Hello lovely people! This week I am writing about exercise :) I like to think I'm not weird about it, but here's your content warning just in case!
So, despite what I said I do have a bit of a weird relationship with exercise. As a kid and teen, I was always told (by medical professionals!) that I surely was a great athlete, because I had the right physique for it. By which they meant, I was skinny and had a low resting heart rate, mostly. Them always telling me this was frustrating, because it wasn't what I experienced. I got easily tired, and seemed to feel more ill than my peers when exercising. And don't even get my started on my horrible coordination! Slowly, PE classes started to feel like a trial to get through. I couldn't hit the ball in rounders, bending over to play hockey hurt, and I was just hopeless at throwing and catching the ball in netball. There were still flashes of things I enjoyed --- kickboxing was a highlight of one of my summer terms, and once I was in sixth form I was allowed to go to the gym and row instead, which I liked much better. But, mostly, it was something that I was desperately trying to get away from. Ironically, I often bunked off of PE to go walking through the fields around my school, but I didn't recognise how funny that was at the time! All of this meant that the story I told myself about exercising was that I was bad at it, and I didn't like it.
Of course, this wasn't helped when I slowly got more and more sick through my first and second years of university. Everything felt like a chore, and I could barely walk down the road without feeling violently ill, my pulse beating loud in my ears. I was constantly exhausted, sick, and I felt like my world was getting hemmed in by my (lack of) mobility.
Well, after years of fighting, I eventually found out what a lot of the problems were. I now take medication that has massively reduced my orthostatic intolerance, and later nerve pain too. I started to feel confident in my body again, and in charge. But, still, I was stuck in this same mindset from when I was a child --- I kept telling myself that I was better now, and getting frustrated at why I couldn't just do the things I used to. I found it hard to accept there were things that I should be able to do, but couldn't. So I'd yo-yo, sprinting down the road then feeling sick, and getting scared to do anything again. Never quite sure when I was going to hit the invisible limit and make myself sick.
So, ok, that's a big burden to hold, right? And I can never be sure if I've gotten over it yet. But, this week I've been pretty excited at the prospect that I'm starting to get there. By which I mean --- I went running this week! Multiple times, in fact. To me, it represents both the excitement of that being a thing I can do, for half an hour at a time (without stopping!). And also, importantly, the excitement that I was able to leave some of my energy on the table, and not nit-pick over my sub-par splits, and just enjoy it. Not push myself right up to the limit and crash and burn out, but gently swim a little out towards the horizon, and do it again the next day. It really was wonderful, and I do love running, so it's so much fun to be back.
On a similar note, I've been doing some dance classes. The sort where you watch YouTube videos, not where you have to see actual other real-life people. That's been a lot of fun too. Another area where I was never as good as I felt I should've been (10 years of classes and hypermobility is not enough to make up for miserable coordination). Over the last year I think I've learned a lot about myself that helps me to forgive these shortcomings, and let me just find a space that I enjoy. I like dancing, even though I'm not very good at it, and it was really fun to get back to it. Sort of the important throughline, here, is that it's awesome to move your body and do things you enjoy and push your muscles and cardio a little bit to the limit and feel the endorphins and so forth --- without an expectation of doing things "right". And wow, is it a massive improvement to put enjoyment first and do exercise because you like to do it and it makes you feel good. I guess it's not a big surprise that, in many areas, it's better to eschew quote unquote correctness for enjoyment & what feels right, but it can still be hard to do!
Alright, I will finally get to the actual songs. I promise, it's all relevant, for two reasons. The first is that my dance classes have been to metal music, which is just sooo much fun, and I've found some new great songs from bands I like! The second, is that I think it fits very well with my theme of focusing on enjoyment instead of doing things "right". In both dance & running, I suppose I have an expectation of what the "right" music to listen to is, and that's certainly not metal music. Classical or pop tracks, maybe. But that's not what I want to listen to when I'm doing to hard things! I want to listen to music that makes me feel good and excited and powerful, and makes me smile !!! So, without further ado let's talk about a few tracks I've really enjoyed dancing to and putting on my running playlist :)
First up, Dethrone from Bad Omens. I enjoy their album THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND, but it was fun to discover this track from their earlier album, especially because it has a very different sound. This is a bit of a theme of the songs I'm talking about --- I often get quite stuck in the albums I get to know from an artist, and I'm not very good at branching out and trying out their other stuff. So this has been a fun way to be introduced to new (to me) stuff. This is really just good heavy metal, and I find the way he sings, "Here am I, take me to the pearly gates" to be really satisfying. It gets you pumped up, it's fun, just a lovely song!
