Down 15-40, but my superhero is coming

I had a dream last night that found me as a professional tennis player. It was the first dream I have ever had that found me in the world of professional tennis, but to be honest, tennis has been on my mind lately. Tennis is a sport that I completely adored growing up. I wanted to be Michael Chang(look him up). Along with my brother and two friends, I took tennis lessons growing up. I loved it. I loved how responsible I was for every aspect of the game. I also craved the gamesmanship. Tennis was and is an athletic version of chess. More than getting to the ball, you have to anticipate your opponent's next move. I am not sure entirely sure why I stopped. It probably had something to do with getting caught up in the more exciting sports and just not having time for it, but my love for the game of tennis has never really gone away. I still love to watch it, and still think about my time playing it.

This August my girlfriend and I are moving into an apartment complex that has tennis courts attached to it. it is imperative that I go back to tennis. It stretches my body and my mind in ways that I desire, in ways that are downright lustful. We have not yet figured out if they have rackets, but this is a call to anyone who has tennis rackets and truly does not use them anymore. I would love to have 1 or 2 of them. This is possibly a very exciting development for me. Hopefully Martina is down. I have this feeling that once I get going, it will be difficult for me to stop. Just typing this has me full of giddy enthusiasm. One of my struggles in getting myself physically healthy, beyond the damaged knee, is finding something I love. I enjoy walking and I really love swimming, but I only love swimming when the weather calls for it. I need to find something that does not feel like work. I think I need the competition aspect as well. I need an opponent, not myself, someone tangible. Someone I can beat. If anyone reading this ever wants to play tennis, please let me know. I really do miss it.

The last few weeks have been incredibly up and down. I have been plagued by physical pain and mental pain. Summer is winding down and I have not had a single job interview for a teaching position. It is getting tougher and tougher to maintain a healthy attitude. The closer it gets to moving day, the more I worry about how I am going to make ends meet. is it time to start looking outside of the teaching profession to find a job? It might be. With all of this going on, I feel like my overall attitude has shifted. I have been feeling so much happier over the last few months, but a few weeks ago I could feel myself slipping and now, when I think about how i have been lately, I have fallen. I am not sure when it happened, but my entire attitude has become one of snark, frustration and apathy. It is shocking how much an attitude can effect everything else.

With an I-Do-not-care attitude, everything about my progress has suffered. My routines have not changed much, but nothing feels like it is working. I have never been firmly in the "think positively and good things will happen" camp, but I am beginning to see the merit in it. A small tweak in one's attitude can dramatically change an entire outlook. A positive attitude gets one through the bad days and right now, I need a serious adjustment. I am at the place right now where I assume little things are happening JUST TO ME!!! Gah! This website is slow just to spite me!! What kind of nonsense is that? So the question becomes, when things are truly not going your way in so many aspects, how do you keep your attitude in a positive place? I can count all of the things I have that so many do not. It is not just about focusing on the positive, it is finding a way to turn the negative into something useful. The journey is what is important and what journey would be complete without bumps? All of the best epic stories are about journeys where the heroes encountered seemingly endless trials and tribulations. That has to be my attitude. I have to be the hero in my own story because if I am not the hero in my own story, my story does not have a hero and what kind of story worth telling does not have a hero? No one else is going to come into my story and be my hero, because that is nonsense. Anyone who is waiting to be saved is going to die waiting.

Now comes my work for the next few days: How do I become my own hero? First, I need an awesome crime fighting costume and set of skills. Or maybe, I just need to remind myself that heroes come in all shapes and sizes and what do I need out of myself to consider myself a hero? I feel like I am rambling now. This blog post has gotten away from me a bit, but screw it, I am running with it. For me to be my own hero, I have to get off the ground first. I cannot change the fact that I have not had any job offers, but I can go about making sure I am ready when one comes. I can stop blaming my knee and get myself back out there for a walk or for swimming. Mostly though, I can remind myself that I truly am in a great place in my life. I get to see a majority of my family in two days, I love a beautiful woman in my life who loves me more than I thought anyone would ever love me and I am healthier today than I was four months ago. yes, that is a start, but a set of crime fighting skills would not hurt.

