While I took some time out yesterday to write about some good old Legend of Zelda stuff in hope of buoying my mood, it only helped a little bit and most of that got undone by sleeping only four hours again. So, rather than get stuck in a negativity spiral, I’m going to write about what’s going on in a more informative than claiming manner. Or, I should say, I’m at least going to try that. Only the writing of this post will actually tell if I manage it, which is uncomfortably close to the process of going through physical therapy to fix my back problems. All you can do is try and see if it works out the way you want. The parallel is pretty apt, too, since I am a decent writer and am directing this blog post and my physical therapist seems to know what he’s doing, so he’s guiding my treatment in a direction that should help with what he believes to be nerve compression. It sounds pretty tame for what it is, to be honest. Or at least for what it feels like. From what I can gather (and I apparently only get to see my physical therapist on days I’m incredibly exhausted and barely coherent, so my understanding might be lacking), the short of it is that sleeping on my old, bad mattress trained my muscles a certain way and that muscle training means that I’m currently putting a bunch of pressure on the major nerves on the right side of my spine (since I went from sleeping in a bowl with a curve that stretched those muscles open to sleeping on a properly supportive surface that keeps my back level and “tightly” closes those muscles on my nerves for hours at a time). It’s sort of like constantly pressing on the nerve in your elbow–your funny bone–for hours until it becomes painful. I’ve been given some exercises to do to help strengthen and stretch my muscles while relieving the pressure they place on my nerves, which will hopefully be enough to eventually counteract the pressure I’m still putting on them.
Continue readingPain
Working Out, Body Image, and Aching Muscles, Oh My!
After a couple weeks of trying to take it easy on myself (and potentially against my best interests since I’ve at least got a cold if not mild COVID), I’ve gone back to doing my full workout every morning. It’s not an intense routine, focused as it is on daily rides on my exercise bike, a bunch of bodyweight exercises meant to work out all my muscles just a bit, and a plethora of stretches mean to loosen all the muscles I used and help counteract some of the effects of getting older or spending all day sitting or standing at my desk. It’s more of a “be healthy” workout than a “get ripped” workout. I don’t particularly want to be ripped since none of my work these days calls for a high degree of strength and I don’t particularly like feeling big and bulky. If anything, these workouts are hopefully going to make me feel less bulky as I lose weight. Once my muscle mass has stabilized, anyway.
Continue readingToday is My Birthday
After a certain point in high school, I haven’t been super fond of my birthday. To be honest, I never really dissected that. I don’t know if I ever spent any energy on why I’m decidedly neutral on the subject of my birthday before today. I’m all about other people’s birthdays and throw myself into celebrating them as much as I can with my limited means and social energy. But not mine. I like to mark them, sure, but mostly by gathering my friends around me to do something like we’d do any weekend. Hang out, go hiking, play D&D, maybe watch a movie or play a game together. Hell, last year I got a cake to celebrate moving day two weeks after my birthday and otherwise pretty much forgot on my own birthday.
If I’d had to say why I wasn’t very interested in my birthday before a couple of years ago, I’d have said that I’d rather celebrate personal achievements. Sure, birthdays are a celebration of life, but I’d rather just do that as a part of living it rather than taking a day to specifically celebrate a particular life. I didn’t really want attention back then and I much preferred to do things on my own terms than try to accommodate people’s desire to mark my birthday. I wouldn’t stop them, of course, I was never that much of a Grinch, but I wasn’t about to encourage it.
Now, I see that birthdays are a chance to let people celebrate you. Structure is super nice and while we should let people we care about know that we appreciate them all year long, it’s still nice to use their birthday as a bit of an excuse to make a production of it. To kick it up a notch or do something special just for them. Which is why I’m more interested in other people’s birthdays than my own. I like letting people know I appreciate them. Any resistance I currently feel to celebrating my birthday is because August has never really been that great of a month for me and I don’t really keep track of my life in terms of years. Sure, I know my age, but that stopped being a measurement of my growth a long time ago and now I keep track of time since big events.
