Tag Archives: mental-health

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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**