A day before my birthday

Before I head deep into today's post, a little update on my knee. I bit the bullet and saw a doctor this week because I knew I had a show and wanted to understand how much damage I was doing. I have strained ligaments in my knee. I am wearing a brace, icing it a bit and taking Motrin for the pain. I am resting it anytime I am not at the theater. It is frustrating and I feel it is hindering my performance, which really irks me. Okay on to the post.

There are two times of year where I get very reflective: New Year's Day and my birthday. The two days are enough apart that they act as great barometers on my life. I am also very reflective on any day where I am awake and breathing. I cannot help it, my brain is stupid active. It is my blessing and my curse. I turn 32 tomorrow. I do not feel 32 because I do not live the life of so many 32 year old people that I know. When I see former classmates on Facebook, it makes me feel like I am living a very different life. So many of them have families, and are already full into their careers. I live in a house with 3 roommates and and am looking for my first job in my career. I feel like I live the life of a 25 year old. I am not saying it is a good thing, or a bad thing, just that it exists. There are times when I worry that I am not doing it right. What is "it"? Well, life. Then I remember that there is not one specific path that everyone is supposed to follow. We arrive at places on our own time table. And that is what makes this life so interesting.

Beyond that, I like to take stock on my life around my birthday. I like to ask myself where am I in relation to last year. I feel very much in the same place as last year in so many ways. Some might find that kind of stalling a bad thing, but considering for the few years prior to that, I was a depressed mess around my birthday, I will take this place. I am on the verge of finally beginning my career. I have direction. It is shocking how great it can feel to just have an idea of what you are doing in life. However, there is one place where I am truly feeling much better this year. It is this journey I am on. I know this blog has, at times, felt bi-polar. I move back and forth between feeling like I can do anything and feeling that I can do nothing. I think, though, that the fact I am TRYING is what puts me in a better place than last year.

Yes, I have had a series of setbacks. I have had 1 soda every four weeks. I have had McDonald's chicken nuggets twice in the last 8 weeks and I have had stretches where I was not as active as I would like, but last year at this time, I would have had a soda every day for 12 weeks and I would have had more fast food than I could count and I would not have been active at all. Every day I decide to make myself a salad instead of buying a Double Western bacon Cheeseburger, I win. Every day I drink water instead of soda, I win. Wins add up! Small victories are as important as big victories because on tough days, those small victories are worth celebrating. I have lost roughly 30lbs since I started this. Even as my knee issues hold me back, I have not put any weight back on. No, I have not lost much in the last few weeks, but I am still 30lbs lighter than I was 12 weeks or so ago.

I have this horrible habit of not celebrating the victories in my life, but I am trying to change that. My life is changing on a daily basis. I can almost look in the mirror and feel proud of who I am becoming. This is a milestone for me. I am learning to be proud of the things I do, the person I am and the choices I make in my life. Life is so much better when you allow yourself to pause and smile when you do something good. That momentary smile can carry you through a bad stretch. I am doing what I can to smile more. I am doing what I can to recognize when I have accomplished something positive. For so long in my life, I collected negative thoughts and now I am trying to replace those with positive thoughts and every time I succeed, I stop for a second and acknowledge forward progress. Even one step in the right direction gets you closer to your goal. Not every move forward can be a leap, some are baby steps, but turn around and you will see you are that much closer to that goal that once seemed so unattainable.

Awesome Person Moment:
This post's awesome person is a stranger. On the way home from Sacramento this week, I saw an old man get out of his car to fix his tire on the side of the freeway. Moments later I saw a man pull over and begin to help the old man change his tire. I probably would not have stopped because of my knee, but after seeing that, I realized that I need to pull over and help people who need it if I am able to help. So to that random guy who helped an old man, awesome.

