Taking the day off from work yesterday was a very good idea. I mean, I have a bunch of crap to catch up with today, but I really needed that break. I haven't been able to relax or sleep well for so long now, and it's taken its toll on my body and mind. It was nice to just sit and watch movies and snooze and hang out with my friends and not worry about anything for a little while. It would have been even nicer to take the whole week off and recuperate, but a short respite was better than nothing.
I feel a lot better today, and it's nice to know that I can feel better, and that I'm not doomed to nervous, flustered, tension-filled crapitude for the rest of my life.
I moved this weekend. Well, I moved my stuff this weekend--I can't actually sleep there for a few more days, because...well, stupid story that I've told too many times already. Anyway, it actually went fairly smoothly and didn't take much time, especially since I had help from my dad and two friends. And those same friends are letting me stay with them until my new bedroom is available, so everything is OK. I don't have to sleep in my car or anything. But still, I hate being in apartment purgatory. I feel so unsettled, and all I do is think about unpacking my stuff and setting things up and on and on etc., but I can't actually do anything about it. It's very frustrating. And I also have a few things at my old apartment, things that didn't make sense to move over and dump in the dining room for a few days, so I still have ties to that place. Which is not ideal.
Today I'm taking the day off, so I can relax and not have to do anything, except maybe take a nap this afternoon. I'm exhausted. I realized yesterday that I don't remember the last time I had a good night's sleep. It's been at least a month. And I feel like crap. Spacy, tongue-tied, can't-focus-for-shit crap.
Maybe September will be better than August.
I've been reading a bit about meditation, since I've been trying to practice it, albeit sporadically. A few years ago, I started thinking about going to Vipassana ("insight meditation") sittings, since there's a center nearby. But, for one reason or another, I never went. I guess it just wasn't the right time, but maybe now it is.
I've been reading some short...essays? teachings? on their web site, and I came across this:
We are responsible for our efforts in practice, not the results of practice, because the results are beyond our control.
And it made me think about how that applies to so many things in life, and to many of the things I have the most trouble with. I get so frustrated and overwhelmed with my life. I want things to work out a certain way, and I focus on the outcome. I want things settled and "just so." But I can't control how things work out; I can only control my actions and efforts. It's not easy to remember this all the time, and it's often much easier to give up. Wail and moan and gnash your teeth. Get angry at yourself. Get angry at other people. But that doesn't get you anywhere (although you do need to go there sometimes, to the point of craziness, to remind yourself that it's not a good place to be).
Eventually you realize (and then forget, and then realize again, and so on) that some things are beyond your control, and you accept that, and focus on what you can do. Focus on the steps you can take, not the roadblocks that are not your fault. Remember that you have to keep trying, that it's your responsibility to keep trying. You'll get there eventually, even if the "there" isn't the one you had in mind.
I spent some time meditating this morning before I came to work. I bought a CD about a month or so ago, and I've been trying (and not really succeeding) to do at least one 15-minute sitting regularly. It's a basic meditation: sit still, breathe, focus on your breath, notice when your mind wanders and gently pull your attention back to your breath.
My mind wanders a lot. A lot. Hmm, I should cut my nails soon. Is my back straight enough? Am I getting a headache? I wonder what I should bring for lunch. I should call so-and-so this week. Is that neighbor dude screaming at someone on his cell phone again? Et cetera, and so on, ad nauseum. I try to focus on my breath--breathe in, breathe out, simple, right?--but the mind has a mind of its own. Even so, I find it does help, at least temporarily.
The soothing voice on the CD says something like "Ride the gentle waves of breath like the waves of the ocean." So this morning I tried some visualization, and pictured myself floating on an inner tube, slowly bobbing with the motion of peaceful waves. Mmm, nice. But wait, am I floating out with the tide? Maybe there's a riptide! Did I hear a motor in the distance? Is a boat going to hit me??! Aaaahhh! I need to paddle back to shore! Quickly! Aaaaahhhhhh!!!
Seriously. This is where my mind went. From peaceful, calm visualization to mortal danger and panic in about, oh...10 seconds.
My God. What the hell is wrong with me?
I feel overwhelmed on a regular basis. Too many things to do, or usually one enormous thing to do plus the usual little things, and it's like my brain and body and emotions start to overheat. The oil of confidence burns up and everything comes to a creaking, shuddering halt.
