Take a plain, thick, athletic tube sock with that thick toe-seam, you know the kind. Put it on kind of crooked, so the seam kind of interferes with your toes. Don't pull it all the way up, so the tip is a bit floppy. Now put on the shoe.
When I was younger, that feeling of the seam-wad-lump-wrinkle of the sock in the shoe drove me crazy. I hated it! Argh!
Some days my whole body feels like that, like my spirit has been stuffed crooked and rumpled into a too-small container.
And on days like that, when I do Taiji, it's even worse since the exercise and the focus increases my energy far beyond normal. And then when the focus ends, it's all loose energy rattling around in a defective container.
This sense of malaise peaked for me yesterday and now this morning I feel clean are refreshed, alert and well.
It's part of a long cycle that feels like a week-long seizure. Since I was sick last week a bit, I didn't notice the headache Tuesday as being part of it, but there is usually a headache involved near the end of the "event", corresponding to increasing tension and bad mood. I thought Tuesday was a relapse, or that all the water I was drinking was flushing toxins, or because I hadn't had coffee, or... and it may have been those, too.
You know how, when you drift off to sleep, your body might twitch or spasm? Sometimes it's big enough to wake you up again. I have the joy of getting those spasms at odd intervals, pretty much any time.
Usually, they are associated with a mental fugue -- where I'll catch on a particular thought, often involving an intense physical image (e.g. cutting off a finger, any violent thing to myself or to another, but sometimes just anything) that escalates and then releases with a spasm. It's really weird.
At the peak of these long, slow, uncomfortable "events" my body can be on the edge of these for a long time, just tense, and anything, a touch or a thought, can trigger one. Like a coil of sissal twine wound too tight, where the strands are breaking one at a time...
There's also an emotional component to the "event", often just an escalating (ummm, sinking?) depression, but also anger, frustration.
And then the creeping headache, that's especially fun.
And it peaks, and it's gone, and everything is good again.
Sometimes it's a few days to cycle, sometimes longer. And there is no noticable schedule to the events, no apparent trigger to start them.
It's been years since I've taken my sanity for granted, really. And you notice things when you don't assume that what you are feeling is "valid" (that is, connected to events around you), odd cycles of mood, or correlations of physical and mental state.
Sometimes it's like the "me" who I feel that I am has been stuffed into a defective robot, whose mechanics force upon me alien feelings or moods, whose electronics affect my clarity of thought, my memory. Sometimes the noise is so great it almost obscures who I am entirely, so my actions and presentation to the world is a lie, doesn't represent who I feel I am on the inside.
Is it any wonder that people have developed the notion of a body/spirit separation? That we would not think of ourselves as our bodies, but as some entity parked in this flesh?
Because some days this impression is very vivid; it's the only thing that makes sense, that feels true.
I just wish I could upgrade the motherboard on this thing. And maybe get a flashier case. And some neon. Definitely some neon, and move from those clunky flat cables to all-new SATA wires. Or something.
Posted by Edwin at November 10, 2005 07:11 AM