The start of another week. I think I'm getting better. At least I don't wet my pants thinking when I think about school (metaphorically speaking, of course). Therapy has been helping a lot, though I am still a slough when it comes to the "homework" I'm given. Tomorrow I start swimming. Supposedly swimming forces you to breathe correctly and so has a calming effect. I guess a little exercise will do me some good as well. I can't believe how fat I've allowed myself to become, and it's gonna take some guts taking off my shirt at the public pool tomorrow, but what needs to be done needs to be done.
The best, and also the most frustrating, part about this extended leave is this amount of free time I have on my hands. It feels downright awful sometimes, knowing that other people are working while I'm watching TV or having a nap in the afternoon. I get guilty about it, but then, this whole ruckus I'm in now is all because I'd been running a marathon at a sprint for a good six months. I'm forced to take things really slowly now, and everything I do seems to be in slow motion. I move more slowly, read more slowly, allow minutes, hours, days to pass without forcing anything to happen.
I still don't know for sure when or if ever I'm gonna be able to find my old self back; maybe it's for the better that the old me has vanished. Still, I feel lost without him. Powerless. I watched Lars and the Real Girl again today, it's a real gem, brings a smile to my face. Read a bit of Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That. Read so slowly that I thought perhaps I was finding the book boring. But every time I started where I stopped before, I found something new and alive in it to keep me glued. It's not a page-turner, well, not yet anyway, but it rewards the patience of its reader I think, and I think that's something I need right now.
