whome's LTU5 journal

[whome]

Day 6

Second day off. While I'm not hitting the same extreme exhaustion as on my days on, I'm getting hit by the emotional crush, the grief, the numbness.

I'm not sure how to deal with it.

Tonight is the first of the four-days-on. I'll keep reporting.

[whome]

Day 7

Today's Sunday so I slept in. I woke tired, and with a light blanket of grief.

[whome]

Day 8

Woke pretty severely tired. Emotionally shot too. I managed in the morning to intentionally breathe to calm my emotions down, and so for the day I'm feeling OK.

It still would be nice if there were some way to know for sure that it's executing. For now, my sense is that it's still not.

[Shannon]

If you're reacting to it, something has to be executing somewhere.

[whome]

If you're reacting to it, something has to be executing somewhere.

Fair point. I meant, like, good execution, like when I was doing DMSI, the part where the women would be all over me, not the bummer execution, where I wake tired

Day 9

For a while, I've been aware of this sense of who I could be, walking around, fully alive, turned up to 11, and feeling into that felt both right and terrifying. There was this powerful fear attached to that, and then, of course, the shame that I couldn't turn that fear off and find the "real me" in there".

I was at my acupuncturist last night, and on the table my mind started to wander, and it started wondering where my center of being would be if I were to be in that space. So I felt into it energetically, and explored feeling that way. And that feeling persisted after the session, to the point where a part of me was chasing what it would feel like to feel that way. I went to bed feeling that way.

I woke tired, though that's kind of expected as I find it hard to fall asleep with the ultrasonic going and I had an alarm this morning. I'm still feeling pretty alive, so that's really good. I've felt like this before, too, and so a part of me sees a decline in mood coming. But for now I'll take it. And it's a good sign that I was chasing feeling like it, and that it felt good to chase it, as I can't remember that happening before.

[Shannon]

The future does not necessarily equate to the past. You are expecting negativity based on past experience, when that is not necessarily the case. Feeling good doesn't require a balance of feeling bad, if your default state is that level of positivity. How do you know that you aren't achieving that as a default state?

[whome]

I'll be happy if I do achieve that as a default state.

This is a tricky space, where in the past I've felt really good, but then it faded away and I went back to a painful, grief space. It was easy to get angry, that I had a taste of feeling good, but that the sadness pulled me back. I'm better at not doing that now, so I'm more in a space of "enjoy it while it lasts, and it's OK if I go back, because that happens".

If I stay in a happy space for a long time, I can re-evaluate things. But given my past I don't want to get excited yet. My sad side is strong, and if I slip back into sadness, I don't want to turn my excitement about changing into a weapon that will be easy for my self-hatred to use against myself.

I'm in this for the long haul, at least the three month cycle noted in the instructions. It would be very nice to hit happiness as default, and I'm open to it. Given my knowledge of how the self-hating voice has acted in my past, I'm going slowly with accepting change.

[whome]

I had my 1:1 with my manager today, and I went into what seemed like a panic space. I don't know if it was a "panic attack", but it was a rush of anxiety and fear and panic, and I couldn't think and I couldn't breathe and I couldn't talk.

My manager is awesome, and it's fine, and I'm better now.

But it feels connected to how I felt earlier. If I'm walking around being me, and being intense, and being turned up to 11, then I do panic and anxiety up to 11 too.

[whome]

Tuesday nights are my acroyoga nights; I go to a beginner class.

Today I felt loopy, like I wasn't quite fully there. I found it hard to engage and bring myself into the moment. Then, at the end of class, our teacher told us that the class that I attend will be cancelled at the end of this month. So much for being lucky.

I'm feeling sadness and grief, though in a much more spread out way across my body instead of tightly in my chest.

[whome]

Day 10
Woke tired.

The grief and sadness is wide and lightly packed throughout my body. I'm going to be seeing my energy healer today and will talk to him about all of this; I imagine we'll have something to do. Meanwhile, this also it the last day in the cycle of 4, so I'll be taking a break tomorrow.

[whome]

Day 11

A day off of LTU. Even though I wasn't listening to anything I slept without any ear plugs because I'm trying to train myself to sleep through noises and sound. It didn't work too well; it's cold and there was too much clanging. The only part of my dream that I remember is pasting inappropriate pictures into the work Slack, and the feeling of self-hatred that came up.

The past few days have been interesting. It feels like everything emotionally is looser, so that I'm capable of both feeling great and feeling terrible. It's both a good thing, playing with feeling bigger than I usually do and closer to my imagination of who I could/should be, and a bad thing, in that I'm swinging to the painful side much more easily.

[whome]

Day 12

Day off.

Dreamt that I had somehow spilled multiple bottles of pills I take in the morning into my hand, so I took most of them not to waste them. Dreamt that someone was slicing up my skin with a razor, though I don't remember details.

I'm still sleeping without earplugs, but that's turning into a real problem with the cold and noise. I'm looking into a long headphone cable so I can use my Kokoons non-wirelessly.

[whome]

Day 13

Disaster dreams strike again. This time water streaming across the floor of my childhood home turning into a flood surrounding it.

Still waking tired. Still able to push my emotions to happy, but also the associated grief just under the surface.

[whome]

Day 14

Still super tired. I slept about 11 hours, though since I got to bed late, about 9am the traffic noise and the radiator pinging knocked me out of deep sleep. Half-asleep I tapped my phone to see that I had a bit of time left on LTU so I tapped pause and put on headphones and got a whole bunch of sleep. Now that I'm awake I see I was about 2 minutes into the last loop, so I'll listen to that last loop later. It'll be interesting to see how my body reacts to, say, a hybrid loop.

Dream-wise, I remember being somewhere (a party?) and complaining about cars being parked in bike lanes, and there was an attractive girl who looked embarrassed and ashamed, and said that she had just done that, and that she was sorry and wouldn't do it again. And she was so full of remorse that I held her waist and reassured her that it was ok, and kissed her on her cheek, but she didn't turn her head in kissing me back. I asked if I was missing something, and she just looked at me, so I went for the kiss and ... that's it.

That's all that happened. Kinda tame, but definitely a step up from earlier in the dream when I was walking down the street and hooligans around me were throwing things to knock down traffic signs, and earlier dreams that I've written about.

My body is still buzzing; my emotions still seem like they're flowing.