Hurts So Good

This Easter weekend, an auspicious period of rebirth and renewal in the Christian culture, yours truly is feeling very much like a 92 year-old woman. My whole body hurts, from the roots of my hair to the recurring tendonitis in my right toes.

I have pushed myself to the physical limits this week, in a not-so-subconscious effort to try to outrun my psyche, to strong arm the emotional pain and confusion I feel about my new life. I strained my right bicep tendon doing repeated G.I. Jane-style pull-ups on Tuesday. My thighs and glutes are painfully sore from squats, lunges and miles and miles of bike riding. My shins are bruised and scraped from a late-Wednesday night tumble off that same bike. And my corpus as a whole feels the kind of chilly fatigue that is hard to shake after traversing the City by cycle for hours in the pouring rain, wearing the armor of soggy jeans, wet socks and cotton clothes clinging to my frame.

I did wonder as I made my way back to my apartment last night if I didn’t have some sort of warrior-style death wish. I have always been a tomboy, and functioning as the son my father never had, I learned a lot from him about silently sweating out the pain, the gym as therapy. I do see a psychologist, and a brilliant one at that, but I recognize that I can only talk about my feelings so much. The story, for the foreseeable future, won’t change, and I hate wallowing. So I try to expel the negative energy through brute force, and even if that doesn’t work, I think as I sweat. There’s not a long of time between grunts for extraneous thoughts. One can’t help but focus.

But I forget sometimes that though the human body is capable of amazing things, it is still a human body, fallible, often frail and requiring proper care to continue running at peak performance. I haven’t been eating well, and at least this week, neglecting to sleep as much as I should. Combine that with self-induced samurai training, and I am in a world of hurt today, even after hibernating for 11 hours and consuming more victuals than I believed my stomach could accommodate.

My body has officially revolted: basta, fini, enough. I have to respect that. But that means that for the next two days at least, I can no longer leave my thoughts in the wake.