Never slow down in the middle of of a mud puddle....

I continue to struggle.

I feel like I have too much going on in my life at the moment and that I am doing none of it very well. I feel overwhelmed and scared shitless that everything is going to collapse from the weight of it all.

I am not coping with the stress of my workload and making matters infinately worse, I am making bad decisions based on poor judgment and the lies that I tell myself. I am fucking up... it is just as simple as that. I have nobody to blame.

In short, life in Scottsville sucks right now. Boo hoo... oh woe is me ...

Oh well, c'est la vie. Another week is upon us; another week to try to do better. There is no use in crying over spilled milk... water under the bridge and all of that.

I can't help but to think that all of this is somehow related (in ways that are not at all clear to me... yet anyway) to my pathological fear of dating and intimacy. It would be just so like me to trash everything in sight just to make certain that I have an excuse to push away any potential partners.... to be all dark and twisty like Meredith from Grey's Anatomy (aside: OMG how brilliant was the first episode... Izzy, prone on the floor in her ballgown, paralyzed by grief....)

Anyway... life goes on. If I can rely on experience, I know that these tempestuous times are transitory and that this storm will pass and I will find myself stronger for having weathered it.

Thanks for all of your encouraging comments. It really helps to know that people care and are rooting for you.

Be well!

Perfection should never get in the way of the good....

First of all, a great big heartfelt congratulations to TriIRONSARATops on her heroic success in the IM MOO last weekend! Reduced to puddles of inspiration and snot ... I say, Mrs. Z. - YOU ARE AWESOME! It has been my privilege to live your IM journey vicariously through you. I so hope that we actually get to meet someday.

I had an appointment with my therapist this week and worked through the question of how and why I managed to get myself so off track during the month of August. As is always the case, in the context of psychotherapy the answer is plain and obvious: I sometimes (less often now than in years past) confuse the way I feel with who I am.

Now if you recall, the whole drama (and it may not even rate as drama) started one Friday night as I was leaving work and I took notice of the fact that I was feeling a little lonely; a feeling which I am loathe to feel and that I can usually avoid, given that I generally enjoy my own company. Now, so I'm told, everyone feels lonley now and again and apparently, most have the ability to address it constructively or simply acknowledge it and move on with their lives. Not I. For whatever reason, I equate the feeling of lonlieness with being a LOSER! And once I start thinking of myself as a loser, then it is only a matter of time before I am off to the races in an attempt to escape the feeling and, in so doing, sabotage everything in sight that I've worked so hard to achieve. Of course it begs the question, whether or not the sabotage is somehow an unconscious response to the believing myself to be a loser or at least, not as good as the rest. Chicken or the egg? Horse or cart?

It is almost trite to explain this away as the result of growing up gay in a homophobic society that told me from the time I was a little boy that I some kind of an abomination. Don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing my behaviour or blaming the world (I have only gotten this far by taking responsibility for my behaviour) rather, I'm just trying to put it into some kind of context.

Throughout August, the preferred method of escape was gambling. It could just as easily been food or drugs... or compulsive exercise... and such has been my life.

The good news has always been that I most often feel like I'm winning the war ... even if I am disgraced in a battle or two along the way.

Moving on....

Despite the fact that my treadmill workouts are progessing in both speed and distance (and without injury) I have been seriously thinking about my goals and strategies for dealing with my life and I have concluded that it just may not be realistic (and therefore unhealthy) to continue to dream about running a marathon (remember the song lyrics from last week about having too many dreams and having to let a few of them go....). Now before the Greek chorus starts, I want to clarify. I am not saying that I will never run a marathon. Maybe I will... someday. What I am saying, is that it is not going to be one of my conscious goals.

At this stage of my life, it feels more right to simply run (or swim or play tennis) for the sake of my health and emotional well-being as opposed to running to train specifically for a marathon (which as you may recall is the ONLY reason I started to run in the first instance... I wanted to be a hero). There is a difference (at least to me) between pushing oneself to satisfy realistic goals and setting oneself up for failure, and it seems to me that continuing to focus on running a marathon as an end goal, is setting myself up for failure.

So, I have decided to alter my goals and to focus on the 10k distance. Now, I could be wrong but I think it to be at least possible that completing a strong 10k race will feel just as satisfying (at least in the context of my life) as running a marathon. As well, by focusing on this distance, I should have the energy to do some swimming and play some tennis..... in other words, I'm striving for BALANCE. I'm striving to have some fun and to treat my workouts as something that is pure and simple about health promotion.

In other words, I do not wish to let perfection (a marathon) get int the way of the good (running for health).

Of course, all you triathaletes out there have me jonesing to try a sprint tri but I just can't seem to get my head around the bike. Where I am going to ride it... on the freeway? But that's a problem for another day.

To such end, for the first week in a long time, I have completed all four of my treadmill workouts; did a yoga class and ate reasonably well. I'm still hovering at or just below the 250lb. mark (sane goal 220; hero goal 200). I hope by next Sunday to join the local gay and lesbian swim group and start taking some lessons.

And the world goes round and round....

And life goes on......