My life has had a lot of big events and there are definitely a few that are sort of definitive moments that I know had a big impact on my life. Looking back on them, I can see how my life would have been incredibly different if I’d made a different choice and how the choices I made contributed to me being the person I am today. There’s a wide variety of events and while reflection on my life is the purpose of this birthday post, I’m not going to go deeply into all of them. Some of them were moments I don’t want to share because they mean more to me for being private or because I don’t feel ready to share them.
The first one, and one that actually was two forks disguised as one, was my parents telling my three siblings and I that they were going to have another children who would wind up being twelve years younger than me. I fell out of my chair laughing and wound up being almost a third parent to my younger sister since my dad worked a lot and my mother was homeschooling us at the time so she needed all the help she could get. I eventually realized that this was the moment that I decided to deal with the crazy randomness of life and (mis)fortune by laughing instead of crying. There’s more behind that, but this isn’t the post to go into it. I also realized that I enjoy taking care of and teaching people. It really helped me to learn to cope positively and how to be patient and compassionate.
The second is not something I’m willing to write about in any detail online, but I learned how I respond in a crisis and that there’s a certain part of me, beneath the compassion and desire to just love people that will stay firm and act when I feel like I don’t have any other choice.
The third was the college I chose. I grew more than I thought possible, in ways I never expected, and learned things I never knew I didn’t know. I met a lot of amazing people, a handful of terrible people, and discovered that we’re all the heroes of our own narratives but sometimes that means we’re the villains of someone else’s. I made mistakes and I hurt people. I made mistakes and hurt myself. Like I said, I learned a lot. Without the place I chose, I’d have been an incredibly different person, to the point of it being useless to try to guess what or who I might have been. I’ve got no frame of reference for who that other Chris could have been, so how could I ever guess? The other side of my college choice is that it also resulted in a giant pile of student debt due which has left me feeling like I’ve been forced to put my life on hold until I pay it off. Even though I don’t regret my choice and think that the choice I made was the right one, I still struggle with the prospect of all my student loans and how much of my money I’ll have sunk into them by the time they’re paid off.
After that, there’s my move to Madison and my first job after the move. It didn’t go well, but I really figured out what was important to me and what my limits were. Tied to that is another thing I don’t want to share online, from two years ago (almost to the day), that irrevocably altered my life. There are some questions you never want the answers to and, throughout my life, I’ve gotten two of them I’d prefer to have never come across. But it reinforced my resolve and sense of self. The two experiences, my first job and the thing from two summers ago, weren’t positive influences on my life, but I learned a lot from having made it through them. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God” (Robert F. Kennedy on hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.).
It’s been a long twenty-seven years. I’ve hopefully got many more years ahead of me, but I wouldn’t mind if they were a little less eventful. I’d prefer if my next major life event was something good, like being able to write full time, getting married, or buying a house. Those would all be nice, even if there’s less to learn from the happy moments than the difficult ones.
What A Headache
Ed woke with his head throbbing in pain. Someone was banging on something, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from, so he looked for the source.
His shelves held their usual dusty allotment of trophies and books. His dresser was covered in dirty clothes and the TV on it was showing the logo of his DVD player, as it always did after he fell asleep watching it. His desk was covered in junk mail he hadn’t gotten around to shredding and a neat stack of bills he hadn’t paid yet.
Guilt picked at him, but he dismissed it. He already tried to get extensions and they’d work it out eventually. It’s not like he had much they could take.
The banging hadn’t gone away, so Ed climbed to his feet to go looking for it. When he stood up, his foot caught on something. As he turned to look, his door burst open and his roommate flew in.
“Dammit, Ed!”
Ed winced. “Even if I don’t have rent yet, that’s no reason to break down my door.”
Matthew dashed past him and Ed turned around to see Matthew start giving CPR to someone. A wave of shock swept through him as he realized Matthew was giving CPR to him, but it quickly passed.