I have not found it yet

The setbacks are starting to become more prominent than the advances right now. I wish I knew how to put that into more flowery language, but that is all I have. I have a giant wall of anger and frustration at the end of a long road of setbacks. I was finally feeling better. I finally got back into the water and I was starting to feel that positive momentum shift. Then what happened, I tweaked my knee something fierce. I was on crutches for two days, I have been gimping along in agonizing pain for the three days. I have a new knee brace and the added stress to my left leg to take the weight off the right has caused a different kind of pain. Sunday night I thought it and Monday afternoon I said it: Maybe I am not mentally tough enough for this. I am so down on myself and so down on my body.

I have had to sit for two days during tech week. It is killing me to sit and watch my cast and not be in the trenches with them. It has caused me to really feel angry at myself for letting this happen in the first place. If only I had not gotten obese in the first place, I might not be dealing with this pain right now. Maybe I would be on stage dancing and moving with a cast of people to whom I feel very close. I do not get close to that many casts because, well, because it ends and we move on to the next one. With the short rehearsal process though, I feel like we all got thrown into something and all we have each other and I am on the sidelines watching. Even as I type it, I just get so annoyed with myself.

I know none of this healthy. I know my attitude sucks right now, but what am I supposed to do? I am trying so hard to get my health back (or get my health for the first time) and these constant setbacks are grating. I am slowly trying to build my knee back up. I have exercises to strengthen my legs and I am doing them twice a day. At some point, they have to work, right? At some point I will start to see progress again, right? Please, someone answer in the affirmative here? I am not looking for platitudes of encouragement, I am looking for someone to smack the crap out of me and get me back focused on the positive. I know I am the only one who can do that, but it is so hard. I am tired of hard, just for a little while I would like something easy. Trying to find a job a difficult enough. Why can't my body just allow me this one thing to be easy. Of course I know it is not easy and I know if I get myself back on track and get back to the work, it will pay off and the harder it is, the more satisfying it will be.

So I am left with trying to make sense out of this. I am not one of those everything happens for a reason kind of guys. I find that a real easy way to not take responsibility for actions. it is not how I operate, however, this moment, this constant stream of setbacks has to matter. There must be a lesson for me to learn from this, not because of some cosmic force, or fate but because I need to know there is meaning here. One of the things I have tried to do over the last few years is make sure every experience has meaning. I usually attach meaning to something to make sure it matters. This series of physical setbacks has to lead me somewhere. I just do not know where yet. I am hesitant to push myself too hard right now. I am tentative. I hate living a tentative life. I lived a tentative life for a long time, I think that is partly why I ended up this way in the first place. I want to experience things. I want to apply meaning to these experiences.

This morning I was at a CPR training and our instructor, to break the ice, asked everyone their favorite food and one guy responded "I am adventurous with food, so I am going to say I have not tasted my favorite food yet." I think I can apply this to so many other things in life. What if I have not had my favorite vacation yet? What if I had not tasted my favorite meal, or drank my favorite drank, or reached my favorite happiness? What if I set myself up to constantly be striving to find my favorite things? Would that change my life in some significant way? Would it cause me to experience more things with fresh eyes, fresh perspective? This is a thought, an idea, a theory that I will be molding in the near future. I will almost assuredly come back to this idea on this blog.

One last thing, people are kind of awesome. This might be a bit of a shock to hear from me, but they are. People, in general, have been so great to me. I have spent so many years thinking that people tolerate me. I have spent much of my life thinking that people could not care one way or another about me, but I am finding that to not be true. I know I need to find the right people, but I have a lot of the right people in my life and surrounding my life. it is something I visited on this blog when I got those two amazing gifts, but I want anyone who is reading this to know that every pat on the back, every text, Facebook message and every comment pushes me along. To really start to believe that I have a community of people who care about my welfare is no longer overwhelming, it is just seriously comforting. I can only hope that all of these people feel that I am on their side with whatever they are going through. I have had people open up to me as a result of this blog because people can see part of their struggles in my words and it is not something I take lightly. I am humbled and honored that people want to include me in their life journey and their struggles. So I will just say it again, people are kind of awesome and we should tell people they are awesome when their awesomeness shines through. So I want to publicly tell my Joseph cast that they are awesome. Thy have been helpful, understanding and encouraging these last few days as I have been sidelined. Also, Steve Isaacson, my director is the most supportive person in terms of my weight loss. he always has been. Every time I start to lose weight, he is the first person to notice and always reminds me how much better I look.

