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.

Slogging through the remnants of a broken shell

Well readers, here I sit, still on bed rest from this back injury. I have about 70% of my motion back. It no longer hurts in the standing up position, but if I am up for too long it hurts. It mostly huts in the transition from sitting to standing, but it is still causing me too much pain to be terribly physical. As a result, I am in a funk. I am kind of a mess tonight. Do not get my wrong, I have loved playing hours of video games, watching the entire first season of SUITS, reading 2 full novels and watching movies. It has been a nice start to summer vacation, but it is not how I envisioned my summer starting.

If you know me pretty well, which some of do, and some of you are learning, you would know I am a man who lives and dies by plans. I love plans. I love to have my entire week planned sometimes. It is a sickness, but it calms me down, especially when so much of my life right now is up in the air. Will I have a job in Sept? Where will I be living in 2 months? I have no clue, but I can tell you what I will be doing Friday afternoon at roughly 3:30 in the afternoon and that calms me down. With Martina having been gone the last 5 days, I had a whole routine planned out to keep me moving forward without her here to help. She may or may not know it, but her constant support keeps my wheels turning on days that are rough. I knew I would keep to this routine, because I like routines, but after cleaning the whole house on Saturday my back gave out and my entire routine went away. So instead of just not knowing about a job and a house, I was now worrying about how I would recover from this extended lay off. Do not tell me it is silly or that I think too much, I already know that. I am the one lives inside of this brain 24/7. I am the one who used to debate calling any friend of mine for 25 minutes before making the call because I was sure that person did not want to talk to me, or would only answer because he or she felt obligated. No one would really willingly talk to me.

Okay, way off topic. Wow, where was I? Yes, my routine. It did not go as planned. I did a pretty good job of my goal to still eat better. Yes, after spending roughly 48hrs alone with my thoughts, I caved and ordered a pizza and drank a liter of soda. But I did not drink the second liter and I only ate half of the pizza. I told my roommate to eat the rest. I did not beat myself up too badly for the soda, which is certainly progress. However, these 5 days of basic isolation from the world have given me time to think long and hard about my life and how I ended up this way. I have been really thinking about my life and the people in it and the decisions I have made. I have been trying to find points of my life to which I can trace some of these issues. Has anyone else ever done that? I mean, wow, that a crappy, brutal, sad process. I truly believe it is necessary, but it can really bring you down. When you really sit back and examine some of the choices you have made in life, it can be more than an eye opener, it is like your entire brain explodes and rebuilds itself with this new understanding.

it hurt. It is still hurting. I know there are quotes about blowing things up to put them back together, and I guess that is what I am doing. I have to explode the shell of who I have been, or who I have tried to be and who everyone sees me as, and find a way to rebuild myself into someone I can look at in the mirror and be proud of. the last few days I have really tried to think about the last time I could say I was truly proud of myself. It is sad that I went through this teacher program, graduated from college, got great roles in theater, and I cannot think of the last time I was actually proud of myself. It was a shocking realization. I have become so crippled in my life by my own self doubt, my "monsters" as I have been referring to my self doubt as, that I have not been proud of these very big accomplishments. It has been an interesting few days inside my head.

However, the metaphorical light at the end is that I realize this now. I am aware. Self-awareness is always a blessing and a curse, but I can make the changes now that I see it. I know that I have to be less hard on myself. I have spent so much time beating myself up before anyone else could get to it and it is not going to fly anymore. I feel like this blog has really been more of a chronicle of my journey to mental health, which is not at all what I intended, when I started. I think I am much more mentally unhealthy than I realized when I began this process.

The best thing to happen to me over the last few days was getting Erik back. Since his own life change partially inspired my desire to like myself more, it is really great to have him around. His constant support has helped me in so many situations over the last 7 or 8 years that I know he is going to be there through this as well. Plus, no one knows my predilection for awful self thoughts more than he does and he knows to tell me when I am being ridiculous.

Tomorrow I am going to try and get back in the water for swimming. Tomorrow I am going to try and wake up and remind myself that I have some pretty damn good things going on and I would not have these great things if I was not deserving of them. Tomorrow I am going to wake up and remind myself that this is a daily life change and when you attempt to change your entire life, and your entire routine, it is going to take time and that is okay. Tomorrow I am going to wake up and tell myself 5 things I like about myself and 1 thing I love about myself. I suggest anyone having a tough time do the same thing. I have people who love me, so I must be doing something right. Now, to get out there and love myself. (Shockingly, I do not mean that in a dirty way.)

My reluctant weekend of relaxation

I just powered through the last week of school, which puts me at the end of the most emotional 9 months of my life. it was stressful, amazing, depressing, exhilarating and every emotion in between. Yes, I have arrived at the end of my student teaching. Well, technically I have one more day, but I am essentially done. In accordance with that, my body is RUNDOWN. I have been in a constant state of go, go ,go for 9 months and my body senses the end. However, I pushed myself this week. I walked for an hour in circles at a mall on Tuesday, even though I was beat, I swam without any breaks one day and I did not sleep that well on top of it. Because of it, I have suffered my first injury. I have strained some muscles in my back. I have not sought help, but I have suffered this once before and this is exactly what it felt like, so I am making a bit of an assumption. Therefore, I am deeming this weekend, a weekend of rest. It means I will not be swimming, walking, or running. I need to let my back heal, so I can hit the ground running when I am up to it.

There is a part of me that wants nothing more to just revel in this rest. I love video games, books, movies and lounging in bed. It suits who I am as a mostly indoor type person. However, I have this momentum and now it is stalled. I am worried that in two of three days, I am going to fall right back into the old habits of my life. I am going to get so comfortable playing video games for more than an hour a day, or enjoy watching an entire season of some show and when I feel better, I am going to not feel like I want to get out there in the heat and continue this journey. of course, the biggest reason I am trying to make this change is so that I am not hurting as much. I know this injury is mostly due to the weight I am carrying. However, in order to lose the weight, I have to be up and moving all of this weight. It is no wonder people give up. It is no wonder why I have given up every single time I tried. Hell, one time I lost nearly 75lbs in a little over two years, and instead of continuing, I gave up. It just got too hard. My body ached too much. I was not seeing the results enough and it was just too easy to stop.

Therefore, my goal over the next week is to not let myself quit. I need to let myself rest this weekend and until I feel comfortable moving again, but I need to keep my mind focused. I think a big part of that will be making sure I still eat healthy this weekend. If I can keep part of my routine going, I will have a better shot and getting myself back into the swing of things. See, the big thing here is, I am not sure how much healthier I am physically right now. I have lost nearly 20 lbs in the month that i have done this, but I am feeling rundown. I am hurting. However, emotionally and mentally I in the best place I have been in years. I am having life altering realizations about how I have lived my life. I am making healthy changes in who I am as a person and how I relate to myself. I am not waking up every day hating everything about myself and feeling like the only way to get validation is to get it from outside sources. I am doing things for me. I am making healthy life decisions. And it is all connected, so I know that even if the weight is not coming of like I want, or if I do not see any change in my appearance, I know it is helping in other aspects and that it will all eventually work together to make me the best version of myself I can be. I can be the version all of my loved ones have told me I can be, but never believed myself.

But for today, I rest. I watch episode after episode of SUITS, or maybe go rent a movie, and definitely play a multitude of video games. Hopefully, I will feel up to going shopping for fruits and vegetables later, but as of now the pain in back is so severe, leaning down to fill my water bottle nearing caused me tears. Oh to be healthy.