No really, why?
I look at my paper. A big question, circled and underlined multiple times. I wrote a lot of question marks beside the question.
There's a lot of arrows pointing to different words on the paper, all surrounding this single question.
Why does moving help?
I have pain. I have a disability. I don't know what this disability is, I have no idea what it is.
And it's a great question, what is it? Great question, but just like I don't know why moving help.
I don't know what my disability is.
So.
I pull my shirt off. I'm doing that a lot those last few hours.
Throwing the shirt on my box, I give a glance at one of the arrows pointing away from the question:
Why does moving help?
The arrow points to a potential lead, right there written on white.
Bloodflow.
There's multiple question marks beside the word, again, similar to the previous question.
I'm not sure if bloodflow matters to be honest, but that's why I'm trying to figure it out.
While standing, in the middle of the room, I start running in place, raising my knees as high as I can, moving as fast as I can.
Just like that, I find myself doing high knees in the middle of my room. Or...well, running in place if you prefer calling it like that.
Quickly, I can feel the constant 90% pain slowly dropping down.
It drops down. But it doesn't drop...normally.
Well, it's normal for me, but it wouldn't make much sense for anyone that isn't me.
You see, I describe the pain in percentages. For example, I'm at 90% pain.
But, I'm talking as if everything was a whole. But the pain doesn't really feel like a whole.
No...the pain is...weirder.
It feels like magma through my veins, yes, but it doesn't really means much when I say it like that.
My pain is almost like...a balloon.
Kind of?
I feel like a balloon, a balloon filled with water, or air, or whatever.
What matters is that I feel like a balloon, I'm a balloon, a big balloon.
My limbs are balloons, my arms moving up and down fast beside my body are balloons, my legs, kicking up and down to make me run in place and make my heart race are balloons.
I'm a balloon.
That's how my pain feels, I feel like my entire body is a balloon, all my limbs, all my organs, my brain, everything is a balloon.
And it feels like everything is constantly getting stretched out. It feels like everything is constantly expanding.
It feels like I'm a balloon trying to hold more water than I possibly can.
I don't know if it makes much sense, but that's how I feel.
So...everything feels bad.
And right now, while I'm starting to breath hard, a flush spreading on my face because of the aerobic work I'm putting myself through
Right now, I have a good example of whatever I meant by saying I'm a balloon.
My legs, who hurted, start to hurt less, the pain in there slowly diluting. Right now, I feel like my legs, even if still painful. Are getting better.
As if whatever my body needed to hold diluted away, escaped me, was being used.
So, overall. IF I COUNT my normal 90% pain, and add how my legs fees.
I would say I'm at 88% pain right now.
But that's not all.
Of course, as I run in one place. My arms move too, they work less than my legs, but they work, just like my core is working to stabilize my body.
If I addition all of that. I would say I'm at 87% pain.
But, if I stop. Something I do. I stop, let both of my feet rest on the ground, and while breathing hard, I focus on my body to have a good measure on how I feel.
I feel my heart pumping, hard.
Everytime I live. When I wake up, or I'm just at rest.
My heart. Like every part of me. Is like a balloon. Like everything else. It always feel like it's ready to explode, that the walls of my heart are trying to crawl out of my ribcage and bubble out like a cancer.
Right now though?
While it works. Hard, my heartbeat pumping in my ears.
It still hurts. But it's way more manageable.
It pumps and pumps, and with it. It spreads more blood thourought my body.
Everywhere in my body.
I always feel like every parts of me hurt. Skin included, as if it was trying to be skinned off or fly away from me.
And my veins beneath my skin are the same.
Most of my organs are the same.
Everything in my body needs blood.
So when I work out, when I get my body to pump out a lot of blood all around my body.
It's as if I was getting a BIG boost in pain relief.
Right now? If I addition everything.
I'm easily at 30% pain right now.
Yes it's a big boost, and like I was trying to explain. My pain is a whole. It's not only in my arms, or my legs, even if I say I'm at 30% pain, it doesn't mean I feel 30% pain on my arms.