One last awesome person moment. Martina, who could be an awesome person moment on a daily basis for me, has been driving me around and doing everything she can to make my stubborn ass sit down and stay down. I love her so much for all of it.

I am going to try and end every blog from now on with an awesome person moment. if you have any, please let me know, I would love to include them.

A mishmash of ideas.

I have been avoiding the blog again. Well, to be fair, I had every intention of posting, but I was waiting for the fog of frustration to lift. yet, here it lingers. I can feel myself slowly moving through the fog, and am starting to see a faint hazy light and am moving in that direction. it has been a trying nine days, and I know this because I am counting the days as if there is something exciting on the precipice. There is not. There is only my hope to be back in a positive space.

I think I need to find a better routine. When summer began I was good at keeping a routine that was healthy. I have gotten away from that. I need to get up in the morning and not at 11 or 12. I need to get back to cooking breakfast so I have the energy in the morning. I need to keep myself going in some direction. I need stimulation of my creative side. I need to try and allow myself time to create something, a poem, a scene, a short story, even if it is just to sing in a room by myself. I need to get the mental aspect on track. This is the big goal in the coming weeks. Give myself time for me to do the things that spark my light, that turn my wheels. I think we underestimate the importance of those activities. I am keeping up with my book a week, which is a good start!

I have been thinking of a cohesive topic for a blog entry, but I am not sure what kinds of things would interest those who keep coming back to this blog. is charting my progress the big reason read, or should I infuse the blog with my thoughts on health related issues, or is this thing best when it is a literal journal? I honestly have no clue. It is weird for me to have a specific focus on a blog about my life. Ugh, I feel like I am rambling tonight.

Focus, focus focus. One thing I have noticed in terms of food is that I am really great at not buying the crappy food I am used to. I love shopping for healthier snacks and entrees. However, when I elsewhere, like at a party of BBQ, I am terrible at keeping myself within my limits. I snack on chips and unhealthy stuff and I eat and eat and eat. Therefore, my will power is still leaving much to be desired. If temptation is put in front of me, I have yet to figure out how to walk away. This is problematic as I am seriously so incredibly popular that I get invited to big happenings at least 4 times a week. This is yet another thing I need to get under my control. Why does it feel like every time I get a handle on something I realize there is work to be done in other areas. My life is a hydra. I cut off one head and two grow back. Perhaps this is why I ignored all of my issues for so many damn years.

I want to end this blog post by briefly commenting on a big entertainment story of the week. No, not Daniel Tosh's idiot "rape joke" although if you want my opinion, just ask. I want to talk about this blog that had a post calling Kate Upton fat. If you are unaware of Kate Upton, stop now, google her, stare at pictures for 30 minutes, then come back. This is not a paragraph to talk about the heavenly nature of Kate Upton's figure, but it is avenue to which get into a bigger discussion about body image. As many of my readers know, most of my closest friends have been girls. This is just how it has always been. Girls are incredibly harsh on themselves, but also insanely cruel to each other. As I have been witness to an insane amount of that, it has made me incredibly self conscious around groups of the opposite sex. If these gorgeous girls are finding the smallest flaws in themselves and in other girls, what are they saying about all of my fat? It is awful the things I can imagine. It is sad how awful we are to each other. Instead of noticing what we like in people, we are so trained to find the flaws, to compete for...well, I do not even fucking know what we are competing for. In order to make us feel less awful, we want to see that other people have these things wrong to. I am desperately trying to find a way to stop that. It makes me sad. I realize I have not directly made a point here. I think the point is, if we focused more energy on the positive, maybe we would all be happier people? I would love to live in a world where every day people talked about the things we like in ourselves and in other people. So I am going to quickly make a list here of 5 things I really like about myself and would like everyone who reads to do the same. (write 5 things you like about yourself, not 5 things you like about me. I am not that self serving.)

1. I never want to stop learning. My mind needs to fed constantly.
2. I am fiercely protective of those I love.
3. I think I am a good writer, but know I should never think I cannot improve.
4. I give really comforting hugs.
5. I am doing everything I can to be a great example to young people.

