guilt

Tomorrow: The Land of Mythical Opportunity

/ Cassie / Leave a comment

“Yesterday you said tomorrow.” ~Unknown

Today was a rather unusually productive Sunday and I was only about to get about 3 hours of sleep last night.  I finished most of the things done on my “to do” list and I managed to do them without complaining.  And, for a Sunday, I was in a rather good mood.  I don’t know what it is, but I feel almost as good as I did a few weeks ago.  For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel like I needed to put things off until tomorrow when I was bound to feel better, happier, or more energetic.

What is it about the idea of “tomorrow”?  We always know it’s coming, and therefor can always put things (ideas, concerns, activities) off until then.  But when Today becomes Tomorrow, how much of it actually gets completed?  And how much of it just gets put off until the next tomorrow?

I know I’m guilty of this.  Constantly thinking that today is the last day I’m going to (insert vice here). That tomorrow I’ll be able to really assert my willpower or make better choices.  As if Tomorrow is some magical land that we can visit that solves all our problems and helps us become more fulfilled and productive.  The people who we are “supposed” to be live in tomorrow while the people that we “are” live in today.

But for me, I hope this stops…tomorrow.  I’ve made my healthy meals and completed my almost entirely clean eating grocery shopping.  My running clothes are out and ready for the morning.  My lesson plans are done and my school bag is packed and ready to go.  I even bought a fitbit because I really want to take this myself seriously this time.  I know I might falter and fall.  I know I might make mistakes. I know I might give in to temptation.  I’m human after all.  But as long as I get right back on track, without waiting for “tomorrow” to come around I also know that I’ll be ok.

Tomorrow morning I head out for my first run in almost two weeks.  I’m not expecting it to go well.  I’m expecting it to be slow and painful.  But, you know what?  Even though I know that’s how it’s going to be, I’m still excited to go.

I’m in it for the long haul.  There’s no turning back now.

Miles to go in the 100 Mile Challenge: 66.2
Pound to go by January 1st: 25

It’s time to stop half-assing my life

/ Cassie / 1 Comment

“The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.”  ~Author Unknown

One word: accomplished.  That’s how I have been feeling lately.  I can’t believe that in three weeks I have actually met a quarter of my 100 mile challenge goal.   25 miles may not be a lot for some (hell, marathoners do more than that in just one day), but to me it is a big deal.  There has been an overwhelming response to my 100 mile challenge.  It’s exciting and flattering to know that I am helping motivate people to become healthier and hopefully happier.

But, the kicker is (I hope you’re sitting down), that I am a giant fraud.  Allow me to explain.  Yes, I have made the choice to be a happier person.  Yes, I have begun running and clocking my miles as a way to keep me motivated.  Yes, I’m trying to eat better and live a healthier lifestyle.  But really…

I feel like I am the queen of the half-assedness.  I make all the plans and have all these ideas and never really follow through on anything.  I can’t really think of one aspect of my life where I am giving 100% right now and that thought saddens me. The worst part is that while I’m not giving my 100%, I’m expecting 100% from everyone and everything else. I’m doing the running thing, but am I really challenging myself enough?  Am I trying to improve and actually become a “runner” or am I trying simply to just get it done in the quickest time possible?  I’m eating healthier, when it’s convenient.  When I’m too tired to cook or clean, take out it is.  I care about the environment and try to recycle when I can, unless it’s too much work.  Even within my friendships I am not giving my full amount of effort that I could give, yet am demanding that people give me 100%.

I really need to put more effort into things and give 100% in my job, in my home life, in my relationships, and to myself.

Because really, if you’re only going to do something half way you might as well save the energy and not do it at all.

Fear and (self) loathing

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“Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason is because you’re stupid and make bad choices.”

I tend to be over analytical in most aspects of my life.  I weigh pros and cons before making decisions.  Each choice I engage in tends to be calculated and the safest, most restrained, choice usually wins out.  It’s all very responsible.

Until it’s not.  Because, let’s face it.  There are always those choices that we make that seem to express the sentiment “What the Fuck?”  I mean, I know at least for me, I can physically see myself making the wrong choice and I do absolutely nothing to stop it.  I somehow assume that THIS TIME things will be different.  THIS TIME it will work out for the better rather than for the worst.

