a metaphor

Healing from emotional wounds is knitting.
You make progress - you get better - you go forward a loop or two.
But then you fall back.
But the falling back isn't pointless.
It isn't always masochistic.
The thread must move backward to fix the forward loops in place.
It's reinforcing the design.
And in the end, after many, many, forward-backward iterations, you have something good.
A scarf.
A sweater.
A hat.
A baby blanket.
A whole.

one of those weird 'I'm-not-fully-awake' moments

In my benadryl-induced haze as I was waking up this morning, I remembered something my ex had done. Some words he had spoken that I had to get over, get around, get past.
And I could see the action frozen in time. A frame. A square. I tried to walk around it - to avoid it on one side so that I could get to the other side and move on with my life. And as I got to a different perspective on it, I could see that it was three dimensional. It was a prism-like solid, deeper in the middle than on the ends. It was bigger than I thought. I could see it rotating on some central axis like in computer imaging programs. I tried to keep walking. I kept bumping into it. It kept getting in my way. I never got around it.
It was frustrating.
If I had been more fully awake, I might have cried.
But if I had been more fully awake, it might not have happened.

uring

When my parents first got married, they knew a lady who tried very hard to be proper in her speech. She never said runnin' or fixin' - always running. fixing. She was SO proper that she would add a 'g' to the end of all words that ended in 'in' - regardless of weather she should or not.
This produced such gems as:

• muffing
  
• robing
• uring
  

It was all my parents could do not to laugh.


Tonight, I saw a guy walking his dog along the streets of Dover. Some contentious citizen had already placed their trash out on the curb for pick-up in the morning. The bright green bag with the Dover city seal was a good enough target for the dog, and apparently it was also good enough for the guy.

In the morning, some poor trash man will have to pick up that bag covered in frozen dog uring.

pain

I can understand cutters now.

Emotional pain is hard to deal with. When it's really bad, there's no banged toe to hold, no aching back to massage, no headache to avoid light and loud noises for the sake of.
There's just this non-localized, pervasive, almost unbearable pain. You can't touch it or make it go away by what you do.
Being able to say, "I cut my finger. My finger hurts." helps. It is comforting.
Especially when you can say "My finger hurts because I cut it."
Emotional pain is not always clearly defined or caused or understandable. It can leave you confused and hurting even more.

As a psychology student, I had heard about this reasoning, and I realized that it made sense, but now I can relate. Empathy is much easier. Understanding is easier.


Hearing the wind rush around my protruding room while the boards in this old house creak is comforting.

baby belt

When I was young, I had a belt.
This belt was special. It was made of an elastic band with the word 'jeans' written all the way around. Even better, the buckle was...


a magnet.

I loved that belt. I was just learning to read when I was wearing it, so I took pride in the fact that I could tell that it said 'jeans' all the way around and imprinted on the buckle. I liked to bring the magnet close to the metal and feel the tug of magnetic force as they got closer and closer together. I liked to stretch it when i wasn't wearing it. I'm pretty sure I frequently wanted to wear it with the rainbow suspenders with the yellow, button-like clips.
But most of all, I was proud of myself for figuring out, all on my own, that 'jeans' had to be upside down for me so that other people could read 'jeans' when they looked at my little pot-bellied waist. That way, I knew which way to put it on in the morning.

Mommy's big girl.
I'm sure she was very proud.



A year or two ago, I found the magnet jeans belt at home. I like belts now, (I guess it was the excellent experience with them in my childhood that paved the way), and I have quite a collection. But, of course, there's always room for one more. So...I stretched out the elastic and continue to wear the belt to this day.
Always careful to make sure you don't have to flip your head upside down to read.