April Musings Rant

It's Sunday around 2:30pm. This past week was absolutely brutal. My wife started her new job, which of course we are super thankful for, but holy shit I think we forget as humans how much our brains can adapt to almost anything becoming "normal". This isn't even the first time Alanna has worked here in the Netherlands, but I think we took for granted how different it would be having a job that is right across the street versus 50km away. Add on top of that the reality of my own work situation and things get crazier. Not only did Alanna start work, but I need to drive her, every day. So the 1 hour commute, needs to begin at least a half hour before to get dressed, walk the dog, and generally prepare to be a decent human being.

Cool, so now it's 8:30am, I've been up since 6:30 or 7:00, and I'm now at the edge of an office park in a city an hour drive away from home or any semblance of comfort. I need to find somewhere to work. Do I go to the library? Now I need to find a parking spot and either pay, or find a free spot and walk for almost a half hour to get to the library to begin to start being productive. Alternatively, I sit in my car and run the A/C the entire day, burning gas and putting idle hours on my engine, annihilate my phone's tethering plan, all to gain what works out to maybe 30 minutes of extra work a day?

So now I've made it to the library. I can't be loud. I can't take any phone calls in these public rooms. I'm hauling a heavy ass microphone in my bag because spending another $100 for a new mic that I really only need for maximum 6 weeks seems wasteful in it's own way. I can't leave any of my stuff attended, even just to go take a piss. Pack it all up, walk downstairs, squeeze into the tiny ass bathroom to take a piss. Oh, free water is not a thing in Europe? So every time I get thirsty, I need to buy something, or perhaps I brought a refillable bottle with me that I can maybe squeeze in the tiny bathroom sink to refill, but now I'm carrying that weight too as I move around all day. But if I drink more, I also need to pee more, which means packing up more often to go downstairs and pee then repeat the process again.

Then God forbid I want to get up and stretch my legs. Gotta pack it all up again, then carry this shit around for a mile. There's nowhere else to really sit for free, so I'm either spending more money to sit at a cafe or whatever, all the while probably moving further and further away from my car that I need to eventually walk back to in order to pick up my wife from work and drive another hour home. This isn't even mentioning my obligations to be in the office two days a week. So add in all the early morning stuff, but I now need to drive another hour to my own office. Some of the problems are solved, but I'm certainly not coming out ahead.

Looking back at my "Steps" count for last week, I'm not sure it's obvious what is going on, which is surprising. As I am thinking about this, I thought, "Steps! This will quantify what I'm speaking about!" ...but it's not. I had one "big" day at 16k steps. An average day going back is around 11 or 12k. That big day was Monday, but every other day until Friday came in under "normal". Friday was just a normal ass day. But on Friday, I was fucking exhausted. It's Sunday, now almost 3pm and just thinking about tomorrow makes me tired.

And sure, there was a lot of other stuff happening in the week. I play ping pong on Mondays and go to a taalcafe every other Tuesday (because I have another obligation the other weeks!). On Thursday, I had a work obligation into the early evening, but still had to drive to pick Alanna up. One of my coworkers had a baby and this is their first week out of the office. Guess who had to pick up all of their daily tasks (hint: it was me)? All of his work was also done pretty early in the morning so there is a lot of built up expectation within the organization to have certain things done at a certain time of day, a time when I am a shittier version of myself! So for sure, lots of shit going on that might not be that way forever... but why doesn't it feel like that?

What if shit just keeps coming up? What if life never slows down again? I didn't purposefully exercise one day this past week. I try to go for a 5km walk every day after dinner, but that didn't happen once. Not only did it not happen, I actively went to bed choosing not to go exercise because I was so exhausted. If I stayed awake until 10 or 11pm, was I really tired? I don't know, but damn did it feel exhausting then, in the moment. Enough so, that I threw away the streak on a month's long practice of exercising every day to lay in bed or on the couch and do nothing. Realtime follow up: I just looked it up in my fitness tracker app. It's been about 4 months straight of continued progress and goal achievement. Maybe not every day was perfect, but I at least made an effort to come back and put in a little extra effort the next day if I fudged the numbers the day before. But this week, I just couldn't be arsed. I actively chose to give up and that fucking sucks.

Food again

And that's not the only place I chose to give up! When it rains, it fucking pours. Thankfully, I've had some amount of shame and at least continued to somewhat track my calories. I say somewhat, because I didn't really make an effort to really track everything. On Wednesday, I was in the city center after dropping Alanna off and work, and I went to a cafe for a coffee. Through nobodies fault, I was put into a situation where I was given a drink with calories in it. Ok, fine. At that point, I was about 4 days fasted, so breaking wouldn't really be a problem, but it had not been my intention. Well because I didn't want to break my fast with a caloric coffee drink, I also got some food. Good food even! Some tomato soup. Then I left and had to pee again, so I went to HEMA, then got a hot dog... then came home and ate a sandwich right before bedtime.

Thursday, my normal eating day, came as well. We had lunch catered at work, then an event after work, also with catered food. Then I came home and made dinner because the catering at work was just bullshit snacks and I left early to pick up the wife anyway. Then Friday I ate dinner... and some leftover easter candy. And Saturday, yesterday, more food and more candy. None of these are even that bad when I go back and look through the numbers. Maybe 3,000 calories a day. Even at my reduced size now, I'm sure I'm burning somewhere around that just in TDEE. Even if I'm 25% under on my estimation, I didn't eat anything Sunday through Tuesday, so that's at least 6,000 "free" calories to not put me off track.

But it doesn't matter. I ate 4 days in a row, which I haven't done in a long time. Usually the maximum is 3 days in a row, and those days are never full of what i would categorize as objectively bad food choices.

So yeah, this feels terrible. I feel kinda like a junkie. Trapped in this viscous cycle of binging on my addiction and feeling sorry for myself when I fail at living up to these expectations that I set for myself. Oh no Daron, shit got hard for a few days and you went off the fucking deep end. The scale went up 4kg, but you haven't had to drive your wife to work for 2 days now! You can't blame the commute for poor choices that happen on the weekend.

And sure, the solution is simple enough, but the demoralizing feeling of failure over and over again is just agonizing. I know all talking points too. "Stop comparing yourself to the good parts you see online" or "Look at all of your progress you've made though!"

Yea sure, but that doesn't change how I feel about yesterday, or how I feel about today. It doesn't change how I want to stop writing and go lay in bed and stare at the wall rather than think about these problems some more. But I know that those thoughts and actions don't help either. So I'm forced to keep moving in this perpetual motion machine of stochastic Stockholm Syndrome as I grapple with the reality of my own reality finding meaning and definition only from that which I give it. I can decide right now not to feel bad about these "failures". I can choose to contextualize them within a broader scope that also includes the successes, but now I've socially engineered my feelings into a framework that doesn't allow me to feel consequences unless I fuck up so massively that it isn't accounted for by the rubric.

Congratulations! You have fasted X number of days, or lost X number of kilograms, or walked X number of miles last week, but did you account for when you binge on enough junk food for a weekend with the boys in a single evening in front of the TV? The accomplishments of yesterday don't hold much weight when compared to the failures of the present. I can't change yesterday, but today I chose (arguably?) to make the wrong decision. Is this just how it is? Everybody makes some fucked up choices and we're all trying to figure out how to live with the consequences? If that is the case, why does that answer feel so deeply unsatisfying to me?

What now?

So yeah... that's where my head is. I was going to add, for better of for worse, but right now it just feels pretty bad. I want to chat about it with someone, but I don't really have that support system here. I would like to vent this all to a real human being who can push back and provide some perspective, but all I have is this blog... and that sucks.