I’ve been sick for an entire week… achey, tired, coughy, sneezy. On top of not feeling well physically, I feel dejected and unmotivated. The excitement of the new year has worn off. I’m uninspired and stagnant.
I’ve spent all of January focusing on my weight loss efforts. I’ve exercised at least once for every day of 2016, including while sick. I continue meal planning and cooking, and reading what I call my “diet books” and meeting with my counselor. I knew weight loss would be my primary focus in the new year, but then why did I feel badly after a phone conversation with my brother last week when I realized I had nothing new to share?
Is there really nothing else going on? Am I up to nothing but trying to lose weight?
I only worked one full day of work last week, but I struggled to lay in bed. Every day or afternoon I was home felt like an opportunity to get ahead. I have a website to build that I have been paying for for over a year. There are blog posts to write and an essay about an experience I had so long ago that the details are starting to get hazy, 50,000 words of a novel I haven’t touched since November 30… I should have worked on these things – I was home.
But I was sick and worn out and unmotivated and needed to REST. My body was talking to me and I have learned to listen to it. So I napped, watched television, read, and cross stitched. I didn’t pressure myself to perform or produce. I know deep down it was the right choice, yet here I sit feeling… guilty? Disappointed?
What is this malaise?
Last week I sat in my counselor’s office feeling this same way. Unenergized. She noted the contrast between my attitude then and our previous session when I was excited over all my efforts. “I don’t know what it is,” I said. “It’s not fun or exciting anymore.”
“You know this is precisely the point when most people quit, right?” she said.
I sat with that for a moment. Five weeks in boredom has begun to breath its heavy sighs. Skepticism that any of this is working seeps around corners. Distractions threaten to derail my focus. I’m settling in to this new routine, which is no longer that new and my behaviors are on the cusp of becoming habit, but the energy I have invested is waning. It made perfect sense that I felt disheartened.
“I can’t quit. I won’t.”
I haven’t quit on my weight loss efforts and I don’t intend to. Until today I still felt unmotivated and disinterested, though. Thankfully, I have friends to point out the obvious things I can’t see like the fact I’m physically drained and still fighting something off, that work has been challenging, I have two big events the next two weekends, and I’m “not getting to focus as much on the things that feed [my] soul.” Also, that it’s February. It’s cold and dark and there’s little to look forward to.
Basically, I realize now that there are variables in play that I hadn’t planned for.
Steve Hickman wrote in the December, 2015 issue of Mindful in his essay titled “Take Your Mind for A Walk”:
“We are often like [a] young child, clutching the levers and pressing the buttons of our own lives with all our might, carefully trying to coax a desired course out of the chaos of life, but who are we kidding? How much control do we really have, and how much energy do we invest in trying to control and contrive outcomes that we are convinced are right, or good, or imperative? And while we can chart our course and connect with an intention to move in desired directions, there are often circumstances beyond our control and all we can do is navigate them like whitewater rapids, clinging tenuously to our intentions and keeping our eyes on the prize.”
I’m navigating my own rapids. It’s winter, I’ve been cooped up indoors, I’m not feeling well, I’m adjusting to a new routine and entering the point when it’s no longer new and exciting, I’m not writing enough or doing other things that feed my soul. But I must weather the storm and keep my eye on the prize.
These aren’t excuses, because I haven’t done anything that requires excusing. These are facts. The bottom line is, I need to keep trucking. This is the doldrums. This is when the going gets tough and that’s why this is when people quit. But I won’t be one of them.
I weighed in today. I’m down another 4.4 pounds. Lent starts tomorrow and I’ve decided to commit to spending a minimum of seven hours per week on my novel. I’m also going to the ocean on Sunday to feed my soul.
I’m keeping my eye on the prize, clinging tenuously to my intentions. But in the meantime, I’ll do what I can to help navigate the course.
