Adventures du jour!
In the end, I didn’t get any writing done yesterday; I was just too fucking angry about the shooting at Club Q. Instead I stayed up way too late talking to a friend who was also in a dark mood.
She talked me down from the worst of it. I’m not effective when I’m that angry. It wasn’t a “calm down!” talk, either, but a “well? what are we doing? what are we all doing?” talk. (Thank you!)
I’ve always been afraid of myself. I think I’ve talked about that? I had to carry a lot of my mom’s negative emotions and self-perceptions until a couple of years ago.–Although now that I think about it, when I went to college, suddenly, as if by magic, she shifted a lot (but not all) of her hate onto a coworker of hers. Because I wasn’t available 24/7. And suddenly I was seduced over the phone into becoming an “ally” in criticizing the other person. When Mom retired from that job was also about the time that she shifted her attention back to me and I was evil and destroying her family again.
Okay, well, morning revelation.
Anyway: one of the things my friend and I talked about was the fact that trauma gives you a capacity for doing bad things. I’m not actually a bad person. It took me more decades than I want to admit to realize that, as part of my divorce.
And yet.
So I try not to indulge in stress, despair, anger, violence, manipulation. Because I don’t want to break myself or lose the respect of people I care about. But I am so angry right now.
Why this time, why not another time, why not before this, why not after this-?-it’s probably the efforts I’m doing to disenfuck myself, honestly. Getting healthier, more mobile, more confident, more independent, more assertive, more able to take risks, more able to think clearly: I am not distracted from how upset I am.
I got up this morning after three and a half hours of sleep, did yoga, danced, didn’t hit things, burned. Went out for a walk. Mr. Assassin came out for a while and offered his sympathies; he says the Goob gets like this, too, and assures me that it’s scary and not ridiculous, which was oddly comforting.
Then he left and my mind unfolded in quick order the stuff I needed to write the next couple of scenes. Goth Girl wants one more chance to get someone on their side before the shit hits the fan. I don’t want to write the scene that follows it. It will be violent. I will write it. I will carry the damage out of my house and into theirs.
I’m also going to look for ways to be less scared of myself, without getting into “praying for the end of the world” mode. One step at a time, being mindful that a life without joy is hard to sustain, and leaves me too fucked up physically and mentally to be effective.
What are we doing? What are we all doing?
We are doing one more right step. We are building one more point of strength, of knowledge, of resilience. We are taking our eyes off tearing each other down and turning our eyes to more effective perspectives. We are doing and feeling and being the things we were not supposed to, so that fear of ourselves cannot be used against us.
From Yoga Anatomy:
“Muscles work together in complex ways. There’s not a right muscle for any joint action, but a whole assortment of muscles that might participate in a movement. There are many ways to do it well, and the best combination of muscles for one person might be unsuitable for another person.
“Instead of creating a map of individual muscles working separately, let’s look at muscles working together as a matrix of potential movement choices that affects every articulation in your body. In this map of connections, muscles do not work in isolation, and a single muscle never works without support and modulation from other muscles. Each muscle has an effect on every other muscle, whether they are nearby or far away.”
May we support each other in such ways.
Off to write.