Ed watched, curious despite himself, and unable to muster up more than vague apprehension about Matthew’s attempts to save his life. After a minute, Matthew’s screams for an ambulance and demands that Ed stay faded to grunts. A few minutes later, when the EMTs arrived, Ed realized what had happened.
“Sleep apnea.” Ed shook his head. “I really should have gotten that checked out.” Ed drifted towards the window to watch his body get hauled away. “At least I don’t have to pay my bills.”
Before the Beach House
Thomas opened the door and looked down at the woman lying in the sand at the foot of his porch. “Do you need help, Sue?”
“No.” Susan looked up at the darkening sky and felt her heart throb in her chest as the shock of her skid across the asphalt started to fade.
Thomas stepped out onto the porch and looked down the street after Susan’s partner and then eyed the blood staining the sand underneath Susan. “You sure? That looked painful.”
“Everything’s fine here.” She lifted a hand up into the air and waved it in Thomas’ direction. “You can go back inside, Tom. I’ll follow in a few minutes.”
“Alright.” Thomas turned away but paused at the door. “Make sure to brush the sand off before you come inside.”
“But it’s a beach house, Tom.” Susan let her arm fall to her side and tried to turn her head toward her older brother. Her neck screamed in protest, so she stopped.
Thomas sighed and turned around again. “Yes, but I want the beach to stay outside.”
“Sure thing, Bro.” Susan smirked and pointed two finger-guns at the sky. Thomas walked inside. “Yep.” Susan let her hands slowly fall back to the ground as a wave of pain swept through her again. “Everything’s pretty alright.”
Half an hour later, as the sky finally gave in to the sweeping darkness and the first stars appeared, Susan rolled to her front and stood up. Her back was caked in bloody sand, but she didn’t seem to notice it. Instead, she stared after the ex-partner who’d decided assault was an appropriate response to being bought out of a business she’d been holding back. Daisy would be someone else’s liability.
Berserk rages didn’t belong in shopkeeping. She’d be happier as an adventurer again.
Everything Changes
I’ve been thinking about change a lot, recently. And not so recently. Change has been a big part of my life and a common topic during my own private musing for almost a year now. After some of the events of last summer, it has never been far from my mind. I struggle to accept its role in my life, especially the individual instances of change, but I think I’m getting better at embracing it as a whole. I dislike big changes that happen all at once and I don’t like when it lots of little changes happen quickly, but I think I’m better at accepting it than I used to be.
That’s the thing about change. You’re always better off accepting it. You don’t have to like or enjoy it and you definitely don’t need to learn to love each individual change, but it is beneficial to work toward embracing change instead of fighting it. The thing about change in life is that you can either learn to swim with it or you can get swept away by it. It is going to happen whether you want it to or not, but you can exercise a certain amount of control over where you wind up if you learn to work with it.
That has always been my struggle. I know change will happen regardless of my desires or actions, but I still find myself trying to fight it. I am a very determined, stubborn person and I tend to push back against things I don’t like or feel are wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of the change in my life winds up feeling wrong to me. I crave consistency, love my habits, and tend to plan everything out as much as I can. Change, and life in general, takes these things away from me. As a result, I tend to fight against change and try even harder to find comfort in consistency, habit, and planning. Generally speaking, this works about as well as bailing out a boat with a sieve. You feeling like you’re accomplishing something because you’re working hard, but you’re really doing nothing but wasting your time.
Thanks to a lot of work over the years, I’m getting to a point where I will only fight against change or stress-out about it for a little while before letting go and accepting it. I still fear it and I like to avoid it when I can, but I can also deal with it now when I recognize that I don’t really have a choice. Which is most of the time. It wasn’t my choice to start going bald or for the neighbor kids to start acting shitty, but I’ve learned to accept these things.