I've also been really enjoying Static by Sleep Theory as well. They're not a band I knew at all, and this is pure good-fun metalcore. Powerful clean choruses, enough grit to keep it interesting, thrumming guitars, it's all good fun. Yipee! Another absolute hit from a band that I (shockingly) didn't know much from is Evisceration Plague by Cannibal Corpse. I do love a bit of death metal, the growling guitars and screamed vocals are lovely, and I have to say when you see the band pictures and it's a bunch of middle-aged dudes with long-ass hair I do get excited for their music. Also I just find the way the vocalist says evisceration plague to be really funny. I don't know. It's such a ridiculous and over-the-top gory name and chorus that it makes me laugh every time. I will say if you get squeamish maybe don't listen too hard to the lyrics. They're hard to make out with his singing anyway, so it's all good. I did look up their controversies section (unfortunately necessary with metal bands) and it's just many sections on countries censoring their music and album covers for being too gory, so.
Ok now it's time for some real heavy hitters. Sorry to the bands I've already mentioned, but the last few songs are from bands I'm more of a mega fan of. Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) is one of those bands that falls victim to me getting stuck on albums I really like (Avenged Sevenfold and Hail to the King), so I'd listened to pretty much listened to NOTHING from their 2010 album Nightmare. Well, the title track, Nightmare is really fucking awesome, and I am very thankful for getting that push to finally listen to this album. GOD I love A7X SO MUCH !! My friend Summer introduced me to them, so I have to give them a shout out --- and my Hail to the King shirt has helped me to make multiple friends, LMAO. Anyway... this tracks has ALL the classic A7X moments. I love M. Shadows' voice, it's so iconic in a way I find hard to describe. He adds just the right amount of grit to his singing voice, while still hitting all the notes perfectly. The guitar solos in this track are really awesome, the drums are unrelenting, and there are six delicious minutes to enjoy. A7X just has that theatricality that I love so much in music, and multiple times this has come up in the queue today and I've done flappy hands from the excitement of the music. A full minute of build up just makes everything hit so perfectly, that when the singing finally comes in and the anticipation has been stretched to the breaking point.
Finally, let's talk Slipknot. I am especially a fan of Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses (Circle I love you what a fun and weird song filled with kind of gross sounds!!! Before I Forget... I could never forget you, you are a delicious song !!!), but yet again this has been a great week of discovery and I have expanded my horizons. I've been listening to SO MUCH of The Devil in I. The whining guitar that swings round into the beginning of the track... the repeated punchy yell of "Step inside!"... the reprieves of slow and melodic sections so that the chorus hits even harder... it's all so good. Also, another longer track --- this is extra nice when you're the kind of person who's always saying to yourself "Just one more song! And then you can stop!" because then you end up running further, LOL. I will note this is another one where their controversies section is mostly just people saying their visuals are kind of gory, so maybe don't watch the little music video thingie on spotify if you're sensitive to bloody/body horror stuff. It's a fun one though! And now, it's time for my song of the week. I've chosen Custer off of one of their more recent albums (10 years old is recent to me, a person who doesn't listen to new albums). By far the best part of the track is the high-pitched siren-like screaming in the background, but it's chock-full of other great stuff. The chorus is SO powerful it will really get your ass moving when you don't want to run another step, it's extremely easy to sing along to, and for once I really like the lyrics too, and advise you actually listen to them. Well, in the verses anyway. The chorus is a bit repetitive ;) So yeah, wow I love Slipknot, and they have been my biggest cheerleader in getting out there and enjoying myself in "real" exercising again. I'll still be walking all over the place, but it's been a joy to do some different and intentional movement in different ways, and I hope that it will continue being so in the future! We'll see.
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