Or myself…either one. BTW if I sound forced, I feel forced. I feel weird today. Still hurting quite a bit, too. But it is what it is. *shakes fist at the sky* effin weather!! But I’m probably at a 7 out of ten on the scale. I can hear parts of my back and legs over the Octopath Traveler soundtrack that’s playing in the background. So if my writing is shite, I apologize. I am not used to this kind of thing.
Anyway, so today was a typical Monday’s CBT stuff. Except we were home due to the storm and connected through Zoom. I’m starting to notice the videos repeat even if not on a precise schedule, but I think that’s the point. You hear about it long enough that the basics are always in your head, that way when shit does happen and you have to have to break out these shiny new skills, you have them embedded in the side of your left temporal lobe for quick and easy access.
Today we did the “how was your weekend” check in, and I sounded like a creaky wooden cart. “Dude I have no idea what happened, but my whole body started hurting” almost flu-like pain, to be honest. But I just got sick in December so it can’t be that. No, that’s apparently normal when the weather changes that abruptly and drastically. I wanted to feel bad for taking a Tylenol and sleeping most of the weekend, but apparently that was the correct call. If you’re not used to it, you gotta do what’s necessary to mitigate it.
But it did me a number, man, like my whole body feels just…idk. GROSS. I wouldn’t go full hedgehog, but there’s definitely some serious heat coming from places like my back, elbows, knees, upper legs…
I do believe, though, that I’ve felt like this before, and have ignored it in the past, because a)it wasn’t there at all or b)I was so tense or stressed out, and it forced my body to stay compact, i.e. unable to “veg out” and um…inflate/swell up? Like I was so tense that I mitigated 90% of weather-related pain/problems.
I remember back in the day, if I’d try to go to a massage therapist, they’d refuse to do anything because my traps were so tight that they feared they’d cause an actual injury, so they would send me to a chiropractor. And recently, I got to go to a massage therapist, who actually did work on my traps and said she could tell my body was in the process of releasing a ton of cortisol and stress.
So maybe all this breath work and meditation and relaxation stuff is actually helping me feel pain even if it’s not a fun byproduct. You know, learning to relax and let your body just exist without anxiety or fear tensing it up — maybe that opens doors to sensations you don’t normally have. Since we don’t get cold weather like this (it’s a record low, today, too — 7 degrees) that often, maybe I just don’t have enough exposure to the pressure changes to realize it’s a thing, now…that, and I just started back at the end of December.
I remember back in 2021 when we got the 14″ of snow that one weekend, and I was out walking in it and making snowmen and having a grand time…but I was also stressed as hell in the circumstances I was living in. I didn’t hurt back then.
So yeah, this might be a positive sign that’s coming out in a very uncomfortable way: being relaxed enough to actually feel my body telling me things like “you need some Tylenol, take it.”
And that’s perfectly fine. I just gotta make sure I have that stuff around when I need it …
