A Good Day
A bloggage
By
Alexander Gordon Jahans
The last 5 months have been hard for varied reasons I can’t talk about. Those hard days are not quite over but the end is in sight.
To be present I have been playing pokemon. A game I can pause and quit quickly but is engaging enough I don’t go stir crazy. I completed Sapphire and FireRed then completed the Kantodex in LeafGreen and have now started on completing the Hoenndex in Emerald. I have been climbing mountains of my youth to tread water during these hard times.
My diet and lifestyle has been shit due to stress and I have not walked as often as I like to. It has made me anxious and fractious. Gorging on cheap food to keep my inner demons at bay because my family needs me.
Lately I have had a week of reprieve. Not a total reprieve because I had to get a testosterone injection done yesterday but I have had time to recover. It feels like slowly coming up to the surface from a deep dive, the pressure easing off day by day and I just took my first lungful of fresh air at the surface. I know events will send me back down again soon but for now the sun is shining and I can breathe easily.
I listened to the audiobook of World War Z during the last 5 years of chaos and darkness and have found myself relistening to it at another hard point within these trying times too. As a scarred survivor of abuse and embarrassing diagnoses I found applicable stories within that fiction that have helped me in these times. One passage in particular has struck me. When the survivors retook the American continent from the zombies they started the crack up and lose it. The people who survived the Z war were hardened people who could take this grotesque world but what made them lose it was realising that they were home and victory, normality, was in sight. When terror is all you know peace holds a nightmarish quality all its own. Like a non-newtonian liquid melting away when it stop being struck.
I feel that tension today. After 5 months of particularly bad poverty and utter shit happening there is peace and relative plenty. I can relax for the first time in so long. I will not panic about the change or allow myself to melt under this reprieve from stress though. I am going to listen to Cortex and go for a walk. today is a good day.
