Plow Stop

Negative emotions are an annoyance to me, something to be mitigated and kept in check. I'm not reactive like I used to be. This is what I learned on the back side of the spiral I was in when I stopped blogging. I strapped myself in firmly and put the gas pedal of Life on the floor, continually picking up momentum as I got better at staying in motion and finding the positives.

After a period of particularly high speed that came out of dumping Kevin, I slowed down once in October, and wrote this in my journal...

This long weekend with nowhere to go has forced me to slow down. I've been running high-tension on caffeine and adrenaline for weeks now. One day off wasn't enough to stop my running, but at over 48 hours now of quiet, I'm stumbling. My head has been so noisy, and I couldn't make it stop. The chatter and the tension both keep me going and require me to keep going. I work, skate, eat, and go to the gym. I wondered how long I could keep it up, and I'm guessing the answer is "until a long down-time."

Here I am now. Sitting on the floor of my room, listening to Matchbox 20. I've spent the last few hours coming down off this weeks-long high. I haven't felt like this in a long time. I've been productive today but I feel like I'm losing ground. I'm losing people.

[...] I will continue to swim through the mud and hope I'm moving forward, because hard work is what I do. I can't stop pushing. Thirty in five, the real-life version.

(Thirty in five is a reference to doing thirty laps of the derby track in five minutes. The current minimum requirement is 27, and I set a goal for myself that I would do 30. I don't actually know if I've accomplished that goal, because I haven't been timed in years.)

I spent that long running from my demons. I was afraid to stop, but stop I have, and it's actually okay. Getting back into this blog and my email account were the actions that let the demons catch up. They were different than the image that I've carried in my head since I set off, but they weren't worse. They bared their fangs as we got reacquainted, but we sat down and hashed things out, and Aiden showed me a direction today in which we could actually be allies.

Aiden: I know having emotions is messy sometimes. but the highs are so much better. Sometimes we need to make a mess to clean things up.

Remember I have awoken profound love in you. That is not a trifling emotion. It may have dislodged some other things on the way out. As we unlock emotional torrents we sooth the knot that created them and allow you to become an even better version of yourself

We make a mess to further shine you.