Writing Marathon - Day 8
I originally only slated this marathon to go for a week. I didn't imagine it would go past that. Some days are easier to write than others. Today I'd rather be doing something else, but there's no room for short cuts.
Today was a gym day. I've lost almost 10 lbs in the last 6 weeks. I haven't had my weight this low in about 7 years. My weight has gone up and down a lot over the years. I was a scrawny kid, but when the depression first started around 11/12, I began to put on the weight. HS graduation was probably the heaviest I've ever been, about 190/195. When I worked at Foodworks and took martial arts, I dropped about 20 lbs and hit 170. That probably went back up for awhile after that, but once I was in college and started hitting the gym, eventually I hit my all time low at 140. I never got the whole six-pack thing going, I'd need to go 10-20 lbs lower for that. That may sound like an unhealthy weight, but for my height it's really not. Technically, according to BMI, 140 is borderline overweight for me, but that's quite skewed considering how muscular I was at the time. After my parents kicked me out, I started putting on the weight again. I went up to 180ish, and that seems to be my ceiling when I'm depressed. When I worked at Apple, I went down to 150, but I had some muscle because my job was walking around all day, and I felt as skinny as when I was 140 oddly, which I've never made sense of. After I left that job I slowly put on weight because of the inactivity, and then came the depression that's lasted to this day. Through some discipline and keeping tabs on what I eat, I negotiated myself back down to 170 in the past few years, and now I'm sitting at about 160. I feel good about my body right now. It feels nice to feel some muscle strength again and to see more more lines instead of curves. The difficult there is not getting complacent, but staying hungry, continuing to push for the next goal instead of being satisfied with what I have...right before I get too lazy to keep it. Right now I'm aiming for the 150 I was when I worked at Apple, but I'm considering trying for that 140 mark again. It'd be nice to hit that benchmark before my 40th and be in almost as good a condition as when I was half that age. My knees certainly aren't the same though, but that's life, I can't emphasis the running the way I used to. I always relied on the excessive cardio to maintain my weight.
*
I was talking to Josh yesterday and I think I'm closer to nailing down why journal writing works so well for me. I already know, it's just putting it in the exact words. It's still about time. See, when I write a sentence, it takes me a lot longer to type it then it does to think it through. Speaker is faster, and can mostly keep pace with what I'm thinking. But, the act of typing, while my brain has thought through the sentence, I can't get far head of that or else I couldn't focus on the words I need to type. It's why I sometimes skip words when typing, inconveniently it's usually a word like "not." I've usually got the idea for the paragraph in my mind, but I get lost in the details of each sentence. As a result, I spend more time thinking about something then I would if I was talking. That forced time spent on each thought or sentence, means different thoughts pop up. Sometimes those different thoughts are digressions that are tangentially related, and sometimes it's a counter point that I would otherwise gloss over because I have time to spot it as it hangs there before I can move on.
*
When I was in HS, an acquitance I knew commented that my song was Billy Joel's The Angry Young Man. In hindsight, I think he read me pretty well. He's the same guy who came up to me after Columbine and apologized for anything he might've done to get on my bad side. as he put, I was the one most likely to snap and go on a killing spree. All boy HS, there wasn't a lot of tact.
I was commenting to my therapist yesterday about the Disturbed song Down With the Sickness. I'd never openly discussed it before, how much the song resonates with me. It's the part of me I do my best to hold back so others don't see, but also keep readily accessible. Most people know the song because it got radio play back in the day, but the radio edit doesn't convey the depths of dark emotions the song is really about. There's a cut out solo late in the song where the singer is re-enacting physical abuse at the hands of his mother as he pleads with her to stop, only for things to swing to a more adult version of him unloading toxicity back upon her - it's the abused becoming the abuser. The sickness is all the awful emotions that come from that, rage being only a piece of what's in there. But what most people don't get about rage, is it feeds off everything around it, the more you fight it, the stronger it gets.
*
My therapist tossed out the idea that my mother was a narcissist yesterday. I meant to write about this in yesterday's entry but passed up on it for later. The reasoning is that she seemed utterly indifferent to the feelings of others and had no remorse. My mother was competitive and felt the need to show she was better then others. My mother's life-long need to be better then her brother is only part of that. There were likely more reasons, but I'm too distracted to write about them...