The thing I’ve learned this year, though, and that I’ve probably been in the process of learning for a long time, is that everything changes. It may sound like a pointless mental exercise or philosophical argument, but change is constant and we’re different from one moment to the next. Who we are is made up of our experiences, which means we will likely never be the same person twice as even a repeat experience is a new experience. I try to embrace this idea because it matches how I view the importance of words. You can use the same words multiple times, but they’ll mean something different each time you use them, both to the person using them and the person on the receiving end. It’s the idea behind the name of my blog and the poem that inspired the name: Broken Words. Every time you use words, they mean something new, so it is worth it to take the time to make sure you get them right the first time. You can’t take them back any more than you can un-shatter a piece of glass. You can make something new from the shards, something that seems incredibly similar to what you had before, but it will never be the same again.
Life is like that. We’re like that. But we’re not the only thing that changes. Everything and everyone changes. People from the past, things we wanted to leave behind, even things we didn’t actually leave behind but just aren’t watching all the time. As a lot of wise characters in media often say, life goes on whether you’re paying attention or not. Change happens whether you’re there to witness it or not.
Everything I thought to leave behind in my life, as a means of coping with pain or trying to move on from things I want that aren’t possible, all of that is still there behind me, but it’s different now. The situations and people involved are different. The most recent is four years old now and I’m so different that, looking back at it now, I barely recognize it when I compare it to the memories I have. Four years isn’t even that long, but it has been long enough that I don’t recognize the pain and anger I remember feeling. I barely recognize the other person involved. We’ve both changed so much.
My past is full of situations and things I’ve left behind that changed when I wasn’t looking. A few of them, the ones I could never entirely leave behind, actually made me miserable because I was trying to fit back into them the way I did when I left. I don’t fit in them the way I used to, and neither do any of the people involved. Trying to slip back into the way things used to be is not only a disservice to myself, but to everyone involved. It keeps the pain alive. We’re all so different now that I have a hard time justifying my attempts to hold onto the feelings I have leftover from then. Right now, as I’m trying to see what has changed in those situations when I was blinded by what I thought they would always be, I feel two forces warring within me. I want another chance at what I feel I lost, but I still have these intense feelings formed from the pain and hurt I felt when I finally got free enough to actually recognize how awful everything was. I can’t let either of them gain any ground because they’re both agents of what I wanted and felt back then. I need to go in with no expectations, no hopes for what might be, and just work at finding out what is.
I feel like this realization is one that a lot of people with painful pasts eventually come to, as they grow. This sentiment I’m feeling as I write this matches the feel of a lot of stories I’ve read about people trying to recapture their past, and learning they can never go back. Hell, I’ve only gotten to this point because I found a story that was literally all about this, about the inevitability of change and way things can quietly change when you aren’t looking. I found it the days after my view-altering event last summer, and it startled me out of my mopey sulk. Right now, as I’m trying to deal with my depression and a lot of stuff I’ve been working through alongside my depression, I went back to that story and was reminded that everything changes and sometimes things just come and go without any reason. Life is fluid and change is constant.
Maybe, someday, I’ll finally get to a point where I’m not struggling to accept change and the shifting nature of existence. That would be nice. In the mean time, I hope this helps you with your own struggles. I hope that my writing is a bit of light and a new way of phrasing things that makes you think. I know that the act of writing this out settled half of the questions still in my mind from the past few days and made me realize that the rest are things I can’t answer right now. Whatever happens, I think I’m going to be alright. I’m ready to stop fighting change.
Real Talk, Without Talking: Real Writing, I Guess
Yesterday’s poem and my weekend binge of doing literally anything but think about the problems I’m facing got me thinking. Eventually. It wasn’t until last night, after a stupid amount of time playing borderlands, ignoring my roommates, and pretty much ignoring every part of my life I could get away with ignoring, that I started thinking. As I stared blankly at my blog and thought about just giving up on the daily updates thing, I realized just how toxic my mental space had gotten while I stewed in frustration and pain for almost three whole days. I forced myself to find an old poem to post and took a brief moment to bask in the coincidence that the first one I found was “Self-Harm.”
