Tuesday, July 29, 2008

I've never royally effed up my neck and back like I did today

So, I've been having some - let's call them stressful feelings - about my career in recent days. These types of feelings tend to come and go, and are very easy to fixate on if one is not occupied at all hours of the day and night. Yesterday, for a variety of reasons, I was feeling particularly nervous about a large hole in my schedule (mentioned in a previous blog when I complained about all the gig offers being in the same 2 second period with 10 years of nothing before and after), and I thought about it a little too much. Then when I went to sleep, I had a stress nightmare that my agents fired me and also said I couldn't do any of the jobs I have lined up with them, leaving me poor and destitute and unemployed. In my dream, one of my agents said something really enigmatic like "when the chicken went cold, we couldn't put it back in the oven" in reference to my not having become a "hot star" or something. I was literally screaming in my sleep and woke myself up in a tizzy. I managed to fall back asleep, but when I got out of bed this morning and walked into the living room, something felt like it snapped and suddenly I couldn't turn my head and it hurt to sit, stand, or move. I spent all day putting heat on this pulled muscle or muscle cramp, and while it's not constantly painful anymore, it still hurts if I try to move my head around at all, and I'm walking around like a stiff statue. A doctor friend of mine looked at it tonight and said that it's a bad muscle cramp, and she prescribed me a muscle relaxer which I will take before bed, because I'm sure with my low tolerance to drugs, it's going to make me really high and loopy. Since I couldn't do anything much without moving, I had the day to contemplate how stress and worry can really take physical hold of you if you fixate on what you don't have happening in your life. I always think I'm getting better at this difficult part of being a self-employed artist, and it takes me having to walk down Broadway (to get my drugs) like some crazy robot with a non-working neck and getting weird stares even from homeless people and crackheads to quickly remind me that I have a long way to go.

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