It’s been quiet around here lately.
With the pandemic still raging – despite the Japanese government’s assurances that everything is really ok, at least until the Olympics are over – I just haven’t been doing much. This means that the most exciting part of my day occurs every morning when my willpower to live gets sucked out from my buttchecks via a stone-cold toilet seat. I do have a warming toilet seat, but like coffee shops in Japan, it doesn’t appear to open for business until the late morning hours.
That’s not to say that I’ve been doing nothing. As the days have blended into one long slog towards whenever we can physically interact without guilt, work had initially been a great distraction. Working was one activity that I could generally control and use to fill the time that I would otherwise spend over coffee with a friend. “If I can’t hang out with friends, I’ll just work,” I reasoned. I was making – and saving – money; I was being productive. It felt good.
Until it didn’t. The continued, year-long discouragement of social interaction translated into a self-imposed obligation to work all the time. On weekends, presented with more free time than I would have liked and hobbies that required thought, I chose to either work or stare blankly at my computer. I burnt myself out about four months ago but dealt with it by stuffing down feelings of guilt and stress with cookies and carbs. I clung to work because it seemed like the one thing that didn’t feel so fruitless. The general sense of loss of control was extrapolated in my mind to a complete loss of control over my circumstances. “Jesus, take the wheel,” my self-control said, and self-sabotage jumped into the driver’s seat.
Rather than enjoying my workouts, eating food that my GI system wouldn’t hate, or doing things that would keep me relatively sane, I either did nothing, ate junk food, or both. While I reasoned that the predictable weight gain had saved me the purchase of a weighted vest or a dip belt for pull ups, there was also the somber reality that my bottom half has become markedly heavier. And bigger. Cellulite, my personal red flag of weight gain I’m going to regret if I keep eating, has seemingly taken up permanent residence on my thighs. With one more thing to worry about, I ate more in response.
“But, the pandemic,” I’d say around a mouthful of donuts, when presented with the mental reminder that this wasn’t actually helping me in the long run. Besides, hadn’t my therapist advised me to “turn off” once in a while?
I understand that my behavior and logic – or lack thereof – requires a special blindness to accountability. The constant self-sabotage has essentially been a muted temper tantrum where I displaced the blame for my own actions because self-care is the harder thing to do. Instead of “turning off” from work, I checked myself out of all responsibility.
But like that one person who uses a second cousin’s in-law’s distant relative’s tragedy to garner sympathy, it’s a stretch to continue to use the pandemic as an excuse to be shitty to myself. Self-care and disconnecting can be exhausting and expensive (I’ve spent more money than I’d like to admit on books in the last two months) but at the very least, my eyebrows look better for it.
As usual, progress hasn’t been perfect. A key takeaway from this most recent period of self-sabotage has been that they really shouldn’t trust me to portion out chocolate bars. (When the entire thing is wrapped in one foil packet, do they really expect me to take some and put the rest back? And have you noticed how the foil is always very thin and rips, thus forcing you to take another portion…? And then another…and another…?) More important ones have been that I haven’t lost control of my entire life, that devouring books instead of chocolate is more effective when I need to get out of my own head, and that the urge to mindlessly snack indicates a need to de-stress.
Which is to say, I’ll probably be busier going forward, but hopefully, I’ll be a less stressed person for it.