I’m trying to psyche myself up. A new Post-It Note adorns my television-front with two messages, officially the only mantra-y thingies on my walls right now.
“Motion is lotion” and “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Maybe now I’ll forget the love affair I’ve recently ignited with my sofa.
It’s the season premiere of The Biggest Loser tonight, and it’s proving to be a bit of an emotional experience. A seriously emotional one, really.
This comes after a rather wound-picking-ish therapy session after work. [insert heavy sigh here] Continue reading
Category Archives: Psychology & Moods
It's a Walled World After All
I live in an area crowded with old brownstones from the ’50s, low-rises with big windows, balconies, and narrow streets between them. The illusion of it being an intimate neighbourhood is exceedingly well done.
For all its lack of imposing, stacked up against the major metropolitan downtown that’s only a few kilometres from here, it’s amazing how little I’ve met the people I’ve lived around for a decade. Maybe a third of those in my alleyway have lived here for the decade I have. Of them, I know perhaps five.
For three months now, I’ve wondered where one of them, the neighbour I overlook from my kitchen, was. I assumed some big trip around the world, since more than a few people around here have turned out to be travellers.
But then I saw her Friday for the first time in three months — more than 100 pounds heavier, looking 15 years older, tired, worn, and just about to quit — life, not just her job. My heart went through the floor. Continue reading
Writing: The Art of Digging In?
I fall out of love with writing.
It’s a love/hate relationship. I can’t live without it. I wish I could.
It’s a near-pathological need to dig, writing. For some of us. For me. Dig, dig, dig. I feel like I’m taking a stab at digging my way to China in my back yard. I’ll never finish. I’ll never even get halfway where I’m going. I know this. Thank god it’s a free passage. Taxes would kill me. And, unlike digging to China, the scenery’s interesting. Continue reading
Everything In Its Place
I sometimes forget I’m a writer. I get out of practice, and then it doesn’t occur to me that, to be true to who I am on any given day, I should be playing with a few words. Sometimes I forget that wrestling hands-on with my experiences and my past is what makes me the person I am, and it’s best undertaken in writing.
But it doesn’t always need to just happen on the page. My Sunday was an infinitely illuminating day, and just the beginning to what I think will be a strange but profoundly fulfilling experience.
I’m undertaking a MASSIVE restructuring of my home. Continue reading
My Very Emotional Day
I should be bouncing madly, ready for the Von Bondies to take the stage shortly, but I bailed on my best friend for an evening at home, after a very emotional day.
Please comment, but don’t do the well-meaning “Oh, Steff, you poor thing” stuff, ‘cos that usually gets me worked up and thinking I should be feeling sorry for myself rather than succeeding being strong.
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So, I know it’s a full moon night. I know I’m overtired anyhow. I know my week was daunting the fuck out of me to begin with. I know these things. I’m sure this is nothing. I know THAT, too.
Nonetheless, my mind went spinning a million directions. Tears were had. More than once. And in my open-space office, even. Continue reading
Hanging Up on Hang-ups
Funny how we get so hung up on our hang-ups we sometimes don’t even notice when they’ve disappeared.*
I was fucking floored Thursday night when I realized the varicose veins I’d been loathing for the last year had suddenly vanished in the last couple months, thanks to my awesome new fitness regime. Poof, gone.
Ironically, I’d already bought some spring clothes last month — and no shorts shorter than knee-length. For what mighta been something that didn’t even need hiding. Silly, silly.
It makes me wonder how often we get stuck in our insecurities, fears, loathings, all out of habit, rather than reality. Is it as bad as we fear? Are we merely choosing to dwell in shadows rather than turn the light on and see what we’re really judging? Continue reading
Yesterday or Yesteryear?
It’s all strange.
I’m slowly trying to get a life again after taking myself out of the equation for years. Looking for people more up than down, more smart than dumb, more communicative than un, more unmarried than married.
That part’s working, it’s fun, but it’s a strange ride, especially since everyone I’ve been meeting is 34 and younger. Even if I am young-at-heart, I tell ya. These “kids” think, “Well, it’s only 10 years.” Yeah. And 220,000 hours. Just shy of 14 billion potentially life-altering anything-can-happen seconds. I’ve changed so much this WINTER, let alone the last decade. Age isn’t just a number, it’s an entity. It’s just not a be-all end-all, but it can’t just be dismissed. That said, I like youth. I’m just bridging some mental gaps, is all. Continue reading
Existential Excavating: What Made Me What I Was
The hardest part of losing weight, I’m finding, is the challenge of identity.
Being fat isn’t just something that happens over the course of a month. Being fat, becoming as fat as I ever got, took me 25 years exactly. 25 years of daily contributing to an obviously ever-growing problem.
From an eight-year-old spending a summer with an unlimited flow of Mountain Dew and Pepsi at my aunt’s for the first time, I began the journey of Becoming Fat. Continue reading
When Waiting Can Be Worth It
The trouble with being a fast-food nation is that it’s become the norm to want what you want the way you want it, when you want it.
We’re led to believe that every single day is so important — which is why we need the iPhone, the laptop, the netbook, the fast car, the microwave — that to waste a single moment or wait a single day is tantamount to a national disaster.
And it’s easy to fall into the expectation that because there’s never going to be another today that tomorrow just won’t do, especially when it comes to relationships.
We often don’t have a lot of patience anymore, particularly in love. Me, I’ve never really had it. Continue reading
The Unpredictability of the Wildcard
It’s a full moon tonight and I had a bit of a full moon today.
A face from the past came ’round. Leaves me with some heavy thinking to do. When the past comes back, it’s for one of two reasons. To either teach you not to go there. Or to prompt you to go there.
I know what’s going down, but that’s for me to know. Suffice to say, interesting times, interesting day.
Do I believe in fate? No. Do I believe in serendipity? Yes. Do I believe life sometimes shows up with a 10×20 billboard screaming “Go directly past go”? Yeah. Continue reading