sloth boxing

I often have trouble getting moving. More and more so, the longer this goes on. When my blood is pumping with cortisol, adrenaline, and endorphins, it gets a lot easier. It becomes sitting still that's difficult. Laziness is a matter of perspective. When we keep moving to avoid the perils of stillness, that too is laziness. It's the overcoming of proclivities that's truly difficult, whichever way we're trying to go.

It helps to have rituals, techniques, and practices to facilitate these transitions. Drugs like caffeine can help us get moving, alcohol can help us wind down, but drugs do little good on their own. I've often spent an hour or so trying to get myself feeling alive enough to start bouncing around like I mean it, but that hasn't been enough lately. As I drag myself into the living room to start working out, I've found that it also helps to just start shadow boxing, even with no energy at all.

I just go through the motions, weakly, half heartedly, slow and clumsy. I gradually pick up the pace and focus as I get into it. I try not to get distracted. This can be a challenge, because if I don't get stoned first, I'm too depressed to move at all. Before too long, I'm moving faster and faster. Once I've been breathing hard and sweating for at least a few minutes, I don my gloves and lay into the heavy bag.

On the one hand, I wonder if it seems I'm being hyperbolic. On the other, I know that I hide just how badly I'm doing. In this moment, and over the course of my lifetime. I'm barely holding it together. I neglect all sorts of things, being too busy just trying to get through the day. When I become too depressed to eat at all, I start thinking about how a few days without food could undo months of work. This gets me to eat. Sometimes I picture healthcare workers standing over my cadaver, remarking on how odd it is that I'd work so hard to get into shape, just to throw it away. This keeps me from hanging myself.

Even with vaccines, it's looking like we're never going back to normal. Society will be divided between those who take precautions indefinitely, those who say fuck it, I can't live like this, and those who couldn't live like this. It's looking like I'll try heading back to the gym by March, but I have no idea how that will go. For now, gyms are still a grey area, enforcing whatever precautions they can. Often these measures are woefully inadequate and yet they can't dispense with the charade until more people are vaccinated.

This pandemic seems to have destroyed me. I'm just living it out in slow motion. I'm not getting better, I just keep getting worse. I think I'm dying.