Day 370..ish

I've been doing better these past few weeks, but I also haven't been doing much of anything, and I'm mostly just numb. I wake up, I work out, I eat, I tend my aphid habitat, and that feels like my limit for the day. Every day. Now and then I squeeze dishes or grocery shopping in there. 

I don't know if getting back to MMA classes will help. It all makes sense, and it's even backed by experience, but it feels abstract. Maybe it won't really matter. It occurred to me today though, that everything really started to fall apart well before the pandemic. Maybe that's why I'm afraid the pandemic isn't really the issue. It all started to fall apart after I injured my knee. I remember thinking the longer it was taking to heal, the more I felt my resilience slipping away.

That was well over a year ago, the summer before last. It's surreal. Where did the last year of my life go? Where did my whole life go?  I've been working out for over an hour a day, almost every day, for many months now. Determined to draw some benefit from this whole ordeal, hoping I will be stronger and more resilient when I do get back. Lest I just get injured again right away trying to keep up with all the twenty-somethings.

I've been paying the monthly fee this entire time, afraid to stop. I've often thought about how irrational that's been, but I'm legitimately afraid of this hurdle, wherein I never get around to going back, and eventually feel foolish for having waited way too long. I don't know if I'll be able to pick myself up after all this, and get back to leaving my apartment again. It actually helps that on top of the rest of it, I'm paying this damn fee and need to stop wasting that, as soon as possible.

Doing something I enjoyed, that felt rewarding, that I could take pride in, I was able to engage with people (but not too much) and feel some vague sense of belonging. Regular exercise and a reason to get out of bed and go somewhere. All important facets of this depression beating strategy. Simple goals that have proven incredibly difficult for me to achieve in modern American society, all too easily derailed by injuries and global pandemics.

Vaccines will be available to Vermonters 40 and up on April 5th. Guess I'll be finding out how much it matters soon enough.

showing off

My legs hurt. So do my arms, my midsection, my back. My legs are the most sore. Some of the slowest muscle groups to heal, so working out every day adds up faster than they recover. Not that I work out hard enough to warrant giving them a rest every other day. I worry that I don't exercise enough, but being a little sore every day seems to suggest that I do. I worry that after a whole year of this, I should see more results. I remind myself that I'm 46, but I'm not sure if that's just an excuse. 

I don't know what to compare myself to. I'm not sure why it matters, aside from trying to counter feelings of inadequacy. Any success therein goes right into my calculations on why exercise seems to be the best use of what little motivation I can pull together. Causality can be tricky, but at some point, you learn that the chicken comes before the egg. The chicken embryo within the egg would be the very first example of evolving chicken DNA, while the egg shares its DNA with the almost-chicken that lays it.

Our senses and intuitions often deceive us. Putting the cart before the horse is in our nature. We've been muddling correlation and causation all throughout history. Some might say that to be motivated, you have to just do it. When that's what we've done, we want to take credit for it. Or when we're ashamed of what we've just done, find some extenuating circumstances to blame. So much of it is nonsense. When we understand why things are the way they are, our chances of improving the situation can go way up. Or at least we might know when to stop trying.

I've been meaning to post a follow-up to that video I made at the start of the pandemic. I was hoping it would show progress, but I'm not really sure what it shows. I don't know what other people see, but much the way I keep blogging here, I'm just trying not to be invisible. In a sense, it takes confidence to want the be seen, and yet I've often feared being invisible even more than being judged. When no one knows we even exist, it's safe but so isolating.

Here we are in March, and not only have case numbers in Vermont gone down more slowly than I'd expected, they've recently started going back up. Maybe it's that more contagious strain, who knows. Looks like I won't be leaving isolation this month, either. Maybe in April. 

I'm honestly having trouble imagining going places and doing things again. I've regressed back to hating the prospect of going anywhere ever. It's increasingly exhausting and overwhelming, and I feel like crap all the time. How the hell I keep working out, I don't even know.