out of character

There is too much chaos in the world today. And every person wields a piece of that madness. We are, clearly, all still trying to figure things out at every stage of our lives. We can look at other people’s problems and hyper-analyze how we would do things differently, how we could fix them. And yet, we cannot bring ourselves to fix our own issues, even though we likely know the solution. The solution is just HARD.

I have been thinking about two things: motivation and discipline. I sometimes lack motivation; I know this about myself. A few years ago, when I spent a lot of time biking, people would say to me, “I wish I had your motivation.” Little did they know.

It takes forever to convince myself to do things, that I’m capable of doing things. I make a long list of pros and cons before I make most decisions (yes, even on paper). Once I make a choice, however, things generally go OK. Why? Because I do have discipline. Discipline is what keeps the act going once the actors decide to show up and read their lines.

For some, like me, even when the evidence is so blatantly clear that life would be better if we did x-y-z, we just cannot motivate ourselves to take that leap. I wish I could get to the root of that for myself, so that I could stop making fear-based choices. So that I could confidently answer yes or no without stress, and not feel like I must over-explain my thought process.

I wish had the ability to take another persons actions at face value and accept them for who they are, who they are showing themselves to be. I wish I could take an unfavourable response and have such a strong sense of self that I immediately recognize that it has nothing at all to do with me. But I’m not that person. At least not yet.

I’ve recently been dealing with some health challenges that are affecting me mentally, and it’s changing my perspective on things. It’s opening my eyes on how I’ve been living and how I must refocus my energy, and reflect on my values, so that my future has a better outcome.

I’ve been on a journey this past year to improve my physical health, and parts, I’ll admit, have improved. However, because of long-term side effects that we had not anticipated, I’ve had to stop taking the medication that had been helping with my weight loss. Now that I’m off the medication, the food noise and hunger are back with a vengeance. I am doing my best to distract myself from all of these things, but it is so very hard.

Now that I’m at the end of this post, I realize how jumbled it all is and cryptic to anyone who wouldn’t know me on a very personal level. But if you’re a regular reader, you probably know by now that these posts are just words of my collective history, so that I’ll remember where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Till next time.

Your complicated human,
M.