Probably one of the most frustrating things about being me (besides the whole insulin thing) is the fact that I have to go to the gym 4-5 times a week just to, like, maintain my current weight.
I get lazy, I slack off and just do two days a week, I play a few video games, and 8 weeks later my clothes don’t fit as well and I’m starting to feel doughy.
This annoys me.
It annoys me because I do 15 min of free weights every morning, I’m not allowed to food binge anymore, I miss doughnuts and pasta and bread, and still. 4-5 days a week, or it’s back to doughy. And you know, I’m not a small person to begin with. So just to stay intimidating as opposed to doughy, I have to invest… time. Also, there’s that whole, I don’t feel like buying new clothes thing. So.
I could wish for all sorts of things. Like a body that was better regulated, more interested in exercise and less in food, or more interested in running than more sendentary stuff like, well, writing.
But that’s like wishing that I could make insulin. It’s like wishing that I wouldn’t be me.
And this is what I am. So this is what I have to work with. This is how it rolls, so you have to roll with it.
Part of growing up has just been accepting that this is me. This is how I work. In some areas of my life, I have to work harder than other people just to look “average.” And sometimes I have to work really hard just to appear “passable.”
Other times, of course, I am just shit brilliant.
But the trickier stuff, the bullshit that annoys me (boo hoo I have to work so hard), it’s really not worth fighting, or bitching about. You just pick who you want to be, and you act like that person. You do the things you need to do to get there. 30-50 on the elliptical 4-5 days a week, plus my two days of weight training at work, and the free weights in the morning, is what it takes to be where I want to be.
So that’s what ya do.
In any case, it’s been back to the gym this week, which is good in a lot of ways. My mood was starting to take a nose dive again, and I was having trouble staying motivated at night (hence the lack of proper writing, too). Gym time gets me out of the house, away from the computer, and away from my sugar free, fat free chocolate pudding and flourless peanut butter cookies (mmmmmm cookies!).
Those exercise minutes are also good book brainstorming sessions. I’m trying to think through how the end of book 2 gets me through book 3 (yes, I have synopses, but I need to fill those in in my head), and I have a lot of character sketches to work out. The trouble with trilogies is that the best kinds are the ones that look like you knew what the hell you were doing when you wrote the first sentence of the first book.
I did not, in fact, have any idea what I was doing when I wrote the first sentence of the first book.
But if I can knock out book 2 and have a lot of book 3 in my head when I start editor revisions on book 1, I can give the illusion that I was really brilliant when I was writing the first sentence of the first book.
As opposed to just shit lucky.
So that’s what I’m up to.
Wild times, I know.
