This has been a pretty whiny blog lately – it would be more forgivable if I was at least also being interesting, but I am not. I am just complaining. It’s been a trying summer, but also a good one in so many ways. We returned from our trip a few hours ago. It was, truly, wonderful. My family has changed so much in the past few years. Good lord, I love them. 

Internally, things are kind of the same. It’s okay, though, I think. I’m figuring it out. Although it is not something I often write about here (because I tend to post here without much planning and also I am not an expert on anything and also I think about God a lot and I know that’s a really touchy thing), existential questions occupy a significant amount of my brain. Everything, for me, comes back to finding a way to wring every drop of meaning out of life. What I have been feeling lately – this impossible vastness between me and everything else – is perhaps twice the challenge (to my existentially-wired brain) because it comes with so many other questions. Whatever this is has been forcing me to go through what I’ve begun to believe with an even finer comb. It’s a good thing, even though it doesn’t always feel like it. I am learning to love the questions.

My back, my stupid back, is getting better. I can sit down now, sometimes, hallelujah. The plank and I are becoming good friends. Yoga and I are also becoming good friends – I got a pass that will allow me to take classes for the rest of the summer, and they’ve slowly become one of the highlights of my weekly routine… I’m looking forward to returning. It’s as good for my brain as it has been for my back, and there have been no more gongs or Alanis Morissette, which is also good. And, you know, I want to eventually be able to do this. (I’ll try any sport that promises I’ll be an acrobat…) 

So it’s not all bad, even though it’s sounded like it. It’s been a strangely tough summer, but it’s also been kind of fantastic. And I am learning. Oh boy, am I learning. 

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I am on vacation with my family. I am writing this from a hotel room because my parents get tired early, and today I am tired early, too – and even though it somehow feels wrong to be online while on a trip, tonight everything is quiet and I could stand to do something with all the thoughts in my head. Even if it’s an incoherent something. 

We’ve been away for only two days, so I have little to report on the vacation front – but we’re in Portland, and so far it’s beautiful. There are amazing trees, ridiculous bridges, the coffee is good, and Powell’s Books is possibly the coolest book store I’ve ever been to. My family is happy, light. It’s nice. 

But something weird is going on internally, with me. It isn’t bad, but it’s hard to articulate. And writing here won’t make it make any more sense, to me, or to anyone else, because I don’t know how to explain how I feel – except to say that I feel impossibly alone. Not alone like lonely, but alone like completely and utterly unreachable, like wherever I am is a place I can’t find my way out of and a place no one else knows about. I don’t know if that sounds dramatic, or silly, and maybe it sounds like both, but I don’t know how else to put it and even this doesn’t fit right.

This feeling comes in waves and often, always. It isn’t new. But this time it is more. I know not to struggle against it – but my parents are laughing with each other and my brother is taking pictures of food trucks and I feel like I’m not actually here.

I am okay, and I know that I will learn things – but I am tired, I guess, of feeling like I can’t acknowledge what I know is a big internal shift, even if I can’t really explain myself. This trip is lovely, and it has the potential to get even lovelier, and I am enjoying it very much, but I am also feeling things I don’t know how to name and don’t know what to do with.  

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I don’t have the words for my life lately. 

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I haven’t been writing because I have been finding myself exhausting. I think so much and sometimes I would like to turn it off. Also, I haven’t been writing because I can’t usually sit for longer than 5 minutes at a time, and it takes longer than that to write a blog post. 

My life recently has revolved around managing pain. My back is much better than it was when I first injured it, but it isn’t really normal. I stretch a lot. I do a lot of muscle strengthening exercises. I am determined to get good at the plank. I am figuring out what I need to do to make this something I can live with. It’s working – slowly. I’m getting there, though the sitting thing remains kind of a problem.

I’m a little bit annoyed and a lot upset, because I feel like I’m too young for this. But complaining won’t do much. And I am beginning to suspect that a byproduct of making this whole thing manageable is going to be abs of steel and… that’s an upside.

