Sweating
The overlooked magic of placebo effect, a song to forget, friend or scammer?, three perfumes, my character, physical pain over presence and the joy of being neurotic.
I have my first meeting with my tutor. She goes through some key points regarding our goals. Then, she asks me to talk briefly about myself and what has brought me here. I rarely know what should be highlighted from the story of my life. After ten minutes of random facts (ranging from the book I read last week to the violence I received when I was a child), she wants to know about my current relationship with silence. There is honesty in my response, “I think and say I love being alone in silence, but every time I meditate I suffer badly. Yesterday’s meditation almost sent me straight into a panic attack. What I enjoy is being alone in silence to distract myself with work or books or stuff like that, you know. But real silence, yeah, not one of my fortes I guess.”
“It’s not just you,” she says, “did you know we’d choose physical pain over being alone with our thoughts? True physical pain.”
She’s right. I looked it up: A study from 2014 revealed that “subjects preferred to give themselves electric shocks rather than experience boredom.”
Terrifying as it is, (to realize we avoid ourselves at all costs) it wasn’t as appalling for me as it was to grasp that 2014 happened ten years ago.
A song I played my son this week to calm him down in the car. A song you may know.
Girl I want to make you sweat
Sweat till you can't sweat no more
And if you cry out
I'm gonna push it some, more, more
Girl I want to make you sweat
Sweat till you can't sweat no more
And if you cry out
I'm gonna push it
Push it, push it some more
(A la la la la long,
a la la la la long long li long long long)
C'mon!
(A la la la la long,
a la la la la long long li long long long)
ooh!
The shock of realizing you’re playing the lyrics of a proud rapist to your offspring.