Because I tabbed over to look at the traits of one. Certain conversations or observations that've come up in the past few months, and I can see how I fit most of those traits myself. I don't have a well-defined sense of self. I understand myself through reflections of others, which historically has been quite true. Arrogance...I don't even need to comment. I've historically not been great at acknowledging the feelings of others, something I went back and forth on. Unreasonable expectations or need for compliance...check. A belief in being special and only understood by other special people...I've been both frustrated and amused at how people never understood me.
Maybe I'm self-diagnosing and falling into that trap. But reading through the list, most of it has applied to me. But some of those things are past. So...am, was, might've been, was on the border of it. I find this all a disturbing rabbit hole to go down and I think it best I leave this alone for now. I'll need to ask my therapist about it to get clarity.
*
Somewhere in the media I consumed, I became interested with the idea of regrets. I liked the idea of not having them when I got older. I devised some ideas on how to do this. (1) Do your best; failure because of laziness was going to create a sense of missing out. (2) Try to envision how you'll feel after making each decision; don't think in terms of immediate gratification but think about you'll feel in the weeks and months to come. (3) Exhaust all options; more of an extension of the 1, but the idea is not to hold back. (4) If it's good enough to live by, it's good enough to die by; last minute reversals because you held back all the emotions you were too afraid to express is foolish. Rule 4 made it difficult to respect my father as I got older...I started forming these rules as a teenager. (5) If you can imagine yourself regretting this on your deathbed, don't do it. (6) Pride and ego aren't good enough reasons to allow others to come to harm. (7) Don't let others pay the price for your personal weaknesses/flaws. These ideas formed part of the core of my determined and often relentless personality. I can say that while these rules may sound sensible, there was a key element missing, because this made it all so much worse. There was no off-switch to my efforts, and it became a set of principles to provide cover for what became antagonistic, abusive and controlling behavior. Regret was always premised upon the fear of loss, but when you try to control too much, you push everyone away. I could never wrap my head around the idea that trying too hard was what was making things worse for me. Looking back, I have a lot of regrets, despite living my life trying to avoid them. The rules were rigid, intractible and missing a sort of heart or balance.
*
There's a recurring pattern in my relationships with others, I either ask for too much or I don't let people do things their own way. It all comes back to control. There've been a number of people who were scared off by the intensity with which I wanted things. Even before i used to say what they were or ask for them, there was a vibe they picked up on, and those who felt it kept me at arm's length. It's one of the reasons I didn't date when I was younger, the women I was attracted would pick up on it. I didn't see it at the time, for a long time really. I think it was Jessie who first pointed it out to me. She couldn't put her finger on it, she just felt I wanted more then she could ever give, and that scared her. Over the years I've thought about her saying that. At first I was angry because she didn't say anything earlier, I couldn't see it in myself and I felt it was unfair to judge me on a feeling, not something I had done. I've come to accept she was right, she saw something and I think others did too.
I used to feel like there was this hole inside me and no matter what I couldn't fill it. Whatever I put in, it didn't fill up. The more I focused on that feeling, the worst it got. I'd talked to Jessie about it once or twice. I don't know if I've ever talked to anyone else about it. In truth, I never did fix the problem. I found that if I just ignored it, it stopped being much of an issue. That may not sound like a healthy solution, it's always sounded better in my head. Ignoring things isn't really my go-to solution in general, but in this case it seems to work well enough. I don't think it ever closes the hole, just makes it smaller, reducing it's radius. It's entirely possible it's hamstrung me for years and I wasn't realizing it. Hard to gauge the effect it has when you're ignoring it, because that's still better then the alternative.
What is the hole. I never knew back then and i haven't thought about it in so long I don't have a feeling in my gut telling what it is. If i had to guess, I'd say it's the hole left from my abusive childhood, the absence of unconditional parental love. And maybe it's tied to this sense of loneliness that's usually plagued me. In my notepad I wrote that loneliness is part of what defines me. At the same time, I also feel like I've gotten a better handle on managing that pain over the last several years. I used to act out a bit more about it. I made a certain peace with it as my isolation is also self-imposed so I wouldn't hurt people.
