#167

I came back a week ago, slightly jetlagged, vaguely reeling and entirely exhausted. Naturally, I fell right back into working eighteen hour days filling my nights with sawdust, bourbon and silence wild parties. Flicked my way to Blogger almost every evening, at the usual time of zero dark thirty. But then, a thought finally occurred, a thought that strikes me periodically and usually shakes me out of a slump for a little while. It's not particularly deep, or even particularly pretty, but it works for me: if you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always gotten*. So I ditched the blog (without any guilt, honestly, I doubt anyone noticed.) and the bourbon (well...I stopped drinking it alone...mostly) and the basement, all in favour of doing something more socially accepted healthy.

It worked, I guess. I've joined a gym, which is something that is long overdue but I hate doing. Gym bunnies tend to look askance at cripples with canes asking about membership so it's one of those things which requires...well, a spine. Perseverance paid off and I unearthed my ideal gym, run by a grizzled old guy with an artificial leg. Naturally I got so over-excited that I absolutely maintained my cool, suave exterior and didn't at all exclaim that it was bloody brilliant that he'd lost a limb. Sometimes...sometimes I really wonder how I've survived this long in polite society. I thought I was forgiven and then he challenged me to a race up the Arch climbing wall, said he'd been looking for someone who was on an even footing with him. I lost, emphatically. Re-match in a fortnight.

All of this is good, undoubtedly. Creeping my way slowly out of isolation and the twin prisons of work and the basement. But things still set me back and some sights or smells or sounds trigger intense memories or flashbacks and feed my nightmares. All of that conspires to make this feel less like progress and more like a prolonged flaying. I wasn't happy alone, in the dark and peace and thick wood-smell of the basement, I wasn't happy curled up in the bottom of a bottle and I'm still not happy. Except now I'm not happy in public, which seems worse somehow, to be seen to twitch and shake and sweat and remember, to zone out of conversations or stare oddly off into corners. But then...if you always do what you've always done...right?

* Yes, I know "gotten" makes my inner (British English) language nerd cringe desperately. Unfortunately it's a quotation so I feel obliged to keep the blasted thing intact.