It just occurred to me that I have been trying to do the “smart” thing for my enttire life and it um… has not worked.

It hasn’t worked because despite my efforts, I make poor decisions anyhow. And that’s what they are :decisions. I think I have pretended otherwise for far too long.

Smart is as smart does, after all. I might have a brain the sizeof a planet when it comes to things like intelligence and creative problem solving and comedy and stuff, but when it comes to living life, I am not so smart at all.

Now I am not beating myself up about that. Honest! I am just trying to get at the root of my problems and be realistic about them.

After all, that’s the smart thing to do, right?

The important thing for me to cling to as the maelstrom of my fragile and unstable emotional state roils around me is that if I have been making poor choices, that means I have choices and that means I have agency,.

It is within my power to improve my life. I can do it. I can make things better.

That doesn’t mean I have to do it. I need to reassure myself of that so I don’t get that feeling of loss of control.

It just means it’s an option.

Like I said before, this life of mine is fine. I have friends, food, shelter, internet, fun video games, an active solo sex life, and one heck of an amazing mind.

So there’s no crisis. It’s not an “improve or die” situation. No stress, no strain, no going insane. It’s just an option. One item on the buffet of options for living the rest of my life.

And here’s the thing to remember when contemplating that menu : there is no wrong answer. Pick something and try it. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it. Try something else.

It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all.

Repeat until believed.

Because if you try and fail, you learn something. The experiment has produced a result. Maybe you have found that whatever it was is not for you. Or maybe you learned that you like it enough to keep trying for a while. Maybe even long enough to get better at it.

One of depression’s biggest lies is that if something doesn’t work out, it was a mistake, and you should not have done it.

It’s a product of the way depression’s adhedonia leave you starved for the pleasure that you need in order to even feel sane, let alone be happy.

This imposes a siege mentality on the person. Resources are scarce and therefore every expenditure of them must produce a large and concentrated amount of reward or be seen (and felt) as a horrible waste of said precious resources, and therefore a terrible mistake akin to Jack trading the family’s last cow for a handful of beans.

Of course, the very sense of scarcity that engenders this response is a lie.

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Fru drains his brain onto the page, part 2.

The scarcity is a lie because I know damned well that the energy to do these things is there and that using up that energy is a benefit unto itself, so even if I spend time and energy doing something that does not pay out, I am still ahead of the game.

Obviously, I would prefer things I try to do work out. I am just saying that even if they don’t, I have still learned something and I still got some useful dissipation of energies out of the deal.

God, I wish I could have a home gym. And by gym, I mean a “Universal Gym” style gym, with all the various forms of lifting weight using different muscles of the body.

If I had one of those, whenever I felt tense and cooped up and restless, I could just pick a station and do that until I felt better.

And yeah, sure, there are plenty of ways to exercise that don’t involve thousands of pounds of very expensive equipment. I could go for walks or jog in place. I could do push ups or sit up or curls. ^[1] I could use heavy objects around the household as weights and lift and move those around for exercise.

But it’s not the same. Using a universal type gym is the one form of exercise that I have tried that I genuinely enjoy. There is something about that kind of exercise that feels right to me. Like that kind of thing is what I am built to do. Like I am some kind of farm animal that needs to pull and push weights around in order to feel fulfilled.

Like, say, a bull. Or an ox.

Other kinds of exercise hurt too much. Like anything involving walking or running. In addition to my being in terrible shape, the hard truth is that I can’t take a single step without pain. Walking hurts my feet. And the more I walk, the more it hurts, until it feels like I am walking on razor blades.

There is not much walking in using a universal gym. Just a few steps between stations.

I suppose I would also need at least one aerobic station. I am thinking an exercise bike would do the trick, although I have enjoyed using a rowing machine before too, and rowing machines exercise every damned muscle in your body.

Aerobic exercise is way less fun for me than weight training, but only a fool builds up muscle all over his body without strengthening the heart and lungs that have to support that muscle at the same time.

And just think, if I really got my metabolism charged up and built up my muscle and cardio, I could eat whatever the hell I wanted.

In fact, I would actually eat a lot more because muscles are way hungrier than flab.

If I only had a gym. (Ya da dada da da… DA!)

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Fun fact : when I do curls, they are called “fruit roll ups”.