Tonight I went to yoga. I am only ever driven to yoga by unbearable physical pain. I’ve used it at various points throughout my dancing life to help deal with injuries, and did it for a while in university when too much running made my hips and knees a scary mess. I like it enough, I suppose, but I’ve never really been into it for more than utilitarian purposes. 

This time I went to a hot yoga studio. I prefer hot yoga to regular yoga, mostly because the heat makes stretching a much less uncomfortable experience. I tried a kind of yoga called yin, which to the best of my knowledge is like if you took yoga – an already slow sport – and dialed back the speed a few more notches. You hold every pose for about four minutes, and the idea is not to engage your muscles so much as it is to stretch the connective tissue around your joints? Or so my alanis-morissette-quoting-gong-ringing yoga instructor explained this evening.

It happened to be the only available class that fit my schedule, but I liked it. You pretty much spend the entire time on the ground – no standing poses – and although it might sound boring, it was almost addictively challenging. Part of the thing is that you can’t move, except to breathe. In each pose, you find a position that is sort of at the edge of comfort – you aren’t in pain, but you’re definitely stretching something – and then you stay there. For four minutes. In silence (except for the Alanis quotes). You don’t itch anything and you don’t wipe the sweat that’s dripping down your face and you don’t shift around when it gets too hard or you get bored sitting in silence. It felt like as much of a mental exercise as it did a physical one. 

And as the minutes crept by and as my sweaty face pressed against my sweaty knee and as I listened to nothing except for the sound of my own breathing, I could feel myself lengthen without any real effort on my part, except for waiting long enough for gravity to do the work for me. It was a very satisfying thing. 

When I left the class my back was the most pain-free it’s been in weeks, and I was so busy thinking about not moving that I hadn’t thought about much of anything else, which was a welcome change. I will go again, I think.

This experience – the back thing – is teaching me a different kind of discipline. I have never really known how to treat my body well. Exercise, for me, was never a health thing. When I danced, exercise was just a part of an activity I loved, and when I exercised outside of dance it was not so much about what would make me healthier as it was what would make me thinner, and those are not the same. I wasn’t sure that I could find a middle ground, but this seems to be forcing me into it. It’s good. I have no choice but to listen to this pain, even though it’s inconvenient and I don’t want to and I hate that it exists, and between the anger and the enormous discomfort, I am very motivated. It’s a good thing, even though it might not sound like it. Frustration is an excellent teacher. 

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Cold waves, enamel bowls, wildflowers and ice in June. 

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I have a week’s worth of nice things to say, but I am coming here with something else.

I injured my back this weekend. I’ve been having trouble with my back for a few months – it began around the middle of the past semester and seemed to be the result of spending all my time sitting at a desk. When I could no longer deny that the pain wouldn’t just magically go away (which is always my first hope), I developed a routine of stretching and going to the gym, both of which helped, and when I got home I immediately began physiotherapy. Back pain is scary shit. A series of x-rays revealed that the spaces between the discs in my lower back are narrowing – for now, the best thing to do is to exercise, and continue to go to physio, and basically work to build muscle in the right places to support the weakening part of my spine. 

I’ve been pretty much okay since coming home. Having more to do in a day than sit at a desk helps a lot. Physio has helped enormously. I’d started to forget that my back was an issue – and it was an issue, this past semester, in a big and often scary way. And then, this weekend, I lifted something I shouldn’t have lifted and since then I have been a mess of curse words and tears and ice packs. 

I feel, mostly, stupid. Stupid for lifting the heavy thing, and stupid for being in pain, and I know that last part makes no sense. Is that a weird reaction to pain? I’m furious, not because I feel like this is unfair, and only partly because I could have prevented it – really, I just sort of hate myself for feeling this at all, and feeling it such that I have to cancel plans, that all I can do or think about is how to make this manageable until it goes away. I’m mad that I’ve been legitimately taken down. 