And you know what?  It never does.  I make this decision that I KNOW is the wrong one.  I KNOW nothing good will come of it.  And I do it anyway.  And then do you know what happens?  I go into a fit of depressive self loathing.

Why the hell is it that I can get my butt up almost every morning at 4:45 am to run before teaching elementary school children in East Baltimore but can’t stop myself eating that one food, drinking that one drink, sending that one text, saying that one thought?  Does it all come down to willpower? Or is it something else?

I really have improved in so many areas over the course of just the few weeks I have been running.  I am happier.  I have more confidence, I am working towards fixing things that need to be fixed.  I love the way my life is going…and yet…I still can’t stop myself from doing certain things I know will hurt me in the long run (FYI: I am not a drug addict, secret cutter, alcoholic, or anything else lifetime made a movie about).  What am I missing?  What else can I do?  I need to make better choices, even if I don’t want to at the time.

End teenage-girl-though-I’m-really-32 rant.

The first step is admitting you have a problem…

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“Selfish persons are incapable of loving other, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.” ~Erich Fromm

I’ve never considered myself s a selfish person.  Actually, to be honest, I tended to be more of a “woe is me” or “nothing good ever happens to me” type of person.  So many things have been happening recently that were really making me feel sorry for myself.  I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get what I wanted and everyone couldn’t cater to me just this once because I never seem to get what I want.  It took me a while (until today in fact) for me to realize that this really stems from the fact that I am selfish and want everything my way.  And, in reality, get mad and pissed off and downright spiteful when I don’t. I get it, I’m a slow learner.  But at the moment that this realization hit me, tears began streaming down my face.  I never wanted to be seen as selfish and looking back and analyzing my actions over the past few weeks/months, I couldn’t believe how terrible a person I was to people I truly care about.

Maybe I’ve been selfish my whole life.  I don’t know.  I think it stems mostly from not ever really being able to think about myself growing up because there was always someone else I needed to be taking care of.  Looking back though, especially recently, I have been selfish in past and current relationship and hurt people I really care just because I took my own feelings and desires into account before theirs.  I know that there is no consolation I can give that would make it better.  For that, I am truly sorry.

I haven’t been fair, and within that, I haven’t been kind.  In fact, I’ve been down right mean sometimes.  I couldn’t understand why people just couldn’t give me what I wanted and why we couldn’t just want the same thing.  I haven’t been generous, mostly with honesty and my emotions.  I’ve let people down because what I wanted and what they wanted were two separate things, or maybe, they were the same things but just unattainable at the time.

With my actions and my attitude lately, I’ve made it so easy for people to walk away, and then I sit there and blame them and hate them for doing just that.  It’s not fair that I expected everyone to be OK with doing what I wanted and what I needed and not expecting anyone to get hurt.  In fact, by trying to ensure that I didn’t get hurt, I hurt others which, in the end, wound up hurting me far more than I ever could have imagined.

I wish I could take it all back, but I can’t.  I wish I could go back in time; days, weeks, months, years down the road and change one minuscule detail so that everyone could be on a happier track…but I can’t.  The only things I can hope for is to learn from my mistakes and hope that I can avoid hurting anyone else to the best of my ability.

Of course, I’m talking about everyone, no one, and a select few all at the same time.  Chance are, though, I’m talking to you.  And I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better person…the person you deserve.

Fall down seven times; get up eight

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“So I put my faith in something unknown, I’m living on such sweet nothing. But I’m tired of hope with nothing to hold, I’m living on such sweet nothing ~Calvin Harris

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness lately. More specifically, the things that make us happy and how people come to feel this way. C.S. Lewis once said “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.” I saw the above quote this morning that really resonated with me. How often do we base our happiness on the actions of others, or moments in time?

Without going into detailed specifics, I’ve had a tough summer, and honestly, I have no one to blame for it but myself. It all started with my dad dying and slowly snowballing out of control from there, to the point that I didn’t even know who I was anymore. And really, I know it started even before that. I saw the warning signs did nothing to stop the avalanche. I was unhappy, moody, sullen and depressed. And when I wasn’t feeling those things, I wasn’t feeling anything at all.

