Well, uh…hi! I’m back, I think. Trauma definitely has a way of stunting everything you want to accomplish in life, doesn’t it? There were a lot of life changes that were squeezed into that absence of mine, and maybe someday I will reveal them in flashback-style life lesson type moments. Or maybe I’ll just let it sit in the past and in paper journals. I guess we’ll all find out together.

As of now, though, I’ve made a concerted effort to get this health train back on track. Since I’m not Superman or Mr. Incredible, it’s taken me some time to push and lever the old girl back onto the track she was meant to go on. However, I feel like referring it to a train is not the way I want to go forward with things. Trains, with the exception of the darlings of the Starlight Express and the creepers of Shingingtime Station and Blaine the Mono, are inanimate and uncaring. They have no feelings, they have no will of their own. They chug along mindlessly and crash into things if not directed. On this ever-onward journey of mine, I’ve come to see my derailments not as some mindless event that happened when I was asleep at the switch, but as something that was handled by the purely emotional side of my brain.

I stumbled upon a brilliant analogy that spoke very deeply to me. It’s called the Elephant and the Rider. Rather than ham-fistedly try to explain it, I’ll let the internet take this one.

What I personally love about this is seeing the emotional side of my being as an animal. I love animals, and I especially love elephants. Approaching a relationship with an animal is something I feel like I understand pretty well, certainly much better than I understand approaching a relationship with myself. So if I just see the emotional, willful part of myself that I need to get on board with things as an animal, it makes it infinitely easier to be kind to it. To understand that instead of hurling abusive words and ugliness at it as you repeatedly gouge behind its ear with a bullhook when it’s already going the way you want it to go but maybe just not fast enough, you need to show it equal measures of love, encouragement, and firmness. You need to all of yourself be on the same page and give yourself easy goals to keep you there.

Thinking of my emotions as an elephant has really, really helped me try to be kinder to myself. Mostly because I love elephants and I could never ever be mean to an elephant. If you ARE mean/unkind to your elephant (the aforementioned repeated gouging), it will pick you up and smash you into the ground and then step on your head like a grape when it gets sick enough of your shit. On the flip side, if you let your elephant decide what it wants to do all the time with NO guidance whatsoever, it will wander off the path and start eating whatever it wants and sleeping in the shade and won’t ever get out of the lake. You need to find a way to compromise. Let the elephant rest in the shade sometimes, let it eat a watermelon now and again, let it be sad or frightened and try your best to comfort it and get it to at least put one foot back on the path, even if you won’t walk any more for today.

This is getting away from me a little (to be honest I’m just now envisioning hanging out with an elephant in real time) but suffice to say this way of looking at things has helped me a lot, probably not exactly in the way it was envisioned to help people, but it gets the job done all the same. So for now I’m back on my bullshit and trying to do better things for myself. I’m going to try including ‘writing entries in this blog semi-regularly’ in that endeavor. Just gotta get the ol’ elephant on board.