I'm thinking about healing today--about how healing is not always a linear or even a chronological progression. Even the use of the word "progression" is deceptive, implying only forward motion. For me, more often than not, healing most closely resembles the hinky way that the knight moves on a chessboard: a little sideways, a little diagonally, an odd number of never-symmetrical spaces, and unpredictably, even to the player whose hand moves the piece itself. Side note: It's one of the reasons I love to attack with the knight. For just about every other piece, the king can be rescued from being "in check" simply by putting another piece in the way (that sacrifice is such a good metaphor for...class struggle? Feminism? Something sociological); however, if you put the king "in check" with the knight, the king has to run, exposing him for the weakling he is.
...well.
THAT certainly got way from me there.
What I am trying to say is that the process of healing a wound, especially a wound on my terribly soft and squishy, yet dangerously full of hubris heart is a nightmare. I clap my hands together with the faux-resolve that I am trying to manifest through a sheer act of will (fooling exactly no one). I say to myself, "Okay, let's get to it," and then I stand there mute and paralyzed by fear when what I need to do is move, breathe, re-regulate what has been dis-regulated, and "learn to love [myself] again". At least these are the things that I'm being told by the totally-random-and-not-the-product-of-terribly-invasive-algorithms of all of my nearby tech devices are telling me. Feh. The reason I have so little faith in this kind of self-help (at least one of the reasons) is that the advice is so...so...so vague. I don't need to be told to re-regulate. I need someone to explain how to re-regulate. Despite the fact that I consider myself somewhat of an abstract thinker (English teachers love that kind of sh*t), when the pain is concrete, measurable, incandescent, I want the solution to be equally as palpable.
What I am discovering is that each time the aforementioned heart gets thrashed, the emotional antibiotics I find the most effective are a steady course of running (this is not a metaphor. I mean actual cardiovascular exercise); slow, deliberate walks in relatively decent weather in which the soundtrack is populated by melancholy and joy alike; drawing and doodling, and readingreadingreading voraciously and effulgently--fiction, nonfiction, poetry--it doesn't matter. As I duck and weave and mend and rend and mend again, I will also cry loudly and deliberately, squeezing the poison in my brain out through my teeny-tiny tear ducts. If I'm lucky, I'll find a way to connect with friends whose sympathetic voices cradle my heart in the gentle, downy ease of "everything, everything, EVERYTHING is going to be okay" until the gravities of both sky and earth have returned to their respective places.
Okay *claps hands together with bravado* before it gets too cold tonight, I am going to go for a run.