I hate that I can’t handle it. But I also know it’s an impossible thing to handle. I was discussing this with a friend today, who pointed out that back pain will bring down even the toughest of fully grown men. Everyone I’ve had to explain myself to has given me huge amounts of sympathy – either because they’ve experienced something similar, or because they know someone who has. And, truly, it’s awful. I can’t think of a way to describe it except possibly nauseating. It is a pain that makes me feel like I could throw up. 

But the hardest part is not the experience itself, though that part is undeniably bad. The hardest part is admitting to it, is it being the kind of situation where I have no choice. I realize that probably sounds weird. My general approach to Things that are Bad is to push through them, and to do so without letting anyone know that Things are Bad, if I can. But I can’t hide this – even if I didn’t ever talk about it, it is written all over me physically. I can’t do the things I normally do. I can’t really do anything. And to have had to say, lately, that I can’t do things, and to have had to rely on the kindness and understanding of other people, to have had to accept it without protest and because I know beyond any doubt that I can’t do a damn thing without it? It’s been humbling. At times, uncomfortably so. 

The back pain will go away. I’ve been taking care of myself, in the physio/doctor/exercise/rest department, and it is slowly getting better… but I’m full of all sorts of weird feelings about it that I didn’t know I had. To have found myself, for a while, without my usual amount of independence, has been a very revealing sort of thing. 
 

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The taken-with-an-actual-camera edition. 

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This is where I spent the past week.

You will understand, I think, when I say I am sad to be back. 

I took so many actual photos, but for some reason I can’t make my camera communicate with my wheezy old computer, so a cell phone photo will have to do for now. I have to give technology a gold star for this one, though – it’s a pretty great picture. 

I don’t have an ounce of eloquence or even coherence in me lately. I came here wanting to write, but I think I’ll just leave this and go. 

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I woke up at 4 a.m. because my bedroom was lit up like a disco. The storm outside was spectacular. The rain hit the windows like it was trying to get in, like something was chasing it. I sat on the couch in the living room and watched it until my eyes began to close. 

It was all very dramatic.

It’s been raining all day, and I have the day off, and I have barely left my room. I’ve been sitting at my desk trying to make something beautiful. It helps, in a strange way, to make stuff – to write, or to take photos, or to draw something – it doesn’t give me answers, but it makes it easier not to have any. 

All my closest friends are far away, so we have been sending each other whatever we can, just to bridge the distance. I have been making little videos, which I mostly film with my cell phone, although I’ve recently learned that there’s a way to make my digital camera (which doesn’t take video) able to film things, and I feel like that would be worth trying. Either way, it’s been nice to have a reason to make nice things and nice to have a reason to share them. I might start posting some of them here.

Generally, I’m afraid to share things unless I feel like they are somehow fully formed and amazing, which nothing I do ever really is. I’ve been trying to do it anyway – keeping a “public” blog was a good exercise in that – but I could try harder. 

I’ve been writing often. It’s all kind of sloppy, but there’s a lot of it, and for now that seems good enough. And I’ve been reading. And I’ve been driving a lot and listening to the radio and slowing down the truck when I see deer in the ditch waiting to cross the road. Next week I am visiting the little mountain town where I worked last summer – I will hike and walk and eat ice cream and sleep on a bunk bed and I can’t wait.

I feel like coming home has been like retreating entirely into my very private, internal world. I’ve developed a routine of reading and writing and driving and working and it’s all pretty calm and I think a lot and do nearly everything by myself and I don’t mind. I think I can understand why people become hermits. It’s nice to have the space to get to know yourself without having to worry too much about outside input. 

I mean that in as unselfish a way as something like that can be said. It isn’t I don’t love very many people in my life, or that I don’t respect the opinions of others, because I do. But I am very – perhaps overly – sensitive, and having fewer external responses to filter through is a nice thing to be experiencing lately. 

That might sound nuts. I don’t know. 

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This evening my mom and I took my grandma to a nearby greenhouse to get flowers. I brought my camera, because I have an unabashed flower obsession, but I ended up spending most of my time following my grandma around between the rows and rows of plants. 

With her white hair and her yellow jacket, she reminded me of a dandelion. 

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