Change Everything, All At Once

I had breakfast with a friend yesterday, who I haven’t seen in a few months and it was great to catch up. I mentioned I was doing something unadvisable. In an effort to make some necessary changes in my life, I have decided to change everything, all at once.

I think generally the advice is to focus on one thing you’re trying to change and then once that’s well in hand, move on to the next. Something about if you half ass several things instead of whole assing one thing you’ll always be left with half an ass. That makes sense to me but I am also super impatient for results so I am going whole ass on a lot of things and hoping a couple will stick.

My autoimmune disease, Hashimotos, makes it challenging for me to lose weight. I don’t think I need to lose a lot of weight, but I don’t like how I feel in my body and I want to be more fit. The last time I felt this way I decided to keep a food diary to help me figure out what I was eating and how it was making me feel. It worked really well, but once I got to a point where I felt good, I stopped doing it and well, you can see how that worked out.

I’m also making an effort to exercise every day and make sure I swim at least 3 times a week. This is not in my nature and I do a mental battle everyday in which one part of me tries to convince the other part of me that this goal is unnecessary and I don’t need to do something everyday. I think that’s most of the workout: getting myself to workout.

This little blog here is another goal. I want to post every weekday, regardless of how stupid the posts are because the more I write, the better it will feel and I need to get better at this. I am frittering away this time I’ve given myself and I need to focus on getting something, anything, published and move forward.

A few months ago I started reading a book at night, an actual book with paper pages. I started by rereading the entire Harry Potter series because I figured it would hold my attention and I was right. It is perhaps this particular success that has compelled me to shove my shoulder into the other tasks to see if I can make a whole bunch of progress all at once.

Failure is imminent and that’s kind of the point. Last night I made an experimental dinner and it was kind of disgusting, but I ate it all up and then flogged myself for wasting time and energy on something I wasn’t sure about. But that is the point. I need to make an effort to make more mistakes even if I predict the failure of the task before I start. There is nothing wrong with that. I also need to work on shrugging this shit off more.

I told my friend yesterday that focusing on myself, really and truly trying to make positive changes in my life is gross. And good grief it is disgusting and messy and I feel like such an idiot most hours of the day, but I am going to keep running full speed at the brick wall because the pain and embarrassment of daily failure feels way better than the shame of doing nothing at all.