The weather this month has been stupid - sun and rain and gale force winds and temperatures all over the place - and it's been driving me bonkers as the kind of person who needs a daily walk the way a dog does. I never used to be that person. I really never used to be. I was firmly Team Move As Little As Possible and I would have taken any excuse not to leave the house. There have been plenty of periods in my life where I was exercising a lot, but it was always motivated by learning how to do something or a social aspect, where I would go to a specific place to do a specific thing. Up until two years ago I've never been someone who just goes for walks for no reason, and I'm still not really used to it. I went for my usual walk yesterday, in high winds and occasional mocking glimpses of sunshine in between random lumps of rain, and I could feel my past self watching me like I was some kind of zoo exhibit.
A lot changed when I got diagnosed with ADHD and started taking medication. For the first year or so it truly seemed like every single problem I'd ever had had been fixed; the difference in my ability to function when medicated was so stark and so unfamiliar, and I was so excited by being able to just exist the way I'd always wanted to. When my medicated state became the one I was used to I realised nope, there's still a bunch of shit to unpack from the previous three and a half decades of being an undiagnosed neurodivergent person. I also realised that I'm still the person I've always been, with the same foibles and the same ingrained patterns of behaviour, and even when medicated there is still work I need to do in order to keep functioning on a day-to-day basis. I'd just started to work on that when the Elvanse shortage happened and I couldn't fulfil my prescription for eight months. It was rough. A lot of things I'd become used to slipped away from me. But for some reason, the daily walks stuck. On this point at least, my brain has re-wired itself. Brains are weird and I really wish I didn't have to spend as much time thinking about mine as I do.
Sometimes the walk helps me think, if I'm in a receptive enough place to begin with. Sometimes it helps me with writing or planning. But honestly, most of the time it does nothing of the sort. It's just there. It's sustenance. It's like a sandwich. I'm not inspired by it, but I'll feel like shit if I skip it. Maybe most people feel this way about going for a walk, I don't know. Maybe this is the least interesting thing I've ever written (it is not. I used to have an America's Next Top Model recap blog). But I'm not used to thinking about it like that. There's so much bullshit grafted onto mundane things, so many ways in which health is just a code word for what will other people think of your body, that I'm genuinely not sure the idea of its being a basic self-compassionate need had ever occurred to me.
I honestly thought when I decided to restart a blog that it would be more "here's some stuff that happened" rather than "I've had Thoughts again", but this is where we are and this is what you're getting. Maybe tomorrow something really stupid will happen.
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