by Adelaide Song on 2024-03-22.
Tags: morning pages
These morning pages are an exercise in a couple of things:
It’s been a frankly embarrassing stretch of time since the last time I wrote anything that wasn’t rulestext, and it shows. The common metaphor of a muscle exists for a very good reason: I’m strongly reminded of how it felt when I first got this job, having to resume the daily trek again after months of sedentary nothing. It’s a little mortifying to have your expectations be so far above what your new capabilities are, but it would be a lot more humiliating to have given up out of some misplaced sense of pride.
In every case I’ve experienced this—physical fitness, fighting games, writing—I’ve always come back pretty quickly afterwards, and usually better off for the break. Pauses are helpful for clearing your head of immediate concerns like tilt, allowing you to see unconscious habits that are holding you back. Ideally I’m not going to take a break this long ever again, excepting situations like severe burnout or medical emergencies, but there’s still arguments to be made that sometimes you do need that level of deep-cleaning. I know I did in hindsight.
One day, my best friend from primary school told me that I was faking my laughter.
At the time of writing this happened decades, plural ago. I still remember with absolute certainty that nothing had changed; I still found things funny the same way I did, and I didn’t remember ever changing the way my body responded to that fact. We were both too young for this to be a problem with puberty changing my voice—a neurosis I’m sure we’ll get into excruciating detail on at some point—and I can’t think of any other reason for my laugh to have changed.
Occasionally I’m gripped by the impossible, terrible fear that I’ve been replaced in my sleep by somebody else.
Of course I’m aware that people change over time. Move enough sand on a beach and you’ll create a whole new coastline. “Prufrock” was my favourite poem in high school, and probably the only reason that I started taking writing and literary analysis seriously—shoutout Dr. G-S.—and Eliot could only imagine how many faces are prepared in the course of a day in a corporate office. Maybe Severance didn’t go far enough.
Still. Still there are shifts that are too far for me to comprehend: if not a bridge too far, then one burnt deep beneath the surface, ash and dust in the dark folds of the ego.
I worry that someday the person everyone else loves will have died, and I will be none the wiser.
Enough existential dread. Time to talk about physiotherapy.
Thankfully I’m not suffering anything major. It’s not a problem of mobility, only pain; my standards for my own personal flexibility are skewed by knowing so many people with various strains of hypermobility.1 It’s still a pointed reminder of the fact that I am still tied to a meat machine, and it can get heated should I forget. Being able to sit comfortably is a newfound luxury, as is being able to lie in bed without dealing with a screaming lumbar.
Massage is good. Unfortunately I would like to be able to live the rest of my life without either chronic back pain or having to hire a dedicated massage guy forever. It turns out in that case exercise is the lesser of these evils. Most annoying guy you know, etc.
Ergo chairs are palliative care (palliative chair?) but they’re not going to solve the issue of having a weak back—nor are they something I can even get to the office, which is an issue when I spend eight hours out of each day there.
If I had a nickel for each guy I knew with Ehlers-Danlos I would have two nickels, which is not a lot, but enough to break my inner circle’s standard deviation. ↩