But the world doesn't come to a halt, as much as I would like it to (I Googled "vacation from my life" yesterday, and it seems that a lot of other people feel the same way). I feel like running away, abandoning my possessions and my job and, I don't know, sitting in a secluded cabin by a lake for the rest of my days. But of course that's silly. And of course I can get through the next week, though thinking beyond that--the next month, the next year, and, oh God, the next decade--whips me up into a churning tornado of panic.
So just think about the step ahead of me. Think about today and only today. Think about what's manageable. Think about all I've managed to accomplish under more difficult or similarly difficult circumstances. Think about how I have people who can help me, who want to help me. Think about the next step.
I think I can do that.
I sleep so much. To bed at 10, up at 7. And in between, dogs barking, dreams of screeching brakes and angry voices that startle me awake and leave me gasping, leg gone numb and dead-feeling. Through the night, I can feel my frowning forehead and mouth clenched as if fighting off rictus, and then I wake.
My body moves through its preparations for the day, creaking a bit, and then stiffened, head swimming. Relax, relax. I try to relax. But my muscles are locked in a pattern I can't quite break. Maybe tomorrow. I have to go to work now, get things done, though all I want to do is lie on my bed and stare into space, and try to let my body soften. Instead, I sit in my office and try to look busy and rub my eyes to keep away the tears that drip every so often.
Some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you.
I'm generally a go-with-the-flow kind of person. Which can be a good thing in a lot of instances. Some things are a waste of energy to try to fight against, or control, or shape, or make bend to your needs and will.
But there are things you need to choose, or at least try your very best to choose. Your job, your friends, your lovers, your home. For most of my life, I've just fallen into things, gone with what's easiest. If someone likes me, I try to like or even love them back, without seriously considering whether that particular person is worth my time and effort. I'm just grateful that someone wants me and I see it as a favor to me, and try to return that favor. Which is its own choice.
Really, though, this route takes more energy in the long run, and is doomed to fail. And failure is difficult, and takes so much time and effort to bounce back from.
That's been a pattern in my life: being chosen, trying to choose back, failure, loss, rebuilding...and then the same cycle all over again. I think it's been about avoiding risk, which it does initially, but it's simply sidestepping risk and postponing it. And it doesn't work--not for me, not for anyone. And it's something I don't want to do anymore, ever.
She was in a house, which she knew was her house, and yet it wasn't familiar at all. That strange kind of befuddled, mutually exclusive opposition that seems to make sense only in dreams.
She walked around, exploring the hallways, wondering why things felt so strange. It was exciting to be in this new-yet-not-new place, but unsettling. She walked up the narrow staircase, pressing her hands against the walls as she climbed. At the top, she peeked around the corner. A hallway, also narrow, was in front of her. It seemed natural to follow it, since she was curious where it went, and for a moment she imagined herself as Alice following the White Rabbit and tumbling down the rabbit hole. A bit dizzy from picturing the blue dress and spotless white pinafore and blonde hair swirling in freefall, she pressed her palms against the walls again, to steady herself as she walked.
The hallway turned sharply to the left, and then opened up into a light-filled room with high ceilings and two large windows along the right wall. It felt snug yet roomy, and seemed to be a bedroom. A bit dusty, but the blue quilt on the narrow bed was clean and unwrinkled, the rocking chair was placed just so, the curtains looked a bit threadbare in places but hardly shabby.
She sat on the bed and smiled. What an exciting discovery! Such a lovely room in her house, and for all this time she had no idea it existed. As her eyes traveled around the room, she suddenly noticed a doorway in the opposite corner. She couldn't see into it from where she was sitting, so she got up, walked over, and poked her head into what turned out to be a closet. A large cardboard box as tall as she was took up most of the width, but there was enough space between the wall and the box for her to squeeze through. Which, for some reason, she felt she had to do, even though she was quite happy to sit in the cozy room she had just discovered--the closet seemed quite deep, and she knew there must be something else back there.
