Slowing down.

So, on Thursday, a nasty thing happenned to me. I was travelling between my resource centre and the docklands resource centre, and had just gotten off the tram. I then decided to cheat and walk off the wrong end of the tram platform to save time, and when walking off, fell badly on my ankle and did a quite bad sprain to it.

I've been going to a new psychologist for the last month or so, and one of the big things he has been trying to teach me is to slow down, to stop trying to race through everything, and just... experience the world, because it's something I'm clearly not good at. Recently he's been encouraging me to walk slower and eat slower, to try and get me to observe myself and my world while I do these things.

Now, I don't have much of a choice - my sprained ankle is forcing me to slow down. And it's becoming so very clear now why my psychologist was pushing me to slow down: because I hate it. I really, really hate slowing down.

Everytime I've gone around walking in the last couple of days, I've been constantly pushing up against my desire to go faster, to rush, to go as fast as I can. Only now, I'm slower than not_in_denial. Normally he's the one telling me to slow down for his sake. On the walk home from the city, he was deliberately walking circles round me.

And the worst bit is that I realise now why I was pushing myself so much, constantly jumping from activity to activity, never really letting myself stop - because I was afraid of actually feeling. And I realised this because I actually started feeling. And oddly enough, it was not fun.

I seem to use distraction a lot as a way of avoiding negative feelings. When I'm alone at home, I'm usually engrossed in either watching something, or playing something, right up until I go to bed, at which point I fall asleep within 5-10 minutes and get to blessed unconsciousness. But now? I'm not at my place, where all my distractions are - I'm at not_in_denial's place, because walking up 2 flights of stairs on a bad ankle was more than a little daunting. So, now I have very few distractions. And I keep feeling things. And those things I feel force me to confront them, and I've been doing such a good job of not having to confront them for a very long time.

And even when I do confront them, it's never on any deep level. I engage on the most superficial level, then run screaming from them. I don't want to do the heavy work of dealing with my shit, I just want to feel better. I almost engage in this hit-and-run tactic of placatig my issues just long enough to bury them again. And I think I'm trapped in this cycle, because I'm not very good at looking past the first solution I come across. I pick a way of doing things, and then I do everything possible to make that solution work, even if it causes me to go through callisthenics to do it.

And this doesn't seem right at all, I think. And all it took for me to realise this was a very painful sprained ankle.

More later, maybe.