Shut Down & Restart
I’m exhausted.
It isn’t so much physical exhaustion but a mental exhaustion. As someone on the autism spectrum, my brain processes data differently than most people.
It’s like my brain is firing on all cylinders, which just hurts. Work. Plague. Concerned about the protestors and their civil rights. Every morning, expecting something else to come up to pile on to my brain.
The lack of a consistent schedule has also contributed to this. My mental health has become very dependent over the years on a consistent schedule. The anxiety of “unknown” plays it’s toll on me.
When all of this is stacked up, I just need to sit in quiet and let my brain “empty out”. The problem is lately my brain has been having trouble emptying. The result is that on top of everything else, insomnia kicks in.
Stack onto this my normal self deprecation and negative thinking, which has been my nature for as long as I can remember. (There’s a longer story about that which I am working on and will be posted later this month.) I’ve spent months beating myself up mentally for not hitting goals, not moving forward. I know it’s a weird circumstance, but I still unfortunately beat myself up over it.
All of this makes not want to do... well, sometimes anything. As a result, I start missing workouts, or not doing what I should be doing, or just letting my diet go to crap.
The good news is that reprieve is just around the bend. My gym reopens Monday with regular daily classes in the gym. This is giving me an opportunity to do a full on respawn.
If you don’t know what a “respawn” is, it’s a video game term where when your character dies, it regenerates at a previous location and gets another term. Just as a phoenix burns down and rises from the ashes, a respawn is reviving and getting right back into the action.
I know my character won’t respawn with the same abilities it had a few months ago. My strength will have taken a hit. My balance and coordination aren’t great right now. While my body composition hasn’t budged too much, it hasn’t gotten worse.
This past week, I’ve been going to a gym in the suburbs for some lifting sessions; nothing too major. We’re going to call this Week 0. Now we move into Week 1 and it’s time to get things done.
Given my prepensity for negative thinking, I have already begun to prepare myself mentally for what I know will be a rough ride the next few weeks. Right before lockdown I was just beginning to hit my stride with workouts when everything came to a halt. I’ll rebuild for a few weeks, and then get back at it hard.
The one thing I can say is that this time off has really given me time to think about my goals over the next year or so and what I want to achieve, from a strength perspective as well as a physique perspective, and most importantly, from an energy and positivity perspective.
I have big goals, big ambitions, and I know I can achieve them.