She turned sideways and struggled through the cramped opening. It was dark and, once she got past the box, she stuck out her hands and felt along the walls. The closet stretched back a few more feet, and then ended abruptly. A lump of disappointment dropped into her stomach. She was so sure, somehow, that she would make another discovery if she explored the closet. She turned to the right, shuffling her feet and softly pressing the wall as she moved, until suddenly her hands met with no resistance and she lurched forward. Fear zipped through her arms like jolts of electricity, and again an image of Alice tumbling tumbling tumbling flashed in her mind. But she didn't fall far at all, and her hands found a firm, horizontal surface. She stayed like that for a few minutes, motionless, hunched over, taking deep breaths and feeling her heart ramming against her ribs. Her eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness, and she could see that there was a staircase in front of her, and so she straightened up and carefully placed her feet on the first step, then up to the next, and then the next.
It grew lighter with each step, and she emerged into another room through a hatch in the floor. Another new room in her house! And she was still sure that it was her house, though it did seem strange that she had never been in these rooms before. This was an attic space, also filled with light, which poured in through skylights set into the slanted roof. Another bedroom, though much larger than the cozy space downstairs. Pinpricks of dust floated through the air, illuminated by the streaming sunlight. Even though the roof was slanted, she could see, as she climbed up onto the floor, that she could stand quite comfortably under the eaves. The dust brushed against her bare arms as she moved toward the bed, but the air didn't taste like stale attic air, and the dust didn't feel quite like dust, either, but more like tiny warm feathers fluttering on her skin.
She sat on the bed and luxuriated in this feeling of domestic discovery, which felt so new and strange yet comfortable at the same time. Like discovering something that was once familiar but lost long ago.
The warmth of the room made her feel drowsy, and so she took off her shoes and laid down across the bed. As she slipped into sleep, she dreamt of more and more rooms, more staircases, more hallways, more hidden spaces that had been there all along but cleverly hidden from view. Or maybe she had just not bothered to look before then. In her dream she wondered how many more she would find, and if they would still be there when she woke up.
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. -G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
Beauty and horror and other visceral experiences usually take this route. No filtering intellect stands in the way of their impact. They slam you in the chest and the gut and it's all pure, raw feeling.
Other experiences might meander through the brain for a while before evoking emotion, depending on who you are. Some people have trained themselves to instantly block and surround experience with rational thought, and shape it in their minds before sending it along to the heart. This is a useful skill, I think. It averts a lot of heartache. It makes disappointments more bearable. The brainy filter can rosy it up, make the glass half full, reason and temper and spin.
Once something circumvents the filter, though, it's much harder to bring it back to the intellect and shape the emotional response, like a plastic surgeon nipping and tucking and carving and smoothing flesh to make it more pleasing. The jolt to the heart stays there like a thrumming echo, and all the reason in the world can't drown that out. But time and practice and patience can help it fade to a tickly vibration of memory, less insistent but still instructive. Unchanged and unfiltered and whole and real, but folded and tucked out of the way, like a 10-year-old love letter.
Summer is such a slippery-quick season. Especially in the Northeast, it seems like it's over in a blazing blue-and-green flash. Just when summer loses its novelty, you realize it's almost gone. Your flip-flops are nicely broken in, your sweat glands have adjusted to the heat and humidity, you've finally rotated all of your sweaters into storage, and then, wham! The leaves are turning, all of the 19-year-olds are back in the city, and you never made it to the damn beach.
But then again, I love summer. I guess not everyone does, and I can understand that. The heat and sweat and dust, especially in the city, can be oppressive. But, oh, the beauty and delicious languor. The smell of cut grass and the blue skies and the warm-enough oceans. The fresh tomatoes and farmer's markets and skin-temperature night air. Summer can be cranky and obnoxious, but its seductive and fleeting gorgeousness makes up for its flaws. I wait for this season every year, and I love it, but it also makes me anxious because I know it will be gone too soon.
But today is perfect. And so I forgive you, summer, for all of your faults. And I forgive you for abandoning me every year, long before I'm ready for you to go.
It was sweaty-hot this weekend, so I decided to go to a movie on Saturday afternoon. I've been meaning to see The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arr�t�), and figured that was a good choice, since I was going by myself anyway and couldn't think of anyone else I know around here who would be interested.
