Don't expect sense at 2am

Well I'm back to about 90% and feeling SO much better. Now I'm just trying to avoid all the other people sneezing and blustering all over the place. Hankies, please, people!

I will be starting a 3 week busy period at work, which is good. Money is good... when your car is due for rego and you know it is going to need a new set of tyres and a major service to get it back in the good books.

I might be getting back into horseriding again. I can't actually afford it, and it is a little risky when I can't get income insurance, but the woman who owns the stables where I was riding contacted me to see if I could take up looking after their website again. I'd originally created it over 2 years ago now, and looking at it, it's a bit clunky and could really do with some streamlining (purely design/page flow wise... don't ask me anything technical about websites... I have no idea). We'll see how it goes.

I miss riding a lot, and I think it would do me the world of good to get back into it again. Apart from all the benefits of being with a beautiful animal, and the rightbrain effect riding lessons have on me, which is so peaceful, just to get back into something physical again is needed. I have been big for a while now, but it is getting silly. This isn't me. And it is beginning to interfere with my life.

Beginning? I wonder how long I've really been using it as an excuse to not risk things. I like to think I live bravely, and on some levels I do. But on some, many, I am so frightened I feel like I'm stuck in one of those dreams where you're running away from something ominous, and you hide in a corner, and you are trying to stop yourself breathing so the ominous thing can't hear you, but you're gasping for air, and as this thing comes closer, you try to hold so still but you're shaking from the effort of not moving, and any moment it'll catch you so don't breathe, don't breathe, don't breathe.

Has anyone out there read Kate Grenville's Lillian's Story? I read it when I was a teenager; young and athletic. Yet the main character still resonated with me. As a young girl she takes to eating, building up a wall of flesh, in an attempt to escape the beatings, and later sexual abuse, of her father. At the turn of the century, when the most she was expected to achieve was a good marriage, this wall of flesh disqualified her from the marriage game, freeing her to pursue an education she would otherwise have not had. Of course, her history, her experiences, her abdication from her social role, all catch up with her in the end. But what I was leading to was, even at 18 I understood the significance of that wall of flesh. And when they later made a movie of this story and ignored this facet of the story (an amazing but very slim actress was cast to play her character), I was more than disappointed. I felt like they'd completely missed the most important key to her trying to control her life.

So, have I built up my own wall of flesh in an attempt to disqualify myself from the love game? People who meet me for the first time might describe me as reasonably articulate, slightly eccentric, and enthusiastic on certain pet subjects, but attractive isn't a word that would sit comfortably, not in the traditional, boy-meets-girl way. It makes a perfect excuse for me to accept lack of interest in me (rather than facing some bigger flaws in my personality), and allows me a higher moral ground (if they REALLY liked me, my body shouldn't matter, they must be shallow -- although I really think, they must be normal), and if the worst was to happen and someone STILL was to try to express an interest in me, I could assume they must have some warped kind of fetish. Nice series of justifications I've built up there. Even the French judge would have to give me a 9.0 for that lot.

So, the big (HA!) question is... what am I hiding from?