Stayin’ Alive, or the John Travolta Method for Getting Over Yourself

Should have just gone for a damn run earlier.

So.
Today I had a nasty anxiety spike. It was mostly just the goddamn old tapes in my head – you know the ones: worthless, wordless, everybody hates you, worm-eatery, blah yarg fuckety smuckety.

Did I warn you that this post might contain a cussword or two? I didn’t?
Consider yourself warned.

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Man, I loathe feeling like that. I guess there isn’t a person alive who doesn’t have those moments, every now and again. They suck syphilitic goat, no two ways about it. For most of the afternoon, all I could really do was sit on the couch, play a stupid video game, and tell myself over and over that my brain was being an idiot. I eventually reached out to my friends – who I know care about me – and asked for a bit of love. Which they poured over me, with gusto.

A lot of gusto.
With a promise of cut-off shorts and bartending, even.

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I have *very* good friends.

I wish I could say that I snapped out of it right away. I didn’t  Brain weirdness doesn’t just go away. But I did convince myself to stop huddling in on myself, to interact with friends and family, to make dinner, and eventually to go for a run.

Please refer to the first sentence in this post.

I feel better now than I have all day. I mean, minus the wobbly legs and the sweat pouring down my face. Of course, part of it is the endorphins; however, some of it is just not letting the stupid anxiety win.
Fuck that shit. I deserve better than being a whiny neurotic heap on my couch.

At any rate. I didn’t have much more to say. I wanted to write about kicking anxiety’s ass (mostly) to the curb, at least for the evening.

I also wanted to post (with video links because I’m cool like that) my run music. It was on shuffle, so it was totally the Universe channeling the right music for me. Even if much of  it had to do with Code 187-MDK and the 80’s.

Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch

 [SITD] – Plastination City

Suicide Commando – Bind, Torture, and Kill

Duran Duran – A View To a Kill

Rammstein – Du Hast

Camoflage – The Great Commandment
What ARE the fucking lyrics about??

CombiChrist – This is My Rifle
Today? You pukes will sleep with your rifle. You will give your rifle a girl’s name.

Wumpscut – Evoke

BeeGees – Stayin’ Alive
Totally John Travolted all the way home during this one.

The last song was really, really appropriate and *totally* cracked me up. I was shuffle-dancing and giggling the last few minutes of the run.

Jack Handy’s Bewbs

Do you know what 1.5 days on the beach can get you?
I mean, aside from a gloriously crispy rack?

Read more about it here.

(not-quite Jack Handy’s) Deep Thoughts and Bewbs

Do you know what 1.5 days on the beach can get you?
I mean, aside from a gloriously crispy rack?

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Ow.

Some time for thought, introspection. I mean, yeah, there was a lot of giggling and talking and having fun. But, there was also hours at a stretch with nothing but a book I wasn’t quite interested in reading right that moment, the sun, the water, and my thoughts.
Some of those thoughts were just those random, floaty things that most people who have some anxiety live with. I did my very best to smoosh those thoughts into a small, glass jar on a back shelf in my head. They weren’t the important ones, you know?

But the other thoughts? The big ones? Those came crashing in with the sound of the surf.
Just recently, I had been hiding from them. They’re scary. They’ve got some long-reaching implications.

Here’s the thing, though. When you reduce all the headnoise, all the thrashing and flailing that your Christ-Don’t-Make-Me-Change! Psyche throws up at you? You come to some serious plateaus of realization.

And I say “plateaus” on purpose. I have roads of work ahead of me. Because what I realized is that I am an awesome person – who hasn’t felt awesome for a good bit of time.1

Thank goodness for therapists and fantastic friends. They help keep you on the sunnier side of sane(ish).
That feeling as though, you never belonged. This feeling is not sadness, this feeling is not joy.  I truly understand.. Please don’t go.

In conclusion, I want to say something to any of my readers to whom this may apply. If you are feeling that you don’t matter, that you are awful, that you are gross, that your friends are only faking friendship, that you will never, ever get ahead of the things that are bad in your life?
You’re wrong.
And you need to talk to a professional someone about that.
Because you’re awesome.
Trust me. I know.

1  – nobody panic. I am just saying that I haven’t felt that feeling that I used to have. That Stride Into a Room, Point Like a Lounge-Lizard Superstar at folks and Be One With the Groove. Anxiety, grief, and the illusion that I didn’t matter had eaten my rockstar face off.