Tag Archives: mental-health

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NEW DAY 97: To heal, the six

Four days after I broke 5 miles for the first time in over 8 years, I hit 6 for the first time ever in my life. I hit 6.01, to be exact: that’s 6 miles and .01 to grow on.

My nasty hanger-on of a cold is still not all the way gone (!), but I’m putting nails in its coffin every chance I get. Breaking 6 miles tonight was not planned; I had a what-if spark early in my elliptical run and just felt I could get there — and then the feeling of what if and I could turned into I’m gonna make this happen. And I did make it happen! In 65 minutes exactly.

It was not as easy as that; I did almost stop at a few different points, and I did wonder if I was writing checks my body couldn’t cash. Would I potentially injure something in this mad pursuit? Would I be decrepit the next day? Well, to hell with the fear. There’s no place for that in this. Decide you want it, and then go get it.

I’m recovering not only from illness, but from trauma. The first half of this year was miserable, yes, but it’s deeper and longer than that.

I didn’t know if my legs — perpetually at high risk of ankle injury — could still do this.
I didn’t know if my lungs — 7.5 years removed from multiple massive pulmonary embolisms — could still do this.
I didn’t know if my mind — plagued by faltering, tentative confidence still in the process of rebuilding — could still do this.

Well… they could.

And they did.

With every step towards 6.01, I proved something critical to myself. It’s not just that I’m physically capable or mentally strong. It’s bigger than that. It’s that I’m healing. I’m learning to trust myself, to believe in myself, and to care for myself again. And even if it’s months before I see 6.00 on another gym screen, I will revel in the moment when I was still unsteady and took command of my story like never before anyway. Because I wanted to, I believed I could, and I decided to.

That’s fortitude. That’s resilience. That’s growth.

That’s recovery.

That’s what leads to peace.

I didn’t cry when it happened like I thought I would. Something even better happened: I got emotional, and I leaned into it. I let the waves of pride, surprise, impressed-ness, relief, success, joy, and accomplishment wash over me. I felt it all. After months years of self-preservation-based blunted feelings, I felt it all. It was the type of rush that is life-affirming. It was the type of rush I thought I was no longer capable of experiencing.

POSSIBILITY.

I may find a way back after all.

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NEW DAY 91: Walking 9-5

Today, I became a person who uses a walk pad at their standing desk.

It wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t the plan at all. But what was the plan went awry when my work day kind of got hijacked, and the only way to get in my first 45-minute workout without waiting until the end of the work day — which would have meant doing my second workout at dark o’clock — was to do it while jobbing.

I’ve only ever even used my walk pad one other time: yesterday. It was not a smooth experience; I was stumbling, veering off center, and reaching the back of the machine with my feet. Twice I had to jump off to the side when I misstepped and risked falling off the thing. I wasn’t even going 3 mph and it was that tricky for me! Now throw in a work station, actual tasks to concentrate on, and requisite dexterity to operate a mouse and a keyboard while in motion, and it’s a miracle I’m not typing this from a hospital bed. It wasn’t a smooth near-hour of work this afternoon, but I made it happen. Having the desk in front of me actually had a stabilizing effect, too. Now that my walk pad is in my office, I suspect it will become part of future wfh days — although hopefully with a little less hastiness.

I’m still (!) sick with this nasty cold, but I finally feel as if I’m climbing out of that hole and it’s on its way out. I can’t wait to feel like a person again, not to mention to get back onto the elliptical and see how many miles I can notch in my 45-minute session! Crazy how a cold can be worse than a more-serious bug. Here’s to NO MORE SICKNESSES in 2025!

I mean, I don’t need help encountering obstacles. I get in my own way quite well, thankyouverymuch. Trying to upcycle an old t-shirt tonight, I cut my finger open with fabric scissors. Really impressive, the innovative ways I find to hurt myself and brush up first-aid skills. **eye roll** This is only the latest self-inflicted injury since Saturday, when I managed to burn my stomach while taking a tray out of the oven. That’ll teach me to think I can cook in a sports bra! (Actually, it will probably teach me nothing.)

75 Hard, you’re a laugh riot.

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NEW DAY 88: Sick challenge, bro

It’s day 85 of recommitting to my health.
It’s day 36 of 75 Hard.
And it’s day 4 of having a yucky cold.

