Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. Who am I quoting?
That’s Dostoyevsky from The Brothers Karamazov. It’s my favorite literary quote and I keep it inscribed in my journal. That doesn’t, of course, make me any less susceptible to fooling myself or giving myself BS explanations of my behavior. It just reminds me to check in more often. Right now I’m confronting my own sketchy stories about this supposed goal that I have and how much progress I’m making, which is... not much. There are a bunch of different types of goals, of course. There are: Other people’s goals for us, type 1, that we think we want but really don’t Other people’s goals for us, type 2, that we pretend to want even though we know we don’t Other people’s goals for us, type 3, against which we rebel rather than pursue our own plans Goals we know how to reach Goals we don’t know how to reach Goals we hold in tandem with mutually exclusive goals Goals we try to reach simultaneously with other very demanding goals Goals we publicly set without privately forming a clear plan At this moment, I am supposedly doing something that I already know how to do, which I have successfully done before, and that is to drop excess weight. I have made zero progress in the last week, even though I set myself a really appealing incentive. See, I lost my AirPods in Belgium. This has been driving me up a tree. My daily routine is built around listening to audio books, and now I have to do it with cords dangling down my torso, just like the bad old days. They keep catching on every single door handle and drawer pull. I can’t help but notice several times a day that one of my favorite personal objects is now gone. I decided I would wait to replace them until I hit a certain body weight milestone. Not the ultimate one, which is “healthy weight for my height,” but the closest that ends in a zero. This incentive is very lively and real to me. These are two things I want, so let’s go! *clap clap* Get a move on! What is happening is a classic example of a hollow goal without a system. I have the clearly defined metric. I have the highly desirable incentive. I know both how to reach the goal and how to attain the incentive. I have the next steps of the plan laid out. (Get replacement AirPods, start outdoor running again as soon as fall temperatures kick in any week now) What I have not done is the one thing that I know really works, which is to keep a food log and write down everything I eat. I did this meticulously for over a year, out of sheer interest, and then I quit, and then I gradually gained weight again. There are a lot of cute little lies that many people tell ourselves. The crowd will join in. “It’s muscle!” they cry. Uh, no. “You don’t need to lose any weight!” they cry. I could make a bingo card with all the predictable responses. Everyone understands a bunch of things that pop culture demands of us around body image and women’s body transformation, to wit, adding weight makes people smarter and sexier, losing weight drives women insane. Simple, right? In my case, I understand that gaining weight on my own personal body, the body that I inhabit and which is my only possession in this world, causes me suffering. It is highly correlated with migraine and night terrors. I was free of both of these conditions for four years, and then I gained weight, and then at a predictable level, they came back. I snapped awake with night terrors again just last night. The Venn diagrams of “body image” and “quality of life” don’t overlap in my world. How can I care whether other people think I look cute during a migraine? OR during night terrors? That’s not what this is about. What it’s about is whether I do the things that make sense to me and whether I can tolerate the consequences. It’s true that there is a lot going on in my life right now. We just moved, and we had a chaotic summer, and our dog has been ill, and my husband has been traveling a lot for work, and our schedule is all over the place. Those are elements of background information, not explanations. The root cause of my problem is that I don’t want to spend three minutes a day writing down what I eat. It’s annoying! Then I remind myself that night terrors are also annoying, and through my inaction I have bought myself an extra week of stasis. This is where self-compassion comes in. It is more compassionate of me, toward myself, to work toward inner peace. That comes not from ignoring my body or tolerating the intolerable, but from caring for my body. I could try to fake some level of pretense that I don’t really mind night terrors, that at least it isn’t something else. Actually no. In the moment, my limbic system is busy telling me I’m being chased by bears and wolves and snakes and I’m about to die. There is nothing further from inner peace. It is the worst feeling that I have in my life. I just don’t think about it much when I’m on vacation, eating dessert every day. I’m always going to be a “live to eat” person and I’m always going to be tempted by the whole package. Large portions! Desserts! French fries! Five meals a day! I have the appetites of a backpacker, boxer, and distance runner even when I haven’t done any of those activities in months or years. I have to balance that against reality, my desires in the context of my behaviors. I have to keep watch on my own lie, every hour, every minute, either that or scratch those lines out of my journal. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
Categories
All
|