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.