In spite of the simultaneous congestion and leakiness, productive cough, and resulting lack of sleep, there has been no change to the program. I have been continuing to get my twice daily workouts — albeit with tamer intensity than usual — and somehow getting even more liquid than the 1 gallon’s worth of water into my body as required by 75 Hard. It’s actually easy to forget that I’m sick when I’m out there moving, save for the occasional interruptions to hack up something gnarly. (Oh yeah, it’s just as sexy as you’re imagining.) It’s when I stop moving for too long that the symptoms seem to kick into high gear. It’s in large part due to that that I completed all of my meal prep for the week before 10 AM today (Sunday)… but now I have nothing to do until the early afternoon. I’m pounding my first mug of tea for the day (following 2 32-oz bottles of water I’ve already downed this morning) and hoping the stupid amount of hydration I’m doing will help speed up the recovery process.

I’m not sure how I’ve done on weight loss this week since I don’t plan to check until later, but I do know that since my last post, I’ve won a Kickstarter DietBet and the first round of a Transformer. For the Transformer, I’m actually hovering right around my round 3 goal weight already, so — at the risk of being overconfident and tempting fate — I feel like I can count that overall win 5 months from now as already in the bag.

I’ve joined an additional Kickstarter to keep the momentum and small financial incentive going, and may add myself to another Transformer sometime before the year is out.

For the next few days, my game plan is to keep doing my 45-minute workouts at moderate difficulty, and to do both outside in service of health benefits for me and limiting contagion for others who’d be in my vicinity at the gym. I should be good as new by midweek, which will coincide with the halfway point of 75 Hard. It’s kind of crazy how many added hurdles I’ve contended with during the challenge so far: I’ve had sleeplessness, blisters, an outdoor workout in a heavy downpour, horror-movie levels of menstrual bleeding through my clothes while on the elliptical, mind-numbing cramps, and now this lovely little virus. Although its demands are almost entirely physical, the stated purpose of 75 Hard is to improve mental toughness. We aren’t even 50% through yet and already I feel confident about mine.

Oh, and I decided to check my weight before wrapping up this entry. Half the week spent fighting sickness, and still another 3.1 pounds gone.

Let no one come for my tenacity. 💪

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NEW DAY 20: Running scared

What if I can’t do it… again?

There’s so much I can’t do. I’ve failed at what feels like innumerable things in my life, and so much this year in particular. Today, I suddenly realized I am having imposter syndrome about everything. EVERYTHING.

My mind is very unhealthy right now. The only thing that has acted as a release valve has been movement.

My current situation is bad, but one luxury I have is that I can go for a workout whenever I want. It’s become a crutch to the point that I wonder if it’s actually problematic to be creating this type of likely-unsustainable precedent for myself, but it’s extremely helpful to me right now, so I’m gonna punt that potential problem to a later time.

The feelings of inadequacy, the fears that things will never get better, the preoccupation with how much I’m doing wrong, the outsize concern over rather trivial matters, the involuntary “what-if” thinking… they’re consuming. They’re suffocating. They’re draining. They’re LOUD.

But not when I’m running. Thank goodness.

I’ve had a long history of fitness attempts, all of which had notable success before ultimately failing. There were big similarities between the trajectories each time. I don’t remember this apprehensive state being part of it before. I know it’s because the stakes are at their highest now, and that this shitty year is casting a very long, very dark shadow over everything I do. It’s one more inner demon to combat in my very noisy mind amid the deafening silence of the faltering existential landscape around me. The discomfort from working out gives me something to feel other than sadness, and the challenge of keeping myself going when it feels too hard gives me something to think about other than how much I’ve fucked up my life. I kind of remember experiencing those benefits before, when the stakes were lower.

One thing I know I’ve never experienced in my past attempts is a total absence of “bad” cravings. It’s like I woke up one day and had zero interest in consuming anything that isn’t a healthy choice. It almost feels like cheating; as hard as physical conditioning and exercise are, especially in the beginning, the diet part was always harder for me. Temptation lurked around every corner, threatening to derail me in a moment of weakness — even in my dreams. This time, that’s a foreign concept. I doubt it will last forever, but for as long as I have this unexpected and incredibly valuable tool in my arsenal, I will be grateful for it.

While I’d love for the total disinterest in crappy food to be a lifelong friend, I’d welcome a change in the rest of my mentality. Fear’s ability to power my workouts is a tarnished silver lining, but feeling powerful in my workouts on my own is what I’m running after.

I hope I catch it soon.

