Adventures du jour.
There was a shooting last night in the hometown of my heart, Colorado Springs. A gunman killed multiple people–five?–and wounded many others at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ space, blocks away from my old apartment on Rebecca Lane. I only went there once (for a lovely brunch) and regretted not having gone more often once I had.
I am angry but I’m trying to keep it close.
May the fucking fascists consume themselves, bite by poisonous bite. May they find no safety, sustenance, or shelter from those they would ultimately destroy. May their children, their spouses, their cousins, their dogs, their coal-rolling supertrucks, their very intestinal flora turn against them, and return to sanity. May they encounter bright light, stony faces, hard fists, and always, everywhere, the words: FUCK YOU.
…
Writing yesterday: I don’t know that I really got the Big Bad sketched out to be truly creepy, but there’s a line that I just remembered that still icks me:
“Mitch’s rubbery face widened until the folds of skin at either side of his mouth looked like pulled taffy. The dark gap between his front teeth seemed to run up through his gums and into his skull.”
–I don’t know if I’ll leave it like that with regards to the gap between the teeth; I feel like it might come across as cruel. But I’m basing the description off a Real Billionaire, and that was the impression I got, like both halves of his face were about ready to swing free.
The characters are anyhow now out of time and I haven’t written everything they need to know. OOPS. Too bad; they’re just going to have to operate without full knowledge, just like the rest of us.
Yoga: did somewhat better this morning. The hip had already mostly released by the time I got up.–It was knifelike sore on and off all day yesterday.
From the Yoga Anatomy book (I’m reading this line with my double-jointed knees in mind):
“Observing movement through all the joints in a pathway of weight can help us evaluate where to encourage more movement and where to limit the amount of movement. These observations can also help us recognize the cumulative effects of many small movements in the overall gestures of our limbs and spine.”
If I lock my knees backward at their fullest range of motion, I am flat-footed, my hips rotated forward. My gait “stumps” a bit, and I drag my feet. The effects roll up my spine to my usual “bad” posture positions. When I do the dancing-while-walking thing, my knees aren’t locked and I’m on the balls of my feet. It’s probably still not the greatest for posture, but it might explain why I tend to trip and fall more when I’m not in dancing-while-walking mode. When my knees are able to lock, my leg movements aren’t as fluid and are almost perfectly designed to slam the soles of my shoes into small discrepancies on the sidewalk.
On the walk, went out to the big park I like. I’m in an overall better mood than yesterday. Walking around the park made me feel like I’d left little packets of good neurochemicals hidden in the places I like to take pictures. “Ah, I was clearheaded and in a good mood the last time I saw this exact place; I can access that mental state a little better here than two feet to the left, for example.”
Got back, took a shower, came out to a ton of ice-cold rain, which is one of my favorite Florida weather moods.
…
Resilience.
People have different strengths; I think endurance is one of mine, to the point where it’s hampered me from developing other good skills, like setting boundaries or just letting things the fuck go.
Endurance is being tough enough to withstand stress and distress. When I’m enduring something, I snort in the face of pain. “Yeah? You think that hurts? My period cramps are better than that on an easy month.” That sort of thing. “Do your worst! I can take it!”
Well, I can. But so what? When I endure, I’m trapped in emergency mode–stress response, I think?–and I can’t heal well, I don’t think clearly, I can’t relax, I don’t have a sense of perspective.
I have a fair amount of mental and physical and emotional endurance, although by the end of my marriage it was pretty drained, and then after my daughter and I moved to Florida I didn’t stop and take time to rebuild it and started to develop more serious health issues (like not being able to walk around the block without getting footsore and winded). I’ve been rebuilding my endurance lately, though.
I *want* to say my endurance comes from some special inner whatsihoosit that is uniquely mine, but it’s probably just genetics from the Knippling side of my family. I come from a line of cowboys who are too dumb to climb off a bucking horse without getting thrown first, and I mean that repeatedly and literally. I can rebuild endurance relatively quickly, the way that some people can rebuild muscle easily, I suppose.
But switching out of stress response mode is a whole other story. I suck at it.
Relaxing? Resting? Chilling out? I can’t. I almost always have to be around someone who can do those things if I want to do them–or push myself to the edge of exhaustion. Or it has to be a gray, still, weathery day like today. For some reason that works sometimes, until it suddenly doesn’t and I’m out walking ninety miles and hour in the rain or the blizzard or whatever just to keep from chewing my leg off. I have “go” but I don’t have “stop.”
I don’t think endurance is the best way to go. I think resilience is better.
If endurance is about being able to handle being in stress response mode for a long time, then resilience is about being able to leave stress response mode and get back to normal.
I used to think I had zero resilience. When I broke things off with the ex, I was convinced that I would be out on the street, that I would get screwed over financially, that Ray would starve, that I would be trapped in that house forever, that my heart would just plain stop from all the stress I was consistently under. At some level I knew I would have to survive long enough to make sure Ray got out okay and had a safe place to recover. (I didn’t know how she would need to recover at that point; I just knew there was no way she wouldn’t need *something.*) But I couldn’t see ever getting back to a place where anything felt good or right again.
People with more resilience than I have kept telling me: You can do this. You will be okay. Someday, you will look back and go, it’s over with. There will be more to life than what you have right now. You are wonderful. We are rooting for you. You are strong. You can do this.
If not for them, I wouldn’t have been able to make it, I don’t think. I would have survived somehow, but I’d still be fucked up about it. I think I patterned my understanding of what resilience is on them, not so much on a conscious level as just picking up their attitude.
Lately, I’ve been finding points of resilience, where I can stand down from the stress response and just relax. It feels foreign. It feels reckless to unloose the things I did to myself in order to endure.–Like the loosening of the three iron bands around the Frog Prince’s servant’s heart, which he had affixed there to keep his heart from breaking over his master’s suffering.
I’m not sure how to describe the process, other than to say that it feels like failing. I fail. I just fail. I give up. I lose. I am wrong. I have no desire to win, to be right, to get done on time, to achieve my goals, to push onward. Things that hurt don’t just hurt, they *fucking* hurt. Sadness isn’t just sad, it’s so sad that I can’t imagine not shaking with grief, crouched down with my hands on the back of my head on the shower floor. I am so sad that I can’t fight. I can’t even be angry. Nothing will ever be right again.–I’m not very good at “stop.” “Stop” feels like misery to me.
But once that passes (and it always passes, because that’s the nervous system I ended up with; I know it doesn’t pass for everyone that easily), I can function like a human being again, instead of like a survivor.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to have inherited the ability to endure. But I tried to use it for *everything.* And a life worth living does not that direction lie.