*
This entry really went into a darker place then I thought it would. Sort of a self-hate vibe going on now. And yet I don't feel it emotionally because each section was written independently, sort of jumping around to shorter topics I could talk about in the time I had to devote today. It wasn't pre-meditated to go in that direction and the ideas weren't connected, so it hasn't sunk in emotionally. Hopefully it'll stay that way. I think I've got 2 long entries left to write, stories or large topics I can't break down. I think that'll be the last of the marathon.
I'll end on one more unrelated topic that isn't so morbid.
One of the biggest influences on my attitude towards alcohol comes from an anime, the Ruruoni Kenshin oav. Feudal Japan, swordsman, yada yada, not important. The whole story is a flashback, set apart from the rest of the series. It details Kenshin as a younger, more headstrong and foolish student out to save the world. His master by all rights should be a drunkard with how much they depict him drinking, but one of the things he says is that if the sake tastes bad, there's nothing wrong with the sake, it's something wrong in you. That stuck with me and over time really expanded in view.
Alcohol lowers in inhibitions. The only context people really bring that up is in school, when they're warning you about impaired judgment. But I let go of that idea because inhibitions are about that little voice in your head that tells you not to do things. And when you're depressed or have anxiety or you're shy, that little voice isn't always right - sometimes it's the inner-bully keeping you down. It's the voice that says they're all going to laugh at you. It's also the voice that says you shouldn't curse out your boss because then you'll get fired. It's the voice of self-control.
So, cross these two things, and alcohol is what weakens your self-control. But that isn't something you need to worry about unless your self-control is what's protecting you. If you're anxious, alcohol quiets that voice and allows you to relax. If you're depressed and hate yourself, well alcohol is gonna turn off the voice that's keeping that in check. Same if you're really hurt, sad or angry. It let's out what you're bottling up. If what you're bottling up needs to be clamped down, then don't drink. If you're stressed and anxious and that's holding you down, alcohol is gonna let out the fun being stifled. If you're an angry drunk, it's not the alcohol's fault, you just need help dealing with your problems.
My parents exposed me to alcohol early on, light stuff and in small quantities. Enough that I didn't have the rush to drink myself into unconsciousness when I got to college or whenever people experience freedom. Derek was the one who got me drunk when I was 17, but man we accidently over-did it. Still, I was somewhat amusing in my drunkeness. Foodworks got a liquor license and started selling sake when they added a sushi bar. So on some weekends I'd pick up some beers for my friends and some sake for me. Near the end of my time working there, I felt it was happening too often that after the work week was over I'd down enough sake to get pretty drunk and then fall asleep from exhaustion. Once a week isn't the worst at that age, and this was over a 2-3 month period, but it was more then I'd ever been drinking before and I was worried it was becoming a habit. So, once I left the job, I stopped drinking entirely. There was also a bad night where Nicole, the girl I theoretically dated online back in HS, died, and I just drank myself silly that night. There was a drunken email to Jessie I'm still embarassed about. So, the rule after that was not to drink when I'm upset.
Amusingly, this was before I went to college or turned 21. I didn't drink again until my last semester of college. I felt like I was in a different headspace and didn't need to be worried. But I also made a point to only socially drink. I also began experimenting with what my tolerence was, testing how I'd react after every drink. I learned how not to get sick, but also what my different stages of drunkeness looked like and how much it took to reach each one. I also learned that if I didn't want to give up control, I didn't have to. Just because alcohol lowered my inhibitions doesn't mean I couldn't elevate them enough to overcome the effects when I wanted. In short, being a control freak means I don't get to blame the alcohol for anything, and I'm always fully aware of every decision I make, with full recall afterwards.
I've only ever made one exception to the no drinking when upset rule. I slowly laxed on other rules. Nowadays, my body tells me when it wants a drink. Mostly it responds to stress and anxiety. The rest of the time, I don't want to drink and avoid it. If I can get in the mood, I'll try a drink and the first sip tells me if I'm going to be drinking anymore. When my body doesn't want a drink, I get a shudder down my spine and sometimes the alcohol doesn't taste very good. I drank a bunch back in January after Daniel left, the whole thing made me angry, anxious and upset. Since then I've barely touched the stuff. I forced myself to finish one drink on St. Patrick's day. And a month ago me and Josh went through a large bottle of wine because it's the feast night tradition. That's not bad for 5 months. And right now I still don't have a desire to drink. But I also know I'll have a lot to drink at the end of July annual bbq, and I may not want to drink for 3-4 months after that.
