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I've been in weird headspace: pain, depression, desire, frustration, therianthropy, and elsewise.
I've been in weird headspace these last few days. The month of pain issues has, for the most part, resolved itself, insofar as I'm not waking up in much pain, and I tend to have a few body-functional hours during the day—but by the evening I'm still stuck with back pain too severe to allow me to sit. The depression that came along for the ride is improved but lingering, which means that I'm sorta-better, e.g. motivated but incapable, e.g. restless, and that when the evening pain kicks in I crash like a highway car wreck—in part because I'm in pain, but largely because I'm anticipating another nonstop month of it and scared sick.
It's frustrating. I want too much, and the wanting builds on itself until it becomes a mythological beast named Want. I can barely manage to fight through a book review but I have my sights set on authors, books, writing—and I idolize and combine it in a mixed desire to read ALL the things/contribute something/be just like all those beautiful, well-read, well-spoke literates that I admire. I anticipate autumn so avidly that dead leaves on the trees make me glace twice just to make sure they haven't yet started to change colors, because autumn is my season of renewal and inspiration (and because I am oh so sick of this heat). The desire to be involved in something literary and wonderful transmutes into a desire for wonder in a general, grand, amorphous sense, and I'm having those stirrings of religious craving that I get every year but have never yet been able to transmute into faith, least of all practice.
And meanwhile I've the attention span of a gnat and it takes me three hours to type a book review and in the evenings it all falls apart, leaving me short-tempered and miserable. And there's something in this mental mess which leans towards cat-shifty, in a sense similar to this shift. In part, it's that my difficulty sustaining a thought or writing a sentence mirrors those shift-triggered difficulties with language; in part, it's that my constant flickering fascination-without-fulfillment is similar to the peak of that particular shift (which was spent at the public library, staring wide-eyed at the mass stimulation of all the moving things! without in the least being able to do the reading or writing that I'd come there to do). After the month with August, I see that behavior in her—and as I see us perk at the same sounds, I see it in me too. One of my lingering doubts about my therianthropy has long been that I'm not as playful or predatory as most cats, but I think there's more of that in me than I realize—some of it sublimated, some of it unrecognized, and some of it never explored or encouraged. I don't expect that I'll turn into the hallway-bounder that my beast can be, but I feel more secure in that facet of my identity, now.
But this pseudo-shift is frustrating. Frustrating, because cats are not the literary geniuses of our time, and insofar as this is a shift (instead of just resembling the effects of one) it's not exactly producing productivity. Frustrating, because it's a keen reminder that I am not indeed a cat. For one, living here separates me from My Person—and Devon is that, for better and worse: he's my petting-slave and food bowl-filler, and distance from him makes it hard to engage in and be satisfied by a shift. I'm forced to be something approximating an adult human, which is good for me—but bad for this. For another, I have both a taunting example and depressing distance in August, who shows me just what I'm not, what my body can't do (she can fit on a single stair step, and it makes me ache to be small) and what I can't get away with (especially without Devon here, because Dee really would not appreciate any more "is it food time? food time? food time now?" than I already do). The other day she played reciprocal chance-and-almost-pounce with me, and it warmed my heart to play with her on something approximating cat-to-cat level—but I know full well that I'm her person and she's my cat, and that distance does a little to break my heart. (But not so much as her presence helps to build it).
So. Better but never well, crashing frequently, desirous, frustrated, nostalgic for something I've never had, unfocused, thoughtful, restless. All over the fucking board. I've been in weird headspace, these last few days.
It's frustrating. I want too much, and the wanting builds on itself until it becomes a mythological beast named Want. I can barely manage to fight through a book review but I have my sights set on authors, books, writing—and I idolize and combine it in a mixed desire to read ALL the things/contribute something/be just like all those beautiful, well-read, well-spoke literates that I admire. I anticipate autumn so avidly that dead leaves on the trees make me glace twice just to make sure they haven't yet started to change colors, because autumn is my season of renewal and inspiration (and because I am oh so sick of this heat). The desire to be involved in something literary and wonderful transmutes into a desire for wonder in a general, grand, amorphous sense, and I'm having those stirrings of religious craving that I get every year but have never yet been able to transmute into faith, least of all practice.
And meanwhile I've the attention span of a gnat and it takes me three hours to type a book review and in the evenings it all falls apart, leaving me short-tempered and miserable. And there's something in this mental mess which leans towards cat-shifty, in a sense similar to this shift. In part, it's that my difficulty sustaining a thought or writing a sentence mirrors those shift-triggered difficulties with language; in part, it's that my constant flickering fascination-without-fulfillment is similar to the peak of that particular shift (which was spent at the public library, staring wide-eyed at the mass stimulation of all the moving things! without in the least being able to do the reading or writing that I'd come there to do). After the month with August, I see that behavior in her—and as I see us perk at the same sounds, I see it in me too. One of my lingering doubts about my therianthropy has long been that I'm not as playful or predatory as most cats, but I think there's more of that in me than I realize—some of it sublimated, some of it unrecognized, and some of it never explored or encouraged. I don't expect that I'll turn into the hallway-bounder that my beast can be, but I feel more secure in that facet of my identity, now.
But this pseudo-shift is frustrating. Frustrating, because cats are not the literary geniuses of our time, and insofar as this is a shift (instead of just resembling the effects of one) it's not exactly producing productivity. Frustrating, because it's a keen reminder that I am not indeed a cat. For one, living here separates me from My Person—and Devon is that, for better and worse: he's my petting-slave and food bowl-filler, and distance from him makes it hard to engage in and be satisfied by a shift. I'm forced to be something approximating an adult human, which is good for me—but bad for this. For another, I have both a taunting example and depressing distance in August, who shows me just what I'm not, what my body can't do (she can fit on a single stair step, and it makes me ache to be small) and what I can't get away with (especially without Devon here, because Dee really would not appreciate any more "is it food time? food time? food time now?" than I already do). The other day she played reciprocal chance-and-almost-pounce with me, and it warmed my heart to play with her on something approximating cat-to-cat level—but I know full well that I'm her person and she's my cat, and that distance does a little to break my heart. (But not so much as her presence helps to build it).
So. Better but never well, crashing frequently, desirous, frustrated, nostalgic for something I've never had, unfocused, thoughtful, restless. All over the fucking board. I've been in weird headspace, these last few days.