I've mentioned before that my father has an anger management problem. Unfortunately, it seems to be something of a family thing, though greatly moderated in my siblings and I. The thing is, I've got a really long fuse, but it's attached to an enormous powder-keg.
I can usually feel when I'm about to lose my marbles, and that's something that I have been trying varying coping methods on for about three years now. When I internalize stress, I mess up my body. My shoulders tighten, which throws off my back and neck, and wreaks havoc on my hip problems. For a while, I was on pain killers for the hip. After a few days, I realized that not only was the pain gone, but so were the feelings of homicidal anger. (I exaggerate a touch there, but it's hard to describe the feeling of standing on the brink of my own temper--it's sort of like standing on the edge of a live volcano and looking into the crater at the roiling magma.) Turns out the pills were also a mild anti-depressant. Sadly, I didn't get to stay on those very long due to our desire to have a baby. Gotta keep the old system clean.
So I turned to yoga. That works great, as long as I can discipline myself to do it. But it's only a proactive method--I can't just drop into downward dog when I'm about to flip my wig. I'm trying really hard not to comfort eat. And I don't want to lose my temper at my husband or the dogs.
I'm telling all this because today, as I was sitting at the computer staring foggedly at PhotoShop and trying to figure out what comes next, I got a call from my hair stylist down in Boise. I have (had) an appointment to get my hair cut off tomorrow. Turns out her baby has the croup, and she can't take the baby to day care until she's better. For many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's still a 170-mile round trip for me to go to Boise, I can't exactly reschedule for any other day. Because I have no idea when we're going to town next, and because her schedule is very busy, I decided that the only thing to do was try to set a new appointment for after we move to Boise. The new haircut date is March 16. I've been waiting five weeks already.
Still with me? After I got off the phone, I hid in the bathroom with tears rolling down my face. Why? Because it was the one thing that I was looking forward to this week. It was the one thing that I was doing for myself. The rest of next week is taken up with work (yeah, they called me back in again), real estate stuff, and all the other normal living things. So one good thing was looking awfully...well, good.
To bring this all back around, I decided to take a walk by myself, up behind our house. I stomped two miles through the snow in 35 minutes, and by the time I walked back in the house, I no longer felt like I was staring into the crater full of lava. I have resolved now to exercise every time I feel like I'm about to lose it. And here's the good part: I'm calling my new coping mechanism Hissy-Fitness.