Tumbling Down, Crawling Along

This week has tried my patience. I cannot point to any one particular event or difficulty. It simply started bad with the general bummer I had on Sunday, and never got much better. Since I will not shut my brain off with alcohol, I've had to sit in the full light of my life as it is, in all it's blandness and restrictedness.

I felt particularly bad the other night when a young man whose blog I follow on Tumblr expressed a lot of discontent and self-loathing. He wasn't quite suicidal, but he did sound very down on himself and his life. I tried to communicate care to him, but beyond that, I couldn't in all honesty say, "It gets better," especially since a lot of what he was bummed about are the same things I'm bummed about (loneliness, feeling unlovable, being overweight, etc.). I let him know I was concerned, but I could offer him no advice. I felt very inadequate, and it was only my concern for him that outweighed that enough for me to say anything at all.

I will say this about Tumblr: the community is pretty good about taking care of each other. Yeah, there are some haters; but usually when anyone expresses genuine sadness or even suicidal thoughts, people rush to send them messages of support. Who knows? This world might get better yet.

My weight seems to have hit a new "set point": ~194 lbs. That's good compared to a year ago when it was ~210 lbs. But I need to get it lower. I like to drop at least another 20 lbs., but I would be happy with 15. The biggest struggle I have now is that my traditional way of dealing with ongoing bummers is to eat (especially if I'm not drinking alcohol).

I need to start focusing on other things I can do to occupy my time. The evenings are just so fraught with opportunities to make things worse. I need to fill them with ways to make things better. I need a hobby, other than reading, surfing the web and watching television. Something that engages my attention fully for hours.

I Need Better Motivation

I opened a new calendar today. I used to get “August-to-August” calendars all the time, but stopped a few years back. Recently I decided to start using them again. They recall to me the school year, and its implied sense of a time period in which to get things done. I make plans for what to do during the colder months (although I don’t often follow through with them), and I try to end up better in the spring and summer.

Last fall I started losing weight, and I did very well for a while there. I lost a lot of weight. But the weight has been creeping back up, largely due to the fact I haven’t been sticking to the diet. There were several factors for this, but the main one simply is this: I lost my motivation. I had several motives for losing weight, but the strongest (albeit largely unacknowledged) motivation was that losing weight would help me look good so I could attract a mate.

When that didn’t pan out the way I had wanted, I lost the motivation to keep on track. I had not realized how much of my drive to lose weight had been motivated by the desire to find a partner. Not knowing my real motivation—and more importantly, not knowing the inherent insubstantiality of the real motivation—led me to go off track, and to start putting weight back on.

So I need to have real motivation to lose weight. Something that comes from within me, is not dependent on others for the expression of results, and carries an emotional component (in order to involve my whole self in it, and not just my intellect).

Fortunately, I’ve caught myself before I put all the weight back on, and I’m still significantly smaller than I was a year ago.