Today was a gym day. I've lost almost 10 lbs in the last 6 weeks. I haven't had my weight this low in about 7 years. My weight has gone up and down a lot over the years. I was a scrawny kid, but when the depression first started around 11/12, I began to put on the weight. HS graduation was probably the heaviest I've ever been, about 190/195. When I worked at Foodworks and took martial arts, I dropped about 20 lbs and hit 170. That probably went back up for awhile after that, but once I was in college and started hitting the gym, eventually I hit my all time low at 140. I never got the whole six-pack thing going, I'd need to go 10-20 lbs lower for that. That may sound like an unhealthy weight, but for my height it's really not. Technically, according to BMI, 140 is borderline overweight for me, but that's quite skewed considering how muscular I was at the time. After my parents kicked me out, I started putting on the weight again. I went up to 180ish, and that seems to be my ceiling when I'm depressed. When I worked at Apple, I went down to 150, but I had some muscle because my job was walking around all day, and I felt as skinny as when I was 140 oddly, which I've never made sense of. After I left that job I slowly put on weight because of the inactivity, and then came the depression that's lasted to this day. Through some discipline and keeping tabs on what I eat, I negotiated myself back down to 170 in the past few years, and now I'm sitting at about 160. I feel good about my body right now. It feels nice to feel some muscle strength again and to see more more lines instead of curves. The difficult there is not getting complacent, but staying hungry, continuing to push for the next goal instead of being satisfied with what I have...right before I get too lazy to keep it. Right now I'm aiming for the 150 I was when I worked at Apple, but I'm considering trying for that 140 mark again. It'd be nice to hit that benchmark before my 40th and be in almost as good a condition as when I was half that age. My knees certainly aren't the same though, but that's life, I can't emphasis the running the way I used to. I always relied on the excessive cardio to maintain my weight.
*
I was talking to Josh yesterday and I think I'm closer to nailing down why journal writing works so well for me. I already know, it's just putting it in the exact words. It's still about time. See, when I write a sentence, it takes me a lot longer to type it then it does to think it through. Speaker is faster, and can mostly keep pace with what I'm thinking. But, the act of typing, while my brain has thought through the sentence, I can't get far head of that or else I couldn't focus on the words I need to type. It's why I sometimes skip words when typing, inconveniently it's usually a word like "not." I've usually got the idea for the paragraph in my mind, but I get lost in the details of each sentence. As a result, I spend more time thinking about something then I would if I was talking. That forced time spent on each thought or sentence, means different thoughts pop up. Sometimes those different thoughts are digressions that are tangentially related, and sometimes it's a counter point that I would otherwise gloss over because I have time to spot it as it hangs there before I can move on.
*
When I was in HS, an acquitance I knew commented that my song was Billy Joel's The Angry Young Man. In hindsight, I think he read me pretty well. He's the same guy who came up to me after Columbine and apologized for anything he might've done to get on my bad side. as he put, I was the one most likely to snap and go on a killing spree. All boy HS, there wasn't a lot of tact.
I was commenting to my therapist yesterday about the Disturbed song Down With the Sickness. I'd never openly discussed it before, how much the song resonates with me. It's the part of me I do my best to hold back so others don't see, but also keep readily accessible. Most people know the song because it got radio play back in the day, but the radio edit doesn't convey the depths of dark emotions the song is really about. There's a cut out solo late in the song where the singer is re-enacting physical abuse at the hands of his mother as he pleads with her to stop, only for things to swing to a more adult version of him unloading toxicity back upon her - it's the abused becoming the abuser. The sickness is all the awful emotions that come from that, rage being only a piece of what's in there. But what most people don't get about rage, is it feeds off everything around it, the more you fight it, the stronger it gets.
*
My therapist tossed out the idea that my mother was a narcissist yesterday. I meant to write about this in yesterday's entry but passed up on it for later. The reasoning is that she seemed utterly indifferent to the feelings of others and had no remorse. My mother was competitive and felt the need to show she was better then others. My mother's life-long need to be better then her brother is only part of that. There were likely more reasons, but I'm too distracted to write about them...