P.S Mom, I apologize for the F word. I felt it was vital to the paragraph.

As midnight approaches

My dear readers please be prepared for some ugliness. Here I sit in bed on a Sunday night and I am left with only negativity. I have been struggling through some pretty immense pain, physical, mental and emotional. The physical pain is the pain of which I am in least amount of control, so it looms as the most frustrating. My knee is no longer swollen, but there is still this intense burning pain every fourth of fifth step. Adding to that is this severe tightness in my back. It is not a place on my back where I have ever experienced pain before. I can feel it in every single movement I make. How did I hurt it, you ask? I answer with a very sad and pathetic, getting up from the couch. You know you are an obese human being when getting off the couch can trigger this amount of pain. I cannot even express into words how defeated this has left me. I have been working so hard, and I know that this pain is most likely due to the amount of work my body has been getting, but in this moment, it does not help. All it means is that I have been disgustingly unhealthy my entire life. As if I needed yet another reminder of that. I knew this process would be tough, but this two steps forward 1 step back dance I am doing is starting to really get to me.

This physical hiccup paired with yet more financial struggles led to a food breakdown. I truly hate to admit this, but if I am not going to be honest, what is the point? I broke down and bought Taco Bell this week. I just could not handle any of this anymore. If I am not seeing progress, why should I deny myself the food that comforts me. There was a problem with this theory though. See, this food no longer comforts me. Every damn bite I could feel myself judging, well, myself. There is a commercial out right now where a guy who cannot afford a gym membership hires middle school girls to tell him when he is being gross. That is how I felt with every bite of Taco Bell. As soon as I bought it I knew it was a bad idea, but with money being tight, I could not throw it away. I ate it. I ate it all and I drank a large soda. The Taco bell WRECKED me. After roughly 2 months of not putting that crap in my body, my body was not prepared for it. I felt awful. It was not just the mental judging, it was the physical awful. I felt lethargic, and gross. It was clear in that moment, that I cannot continue to put that kind of junk in my body. It was such an interesting experience. I could feel myself hating every single bite, yet I could not stop myself from eating it. It was like I was trying to convince myself that this is exactly what I wanted and needed, but it really was not. Through all of the other doubts and negativity, my food intake has remained pretty healthy, and now I know why. My body does not want this garbage any longer.

So what am I left with on this Sunday night? I am left with a body feeling completely destroyed. Rehearsal was a real struggle for me tonight, but we do not have enough time left for me to sit out numbers, so I powered through. I miss the walking and the swimming. I no longer enjoy sitting around doing nothing. I want to be active. I want to do something and my body is not letting me. This has led to me having a really difficult time keeping myself mentally healthy. I am really down on myself. I have been all weekend. I can tell that I am not myself, but I cannot seem to stop it. I have reverted back, in a way. I pulled away from Martina, momentarily, but I did. I hated it. I just wanted to shut myself in my room and wallow in this awful feeling. It made me angry, which leads me to my next big goal.

When I was younger, like early teenage years, I had a serious temper. There used to be holes, or cracks in the house in which I grew up that were caused by my fists, or by me throwing doors open or closed in a fit of rage. In 8th grade I got into a fight after school with the kid who was basically the only person in 8th grade that did not make fun of me. I beat him up pretty good. I do not say this proudly. It is an embarrassing part of Kyle history, but it exists. After that fight, I vowed to not take my anger out anymore. The problem was that I just stopped dealing with anger all together. I bottle it, badly. I have no idea how to express anger when it happens. I keep it stuffed down until one event, usually tiny, causes me to unload in a way that is completely disproportional to the trigger. This anger has been boiling just below the surface as of late. I can feel it every day. Little things will start to irritate me to the point where I get more frustrated than I should. I need to work on that. I have to learn how to express myself in the moment. I have such fear of being alone, that I am afraid of confronting someone because I feel like they will just leave. It is utterly ridiculous, but there it is.