It was dark, and violent, and moody, and pretty good. Not the best movie I've ever seen, but interesting. Although, whenever I see films in another language, and also when I read books that have been translated, I wonder about how the translation changes the meaning and emotional effect. One scene in particular made me think about this: the main character, Tom, meets his father's new girlfriend for the first time (his mother died maybe 10 or 15 years ago), and he's very snide and fairly nasty to her. When his father asks his opinion, he says she's une pute, a whore. Right after that scene, he's driving in his car and a song is playing with the lyrics (in English), "There's a monkey on my back / Makes me talk like that...". Which struck me as pretty ham-fisted and anvil-y overkill--I think that anyone watching would understand his reaction, and the song is just a little too much. But then again, the average French speaker, who probably doesn't know English well enough to catch the slurred, echoey lyrics of the song, might not have the same reaction. Anyway, it's a small point, and there are probably lots of other examples of the reverse that I, as someone who speaks French un peu, didn't catch, but it made me think.
The movie also made me think that I'd like to relearn my French. I'm not sure about the best way to do that, besides moving to France, but maybe I'll work on that soon.
Another thing I've been wanting to do lately is learn how to ride my bike in the city. I've never done it, because it kinda scares the poop out of me, but I think it's time to suck it up and do it. I mean, I probably won't get run over, right?
It was hot in the car, and she could feel the heat prickling her scalp and spreading down to her neck. Her face was probably bright red, but she didn't feel like wriggling up to the front seat to look in the mirror. She took a deep breath through her nose and let the air whoosh out of her mouth, letting her lips flap loose like an untied balloon. The parking lot air smelled like sweat. She crinkled up her nose and decided to breathe through her mouth instead.
She should have brought a book with her, but Uncle Joe said they were just going for a quick ride, making a quick stop, it would take 10 minutes, tops. She'd been waiting in the car for longer than that, but the clock in the car was busted, so she didn't know how long exactly.
An inchworm was crawling on her leg--probably climbed onto her clothes before the car ride, when she had been sitting under the tree--and so she watched that for a while. It was pale green and had stumpy little suckers for feet. She pet it gently and it felt soft, like the skin on a puppy's belly. She watched it move along her leg the way inchworms do, folding itself in half like it was touching its toes, and sometimes standing up on its back feet and waving its top half in the air for a few seconds. Her leg started to tickle and itch, though, between the little suckered feet and the prickly heat, and so she picked up the inchworm and placed it gently on the window.
She stuck her legs out and wiggled her toes, listening to her flip-flops make a slapping noise as they whacked against her feet. She sighed again, this time making a high-pitched sighing sound in the back of her throat. Still no Uncle Joe.
She started counting her freckles.
I went to the doctor yesterday, to talk to her about my TMJ-related stuff. It's probably mostly TMJ, but also might be allergies, something wrong with my sinuses, something wrong with my eustachian tubes. She gave me a prescription for a muscle relaxer, and told me to take that at night along with two Alleve. So, I did that, and now I have mushy oatmeal for brains. I slept for about 10 hours, I've been up for about 3 hours, and all I want to do is go back to bed. I think I'll take a half pill tonight instead of a whole one and, in the meantime, leave work early and just go home and get horizontal for most of the day.
I'm getting a CT scan tomorrow (I've never had one before; it sounds kind of exciting), so I'm hoping that will shed some light on what's going on in my head.
I was sleeping deeply at 2:30 this morning, and then someone screamed. Or maybe shrieked. It's hard to think about auditory nuance when you're asleep.
The light in the hall was on, and someone was whimpering on the floor close to my bedroom door. The dogs burst in, the neighborhood cat who was sleeping on my bed growled, and I heard my roommate yell something about a bat.
"A bat," I thought. "There's a bat?"
Something something bat; something something what do I do?
"It's not going to hurt you," I said, or mumbled, but clearly enough for her to hear me. "Go into your room and shut the door."
The dogs paraded out of my room, the cat slunk out from underneath the bed, my roommate closed my door. I fell back asleep without any trouble.
I don't think I had any dreams about bats.
I've been writing a lot lately. Not because I have more to say than I usually do, or because I want to tell people anything. I do it because I need to. I need to write every day, and I've promised myself that I will, even when I don't feel like it.
