My brain is spinning around tying knots in itself.
I’m anxious. Concerned.
Some recent events in my life have significantly increased the pressure that I feel to pin down what I believe in my heart of hearts to be true about this life and eternity.
An effort that would perhaps bless me more than anyone else, but one that I hope would also be a blessing to others.
I want to stop running.
I want to stop avoiding.
I want to find the ground upon which to place my feet again.
There’s so much spinning around in my brain. A million thoughts compete for primacy.
I’m always overwhelmed.
That’s why so many efforts to escape into fiction. My brain never stops. It’s always full go, gathering data, analyzing, planning, preparing…
Think about one thing at a time?
Fat chance. I’m thinking about everything and everyone. I’m concerned about everything and everyone.
My brain is so full that I run all over trying to slow it down, trying to avoid thinking because thinking exponentially multiplies the combinations of thoughts that build upon one another, synapses firing a million times a second with thoughts on 80 different trails at once through the forest of my mind.
Perhaps that’s why I enjoy the outdoors so much. Nature is so much… simpler. So much… quieter.
But I can’t fully enjoy it because my heart and mind scream at me–the vision of my potential, a potential I’ve never realized, haunting me, cementing the utter loss of confidence in myself as I see myself, day after day, fail to live up to my own standards for myself, standards no one else in the universe has set upon me but I myself.
What do I believe? What do I truly, deep down believe?
I’ve avoided the heavy lifting this question requires of me. There’s a level of PTSD behind it. I’m afraid to face it. I’m afraid I already know the answer.
I don’t want to go back.
But my heart is still there… more than it isn’t.
Oh, b I wish this journey were at an end.
But in some ways, it’s just beginning.
I’m in a pit. I don’t know how to get out. It’s a pit that has swallowed my hopes, my dreams, my energy, my ambition, my belief in myself, my belief in good things to come, for myself and for the world.
It’s dark.
It’s encompassing.
I keep wanting to try, but there’s no energy or real hope in the effort. Eventually the winning ideology takes over–“What’s the use? Nothing will get better. Nothing will make a real difference. Things won’t get better. They’ll just get worse.”
How do I get out of this pit?
I’m still swallowed, buried by all the stuff that still hasn’t sold. I’m still overwhelmed by the comparatively little effort needed to do my nonprofit stuff.
[sigh]
I’ve got to figure this out.
And soon.
…
In other news, it would be good if I would take the time to go get work gloves when I’m working outdoors cleaning up the woods and beautifying everything.
Splinters. Thorns. They break off inside my fingers and hands on a regular basis. They break off and leave no Trace except for pain to touch, letting me know there’s a splinter buried deep down invisible from the surface.
Ugh.
Yes, gloves would be good.
I’m still waiting for my power station to arrive. It’s been stuck in Texas for the last almost 4 days now.
Realistically, that means it’s been lost. That’s generally the result when this has happened in the past. It was supposedly supposed to have been delivered on monday. Well, that came and went, and it’s still supposedly sitting in Texas somewhere.
I answered 24 questions today.
That’s a fairly decent number. Were I to do that everyday, that would be a fairly decent living.
It’s been getting harder and harder, though. The question quality has been getting worse and worse, with few reasonable questions to answer.
Believe it or not, at this point, the vast majority of people I work with are people who didn’t realize what our company does and pretty much accidentally bought a membership that they want refunded.
So I spend more time being a customer service representative than I do being an online mechanic.
Which I’m guessing probably contributes fairly significantly to negative reviews, as I deal with a lot of very angry people when I choose to accept those questions.
It was chest/tricep day at the gym today, and everything was great until the very last rep of the very last set of my very last exercise, during which I strained my left rhomboid.
At least I think that’s probably the muscle. Whichever muscle is kind of right in that spot that’s the stereotypical starting spot for giving someone a back massage (where your thumbs would go if your fingers are over their shoulders).
It’s been somewhat painful, but not awful.
Not sure what it’s going to do for my exercise routines. I can’t be stupid. I have to ease up a bit so as not to make it worse.
Ugh.
I always eventually end up straining something. My soft tissues never have been able to handle the weights I lift. Something always gets strained, whether it’s a muscle or a ligament or something.
The only positive was that I strained it while having successfully moved up to three sets of five dips, and that comes after already doing three other exercises three sets of 10, all working the triceps super strongly, so by the time I get to dips, my triceps are already pretty exhausted.
So it was a success… until it wasn’t.
I did manage to force myself to do cardio. I hate hate hate cardio. Give me a basketball and some people to play with, and I’ll play basketball until I drop over dead with exhaustion. Put me on a treadmill or a stair stepper machine or any of those darn cardio machines, and I’m looking at the clock and wishing to be done in 10 minutes.
But I stuck it out, bumping up the speed of the stair stepping machine to level seven and doing 30 minutes of dripping sweatiness.
🥵
Here is a virgin fear for you: That’s one of my fears about sex, I get hot really easily, and I sweat profusely.
Seems like a pretty yucky experience, not to mention embarrassing. 😅
But what do I know. I’ve got a big aging zero in the way of experience there.
After the gym, I dropped four tires off at the Rogers recycling center. No one else has taken any of the tires that I gathered up when I was cleaning up the hill last year.
It’s discouraging, but I took four more today, and I reached out to one of the Hill family and asked them if they would take some.
Then I headed up to Pea Ridge and hung out at the Wendy’s there answering JustAnswer questions and improving my collection of canned replies.
I invited my mom to come join me, and she came and hung out for a little while, and we chatted in between questions that I was responding to.
From there it was back to Rogers. I spent probably an hour standing in front of the blender aisle at the Walmart Supercenter trying to figure out what blender to buy, watching a YouTube video from the project farm dude, reading through recommendations online, etc.
The more I go through those Top 10 ratings sites online, the less I trust any of them.
That’s why I’m grateful for people who do things like the guy who does Project Farm. Great stuff.
Then I headed over to the Planet Fitness parking lot for a while… Just to keep moving, so as to not stay too long in the same place.
I’m tired.
I finished watching mission impossible, dead reckoning. The last mission impossible comes out in a couple months or three.
I like Tom Cruise movies, generally, despite the ridicule he gets for his Scientology affiliation. Though I’ve only ever seen him in movies and interviews, I like the guy, at last what I’ve seen of him.
I’m tired.
Good night, world.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Oh, and I’m a little worried today. For some reason, tonight, both my right and left heels went numb, and then when I got the feeling back, probably an hour later, my left leg, most of my quad and some of my hamstring went completely numb.
What on earth is going on with my nerves?
😳
Lift the World 