monster, never leave home without it

There is a savage beast living inside me.  Dexter (the serial-killer) has his dark passenger.  I have my migraine monster.

Not many people can see it.  I've learned to hide it so well.  I used to have a good friend in college who could always tell, no matter how well I thought I was hiding.  She said it was something about my eyes.  I think most people don't look that closely.

It's changed me into someone I don't always like or respect.  I used to be intrepid and love adventure.  Crave it, even.  Now, I am more cautious, more fearful of the excruciating torture that I know can arrive at any minute from this invisible, merciless barbarian.

When I did a zipline tour in Costa Rica several years ago, which was 600 hundred feet above the ground, I wasn't scared of dying.  I got stuck along the line because my weight wasn't enough to zip me to the end.  That wasn't scary somehow.

And now?  I'm scared to eat too late or to stay up too late.  I used to travel all over the world, but now I'm resistant to spending an entire day away from home.  Twenty-year-old me wouldn't like current me.  And that has to change.



Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

wisdom -- it's a kind of magic

I had another rough week, but I woke up again this morning, so here we are.  Me, with my woes, and you as my muse. 

I don't like being down, and most especially, I don't like being knocked down.  So I force myself to rise again, both in spirit and in the physical sense.  I've been doing brief spurts of calisthenics three times a day.  One day, I was too weak to do that, but the rest of my week, I did it, despite the pain and weakness.  Does it help?  Who knows.  But I feel like it does, and that's half the battle, right?

It seems to me that wishing life were different is not at all helpful or beneficial.  Therefore, the wise soul will be in the current reality, not wishing for a different one.  I tell myself that on days when my anxiety levels skyrocket.  Lions don't have anxiety.  They hunt when they are hungry and relax when they aren't.  Can't my life be that simple?  Why do I need to over-complicate it?


“Study me as much as you like, you will not know me, for I differ in a hundred ways from what you see me to be.  Put yourself behind my eyes and see me as I see myself, for I have chosen to dwell in a place you cannot see.”
― Jalaluddin Rumi