Last night, I was pondering how my life felt like a long dark corridor leading nowhere, holding the image of said corridor in my mind as I did so, when suddenly the image changed into a long dark…. library.

Or at the very least, that’s my best attempt at describing the experience. I am new at describing these kinds of non-rational experiences, after all.

Speaking of which, an earlier, less enlightened me would have vehemently suppressed that spontaneous transformation and pretend it never happened out of fear of the implied chaos and disorder.

That seems quite sad to me now, although I am by no means out of those particular woods. Clearly my mind if trying to tell me something.

I don’t know what it is yet, but that’s to be expected.

If it was easy to understand, my rational mind could have handled it.

Instead of suppression, I am embracing this transformation instead. And I am quite excited by the prospect of trying to figure out what it means.

The long dark corridor image has always, to me, represented my depressive life. How it feels like my life is nothing but a long dark corridor leading nowhere and with nothing in it, not even sound, and ending only when I meet my silent and pathetic death.

There’s times when I have found the image soothing and times when I found it smothering and times when I found it cold and alienating, but what it represented never changed… until last night,

So what change does this new image represent?

My intuition says it has something to do with the corridor expanding to encompass something about my mind. Like perhaps the books are my memories and the shift in imagery represents my mind’s attempt to start directly accessing all those long surpressed traumae directly instead of going through the conscious mind.

The conscious mind is too damn slow for this kind of work. Emotions may not be “smart” but they sure are swift.

The memory theory seems wrong somehow, though. It’s suspiciously neat andplausible. I have the feeling that there’s a lot more to this than that.

Certainly, libraries have always made me feel safe. I used to hide from my bullies in the school library, which was of course also full of books, which I loved. And they are also wonderfully quiet, which soothed my nerves.

To this day, then, being in a library or bookstore makes me feel calm and safe. So it would be easy to declare this transformation to be an attempt for my mind to soothe itself with a more familiar and nonthreatening image.

But that’s not it either. I can feel it in my bones.

Perhaps I need to relax and let the image thaw out for a while. It came to me wrapped in that icy cold feeling I have come to associate with recovery, and it could be that I will not grok it until the icicles melt off.

Heck, I got icicles in my heart just from talking about this.

And that’s good. Means it is working.

More after the break.

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Looks like I am not going to review those other two games.

Quick summary : two dungeon-crawling and board game mashups that seem promising but are ultimately tedious to play.

Today has been weird.

I have felt cold all day, and didn’t really think much of it. Thought it was just because I had the window in my bathroom open a couple inches.

It is winter, after all.

So I closed the window. Still felt cold later. Turned up the heat. Still feel cold. Weird.

Then I am woken out of a nap by a feeling like someone is pushing up hard on my right foot. Like they are trying to my leg shorter by brute force alone.

That freaked me out. Luckily, it passed in around five seconds, but seriously, what the fuck? It was such a weird sensation that it felt downright spooky.

It’s always super weird when you body does something on its own that normally you would have to tell it to do.

It’s like someone else is controlling your body.

And they totally suck at it.

It happened again when I was trying to go back to sleep around half an hour later.

I really, really hope this is not the new normal.

The only thing I can think of to compare it to was the charlie-horses I used to get during my seriously big growth spurts when I was a teen.

I would be woken from a deep and sound sleep by intense pain from my legs as the muscles tied themselves into one big knotted cramp.

It’s a terrible way to wake up. Would not recommend. Zero stars.

I would then end up pacing to relieve the tension and steeling myself to do what I knew had to be done, namely put weight on the cramped leg and flex it, which would hurt like a son of a bitch but stretch out the cramp.

It was the only way to get rid of the cramp. The only alternative was to wait for the cramp to relax on its own, and that took forever.

So it was a real “rip off the band-aid” type situation. Either stretch out the cramp and suffer a whole lot all at once, or suffer the same amount stretched out over time.

I just wanted to go back to sleep. So I stepped on that motherfucker. But I was still a wimp. so I would do it a little bit at a time.

Worst of both worlds, arguably.

I would find doing it all at once much easier now. My will is stronger and I am more in control of myself. Plus my adult’s greater sense of the future lets me focus on the relief that will come after the pain, and that helps a lot.

Oh, and between the two bouts of neuromuscular weirdness, I took a dump, and let’s just say my bowels were playing it fast and loose.

And now it’s 6:30 pm, the heat has been on for hours, and I still feel cold.

Methinks I might be coming down with something.

Which totally sucks. Because I want to go out tonight. I want to go do Subway with Le Gang then watch videos back at Felicity’s Parents’ place.

But I can’t go out if I am feeling sick and my bowels feel this…. infirm.

All I can say about that is, well….. phooey.

So how was YOUR day?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.