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NEW DAY 18: Mind over what’s the matter

Apparently I’m in a phase where it I can easily be triggered into anxious feelings. I had a wave of it yesterday that caught me off guard while trying to focus on something important. Today, I felt another coming on while reattempting the same thing.

I wanted to get out of my skin. It turns out that’s not a thing, so I did the next best one: I went to the gym.

I am not exactly in peak physical condition. In my fitness prime, I could go 5 miles on the elliptical without stopping, in well under an hour. The most I’ve been able to do in the past few weeks since I (re)started working out has been 10 not-fast minutes, getting me not-close to a single measly mile.

Today, I challenged myself: what if I could double that?

And then I did.

I can do 20 minutes. I could do 30. I could probably do 60. It wouldn’t be pretty — 20 wasn’t! — but I bet I could get myself there.

Another thing it wasn’t, was easy. Ho.ly.shit., the mental effort to keep going when I stopped wanting to around minute 12! But I pushed myself, because I didn’t want to feel that surge of disappointment for not doing what I had come there to do. I had something to prove. I had something I needed to do.

And I did it!

In 20 sweaty minutes, I ran 1.52 miles. I was consciously trying to keep my speed below 4.5 mph so I could make it the full time I wanted, and I had to rein myself in more than once. My legs have been sore from adjusting to returning to this type of movement after such a long hiatus, and they scream at me as soon as they feel the pedaling motion when I start the elliptical. They howled at me that entire time today, and they’ll probably be jelly tomorrow. But today, I felt powerful for turning my mental nerves into mental command, and exerting my mind over my body.
I was powerful.
I am powerful.

That feeling is unbeatable.

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NEW DAY 15: It’s aliiiiiiiiiiive!

Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It has been **checks notes** 7 years (🤯) since my last post.

Every spring, I have to decide whether to renew the annual cost of owning this domain name. Every year since 2018, I have come very close to hitting cancel. It’s only out of sheer laziness that I haven’t. I finally figured that I’m paying for this thing — I might as well use it. There’s plenty to write, and if all goes well, there will be plenty more.

To say it’s been a strange ride since I last wrote in here would be a laughable understatement. To try to do any kind of meaningful actual update on those intervening years would be equally ridiculous. So I’m picking up here at this time code without concern for what was missed in the fast forward. The plot had its twists and turns, but the ending is still on its way and TBD by plenty of other factors.

What I will say about the time since February 2018 is that it can be characterized by a few choice words. The one rolling around in my mind right now is “almost.” I came close to realizing a lot of my priorities. Some of them, I did realize, only to see them crumble.

Frustrating. Sad. Wasteful.

In the past now.

This year has been particularly challenging, in a way that no year since 2018 has been — not even those pandemic years. I’ve been staggering through events in my personal life that have toppled the structure I had built atop what I believed to be a sturdy foundation, and which have left me questioning core pieces of my worldview. Everything about this time has been erratic. I’ve been emotionally volatile, my energy has been virtually non-existent from the simmering anger and sadness always coursing through me, I have been getting nowhere near enough socialization, my eating/sleeping/activity/bathing/general adulting habits have been all over the place; there has been no routine to speak of.

I’ve felt wronged, insulted, tarnished, judged, abandoned, unimportant, forgotten, betrayed, mistreated, and rejected.

I’ve felt stressed, alone, scared, confused, hurt, angry, stupid, hopeless, devastated, nervous, useless, mournful, and exhausted.

I thought more than once about giving up entirely.

I knew incorporating exercise into my life would make a difference. When I think of the time in my life when I was most emotionally, psychologically, and physically healthy, it was when I was disciplined around being physically active. The two-pronged problem standing in my way for months was a total lack of motivation alongside deep apathy.

Then one day — if you’ll forgive the facile, cryptic, and highly suspect jump cut (again) — everything in the space around me was suddenly batshit crazy. That’s coming from someone who was pretty sure she was the dictionary definition of crazy at this point, so to see that things around me had out-crazied me to the batshit level was… something. The abrupt intensity filled me with a new kind of restlessness that was frenetic, and HAD to be released before I exploded into a million pieces. And so I found myself back at the gym for the first time in years.

For the past two weeks, I have been sticking with my plans and commitments to self to prioritize my overall health.
I am running again.
I am preparing thoughtful meals for myself and not consuming meals from restaurants again.
I am managing my finances responsibly again.
I am writing to detangle my thoughts again.
I am making an effort to keep a social life again.
I am getting out of bed in the morning again.

I am trying again.

**deep breath**