I am not going to lie. Tonight, I am not loving myself. I have this dark cloud hovering over me and I am not sure how to shake it. I have been moving forward so well, and this roadblock has truly found a way to interrupt my flow. And no one likes to have their flow interrupted. I was hoping as I was writing that writing would maybe shake these feelings, but it honestly has not. I have reached a pretty significant length, and I am still under this grey cloud. There is still so much work I have left to do, and I know this attitude is not going to help push me closer to living a better life. In fact, it is toxic. I have been working to get the toxicity out of my life, but I still have to deal with the toxicity I feel towards myself. When you have told yourself you do not deserve to be happy for so long, it is more of a fight than I thought to remind yourself you do deserve happiness. I deserve happiness, and whoever is reading this does as well. I know I have to shake myself out of this funk, and I hope that this honesty will help me and maybe help someone else. We all hit these roadblocks, it is how we bounce back from them that will determine who we are. it is easy to be positive when things are going well, it is these tough moments that define us and I am no longer accepting personal defeat. I will wake up tomorrow determined to fight back. If I do not fight for myself, how can I expect anyone else to fight for me? See, I knew if I kept writing I would eventually motivate myself.

My physical frustration

Well, the darkside is back. I was in such a groove of positive energy and this damn knee of mine has really brought me down. The tendinitis in my right knee has been causing my knee to be swollen for nearly 48 hours now. I pushed through it yesterday which was probably not my most wise decision. Between choreography on Saturday, dancing at the wedding on Saturday night, choreography on Sunday night and walking to rehearsal on Monday night, my knee is in a bad way. With it, the reminder of why this entire process is so maddening to me.

being obese already puts a tremendous toll on my body and the only way to attempt to alleviate that toll is to get active. However, the more active I get, the more of a toll it takes on my already in pain body. yes, it would have been easier to not just have been grossly fat in the first place, but that shipped sailed many many years ago. All I can do is focus on how to get my life back. Everything was going so well and now that my knee hurts to stand, sit, switch positions, push the gas pedal and certainly do any sort of exercise it reminds me why I always give up. At some point, the pain just becomes too much for me to overcome. The pain outweighs whatever results I see, because I never see the results fast enough to make me forget about the pain. Every time I watch something like The Biggest Loser I get so frustrated because they do not show that aspect of the show. We never see the medical staff of set that is there to make sure no one pushes passed the ability. Well, as someone who is in debt, and cannot afford to ever see a doctor, I have no idea if I am just in pain, or if I am doing serious damage to my knee or to the shoulder that has felt pinched for nearly a week. Without knowing what I am doing to my body, I am left to decide for myself how much to push and right now, I am feeling like I need to ease up just a little bit, at least until the swelling dissipates.

This constant back and forth is starting to weigh heavily on my mind. I know I need this change. I know it is the key to accepting myself and to allowing myself that elusive happiness I am digging for, but what if I cannot get there? What if my body is already too damaged to be helped in a serious way. I know this is a dramatic turn from last week, but such is the life of someone trying very hard to make a severe series of drastic changes. I started to feel myself hit these "what if" scenarios pretty hard two days ago and I have not been able to close the floodgates on them. I am doing everything I can do make the change, but what if it is not enough? Like so much else over the course of my life, what if I am just not good enough, or strong enough to overcome this wave of pain? I am fighting like hell and I think that is all I can do. I have to keep moving forward with the hopes that I will soon find a job, and then be able to afford people to help me really figure this out. Whether that person is a trainer, a doctor, a nutritionist, or maybe one of each, I have no idea. I can only hope that I can hang on long enough to find out if there is something else I should be doing.

I hate feeling like such a downer, and a disappointment, but I think I have to allow myself to have a bad day every once in a while. I just have to get myself out of it before it becomes the predominant thought. I have to know when enough is enough. This is not a pity party, and I am not feeling sorry for myself, I am just frustrated and disheartened today, which in and of itself is progress, because this frustration has always led to a pity party before. I am still going to eat something healthy for dinner and still eat grapes and watermelon as a snack, I am just going to drive to rehearsal tonight and try my best to remain upbeat, but that will be tough tonight.