, a tessellated library.