Staying Upright

On motion, balance, and learning what the brain can still trust

At the start, everything is tight. Not pain — pressure. It sits above my right eye and stretches laterally, the way your finger would travel if you dragged it slowly toward your right ear. A shallow arc of tension. It feels like a mild hip flexor strain — the kind where the injury is small and specific, but suddenly the rest of the leg doesn’t quite work right — except it’s happening inside my head.

It isn’t sharp.

It doesn’t throb.

It pulls.

A gentle, persistent tightening, as if some small internal guy-wire has been cinched a notch too far. Just enough to be distracting. Just enough to make everything else feel crowded.

Then the run settles in.

Breath finds a rhythm before my mind does. Steps stack neatly on top of each other. Cadence becomes arithmetic — left, right, repeat. Somewhere around minute ten, something changes. The pull above my eye slackens. Not gone, but loosened. As if that invisible line finally gets permission to give.

Running is one of the few times my brain feels calm — not empty, not numb, just organized. The pressure loses its urgency. The right side of my head stops demanding constant attention. Sensations don’t disappear; they fall into line. There’s room.

I don’t tell myself stories about healing while this happens. No metaphors about flushing anything out or outrunning anything. That kind of narrative feels dishonest, and my body seems allergic to bullshit lately.

This isn’t triumph.

It’s temporary alignment.

Movement imposes order.

There’s something almost mechanical about it. Breathing deepens. Blood redistributes. The autonomic system — normally jumpy, over-alert — gets a clear instruction: we’re doing one thing now. No scanning. No interpreting. Just forward.

I noticed the opposite early on, when the symptoms first showed up. When I stayed still, things fell apart. Motionless, I’d lose balance. My body didn’t stabilize itself — it collapsed. Slow movement helped a little, but it felt precarious, like hovering right on the edge of control. Too little momentum and everything wobbled.

What surprised me was that moving more — no panic, just decisively — changed the equation. With enough motion, my system seemed to organize itself around the task. Balance improved. Awareness narrowed in a useful way.

It wasn’t comfort.

It was enough energy to stay coherent.

That pattern showed up most clearly in my vision. My right eye couldn’t hold me upright on its own. If I closed my left eye and relied only on the right, I’d tip and fall. No warning. No correction. Balance just vanished. Even with both eyes open, things weren’t reliable yet.

Not long before that, I was trying to relearn how to walk with a trekking pole. One. Not two. In reality, I probably needed both. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. One pole looked like an injury. Two looked like something else entirely.

I struggled anyway. Even then, I couldn’t hold a twenty-six-minute mile. Balance slipped in and out. The ground felt unreliable, like it might change its mind at any moment. The house recorded all of it — bruises on furniture edges, missed doorways, small collisions that added up.

Less than ten days later, I wasn’t cautiously jogging. I was angry. Raging, really. I went out and ran hard — around 7:15 splits — far faster than anything my body should have been negotiating at that point.

It wasn’t graceful or controlled.

It felt violent. Necessary, but violent.

The world didn’t smooth out when I picked up the pace.

It vibrated.

Everything looked like it was shaking just slightly out of phase, as if the signal couldn’t quite lock in. The white lines on a high school track wavered and crossed, and I focused on staying inside them the way you concentrate on the road when you’re exhausted and trying not to drift.

I wasn’t running with confidence.

I was running to keep the system from collapsing.

It worked — mostly.

I stayed upright more often than not, but I still fell. Awkwardly. Publicly. The rubberized track was forgiving, but the moment wasn’t. I got back up quickly, pretending it was nothing, hoping no one was paying attention, hoping I was still inside the lines.

Around that time, I was learning what was actually misfiring. Not out of academic curiosity — my body was forcing the lesson.

The issue wasn’t my eyes themselves. It was the wiring between them. The sixth cranial nerve, which pulls the eye outward. The third, which helps coordinate everything else. And between them, the medial longitudinal fasciculus — the MLF — a narrow relay that keeps both eyes moving as a team instead of as independent contractors.

When that pathway doesn’t work, the eyes stop agreeing on where “straight ahead” is. One eye moves, the other lags. The brain tries to reconcile the mismatch in real time, and the result isn’t just double vision — it’s instability. Vibration. A sense that the world won’t hold still long enough to trust it.

That’s why balance fell apart when I relied on my right eye alone. Why standing still made things worse. Why tentative movement felt dangerous. The system couldn’t integrate slow, ambiguous input. It needed momentum — strong signals, continuous feedback — to paper over the gaps.

Running didn’t fix the wiring.

It gave my brain enough information to improvise around it.

These days, it’s mostly quieter. The dramatic stuff has faded. What’s left shows up at the edges. When I look off to the side — especially in my peripheral vision — it can feel like a low refresh rate on a streaming show. Not frozen. Not broken. Just slightly out of sync, like frames dropping when the signal can’t quite keep up.

It’s subtle enough that most people would miss it. Subtle enough that I can work around it. But once you’ve lived inside a system that fully came apart, you notice even small delays.

I’ve thought about where that adaptability might have come from. Long before any of this, I ran along the edges of the Pacific Northwest — narrow paths, uneven ground, water close enough that a misstep would have had real consequences.

At the time, it didn’t feel like training. It was just running. But looking back, I wonder if those repetitions built something deeper than fitness — an unconscious map of balance, timing, and correction. A body that learned how to stay upright when the ground couldn’t be trusted.

Had I misplaced my foot out there, the fall wouldn’t have been symbolic. It would have been final. That awareness sharpened attention without panic. It taught commitment over hesitation.

When vision faltered and balance wavered, my feet remembered something my eyes couldn’t fully provide.

In the weeks that followed, during the peak of it, I noticed something else. Sound started doing work my vision couldn’t. The sound of water, especially. The shower. Rain hitting the ground. The irregular splatter of it landing somewhere below me.

It was calming in a way that felt physical, not emotional. The vertigo softened. Not gone, but quieter. My body seemed to settle when it could hear water falling.

I didn’t understand it at first. But eventually it became obvious that my brain was borrowing another reference point. If my eyes couldn’t reliably tell me what upright was, sound could. Water falling establishes down. It creates gravity you can hear.

Standing in the shower, listening to water strike the floor, my system could solve the problem again. Not perfectly. But well enough. Enough to stand without bracing. Enough to breathe without anticipating a fall.

I wasn’t calming myself.

I was giving my brain a signal it could still trust.