I'm a perfectionist, or at least I have those tendencies, and that quality is very good at throttling creativity. I self-edit, I reject as not good enough, I criticize my words before I can even get them out. But good writing doesn't start out that way. It doesn't erupt fully formed and float softly like a million perfect snowflakes onto the page (or screen). Some of it's crap, and some of it's OK, and there are a few flashes of really good in there. So you weed out the crap, replace it with more crap, nix that, put the shiny bits of really good aside, try to add to that, end up tarnishing it, scrap that (even though it wrenches your heart and guts because you know it's great, but you also know it just isn't working), start something new, polish and add and cut and trim and change ad nauseum, until you have something completely different and maybe OK.
It's messy and completely chaotic, and I have a very hard time living with and accepting mess and chaos. But I also need to write. It's something I've always needed to do, and I lost it for a good while there. I just didn't do it, because I was too busy working so I could pay the rent or trying to figure out how to make an unworkable relationship work. I didn't have the energy. And I lost the faith I once had that I could do it--not necessarily an "it" that would win a Pulitzer or that even more than five people on the planet would like. Just something that was part of me and that was probably, maybe OK.
And I think I can do that, with a little more practice.
It's so true: when it rains, it pours.
(I know that's a stupid ad slogan for Morton salt, but I'm talking about the more general, aphoristic meaning here.)
It just seems that when bad things happen, a lot of bad things happen all at once. Like disease clusters. I suppose that this phenomenon has something to do with perception--like, when something bad happens, you're more attuned to other bad things--but it can't all be perception. I mean, the bad things are real, they're really happening in quick succession, and there's no question that they're bad things. Sometimes it's a ripple or snowball effect, but sometimes the bad things are completely unrelated.
Like when my aunt, uncle, and grandmother all died in the space of less than a year. When my dog died, my relationship fell to pieces, and then I fell to pieces. And like this weekend, when I got very clear signals that someone I like definitely doesn't like me "that way" (not awful, I'm pretty much over it already, but still, upsetting), a good friend's mother died (definitely, completely awful), and my sister's dog is in the hospital and the prognosis is not good (also terrible).
I suppose that things can happen the other way around, too: good things can happen in clusters and in quick succession. And similarly, perception and a snowball effect are also at work there. I guess I just don't see this inverse theory at work nearly as often, which is a shame.
I came home the other night kind of late, and I was walking up the hill to my street when a man stopped his car and asked me, "Do you want a ride?" I said, "No," and he drove away.
It was so...odd. I mean, as a woman, you get accustomed to being propositioned once in a while by strange men. (Well, not exactly accustomed, but it becomes less noteworthy and unsettling.) Usually, though, the guy is drunk or otherwise boisterous and it's more of a display than a serious offer. Like a pigeon strutting around and puffing up its feathers. But this was so straightforward: just a simple question, a simple answer, and an acknowledgment of that answer.
Which makes it more unsettling than if he had yelled, I don't know, "Hey baby! You look sweet! Come and take a ride with me!" or something like that. This man was completely serious and businesslike. It thoroughly creeped me out.
On a not really related note, I've started getting bizarre messages on Friendster from random men. The first was from "James" who says:
Hi Baby, My name is James and am a model.I think I like what i see in this picture of urs.I wud really love to know u more.
Um, yeah. Love the sweater.
Today, I got one from "frederick," who is from Nigeria:
My name is frederick. I am a computer engineer and i am single and searching. My hobbies are palying football, reading and spending time with family. I have gone through your profile and i found you to be very interestine, that is why i decided to contact you. Actually i am in search of a good relationship that will lead to marriage cause i am ready to settle down and start a family of my own.
In case you want to paly some football with him, he gave me his email and phone number, so just let me know and I'll totally forward it to you.
I'm guessing this is the newest wave of spam innovation, and I don't like it. Not one bit.
I've been wondering lately how people make friends. I know people who can do it incredibly easily--it seems like they simply snap their fingers and people flock to them. And I just don't get it. Do they simply have an inherent magnetism that draws people like iron filings? Do they have a critical social skill that I never learned?
I don't mean this to be self-pitying. I'm genuinely curious. I know I have things working against me in this department: I'm shy and introverted, I don't have any intense hobbies, I can really put my foot in my mouth sometimes, I'm cautious. I am a good friend, once people get to know me, I know that, but that's the catch, isn't it? People need to get to know me first, and I don't have that charisma, that eye-catching quality that makes them snap to attention when I'm in the room.
I don't know what to do about this. I have a feeling there isn't anything I can do about it, and that it will be a puzzle and a problem for a long, long time.