Because I tabbed over to look at the traits of one. Certain conversations or observations that've come up in the past few months, and I can see how I fit most of those traits myself. I don't have a well-defined sense of self. I understand myself through reflections of others, which historically has been quite true. Arrogance...I don't even need to comment. I've historically not been great at acknowledging the feelings of others, something I went back and forth on. Unreasonable expectations or need for compliance...check. A belief in being special and only understood by other special people...I've been both frustrated and amused at how people never understood me.
Maybe I'm self-diagnosing and falling into that trap. But reading through the list, most of it has applied to me. But some of those things are past. So...am, was, might've been, was on the border of it. I find this all a disturbing rabbit hole to go down and I think it best I leave this alone for now. I'll need to ask my therapist about it to get clarity.
*
Somewhere in the media I consumed, I became interested with the idea of regrets. I liked the idea of not having them when I got older. I devised some ideas on how to do this. (1) Do your best; failure because of laziness was going to create a sense of missing out. (2) Try to envision how you'll feel after making each decision; don't think in terms of immediate gratification but think about you'll feel in the weeks and months to come. (3) Exhaust all options; more of an extension of the 1, but the idea is not to hold back. (4) If it's good enough to live by, it's good enough to die by; last minute reversals because you held back all the emotions you were too afraid to express is foolish. Rule 4 made it difficult to respect my father as I got older...I started forming these rules as a teenager. (5) If you can imagine yourself regretting this on your deathbed, don't do it. (6) Pride and ego aren't good enough reasons to allow others to come to harm. (7) Don't let others pay the price for your personal weaknesses/flaws. These ideas formed part of the core of my determined and often relentless personality. I can say that while these rules may sound sensible, there was a key element missing, because this made it all so much worse. There was no off-switch to my efforts, and it became a set of principles to provide cover for what became antagonistic, abusive and controlling behavior. Regret was always premised upon the fear of loss, but when you try to control too much, you push everyone away. I could never wrap my head around the idea that trying too hard was what was making things worse for me. Looking back, I have a lot of regrets, despite living my life trying to avoid them. The rules were rigid, intractible and missing a sort of heart or balance.
*
There's a recurring pattern in my relationships with others, I either ask for too much or I don't let people do things their own way. It all comes back to control. There've been a number of people who were scared off by the intensity with which I wanted things. Even before i used to say what they were or ask for them, there was a vibe they picked up on, and those who felt it kept me at arm's length. It's one of the reasons I didn't date when I was younger, the women I was attracted would pick up on it. I didn't see it at the time, for a long time really. I think it was Jessie who first pointed it out to me. She couldn't put her finger on it, she just felt I wanted more then she could ever give, and that scared her. Over the years I've thought about her saying that. At first I was angry because she didn't say anything earlier, I couldn't see it in myself and I felt it was unfair to judge me on a feeling, not something I had done. I've come to accept she was right, she saw something and I think others did too.
I used to feel like there was this hole inside me and no matter what I couldn't fill it. Whatever I put in, it didn't fill up. The more I focused on that feeling, the worst it got. I'd talked to Jessie about it once or twice. I don't know if I've ever talked to anyone else about it. In truth, I never did fix the problem. I found that if I just ignored it, it stopped being much of an issue. That may not sound like a healthy solution, it's always sounded better in my head. Ignoring things isn't really my go-to solution in general, but in this case it seems to work well enough. I don't think it ever closes the hole, just makes it smaller, reducing it's radius. It's entirely possible it's hamstrung me for years and I wasn't realizing it. Hard to gauge the effect it has when you're ignoring it, because that's still better then the alternative.
What is the hole. I never knew back then and i haven't thought about it in so long I don't have a feeling in my gut telling what it is. If i had to guess, I'd say it's the hole left from my abusive childhood, the absence of unconditional parental love. And maybe it's tied to this sense of loneliness that's usually plagued me. In my notepad I wrote that loneliness is part of what defines me. At the same time, I also feel like I've gotten a better handle on managing that pain over the last several years. I used to act out a bit more about it. I made a certain peace with it as my isolation is also self-imposed so I wouldn't hurt people.
*
This entry really went into a darker place then I thought it would. Sort of a self-hate vibe going on now. And yet I don't feel it emotionally because each section was written independently, sort of jumping around to shorter topics I could talk about in the time I had to devote today. It wasn't pre-meditated to go in that direction and the ideas weren't connected, so it hasn't sunk in emotionally. Hopefully it'll stay that way. I think I've got 2 long entries left to write, stories or large topics I can't break down. I think that'll be the last of the marathon.
