still here

Hello all. I know it's been far too long since I've written in here, but I couldn't for a while. I got my heart broken in October and spent the rest of October and November essentially emotionally shut off to help myself heal. I realized very quickly that just the idea of doing Feldenkrais or anything equally self-examining terrified me of the wound I'd find inside, so I stopped for a couple of months. Over my Thanksgiving vacation in Santa Cruz, my mom convinced me to give her an FI. I was extremely reluctant, but decided it was time to try to move on and gave her one anyway. It went surprisingly well, all things considered, but it also showed me that I had been right to wait - giving a lesson sooner than that would have gone very badly for all involved.

Since then I've continued letting my heart heal (getting a little better every day), and have slowly been making my way back into giving lessons. I have an assignment from class to try to give 20 FIs in the current break between segments and keep a journal on them, and I've done 3 so far, so I've got some motivation to get going. If anyone wants one, let me know. I need to do a bunch between now and mid-April.

What prompted me to finally write here again was an eye-opening experience I had this morning. My friend Bethany's cat is very sick (she's got kidney disease and a tumor in her bladder) and it means a lot of trips to the vet. To spare Bethany's boyfriend another trip so he could have some needed extra time at work, I gave Bethany and Rose (the cat) a ride and stayed with them for the vet visit. What didn't occur to me going in was that we'd be going to a veterinary hospital, not a clinic, and how similar the experience of being there would be to a human hospital.

So, in the middle of hearing about possible treatments for Rose's tumor, my brain decided to take all the familiar medical terms it was hearing and the familiar medical exam room it was seeing and twist it all around. My head started to feel fuzzy, I lost track of what the doctor was saying, the room started to feel too hot and stuffy and small, I felt all the blood drain out of my face, and if I hadn't left the room to sit in the hallway where there was a little fresh air and a kind nurse with a glass of cold water, it could have turned into a full-fledged panic attack.

Luckily I was able to stop it before it went all the way, but it was a useful reality check. It's clearly not just Stanford Childrens Hospital I have a problem with, or other pediatric hospitals. It's just... hospitals, off any sort, even if it's completely unrelated to me or my history. Too many bad memories of that atmosphere, of that pain. Must find a way to move on from this part too. No one can avoid hospitals forever.