7:49pm December 13, 2011

I feel like a tightly compressed spring.

Wow I’m really going back to old ways of handling stress I’d forgotten since I don’t get this stressed very often anymore. (For largely physiological reasons.)

All the stuff I’d managed to mostly forget in the past few years since that health crash fundamentally changed my body in all kinds of odd ways.

Wanting to hide under furniture (So glad my bed goes up and down electronically now.)

Wanting desperately to be able to climb something the moment something even slightly alarms me. (Used to do trees if outdoors, door frames indoors. Alas I currently lack the muscle strength for it.)

Feeling utterly wrong on furniture. (I stayed on the floor as long as I could today, including dinner, before my body ordered me back in bed. I am now remembering, at my most stressful time periods, shrinks and parents trying really hard to force me to use beds and chairs.)

Unfortunately these days if it’s my first instincts vs. my body… my body wins, every time. I just can’t move the way my brain wants me to. Not that I’m trying to be all sob story about it. This sort of thing in the end doesn’t make me miserable, it’s more like inconvenient.

But it’d still be nice sometimes to be able to run up a tree when startled, as easy as thinking it. It’s not even that these desires have gone… it’s just that they don’t express themselves in my body so thoroughly anymore.

(I still remember a staff person pretty much forcing me to stay in the car. She was afraid if I went up a tree someone would call the cops. I was just struggling desperately to get to the tree and the cops be damned. Of course it’s that kind of thing that’s resulted in a lot of bad police encounters. Apparently people like me should not stress out in public. And if I wasn’t white I’d probably have gotten myself killed or jailed that way – as it was I got a lot of involuntary commitments that way, because don’t you know showing atypical patterns of distress in public is being a danger to oneself and others.)

I’m starting to feel some of the shaking everywhere inside dissipate and move towards a body-wide desire to slow down and eventually sleep. Maybe when I wake up I won’t feel so much like I need to either jump under the bed or run up a tree. I wish I knew a good simple word to describe this odd kind of edgy alertness where all my instincts are telling me to react these ways…

…okay body is now fading really fast so sending this.

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