I'll end on one more unrelated topic that isn't so morbid.
One of the biggest influences on my attitude towards alcohol comes from an anime, the Ruruoni Kenshin oav. Feudal Japan, swordsman, yada yada, not important. The whole story is a flashback, set apart from the rest of the series. It details Kenshin as a younger, more headstrong and foolish student out to save the world. His master by all rights should be a drunkard with how much they depict him drinking, but one of the things he says is that if the sake tastes bad, there's nothing wrong with the sake, it's something wrong in you. That stuck with me and over time really expanded in view.
Alcohol lowers in inhibitions. The only context people really bring that up is in school, when they're warning you about impaired judgment. But I let go of that idea because inhibitions are about that little voice in your head that tells you not to do things. And when you're depressed or have anxiety or you're shy, that little voice isn't always right - sometimes it's the inner-bully keeping you down. It's the voice that says they're all going to laugh at you. It's also the voice that says you shouldn't curse out your boss because then you'll get fired. It's the voice of self-control.
So, cross these two things, and alcohol is what weakens your self-control. But that isn't something you need to worry about unless your self-control is what's protecting you. If you're anxious, alcohol quiets that voice and allows you to relax. If you're depressed and hate yourself, well alcohol is gonna turn off the voice that's keeping that in check. Same if you're really hurt, sad or angry. It let's out what you're bottling up. If what you're bottling up needs to be clamped down, then don't drink. If you're stressed and anxious and that's holding you down, alcohol is gonna let out the fun being stifled. If you're an angry drunk, it's not the alcohol's fault, you just need help dealing with your problems.
My parents exposed me to alcohol early on, light stuff and in small quantities. Enough that I didn't have the rush to drink myself into unconsciousness when I got to college or whenever people experience freedom. Derek was the one who got me drunk when I was 17, but man we accidently over-did it. Still, I was somewhat amusing in my drunkeness. Foodworks got a liquor license and started selling sake when they added a sushi bar. So on some weekends I'd pick up some beers for my friends and some sake for me. Near the end of my time working there, I felt it was happening too often that after the work week was over I'd down enough sake to get pretty drunk and then fall asleep from exhaustion. Once a week isn't the worst at that age, and this was over a 2-3 month period, but it was more then I'd ever been drinking before and I was worried it was becoming a habit. So, once I left the job, I stopped drinking entirely. There was also a bad night where Nicole, the girl I theoretically dated online back in HS, died, and I just drank myself silly that night. There was a drunken email to Jessie I'm still embarassed about. So, the rule after that was not to drink when I'm upset.
Amusingly, this was before I went to college or turned 21. I didn't drink again until my last semester of college. I felt like I was in a different headspace and didn't need to be worried. But I also made a point to only socially drink. I also began experimenting with what my tolerence was, testing how I'd react after every drink. I learned how not to get sick, but also what my different stages of drunkeness looked like and how much it took to reach each one. I also learned that if I didn't want to give up control, I didn't have to. Just because alcohol lowered my inhibitions doesn't mean I couldn't elevate them enough to overcome the effects when I wanted. In short, being a control freak means I don't get to blame the alcohol for anything, and I'm always fully aware of every decision I make, with full recall afterwards.
I've only ever made one exception to the no drinking when upset rule. I slowly laxed on other rules. Nowadays, my body tells me when it wants a drink. Mostly it responds to stress and anxiety. The rest of the time, I don't want to drink and avoid it. If I can get in the mood, I'll try a drink and the first sip tells me if I'm going to be drinking anymore. When my body doesn't want a drink, I get a shudder down my spine and sometimes the alcohol doesn't taste very good. I drank a bunch back in January after Daniel left, the whole thing made me angry, anxious and upset. Since then I've barely touched the stuff. I forced myself to finish one drink on St. Patrick's day. And a month ago me and Josh went through a large bottle of wine because it's the feast night tradition. That's not bad for 5 months. And right now I still don't have a desire to drink. But I also know I'll have a lot to drink at the end of July annual bbq, and I may not want to drink for 3-4 months after that.