A common theme in my blog entries is my search for balance, or at least how I feel balance impacts my life. It seems like I can never just be happy. There has to be something weighing me down, even if it’s just my own thoughts. I think I’m experiencing that again right now.

I’m truly in a good place right now. Well, at least emotionally, I am. I’m enjoying my day to day life. I’ve been social. I’m doing things again. It’s a good time to be me. And honestly, there was a time when I wouldn’t have believed myself if I said that last sentence out loud.

But, of course, there’s a downside to being me at the moment. My mental and emotional self is doing well, but my issues now are mostly physical. I’ve put a few pounds recently. To make it worse, I put a little bit of effort into losing weight and it just didn’t happen. There’s various factors that have gone into this and I know that some of what I’m going to say will sound like excuses and not legitimate reasons.

Just about two months ago I decided to rededicate myself to getting into shape. I was going to start working out at home more frequently again. I was going to start running again. I was going to start going to the gym more frequently too. I had it all planned (in my head). Unfortunately, I was truly very busy with other things for a while and I did not have the time to commit to any of the concepts of workouts that I wanted to achieve. My motivation to get it done went away as I realized that it wasn’t possible to get where I wanted to go.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve decided that I’m going to start waking up earlier than I do and get an at-home workout in before I go to work in the morning. I also cannot tell you how many times I hit the snooze button multiple times in the morning and get nothing accomplished before I leave for work.

Sleeping as poorly as I do doesn’t help any of this for me. Waking up and getting out of bed is quite possibly the most difficult thing that I do each day. I don’t think that my inability to leave my bed is a depression related thing, although I know that it has been in the past. I don’t think I’m necessarily going through a depressive episode, but there’s also too many things that are telling me that I am.

I’m fully aware there’s a lot of contradictory thoughts, behaviors, and actions. And I’ve been thinking about that and how it ties into my “balance.” At many points in over the past decade, I would go to the gym more often or do longer home workouts during some of my more obviously depressed times. Now, things are going well for me and I’m not doing any of that. I understand that there’s other factors at play too. My work hours are different. For a long time, I worked retail jobs that would have me start a shift at 6am and I would be done no later than 2pm. I still had a lot of the day left to do stuff. I could get to a gym and get a lot in by 4pm. Now, I work an office job from 9am until 4:30pm. If I go to a gym after work, I’m tired and I don’t have the motivation to do anything.

All too often, especially over the past year or so, I’ll start a workout and lose all motivation to continue doing it. I don’t know if it’s fatigue. I don’t know if it’s a depression thing. But whatever it is, whenever that voice in my head says “we should stop now” or “I don’t want to do this anymore” I’ll first feel a conflict inside me trying to rationalize the need to stop. I know that I’ve been on the treadmill for 20 minutes. I planned for 30. That 30 seems like it’s too much. Quitting there becomes a feeling of relief. And, there isn’t a feeling of disappointment for not getting to 30, there’s a small sense of pride for getting to 20. At the same time, I know that at 20 minutes, I should be looking at 30 as the finish line and know that I’m not there yet.

To anyone that read the last paragraph and thought “why don’t you just do the final 10 minutes?” My answer to you is, I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Am I too happy to workout? I used to do so much better when I was truly miserably depressed. Is it because I haven’t had any 5k races to run in over two years? Was getting myself ready for those races the key to my motivation? I did try to convince myself to train like I was going to run races this year, but I just didn’t keep up with it.

I really don’t know what is causing this apparent mental block for me right now. It could just be as simple as me not listening to the voice in my head that tells me to stop and just continuing to move forward, because I know that right now the only thing this is moving up is my weight, which is not good for me.

Like I often say in these entries, this is not me feeling sorry for myself. This is not a “woe is me” thing. This is me putting my thoughts into words and putting them out there. I’m hoping that this makes sense. I’m hoping it makes sense to me before it makes sense to anyone else. I know that I have work to do. I just need to get the work done. I am going to revisit this topic in the near future. I hope to have a better story to tell.