On Fitting an Elephant in a Teacup

Life feels a lot like this lately.  Sometimes I miss being so megamaniacally (my made up word, deal) focused on ONE BIG THING because it was easy to ignore all those awesome and time consuming possibilities on the horizon.  All that mattered in my life was my Zliten, and work.  Everything else was completely trivial.  If I didn’t get groceries one week, we just got takeout.  We rarely got invited out and we weren’t generally expected to show up.  Hobbies?  I listed them on my resume as playing games (usually testing out what I was working on), swimming (I would occasionally walk downstairs and jump in the pool to cool off), web design and art (it had been YEARS), anime and sci fi (watching while working).  My friends, I was a 4.0 student that had no extracurricular activities.

Now, my life is completely different.  I’m like that kid with the middling GPA that doesn’t try very hard in class but gets by, but is president of the glee club, in student council, plays on the soccer team, and also knits afghans for the homeless in quilt club.  For example, this week, I have just about every hour outside work mapped out.  Yesterday was catching up on my novel, dinner, and cleaning the bedroom.  It was naaaaasty (said like Clevland).  Today I ran and shredded before work, now work, lunch out, work, obtain groceries for party food, novel, then bed.  The rest of the week doesn’t get much better.  It’s all pretty much diet hell as well unless I remain a pillar of motivation and stability.   This last week was my reprieve, and I did alright.  This week, it’s on like donkey kong.  Battle Royale of Quix vs Too Much Food And Booze.

I always spend some time self negotiating here.  The fight between lazy self and truthy self.  “Why not quit NaNoWriMo?” says lazy.  “It’s a busy month and it’s your first time trying.  You’ve got a good start.  Give yourself six months and see if you can get it done by then.”

Then, truthiness self steps up.  “No!  You always say you want to be a writer.  If you give this up, you know you’ll lose steam and it will be just one more failed manuscript.  It’s one month.  It’s 50,000 words.  You blog about half that in a month.  Suck it up, buttercup!”

Truthiness self is totally right and lazy pouts.

“Well, then something’s gotta give, right?”  Lazy says.  “Maybe I should just cut down the exercising.  I’ve done 3 weeks of shredding, that’s enough right?”

Truthiness self pounds her fist down on the proverbial table.  “Ok, let’s stop when you’re finally having the first results you’ve seen in months.  And let’s not even begin to entertain the thought of letting go of your eating.”

“But-” Lazy protests.  Stupid mind reading truthiness self.

“Hey – you know as well as I do.  It takes no extra time to control your portions and choose healthy things from the menu.   No excuse.”

Lazy is totally pouting here.  This could have been her excuse to order some really awesome greaseball food at the company event on Wednesday, the outing Friday, and completely go crazy Saturday night at the party.  “Who would blame me?  I’m totally busy this week.  Busy people eat junk food, right?”

Truthy rolls her eyes at Lazy.  “Other busy people eat junk food.  YOU are better than that.  YOU know that all that noise is comfort eating.  YOU know your body feels better when you don’t consume junk.”

Lazy grumbles.  “Fine, I give.  So what’s the deal.  What do I do?”

Truthy gets a little too close (come on, personal space, self!) and looks Lazy in the eyes.  “Like I said, suck it up, buttercup.  You want to write this novel.  You want to lose this weight.  You want to maintain this fitness.  You planned this party this weekend.  These are all things you want to do.  WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING ABOUT THE ABUNDANCE OF AWESOME THINGS GOING ON THIS WEEK?”

Lazy wipes this spit off her face.  Truthy is a little enthusiastic sometimes.  “You are so right.  I just need to get on with myself and do it.”

Truthy smiles and pats Lazy on the butt.  “Good kid.  Now get out there.”  Not entirely sure why my hard ass self is trying to do an impression of my middle school gym teacher, but there you go.  Welcome to my head.

What I need to remember is that there is never a goddamn good time to do anything.  When I started doing this healthy living thing, I was surrounded by people (minus the Zliten who was trying to do it with me) that were either ambivalent, skeptical, or unsupportive.  I cannot think of a good time in the last 3 years to have written a novel.  I can’t think of a month that hasn’t been a whole lot of crazy.  Last spring was not a particularly good time to start training for a half marathon.  In fact, heat training sucked.  I never got surrounded by this healthy living bubble that made it all easy.  This morning I was accosted by a cupcake the size of one my shrunken buttcheeks in the break room, but I didn’t give in.

Things may have been simpler then when I only cared about one thing, but when I took the blinders off and saw the rest of my life in ruination, I knew that I had to bring back some balance, some harmony, some remedy to all-work-and-no-play makes Quix a fat evil genius-wannabe.  Between discovering that there was indeed life outside of work and shedding approximately one petite human being from my physical mass, the blinders were way off and my head was up in the clouds, dreaming about all these new awesome things I could do.

I’m good at the dreaming.  What I need practice at is the doing.  It’s easy to make excuses that life is too busy, and you’ll wait for a better time to start working out, start that novel, start cooking dinner instead of getting take out, take a clogging class, etc.  I’m here to tell you now – your life is not going to get any easier.  Unless you have extreme circumstances (aka, you work crazy hours for 3 months and then have 3 months off, or something similar), there is NO GOOD TIME to start something.  You just need to decide to grab time by the huevos, look it squarely in the eyes, and tell it that you’re going to be watching it closely, making sure that it doesn’t slip away.

So there you have it.  I am going to make it through this crazy busy week, my writing is not going to suffer, my workouts are not going to suffer, and I am going to make the healthiest choices I can out and about this week.  I am not going to sacrifice sleep, and I am not going to get stressed about it.  There are 24 usable hours in each day, I just need to make the most of the waking ones for the time being.