August is here, deep summer. The cicadas are trilling every night--an insistent, soothing, drowsy sound. A sound like lush velvet air, languid movements, sweating beer bottles dropping dew onto the grass. It's so evocative, it's difficult to describe. Like when a smell brings back a memory or feeling so sharp and clear, but also so complex and fleeting you can't quite grasp it, and it lingers there, diffuse and shapeless.
Hearing the cicadas every night, and also just the general hum and heat of August, brings back memories of my earliest summers growing up in Pennsylvania. We were in the suburbs of Philadelphia, surrounded by quarter-acre plots planted with faux-Colonial split levels, but our 8+ acres, bought by my grandparents in the '30s from a farmer who had gone bust, was a true oasis.
I remember waking up and not worrying about school, or anything else. Eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and watching Reading Rainbow in the dim chill of my grandparents' stone-floored living room while my grandmother puttered around her kitchen. Bumping my bike with the pink streamers and flowered seat down the long rocky driveway, feeling the breeze dry the sweat from my face and my brown bare legs. Stopping where the old spring house used to be, wading in the filmy water and smoothing my hands over the slippery green rocks. My sister and I would visit each clump of honeysuckle and carefully bite the base of each picked flower, giddy when we found a sweet drop of nectar instead of just the tart bite of green stem.
Playing, reading, wandering, dreaming, exploring, and thinking in the insect-chattering, blue-sky, heavy-aired days of summer. Not every day was as serene and happy as I remember it, I'm sure, but the general feeling and the memories are true. So innocent and enviable.
So, this is generally how I listen to music: When I find something I like, I listen to it over and over and over again, until I can't get it out of my head. Until you'd think I'd be sick of it, but I can't get sick of it, because it's so good.
KEXP has been playing a couple of songs by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (album is self-titled, self-released), so I bought the CD, and I've been listening to it every day this week. It is good good good. It reminds me of the Talking Heads, sort of, but it's more...I don't know. Something. Music criticism isn't my thing. Just go to their web site and listen to the songs they have up there.
I moved pretty recently, back in February. I really, really hate moving, but I'm going to be doing it again in about 3 weeks. I've had some difficulties with my current roommate, and the new place is closer to work and the T and the grocery store and the gym, and it's nicer and bigger and all that. So, moving will be a good thing. But, still, I hate moving. HATE.
I've been in Boston for almost 10 years now. I've lived in Brookline, Back Bay, Brighton, Medford, Somerville (3 different places so far), and Cambridge. So, when I move this time, that will be...9 moves. Nine. Jesus.
Here's hoping I won't be moving again for at least another year. I think I need to bring down my average a bit.
So, I've just started reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I read A Wild Sheep Chase sometime last year, and this book seems quite similar: breezy, almost detached prose, with this pervasive feeling of...oddness, which eventually turns into overt bizarre-ness, and yet somehow keeps a feeling of the everyday. On the surface, things are fairly ordinary: the husband is unemployed, the cat is missing, they have a fight about tissues that is really about the husband not paying attention to his wife. But you can tell that everything will turn upside-down and mystical and freaky fairly soon. I'm only about 30 pages into it, but I'm enjoying it so far.
There's one odd similarity between the two books that I've noticed already: a fixation on women's ears. They seem to be mentioned quite a bit, and a woman's perfectly shaped ear played a major part in A Wild Sheep Chase. Is this a cultural thing? I mean, I suppose that people can have ear fetishes or fixations or what have you anywhere in the world, and maybe this is just the author's thing. But maybe ears are a sexier body part in Japan than they are here. I'd be interested to find out.
I'm not stranger to nagging, persistent pain. I've had back pain on and off for a while now--not so bad that I can't stand it, but definitely irritating. That's still around, but now it's become full-on from the top of my head down to my toes pain.
Apparently, I clench my jaw. All the time. I could probably crack walnuts between my molars at this point. I'm getting fitted for a night guard later this month, so I'm really hoping that will help because this is becoming intolerable. My neck is sore, my face feels like it's all twisted up, I can't see straight, my ears are constantly plugged up. I've been to the chiropractor, physical therapy, a neurologist...and they all say the same thing: RELAX. You just need to relax.
It's funny how something so simply said can be so overwhelmingly difficult.