No really. I do.
And not for some long term reason like lowering my blood sugar, elevating my mood, helping me lose weight, or any of the other usual reasons.
I need exercise because I am feeling very tense and nervous and irritable and I am pretty sure exercise is the cure.
It’s always better to focus on immediate benefits when trying to talk yourself into doing something you don’t normally do, or even want to do.
Now obviously, I have known about the long term ways to “need” exercise for a very long time. But they never meant much to me. Just another set of things I “should” be doing but did not remotely feel even the slightest motivation to do so.
I’ve got a lot of those. The list is very long. They honestly don’t even feel like they belong to me. That sort of thing is for other people.
To me, all the things I “should” be doing are a passing curiosity at best. Like, I agree with them all… how could I not? They are all perfectly sane, logical, sensible things that I would have to be a blithe idiot to disagree with.
On the other hand, I don’t even feel like I am personally involved.
In that cheerfully fatalistic (emphasis on the “fatal”) vein, I need some exercise. Something to burn off the excess energy making me all twitchy.
And that there is a paradigm switch devoutly to be wished. The default mode of depression is to view effort as the enemy and to treat one’s personal energy as a precious resource to be hoarded like a miser.
Which is bullshit. Sometimes you are one hell of a lot better off without it. I dream of being able to view each day as an opportunity to exhaust myself. To not stop doing enjoyable, meaningful things until I am sure I am done.
Instead, I have lived each day like I’m an invalid until, what do you know, it became true. Now I am riddled with issues and circling the drain and wishing, however futilely, that I had taken all this shit more seriously many, many years ago.
But the truth is, I couldn’t. Depression killed my motivation and there was nobody in my life to tell me to start taking care of myself more so I was free to self-neglect myself into this sorry state as much as I wanted to, or at least, could not keep myself from.
Had a call from my doctor. He’s gonna hook me up with a new endocrinologist. Which is fine, I suppose, but all they are going to do is tell me to do the things I already know that I should be doing.
Testing my blood. Taking my insulin. Getting my blood sugar way, way down.
Seems like a lot of pain and hassle and work just to keep from dying. That honestly is not enough of a motivation for me.
If only there was some kind of cash prize. Give me a cut of the money I will be saving the taxpayers by not getting way, way sicker.
You laugh, but it would work.
Then again, the real savings come when I die young.
So there’s that to look forward to.
More after the break.
The great mass at my center
Like the trans Pacific garbage patch, there is a conglomerated mass of toxic nastiness circulating endlessly within me, and it really needs to go.
It is the living core of my depression. It is the massive unhealed wound that cripples my soul, destroys my will, drains my life force, and leaves me unable to deal with life. It is the fundamental flaw that denies my destiny.
It also really sucks.
If I could but dislodge this mother of all clogs, I could return to life for the first time since I was raped 43 years ago and start to truly breathe free and live the healthy, strong, powerful, and fully engaged life that was denied me so long ago.
I can feel it so clearly now, this sticky glacier bearing down on my heart, filthy and poisonous and oppressive and so very, very heavy.
And it’s never seemed smaller to me. Far from being the all smothering blanket of mental fog it used to be, now it seems quite limited and finite and… mortal.
Not that I am ready to stick a metaphorical finger down my metaphysical throat and hork the whole fetid, squirming parasite onto the floor for the stomping just yet.
But I have never been closer. Some time soon, I will get enough leverage on that god damned demon to hurl it from me with hurricane force and then it will be gone from me forever and I will finally be clean.
I don’t remember what that feels like. Even fresh from the shower I feel like I am nothing but syphilitic diarrhea on the inside. The times in my life where I have had severe hygiene issues were powered in part by the feeling that cleaning myself on the outside just made me feel dirtier on the inside and it was all pointless because there was no such thing as a clean turd anyhow.
Migosh that’s awful. And so totally unfair.
And yet that’s still how I feel inside. Knowing it is wrong on all levels does not, sadly, make it go away. This feeling of being fundamentally tainted and the cringing shame that drives me into the shadows that comes with have been with me for so long that it’s hard to imagine them not being there.
But it’s what I deserve, god damn it. I have spent four decades in hell for something someone else did to me, and that shit has got to stop.
I deserve liberation. I deserve freedom. I deserve the warmth of human connection. I deserve love, tolerance, and acceptance. I deserve to come in from the cold.
I deserve a normal life.
And somehow, some day, I am going to get it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.