After a brief disclaimer that help put things in context for myself (and hopefully kept anyone close to me who might read it from worrying), I posted it and decided to stop playing video games. I took a hot shower, had a difficult internal debate, and then took a few deep breathes, all of which helped me push through the fog of depression that I’d let into my mind. I was finally back to reality. There was work to be done, a difficult conversation to be had, and the demeaning specter of my depression to face. All at the same time.
The conversation was productive, my fears were quelled, and I proved to my depression once again that I am not an unlovable wretch. There is still work to be done, there are still conversations to be had, but I feel up to the task now. I don’t think my depression has entirely returned to the calm sea it usually is between wave events, but it’s calm enough for me to work with.
I haven’t been doing much writing aside from the daily blog posts in a long time. I keep making plans to write more, but I never seem to get it done. Every time I sit down to write, I have trouble focusing or I get caught up in blog stats. I lose track of what I sat down to do and content myself with trying to track metrics that’re ultimately meaningless. Feeling productive as a writer is helped by tracking the total number of words I’ve written each month, but actual progress on my goals is far more helpful. Blog posts every day is a great goal, but I know I can do so much more. A year of consecutive blog posts is going to feel amazing, but I’m selfish and want more.
Honestly, there really isn’t much stopping me from writing more. I’ve got plenty of ideas, I could easily work ahead in any number of blog post projects, and I’ve got enough time each week to easily do another thousand or so words a day without losing the time I spend on recreation. The only thing getting in the way of me writing more is myself. It is entirely self-sabotage. Some of it is subconscious, like when I got to this paragraph I realized I hadn’t checked all of my webcomics, so I took a quick break to see if any of them had updated since I last checked. I clearly don’t want to face the topic I’m heading toward because it makes me uncomfortable. Some of it is conscious, like when I decided to put off writing this until the morning because I knew I’d have to hurry through it and might not be able to get it all written before I had to leave for work. At the very least, I wouldn’t be able to think about it very much until after I’d done the work of writing it.
I get in my own way a lot. I’ve never engaged in cutting or any kind of physical self-flagellation, but I’ve been absolutely horrible to myself in terms of criticism and preventing me from working on goals or feeling positive. All my self-harm has been the non-physical kind that tears you up inside but never leaves a mark. There are a lot of people who do the same thing and we all call it just a part of anxiety, mental illness, depression, and so much more. After this past weekend, I’m inclined to call it all a form of self-harm.
I literally spent three days being miserable, basking in my own misery, telling myself I wasn’t worth the effort it’d take to proactively fix things, and wallowing in the waves of my depression as they repeated everything bad I’d said about myself since Thursday but magnified many times over. There was nothing preventing me from actually doing something productive, either to fix the problem or to make use of one of the various positive coping mechanisms I have that help me reflect on and find the truth in my internal conversations. If I’d written something about what I felt, I’d have discovered what was actually bothering me and what to do about it. If I’d talked it out with someone, they could have explained I was being far too critical of myself and that my depression was making everything seem worse than it was. If I’d done almost anything but what I did, I would have felt better.
Normally, I’m not this hard on myself. I don’t normally spend that much effort and energy on creating the ultimate stewpot for myself so I can bask in my own misery. This was a particularly bad weekend because it followed on a week of severe depression which was following on a week of growing-pain conversations with my girlfriend. It was a hurricane. The “perfect storm” of my depression, my anxiety, and my OCD and I swam right into it.
I’m willing to cut myself some slack here, because there’s a good chance that the current pulled me toward it, the wind pushed me toward it, and the spirals made it almost impossible to escape, but I’m not going to lay all the blame on my mental illnesses either. The first stroke was mine and mine alone. I chose this storm for myself because some part of me thinks I deserve to be miserable. Some part of me fears extended periods of positive emotion. Some part of me believes being in constant misery is exactly what is best for me.
That’s horseshit. And bullshit. And Zebrashit. If planets could shit, it’d be planetshit, too.
