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Lived Experience

Continuing a college education can be one of the most exciting experiences for an older person who is trying to improve the direction and outcome for their life. When I signed up for my classes this semester earlier in the month, I looked forward and even romanticised the idea of passing my classes by pushing myself to study hard by spending many hours completing quizzes and turning in assignments. The idea of having nothing standing in between me and many hours of uninterrupted time with my office computer subconciously drove me to take on this goal.

However as the days and weeks have gone by, self-care has quietly slipped away from me, replaced with obsession and addiction to hours of stimulation. In the weeks since continuing my journey towards earning a degree, I have skipped appointments with my therapist, missed out on my coffee commitment for my A.A homegroup (several times) and developed an irregular sleeping pattern. I don’t know about anyone else but I find it very easy to get lost into the void of a screen.

Moreover, when something becomes important to me I like to do alot of it, as often as possible-maybe even too much. My passions can evolve from being something freeing to just another prison cell that I trap myself into. I started to gain weight after many hours of consuming junk food as I multi tasked between blogging and studying, my nails became very long and I didn’t trim them, my beard quickly grew covering my face and neck like an itchy dirty rug, I didn’t shower for a couple of weeks and I became a shut-in who didn’t leave his home for days at a time.

It wasn’t until today when I finally managed to overcome the lethargy enough to go see my therapist Angela for the first time in a month, that I was able to gain some clarity and insight about my situation. She didn’t say anything particularly insightful, but she gently reminded me that if “Nothing changes, than nothing changes”. It seems like a ridiculous saying because it’s obvious and self-evident, but the point of this saying is that whole spiel about insanity; you know, same actions, same results. Over time, they add up to a larger picture and it clicked for me in my brain just before I left after the appointment was done “It Starts With Today”. The same motivational phrase I've told myself in the past, whenever I have managed to accomplish anything of note in my life. Somehow in the midst of my internet addiction, I had lost touch with my sense of personal responsbility and autonomy.

So what did I do after the appointment was done? I decided to go back to my local gym and pay for a new platinum membership. This particular gym also happens to have a restaraunt inside which serves health concious food products. After I finished purchasing a new gym membership, I bought myself a grilled chicken habanero wrap then waited awhile before putting in a solid forty minutes of work out time. After I finished there, I decided to go to the barber to pay for a much needed haircut and shave, then I went home, clipped my nails and took my first shower in about three weeks. Every step of the way, a part of me resisted. Yet, I realized I had to push past my laziness and find a way to progress forward, because I knew I couldn’t continue living the way that I had been. I needed more structure, more discipline. In the pursuit of grades and blogging, I had neglected my mind and body and the consequences were becoming harder to ignore.

“It Starts With Today”

No online guru or father figure ever taught me this phrase, it’s something that I have used to motivate myself to accomplish longterm goals. I have no idea why it helps me so much, I guess it’s a reminder that I have the power of personal choice at any given point to turn the ship around and start making changes. It can be really difficult to motivate myself when I know that I may have a long road ahead of me. I find it exceptionally easy to come down with a case of the “Fuck Its” if I feel overwhelmed looking at a mountain of progress that I have to climb in order to reach some proverbial peak of perfectionism and accomplishment.

There was a time when I had committed myself to a regimen of intermittent fasting, healthy eating and regular workouts to go from two-hundred sixty pounds down to around one-hundred and eighty pounds. It took intense work and more willpower than I’ve ever had to muster in my life, but I did manage to do it! That was almost two years ago and I have since gained back most of the weight. Funnily enough, I regained it because I was in a few college courses and had the same obsessive, sedentary habits that I’m struggling with right now. Back then I would spend hours upon hours at a time, grabbing fistfuls of trail mix with Eminems, raisins, peanuts and carmel bites obsessively. A fistful at a time for weeks on end, until I was overweight once more.

Though I was hesitant to make the changes from the beginning, I realized that while I still didn’t feel “good”, I at least felt better! The clipping of the long fingernails, the shower, the shave, the gym and the healthy food all helped to make me less tired and more optimistic. I type this right now feeling like less of a slob, with plans of going to the gym tomorrow as well as going to an appointment to get a massage for some neck and shoulder pain I’ve been experiencing as of late. I find it really easy to get caught up in “hustle culture” and the idea of “Locking In” to the point of losing sight of self-care and end up a few sizes too big for most of the jeans in my closet.

I think the amount of time I’ve been spending on my computer and on the internet has caused me to become resentful about politics and current events. I’ve been turning out blogs that I don’t feel are representative of my best work lately and I believe I have observed the results of that. Writer’s block combined with being a stat chaser causes you to really produce some “slop”. You go from being someone who writes because they love writing to being someone who is a stat chaser and whose work becomes a performance. With the exception of three posts that I recently removed from my newsletter, I wouldn’t take those half-assed ones down because I feel like it shows my progress. The ups and downs of me as a person who loves to write.

There have been and will be times when I’m not putting out my best work and I think being able to have an archive or a body of work that demonstrates imperfection is better than a super polished newsletter that feels like a P.R team went through and scrubbed the humanity out of it to make it “safe” for consumption. I’m very capable of putting out dull posts and then realizing “Wow, that was a fucking dud!”. I had at least three of those in a row very recently. I may have a few more in the days to come but again as a writer, I simply enjoy the process of writing and hope that people will stick around for the best and the worst. This post is my reminder to myself and to others to look for the ways that we trap ourselves and try to find freedom from those things.