slipstream becomings

i got home last night around 9:30 from dropping the girl at her friend owen’s house for a sleepover. owen’s mom and i have been friends since university….going on 15 years now.

but.

it’s another one of these relationships that i can’t continue to have. she doesn’t listen. my life is profoundly uninteresting to her. my job in the relationship is to praise her. unerringly. everything she does. her house. her kids. her job. everything. and there is no reciprocity. i told her another of my papers had been accepted to a conference. she barely acknowledged that as a success, nevermind expressing even a remote interest in what i am doing. i kept my praise of her gardens, her kids and the renovations to her home to a minimum, but it became very clear that’s what she was looking for. i am her own personal cheerleading ever-ready pompom girl.

i have lost 22 pounds. there was only a derisory remark about how i have been off and on exercise kicks in the past. i look a bit different for sure. better. but far be it from her to acknowledge that. or maybe, sadly, even to have noticed. yet when she drop weights (which she says is easy for her - really easy. and i believe her. she is a terrible cook and i don’t think she gives a shit about food generally. she cuts the sugar and wham. she’s thin again. ohhh i’ve always bee jealous of that.)

therapy. it’s so hard to see these relationships in this new light. i laughed in that horrified way the whole drive home, shaking my head. and i am sad to realize that there is no point in talking to her. what would i say? “hey don’t you give a rat’s ass about anything i do? or anything i am interested in? why do i always feel like a second class citizen in your eyes?”

her house is a chaos factory though. the energy in there is purely frantic. i know my girl will be okay, but i’m going to pull back a bit. i’m exhausted. 

when i got in, i decided that i’m a month behind my goal to start running and i needed to get a workout in and yoga wasn’t going to cut through my upset/discontent.

so i got suited up and did the first workout of the couch to 5k. i ran/walked for an hour (because i always swim for about an hour, so a 20 minute run just seemed too short…) it was AMAZING. i took the dog. i ran by the river. i am always amazed how running spikes an endorphin kick like no other exercise i have ever done. 

why, in the past, have i stopped? oh please, don’t let me stop this time. 

i came home and did two relaxation/flexability flows from the yoga dvd and had a hot bath.

i slept and woke in the gentle symphony of rain.

namaste. gratitude for every breath.

on the yoag dvd i use, shiva rea talks about honouring your body, about knowing when you need to come into wisdom pose, when you need to come off you shoulders, off your knees, off your wrists. she talks about honouring the wisdom of your body and listening to what it is trying to tell you.

i swam hard yesterday, completing an uninterrupted 1500m swim. and then last night i stayed up way too late and drank too much wine.

today i felt like crap. crap. i was disppointed in myself for drinking and staying up so late when i really didn’t want to. i was late (very very) late with the girl this morning and i didn’t get much work done at school. i didn’t drink enough water and because i was so late i skipped lunch.

i went to the pool though, and swam for 40 minutes. everything hurt and i felt awful.

i was in real trouble afterwards, feeling like i had the flu. i picked up the girl, we rode home and by the time we got here i felt like i was going to be sick. i drank a big glass of water, popped some advil and turned on a video. i felt better after a couple of hours, but i’m off to bed by 10, no fooling around.

i learned something today, not for the first time. if i do not care for myself, if i  do not honour my body, i cannot do the things i want to do. if i do not take of meself, i cannot be the person - the mother, the human, the self - i want to be.

it’s the wisdom of knowing when to listen to your body.

the car and i were flooded outo n western road today.

i don’t know what’s wrong with it, and i am over course totally stressed and utterly convinced that i have managed to crack the engine block through impatience while sitting in a small roadside lake.

but you know what?

to calm down i did a yoga session from the dvd followed by a relaxation meditation from doyogawithme.com

and it worked. i calmed down quite a bit.

i’m still almost sick with stress, but….but.

and i’m not journalling my food. i’m loosely counting points,and not freaking out or bingeing or jumping ship entirely. i just lost the compulsion to journal. (becuase i went over last week and didn’t want to see it in ink. that’s the truth of it.) i don’t know what happned. or rather, i know exactly what happened. i was a little bit successful. and then the demon of self-sabotage kicked in and a life of not really believing i have the right to be successful kicked in and this is the sound of my sliding into the comfortable nowhere zone of mediocrity. that and for all my conscious believe in the need for balance, my internal perfectionist jumped ship. fuck her. she has well and truly entered the long slow process of losing her job. 

listen up for the roaring sound of me kicking the demon’s ass and escorting the inner perfectionist from the building of my soul. (i could start the journal tomorrow. okay. i’ll start the journal tomorrow.)