I have to be careful in my workout regimen. I have a leaky heart valve and am on beta blockers which tends to slow the heart's capability to respond to stimuli. That means I have to carefully milk my workout routine, because I can suddenly find myself in a kind of anaerobic shock where blood supply is not sufficient to deliver the oxygen where it's needed because the heart is medically being prevented from keeping up.
That said, belly dancing is an aerobic activity and it counts for some of my activity. Yeah, I'm not up to 30 minutes a workout, but I did 21 minutes this morning while getting ready for work and I had two 25 minute sessions of carrying 3 baskets of laundry across the apartment complex. I would have hit the treadmill, too, but I was out of socks. I've come a long way from where I was last year. The other effect the workouts are having is that I am exchanging more toned muscle tissue in my waist for fat. I surprised myself by noticing my size 12 jeans were a little baggy, I had nice waist indentations in the mirror, and yet the scale was now sitting at almost 200. But I also noticed my lower back muscles were stronger as I lugged the laundry baskets.
As to the effects of hormones, I noticed that the change in hormones changed the way I sensed the world. Particular colors became more vibrant, I was more sensitive to smell, including subliminal smell, and my skin became more sensual as well. When estrogen flooded my system, I craved to be touched. All of these changes in sensual stimuli were bound to have an effect on my way of perceiving and reacting to situations. I got myself in trouble a couple of times by being misled by men trying to coerce me to be with them, do things I didn't want to do, because they would do some things that woke the sensual nature and caused half of me to crave more, while the other half panicked and wanted out of there. This was a new emotional space to navigate, and I was completely lost.
A couple of other things occurred as well. The rejection monster deep in my psyche began to be more easily triggered and not easily calmed. I also felt a quickening of intuition building. The very nature of desire itself seemed to have changed, from wanting to be with someone to having someone be with me, touch me, stroke me.
In this way, I was like an adolescent. Having to learn to make rational decisions in a new world, a world made new because the way I perceived it had changed. They way I perceived myself had changed. I suddenly had to find out who I was and the kind of woman I was to be, in the face of new emotions.
And so, the only way to find ourselves is to explore, and we do so, we take chances and not always under the wisest of circumstances. But that is how wisdom is gained.
To be honest, I was so bound up in my own discovery that I didn't look for it in others. But when a girl in her 30's starts selling her dignity, thinking she'll never regret it, she is deceiving all the wisdom she had gained as a man beforehand.
Actions based purely on emotions, without temperance of experience is the hallmark of the adolescent years. And I'm sure if you put your mind to it you can recall many examples where t-girls or t-boys have done exactly that.
Hugs and God Bless,
Sophie
No comments:
Post a Comment