I’m not good at advocating for myself, not even to myself. I don’t do a good job of defending myself against anything. So, when someone says something that hurts me, my depression grabs ahold of it and tells me “Aha! I’m right! This clearly shows you’re worthless and no one will ever love you.” and I just let it. I don’t really fight it. Most of the time, I can just ignore it. Sometimes, like last weekend, it fits right into the internal narrative I’ve been constructing because I feel like I deserve to be punished for something so I just sit there and take it.
The part of me that believes I deserve misery and pain is probably the same part that is the source of my depression, anxiety, and OCD. I’m currently working with my therapist to address that and see what we can do it make it go away, but that’s always easier said than done and never a guaranteed outcome. I mean, I’m trying to talk about it now and, even after a couple of editing passes, this whole thing still feels super self-critical. Probably because I can still see and hear the words I’ve taken out, but that’s because they’re the words I use on myself all the time. How dumb is that? One of the ways I inflict emotional pain on myself is by giving myself a hard time about how I’m prone to self-harm through emotional pain. I’ve gotta be careful here, or else I’m going to start adding even more layers of recursion. It’s insidious!
It’s a difficult problem without a clear solution. If I take myself to task too severely, I tread right back into dangerous territory. If I’m too lax, I wind up inventing problems just to cause myself misery. If I get upset because someone did something that hurt me, I find a way to magnify it and make myself feel I deserved it. I rarely get angry or project my negative emotions outward.
I’m not saying that’s the solution to this problem, either. I’ve seen the pain that anger and negative emotion directed outward can cause. I’ve been on both ends of it. I hate hurting other people more than I hate hurting myself, so it is often easier to make myself miserable and spend a bunch of time feeling like I deserved it than to let someone else know they accidentally hurt me. I’m going to be in pain either way, so why not spare the other person? Ultimately, there’s a fine line I need to walk and I need to stop automatically jumping to the “embrace all the pain by yourself” side of it.
Self-Harm
Sometimes, when you’re having a rough week and trying to deal with something really upsetting, you write really emotional poetry that exaggerates the reality of the situation because you just feel so wretched. That’s what this poem is. A mixture of metaphor, over-exaggeration, and the desperately awful way I feel sometimes. It is also rather old. I wrote this a while ago. It is not about anything going on in my life today, though I do feel a certain attraction to the dramatic pain this poem displays.
Daydreams of what I wish could be
Shatter in the thunderous sea
Of impinging reality
While all my hopes so quickly flee
My every desperate plea
To stay a bit longer with me.
Now all that there is left to see,
In all of its banality,
Is the somber painful decree
That what I want can never be.
~ ~ ~
Every lesion in my head–
So sharp and sweet in welling red–
Suppurates as hope is bled
In the face of rising dread
Now my dearest dream is dead.
Is every single blood-stained shred
Of the wishes I have shed
Crushed beneath my drudging tread
As I pursue the truth instead
Of allowing myself to be misled?
~ ~ ~
Self-flagellation at its best
As I put all I am to the test
And face the truth that I detest.
I laugh and say that I’m just stressed,
To worry not and get your rest,
As I clutch the truth to my chest
Hoping that you never guessed–
Those few words we never addressed,
Memories you’ve all but repressed–
Are a big part of why I’m depressed.
Poison Drops
These little drops of poison dew
Collect upon my heart.
These little drops are not from you
Nor did you make them start.
No, my dear, they have always been,
So do not shed a tear.
These poison drops feel lesser when
I can hold you near.
These drips have taken no small toll
But they are not a threat.
You need not worry for my soul,
Its strength is greater yet.
I will not lie or hide the pain
Poison drips can cause me
But worry not, they leave no stain
And are temporary.
They’re little remnants of my past
That will not go away.
They do not fall upon me fast
Nor do they overstay.
I’ve lived with them all of my life
And doubt they’ll ever cease
But they are to my wit a knife,
It’s sharpness to increase.
I’ve made my peace with poison drops,
Painful that they may be,
For I have pulled out all the stops
So they may work for me.
Thank God
I thank God for the feeling,
Even though it hurts.
The pain may leave me reeling,
But now I know it works.