You've got so many dreams

That you don't know where to put 'em

So you'd better turn a few of 'em loose

Your body's got a feeling that it's starting to rust

You'd better rev it up and put it to use

Fire Inc. Nowhere Fast

First of all, thanks for all the encouragement and supportive comments during my late summer hiatus (otherwise known as irresponsibly fucking around, consequences be damned). In my last post, having fallen [HARD] off of my pink cloud, I cursed gravity; i.e. what goes up, must come down. Now, having skulked around on the outer margins of respectable and polite society for the last six weeks, I can only hope that there is nowhere else to go but up.

In any event, I think the following parable (which is a paraphrase, author unknown) provides an apt framework to describe where I currently find myself in my life journey.

An Autobiography in Five Short Chapters:

1. I walked down a street. I saw a hole. I fell in. It was not my fault.

2. The next day, I walked down the same street. I saw the same hole and I fell in… again. Though I am not surprised, it is my fault.

3. On the third day, I walked down the same street. I saw the same hole. This time, I tried to jump over. I fell in… again. I am undeterred.

4. On the fourth day, I walked down the same street. I saw the hole. This time, I tried to go around it. I fell in again. I know that I am beaten.

5. On the fifth day, I took a different street.

Following years of hard fought for gains and up until August of this year, I felt like I was safely on “the different street”. It has been, all things considered, a great year in my life. To wit:

• I quit smoking (over 10 months now);
• I have lost some weight (not as much as I need or want to but considering that most people gain weight when they quit smoking, I’m doing ok);
• I am arguably fitter now, than at any time during the last 5-7 years;
• I have been employed at my current place of employment longer than at any other job during my career – almost 3.5 years (caveat: this is a double edged sword as I fear that each and every day will be my last swimming as I do in a sea of sharks);
• I started this blog and connected with some amazing and interesting bloggers;
• I finished my kitchen reno which enabled me to open my home for dinner parties and the like;
• Family relationships are great and relatively stress free;
• I had one of the best vacations of my life this past May;
• I’m running stronger and longer on my treadmill than ever before and simply cannot believe how clear my lungs feel since quitting smoking (who knew?);
• I have become politically active and am working on the campaign of a man who could become Canada’s next Prime Minister (trust me, the World will be better for it if they do elect this man);
• I started playing tennis again and discovered that age aside, it is possible that I was hitting better than I ever did; and
• I started yoga and regained flexibility that I had thought was lost to age forever.
  

Apparently not.

Despite this veritable embarrassment of riches that is my life, I marched right back down the street with the hole, looked right into it and said ‘yee haw giddy up’ and I dove right in head-fucking-first. I was not shocked, nor was I stunned. In fact, I knew well of the dangers lurking in that hole but I jumped in anyway.

Explanation:

Why you ask would I do something so magnificently stupid? Ask my heart. [Now before I go on, please remember that there is good news in all of this and the fact that I am writing this at all is somewhat of a miracle - so the last thing I need or want is sympathy or pity... understanding is welcome]

Ask my broken heart that has probably mended by now but is terrified of being broken again.

You see, at some point in my life, as the result of witnessing the deaths of too many friends of HIV/AIDS, the death of my Father and a couple of cherished pets, the shocking loss of a job by a knife in the back, coupled with the excrutiating pain of unrequited love, I decided that I couldn't go on. All of this exacerbated by addiction to one thing or another (thankfully not nearly as bad as it could have been). At the time, with my heart blown to smithereens, I was down... and so I thought, for the count. I just couldn't imagine how I was going to get up... yet again.... and try to make something of my life.

Well, thankfully, with the passage of time, the intervention of some very good people (professional and otherwise), I made a very conscious decision that I WAS GOING TO LIVE.

Having made that decision and with a lot of hard work, I have arrived to my present state and have been known to run around strewing daisies about and shouting about my happiness from the rooftoops. However, it's not the full, unvarnished truth.

Yes, I am happy on the outside. But my heart has always wanted and needed more and I have been too afraid of being hurt all over again to risk anything even remotely resemembling vulnerabiltiy or intimacy. So it's happy as a pig in shit versus soul sucking loneliness. And around about the first week of August, I came to the crossroads at which point I decided that I simply had to admit to this and to do something about it. And, so in the face of so doing, I jumped into the hole, apparently preferring misery over the potential for happiness.

blah blah blah blah...... and so it goes..... boo fucking hoo......

It's time to get over it.

And this my blog friends is where we start over in September of 2006. I think that I've crawled back out of the hole (not so much worse for the wear thank-God) and I'm looking for another street which will be, in part, represented by my continued workouts (albeit with more focus on running for health and happiness vs the former heroic marathon goal). Professionally, the fall season is going to be a roller coaster of busy busy with the added burden of a course in securities law and the potential for attendance at the Liberal Leadership convention in Montreal at the end of November.

Further, I have decided to take a page out of K and M's book and try internet dating to see where that might lead. Who knows perhaps I'll end up with the love of my life in some far off distant land?

So, stay tuned. In the coming weeks, I intend to start posting details of my workouts and I might even start posting my weight as a measure to hold myself accountable.

[having just reread what I've written, I will probably need to fill in a few details here and there that I glossed over in my haste to get this posted.... ahem K.....]

I hope you have all been well and I look forward on catching up with all of your blogs!

P.S. The video is from the 80's movie Streets of Fire which is appropriate in that it was introduced to me by the all time unrequited love of my life... during the early 90's when I was in peak athletic shape, I used to workout all the time to this music but only recently rediscovered the lyrics. Indeed.... you've got so many dreams....