I needed something. I was feeling antsy and itchy. I felt like something was missing that I couldn’t put my finger on. I felt like my skin was too tight and something within me was trying to break free. What it all comes down to was the need to feel alive, or rather the need to feel something other than what I was feeling. I felt like I had been going through the motions for so long thinking that maybe I was happy, when I realized that I was simply complacent. When my dad died, something inside of me changed. It wasn’t that I was devastated or heartbroken, because I wasn’t.

A first I felt relieved that all his suffering was over. And then I began to worry…about myself. My dad spent most of his life depressed and angry which caused him to alienate every single person in his life. Most days, he was downright mean. And I could really see myself heading down the same path and it scared me.

I needed to shake things up and feel something just to prove I was nothing like him. I needed to be reckless and downright irresponsible. And I was. I put my needs for “aliveness” ahead of the the needs of so many people around me. I felt conflicted but I also felt alive…knowing I should change the situation, but also unable to do it at the same time.

I now realize that a lot of it had to do with me looking outside of myself for some form of happiness and thought certain situations were going to make me happier. And they did…and they didn’t. I spent most of my summer in complete turmoil, wrestling with feelings I thought I had, with feelings I actually had, with feelings I was supposed to be having, all while trying to wear the mask of normalcy around my children and friends.

And then just as quickly and spontaneously as the “aliveness” started, it was over. I have let myself think and analyze for a week. Its almost as if I was grieving. I don’t know, though, what exactly I was grieving for. Was it for what I lost, or was is simply because I now knew I was going to go back to feeling nothing in my daily life?

I still haven’t figured it out, but what I do knows that it’s time to take a breath and move on and start figuring out how to be again. And maybe if I can figure out how to simply exist without all this sadness and anger, I can also figure out how to be happy.

I have to try, I have to try, I have to try. My life depends on it.

Oh, the Guilt…and Letting Go.

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“No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” ~ Alan Watts

I tend to carry around a lot of guilt.  I don’t know why.  I joke around that it is because I am Catholic, but really, I only am in the technical sense.  It could be because I am the first-born and am constantly trying (and many times failing) to take care of everyone.  In all honesty, the reasoning probably isn’t that important.  I’m constantly worried that my words and actions (or lack thereof) are hurting the people who are closest to me.

It’s a terrible feeling to have guilt over a situation and an even more terrible feeling to share with others.  They either assume you are egotistical and think you think the world revolves around you, or they see it as a grave emotion, one which will alter the space-time continuum because it means you think you should be making a different choice.

I have been wondering lately if guilt really is about actually feeling bad about certain words, feelings, and actions or if it is more a way that we make ourselves feel bad simply because we know in certain situations we are supposed to feel that way; almost as if it is a type of penance for the action itself.

For some, guilt hardly exists at all, and when it does, it is fleeting and inconsequential.  For others, it drives them literally mad.  I feel like I am somewhere in the middle.  I tend to suffer from just enough guilt to kind of ruin my day or a situation.  And the funny thing is I tend to feel it even when I know I shouldn’t…even when I really don’t have anything to feel guilty about.

I’m having trouble letting go of the guilt and I’m not quite sure what, if anything, I should do about it.

Frankly, I seem to have a problem with letting go period.  My head can sit down and make a logical argument on why I should let go of certain situations.  I can make valid arguments as to why things are better a certain way.  It looks so good and paper and I get so proud of myself for making the right decision, the informed decision, the logical decision, the guilt-free decision.

And then there’s my heart; who doesn’t care about my logical arguments and all that other bullshit.  It just wants to run free through a field of wild flowers and feel the most emotions (whether good or bad) that it can.

I wish they would take to each other more and maybe work out some form of compromise.  But then again, as I’ve stated before in this post, I tend to be an extremist.  With me, so many times, it’s all or nothing.  All heart or all head.  I realize it shouldn’t be that way.  I realize it is completely unhealthy, yet I do it anyway.  The most horrible part is not how these types of actions affect me, but how they affect the people around me, especially those involved in the situations and circumstances (oh, hello guilt, nice to see you again).

I’m pretty sure this is why I have such a hard time letting go.  Because for me, letting go means: close curtain, finished, finito, nothing more, final, culmination, and most importantly, the end of the road.

Do I have trouble letting go simply because I’m selfish and greedy and I want things my way or no way, or is it because I’m not ready to give up yet?

In any case, maybe it’s time I had a talk with my heart and had her back off a little for awhile and let my brain take over.  She could probably use a vacation anyway.