So, hi.
It’s been a while.
When I began this blog, it was with the best of intentions. I wanted to find a way to tie my love of writing, something I had spent over half a decade cultivating the best of all possible habits, with my new healthy lifestyle, which was forcing me to face a lifetime of the worst possible habits. It worked. As I struggled through the early phases of my new direction, I was able to use this platform to vent some of my bad days and frustrations, and celebrate my triumphs. It was, for all intents and purposes, for my benefit. I never expected it to actually find an audience. But it has.
Over the last six months, I have found out just how many people have been reading my ramblings about my love of coffee and my lifelong hatred of vanilla pudding. It’s been strange, but it’s also been edifying. It’s a constant reminder that I’m not alone in the daily struggle involved in treating your body as something other than a garbage dump. It’s made me realize that I’m part of something bigger, and that’s not something I ever expected.
So all of that rambling brings us to the nearly one month span of silence from this blog.
When I was young, and I would find myself on the wrong end of my mother’s wrath for burning a hole through our picnic table with a chemistry set (true story) or some such offense, there were a few possible fates that awaited me. Immediate punishment was the norm, dealt out with swift certainty by my mother, who towered over me like an avenging angel bearing the feared hammer of cleaning the garage. Those moments of matriarchal rage were the kinder option. If I had committed a truly grave sin, one that demanded the cruelest of penalties, my mother would, in a calm quiet voice that would send Josef Stalin sprinting for the hills, tell me to go to my room and wait for my father to get home.
Anticipation is the distillation of all that our imagination can conjure, and our imagination, while full of wonders and extraordinary ideas, is a sadistic psychopath. It revels in conjuring the worst possible scenario, then injecting that scenario with steroids until it’s a hulking monster, filling every corner of your mind. The rest of the world blurs, and the only thing that remains in sharp, 1080p focus is that fear.
In recent weeks, the company that provides my biweekly paychecks was acquired by a competitor in a process that seemed less like a hostile takeover and more like squashing a pillow over the face of a bed-ridden corporation that has long since been known to be terminal. The handful of us who survived the swinging scythe of layoffs that left our office a ghost town find ourselves counting down the days, waiting until our usefulness has expired. I know for a fact that my job has an expiration date, and that date is fast approaching.
There are a lot of things people have told me about this situation, so I’ll get the major ones out of the way. Yes, it could be worse. Yes, I’m lucky to have kept a job as long as I have. Yes, I know that I have other opportunities and things going for me. All of those are fine. (That being said, if one more person says the phrase, “When God closes a door, He opens a window,” I may hit them with a church pew. If that’s true, God’s air conditioning bill must be brutal.)
The fact is, all of those things may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that being out of work is frightening as hell.
As I’ve waited for news, the stress and fear have taken their toll in a number of ways. First, my eating habits have slipped. While I haven’t returned the eating habits I used to embrace (which could only accurately be described as suicidal), I have stumbled on many occasions over the last month, eating things I know to be bad for me. My exercise routine has stumbled. Five days a week in the gym slipped to three, and then two. My motivation and enthusiasm for this process has been sapped. It’s brutally difficult to remain optimistic and energized about right now when the future is busily scaring the shit out of you.
As all that has happened, I’ve sat at my computer and tried to think of what to write, and have generally come up with jack in one hand and squat in the other. So I convince myself that I’ll write a post tomorrow, knowing that it won’t be any easier then.
These are all reasons for my absence, and they are decent ones. As excuses, they stink. Badly.
Today, I got an email from someone who reads this blog wanting to know why I’d stopped posting. They told me that my entries made them laugh, and a few times, had helped remind them why they were working so hard to get healthy. This was the latest from quite a few people who wanted to know if I’d quit.
Nope. I just needed a kick in the ass. Thank you to all those who provided it.