It's a measure of everything.
My ears for example, hurt as much as usual.
It's possible for me to feel no pain in one area while feeling immense pain in another, or it's possible for me to feel pretty good everywhere, while one part of my body hurts. My pain is annoying like that.
It's annoying, but it also means that cardio, with the blood that gets pumped in every single part of my body easily takes care of most of my pain.
Not in a STRONG way, but in a general way. It's like...a constant pain resistance buff on every parts of my body, which makes the percentage of pain drop down exponentially.
It's like the saying, little things add up. And the blood, even if it doesn't heal everything fully, it helps reduce the small annoying things, like my skin, some of my organs, random muscles I don't know exist, random tendons I don't know exist, the fascia under my skin. And all of those little things add up until it gives me a massive drop in pain percentage.
And this percentage drop is great enough for me to break out a big smile.
It feels magnificent.
And it's rare for me to be that low. On a normal day, I would probably be at 40% but...because of whatever I did yesterday, I woke up at 90% pain.
However, bloodflow is a really fickle thing, in a minute or two the pain will grow back to it's usual baseline.
It will rise sooner than later, always.
I look down at my paper again, sweat building on my body.
The bloodflow theory is good. But I don't think that's all.
I look at the other arrows leading to other words.
There are some that leads to 'exhaustion?'
A good idea from me. Which makes sense, because right now, as I'm recovering from the effort, my breathing steadying, the pain starts climbing up again
40, 50.
It climbs, slowly but surely, the more I recover the higher the pain will get. Probably will end up at 86~% pain or something like that.
I know my body enough to guess that.
That's why I wrote exhaustion on my paper. Because exhaustion is the only thing that REDUCES my pain, for a longer time period than just 10 minutes.
I look down at the ground. Wondering if I should do pushups. But then I eye the other arrows, leading to other words, and shake my head at myself.
I would love to feel less pain. But I can't afford to exhaust myself when I have things to test.
But it doesn't matter. I know very well what exhaustion does to me.
That's why all of my workout are based on exhuatsing myself as much as possible.
The more I exhaust myself, the less pain I feel. Not as much as I could with a cardio workout, but I get less pain on a longer length of time.
I don't know why.
But I remember one day, one day where I trained so hard -trying to understand what's wrong with my body- I trained so hard that I couldn't even walk, genuinely, my legs gave up on me.
But I needed to do things, so I tried to crawl around, and my legs were shaking, they were fucking shaking, worse? I couldn't even use them to crawl, they just didn't want to answer me, no matter what I did, they were limp.
I remember this day well. Because I cried after this.
Not because it hurted. But because for once in my life, for once in my small little life.
My legs didn't hurt.
When they were so tired I couldn't even move them, as if they were anesthesied. For once, I didn't felt pain.
It was beautiful.
But I stopped doing those kind of workout, just do enough to be utterly exhausted now, I avoid this disabled level of exhaustion.
Because...well.
Uh, it's not like it stopped my pain fully. Just does it on one part of my body, in this case the legs, also came back the next day.
Like usual.
While I didn't felt pain on my legs, my arms were still in pain, my torso too, my organs, everything really.
And the worse is that I couldn't get up or do cardio because my legs were anesthesied, I figured out some kind of weird crawling while my legs dragged behind me after this, but it wasn't that practical, and I almost got an injury after that, I could feel that if I did any more workouts without resting for longer I would get a genuine injury.
And for the fear of losing my pain relief, I needed to rest, therefore stay at 100% for a day or two.
So I stopped doing it.
....maybe I'll start again to study the exhaustion phenomenon, maybe I'll be able to understand why does exhausting myself feel so good?
Maybe.
In any case not today.
Today, I'm focused on something else.
On another arrow showing of the word "Movement?"
And again, I'm reminded of my question of earlier.
Why does moving help me?
And I think I'm starting to have a guess