I had a kind of unfortunate time during the day Monday, when I was having a conversation with a nice lady and suddenly had a powerful flashback to the Bad Relationship of a couple of years ago. This happened at the beginning of last year, too, with the girl I was dating at the time: the memories and emotional damage from that time comes up and sort of takes over, so that I can no longer clearly react only to what's going on here and now, but emotionally I'm reacting to the past events, essentially reliving them. Everything kind of shuts down, and the best I can do is explain to whoever I'm talking to that I'm freaking out, I'm not really considering them in real-time, and I have suddenly become incapable of seeing and dealing with my feelings for them. It's not fun, but there are worse things, and it's better now than it has been in the past.

The cure, or the way out, is the same as always: to focus on what I'm doing, keep myself doing stuff, practice being present, do some meditation, and remain aware of that spark inside that makes me me, and where I draw strength to keep going to do whatever needs doing. Recovering takes a little while, but it does happen, and the occasional relapse seems to just be part of the process of healing and letting go. It's kind of a curious state...among other things, memories or the idea of emotional closeness with somebody feel very distant and foreign.

So my September spending was pretty well under control until I bought plane tickets for Christmas, but my big splurges this month have been on nice stuff, as I try to mold my relatively compact living space into something that's more me, a kind of place I'd rather be. I'm sort of limited by money and the fact that my housemate already has the place furnished, but money will change when I get a new job, and furniture will change when my housemate moves out in a month or two.

I'm still thinking about moving up to the city, though I don't think I need quite that much lifestyle churn yet. I still have fencing and Caboose Restoration starting soon, and I may add capoeira to that to get a bit more exercise, since aikido keeps me muscular and relaxed, but since we learn to make our aikido be less work over time, it's not helping me lose weight any more (notwithstanding that I still eat too many cookies). I have a background project to build a coke forge, but I've found trying to learn blacksmithing to be really frustrating just to get started without spending a ton of money on the Crucible, so I'm aiming for some more general and body-oriented stuff. It's definitely the year of doing stuff I always wanted to do, though. A lot of it's distraction, I realize: if I stand still for too long, I have a lot of leftover crap (mostly relationship crap) over the past few years that I'm still trying to assimilate--one relationship that hurt because I had it, another that hurt because it was all that and a bag of chips, and it ended and it was right for it to end, and maybe 5% of the time I refuse to accept the unfairness of it all.

But the world is still so pretty, and everything is okay.