My new job starts at 8:00am, a time of day of which I have never been particularly fond. So that means I have to wake up around 6:15am, and if 8:00 sucked, then 6:15 is the devil's ass-crack-of-dawn. I am not a morning person, unless by morning, you mean the last-ditch effort of waking up by 11:30am, and I usually don't fall asleep until midnight on an early night, so getting back into a routine of getting up only a few hours after I would prefer to fall asleep takes some serious discipline. Routine, for me, can be as confining as being wrapped in a straight-jacket. It can also be the only thing that gets me through good and bad times. And for as much as I would love to live a more bohemian lifestyle, setting my sail to take me wherever the wind may blow and all that other crunchy/groovy/I-live-in-a-van crap, I know that a reliable way of combating effects of depression is to keep myself doing good things with consistency. Taking supplements, working out, eating well, allowing for some down time for a movie or a book, these are all things I try to fit in at least every day, and now that I have to change my daily schedule to allow for a job that takes 8 hour out of what had been a laissez faire kind of existence for a few months, I have been doing things at completely different times.
For two days now, I've been back to working out first thing in morning, as in, the first thing I do after turning off my alarm clock and getting out of bed. I prefer quick and intense workouts anyway, so squeezing two rounds of Tabata clears my head and gets me functional faster than anything else at, again, the devil's ass-crack-of-dawn. I'm hoping to make this a regular thing every workday morning, since it's hard for me to burn out on short workouts, and I always work different muscles groups and incorporate different moves or weights with every round, keeping my system fresh and constantly recovering. Exercise has been something that has been in the far background of my mind for so long that it became a significant source of failure, and therefore, stress. Why "failure"? Because if I didn't get a workout into my day when I know for a fact that I had the time, energy, and opportunity to do so, I feel like I let myself down and begin berating myself, reminding myself that I will never succeed in anything if I don't make efforts to follow through when I should. You would think that I could find a way to make this language motivational instead of completely damaging, but that is not what I have learned in my almost 30 years on Earth. I learned that if I could and didn't then I am wrong and a failure. That's proving to be a difficult lesson to unlearn, but that isn't too surprising, since I took nearly 30 years to learn it in the first place!
Early today, I had an extra adjustment with a different chiropractor, and later today, I have my session with my therapist, so I certainly recognize that I am taking good care of myself physically. (This is on top of morning workouts and some better food choices now that I have a source of income again.) I've been learning new things and feel confident that even when I make a mistake, I am fixing it and learning how to prevent it again, so that's a good boost for my self-esteem and mental health. My oldest brother and his family are taking a road trip out to Colorado, so I get to meet my newest nephew this Sunday, and that certainly satisfies my emotional needs. So right now, I feel like things are clicking along very well. I know that it is an evolutionary thing to have that voice in my head that keeps me warned about how things may go wrong in the future, because then my brain can go into problem-solving-mode and hopefully keep myself alive if that ever happens, maybe even keep it from happening at all. I completely get that. I just wish that I could go for a long period of time without feeling like I need to engage in some superstitious behavior to keep myself in the good graces of The Whatever From High Atop The Thing. Why does it ever have to be difficult to allow for good moments to become the norm? Sometimes I'm concerned that I'm the only one who feels like this, but I wonder if this is a universal human trait. I'm not a pessimist at heart; I like to believe in the best of things and circumstances and people, even if they don't give me reason to. But I have also been in a crouch for so long that it's been much easier to assume that things will go wrong at the whims of The Whatever, and I don't like believing in that. I don't like who that makes me become, and if I can change that, I will.
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