Thoughts on This Morning's Bike Ride

This morning I rode my bike around the Upper Newport Bay Nature Reserve. There is a trail loop there, and it took me about twelve miles and an hour a half to complete. Before I started, I shoved my bike in the back seat of my car, the front tire removed from the frame because it would be too wide to fit otherwise, and brought it over to a parking spot at the north-eastern most part of the trail. After parking, and screwing the front tire back on of course, I was on my way. 

I turned a corner before the trail dropped down to a steep grade. I took on that slope at full pedal, keeping in mind the backpack hanging behind me and my camera slung across my torso; bouncing against my side as I sped through the cool air of the morning. 

This was something that shouldn't have happened. It's the kind of thing that I would talk myself out of almost immediately. 

You can call it laziness. You can call it anxiety. You can call it apathy. I've considered any combination of the three at some point in time, but the end result was always the same: I stayed at home, stayed with the status quo of YouTube or Starcraft II, stayed blissfully inactive until it stopped being blissful: when pangs of regret or guilt or shame reminded me that, once again, I'm stuck in the same state of depressive inertia despite having told myself that I needed to do something about it. 

With enough iterations, that depressive inertia grows into depressive despair, and that's when the really bad things come out of my brain, telling me that there's no way out of this endless loop I'm putting myself to, that I am incapable of improvement, that I am useless, just like he had always told me. 

Here is the part where I'm supposed to say that it comes from the deepest part of my psyche, but in reality it's easily accessible. I imagine that, in the bookshelf of my consciousness, I have the Jonar is Useless book at the third shelf, easy enough for my 5'7" internal librarian to reach for at arms length.  

I won't tell you where I acquired this narrative, but I will tell you that I have nurtured it as much as a writer could. I have revised it endlessly, intensifying different parts of the narrative for every failure or milestone that I missed in my strange plan for my life. It has grown into a tome of self shit-talk, and I've made more than fifty copies of it for that psychic shelf. 

And when I play/read this narrative in my head, it's all overwhelming and drains me of so much energy. Sometimes I wonder if I stay inert because of exhaustion, rather than having been convinced that I am worth nothing to no one. I certainly don't feel that way on the good days, as few as they are. 

Thankfully, none of that happened this morning. This morning I went out for that ride, and it only took a small amount of effort to put that awful narrative away. Once I started off on my bike, practicing unsafe riding on the way by shooting my camera on the move, it didn't come back. My body was too busy being in motion. Though that motion is cyclical (yay, pun!), that physical repetition is a lot better for my soul, as opposed to the loop that always runs through my head on most other days.

Keeping to myself and keeping it simple

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve cut my Facebook activity to close to nothing. So far it’s been alright. It took me a little effort to keep from tapping the FB app on my phone. Sometimes I would slip and the app would start, but then I’d press the Home key before it loaded up. There are times when I take a quick look, but only because Facebook sends me notifications on my phone. Excited, I would check it out hoping that someone was trying to contact me, only to find out that was not the case. Thank you, FB, for trolling me. 

But then I close the app and move on. I don't think about it after that. I consider that a victory. 

The main reason why I’m keeping a low profile (ha ha) in social media is because it isn't serving my needs. I tend to focus on others, even above myself. I go out of my way to read status updates that comes my way. If I thought I had something clever to say, I would take the time to craft a response. I used to spend a lot of time doing this, even at work or in the place of other activities like reading, or cooking dinner, or laundry. Eventually this lead to sinks full of dishes and a really dusty room (thanks to my psoriasis flaking off) - resulting in a consistently bad mood. 

Neglecting my own ego was fine as long as I got likes and acknowledgements for the things I post. But lately those have dried up, in part to Facebook's tendencies to not broadcast my posts, and without a healthy lifestyle to fill the void (thanks to all that negligence), the lack of attention made me even more sad. 

So I decided to take a step back and be my own cheerleader for the time being. It may seem extreme to remove myself in near totality from social media but I had to shake things up a bit. It’s hard to break out of a negative mindset when you don’t know you’re in it. Pulling myself out of FB jolted me out of that sad reality and allowed me to look at things from outside that system. 

I’ll get into what I’ve been doing to with my time in another post. But for now, all I want to say is that I’m sticking to the basics. I need to focus on showing up to work on time, cooking my meals (instead of always eating out) and doing my laundry (instead of wearing the same shirt twice in a row). I will add more complexity to my life, such as writing projects, classes, and maybe even cleaning my apartment, after I can comfortably do the things that I need to pay rent and eat ramen.  

As I said last time, I stretched myself way too thin in 2014. I'm going to try to keep myself together this time around. 

A Nu Start

New post for the year. I'm going to keep it short because I think it'll be better this way. Plus it's the only way I can actually get anything done around here if I promise myself that this will be quick and painless.

What I want to do for 2015:

1.  Pare down my life so that I have minimum responsibilities - I stretched myself out way too thin with commitments to writing articles and doing homework for writing classes. I found myself getting stressed out over assignments that I procrastinated on, which affected the way I handled the other aspects of my life. My apartment was in a perpetual state of dirtiness, and I kept showing up late for work because I didn't want to face the day with all that I needed to do. So I'm going to take it easy for a while, focus on work and my health. Maybe I'll find the energy to get more ambitious than that, but for now I'm not even going to think about it. It's gotten to the point where even dreaming is stressing me out. 
2. I've disabled my Facebook account again and will probably keep it down for the year. Facebook has a weird effect on me. Almost all of my interactions with people have been through FB and any interaction I've had with them has been unfulfilling at best. It was making me very depressed, feeling like I'm alone and ignored on a platform that supposedly is made to keep me from being alone and ignored. Staying away from Facebook at least keeps things honest. I can be alone and ignored without the irony. 

That's it for now. This wasn't that short, but if I told myself that this post wasn't going to be short I would never have started. So, I had to lie to myself. And I guess I lied to you too.

Happy New Year.

[By the way, this is a respost from my other blog at jonarisip.com. If I make any more new posts you'll find them there. I might as well make use of the website, considering how I paid for it and all.]

Update 1/5/2015

• I've reactivated my FB account, but only so people who don't have my phone number can message me. I figured it would be unfair to them that fall off the face of the earth without any warning. I'm still not checking messages or posting though - so I'm still staying away from Facebook.

• I still have an audience on this blog, so I've decided not to make it more complicated by moving over to my website. So all new posts will show up here. I'll just have to figure out a way to use my Squarespace account outside of blogging.