The Wrestler

Spoiler alert: While I don't say what happens in The Wrestler in the following post, I do talk about insights and personal conclusions, so read at your own risk!

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Friends and family are noticing something different about me, and I notice it, too. I feel like there is a big change coming, that I'm ready for something to change, but it's gonna take guts on my part.

This week has been a strange one, no doubt made even stranger by my new experiments with pot. Yes, at the tender age of 50, I was doing something all week that I didn't even do in high school or college. The results were curiously positive for the most part, but I'm not sure it did anything for the pain.

I will say that in the mornings, I was so alert that I felt like I slept like a two-year-old who's so dead to the world that you could toss her in the air and she'd sleep right through it. I've read that cannabis opens capillaries in the brain, so that right and left sides communicate instantly with each other, which is why people can feel so creative when...well...stoned. Their senses are heightened, and insights can come quickly, especially when you're looking for them.

I wonder, too, if pot somehow makes sleep more restorative, as the subconscious becomes so active. Perhaps we work through issues while we're sleeping that's in some way helpful, as this week has been fraught with insights all over the place.

Regardless, I'm finished with pot, for now anyway. The main thing I have to remember is that now is not the time to give up on life, even though certain days feel like nothing more than an endurance test. I have to wait out the suffering and just hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

I saw The Wrestler recently, and that's really the point of the whole movie--that so often, just when we're on the brink of having the things in life that truly matter, we give up on ourselves, thinking that neither our circumstances, nor we ourselves, will ever really change.

The film was profoundly moving, and it has stayed with me. I don't know Mickey Rourke, yet I feel so strangely happy for him that he mounted this tremendous comeback. (If you see the film, the word "mount" is probably not the best I could have chosen. lol!)

Unlike his brilliantly rendered character, Rourke himself did hang on through his own darkest days, and he prevailed in being "discovered" yet again. Talk about lightning striking twice. There was a tremendous amount of luck in him getting this role, of course, but no one could ever take away from him what he did with it. His work as this aging wrestler is one of those performances where you soon forget you're watching the actor, and you just see the characters and story...and yourself.

It was the movie I needed to see this season, as I feel so on the brink myself of good tidings; I just have to remember that I can't give up, not now, not ever.

The worst way I could give up would be to descend into a haze of pills, pot and god knows what else. I know what I have to do, and I know there's no shortcut around it.

Wish me luck.


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