shift

The longer I go without writing, the more my thoughts pile up in my head until I literally feel weighed down with worry.  The worst part is once I try to write some of what I'm feeling, everything is too tangled up to pull apart and put down.  It feels weird to go so long without writing, like I'm missing something from my routine, like I'm missing something from myself.  It's like not brushing my teeth for a week and then discovering I had no hand to do it with in the first place.

I feel like I've been busy although I'm not sure if it's legitimate business.  I've been reading a lot lately.  I even managed to tackle two books at once at one point, which is a pretty big accomplishment for me because I can't really multi-task when reading.  I'm a one book kind of guy, most of the time.  If I'm not, some of the characters start book jumping, along with situations, until I'm utterly confused, unable to tell one story from the other.  Plus, I can't read more than a few chapters of any book, no matter how interesting, without falling asleep.  You'd think this would be a good night-time routine but it doesn't necessarily work that way.  It only seems to happen in the middle of the day.  I'm on my bed reading and suddenly I'll wake up two hours on top of a drool-stained page.  People don't like to share their books with me.

I've also been trying to exercise more.  It's horrible I tell you.  I hate exercising and I always have.  Even when I was at my thinnest, I hated what I had to do to be that size.  I never felt those endorphins and never had more energy afterward.  And it sucks because I have to be incredibly consistent.  If I take one day off, it makes it all the harder to get going again the next day.  But, I've been trying and that's the first step.  I've collected quite the selection of exercise programs over the years and so I should have a good variety of workout routines to choose from without getting bored.  Right now I'm doing one of those walk five miles in your living room workouts.  It's pretty easy, which is a good thing.  I don't want to get too burned out too quickly.

The only other problem is my diet.  It's funny how I can do really well with dieting and then never exercise or be really good at exercising and then eat garbage.  I can't seem to find a good balance of both.  I know a big part of it is because my head and my heart just aren't in it.  I think at this point it's just easier for me to wallow in my sadness, to allow myself to be a slave to my gluttonous desires.  I can't seem to get my mind to focus on the larger picture, to realize that these small sacrifices should pay off in a big way later on.  I guess I'm so miserable that today is the big picture, that I am just barely scraping by, am just trying to get through one day at a time.  Kind of sad.

I feel I've been going through these turbulent shifts in awareness and ignorance lately.  All my shattered convictions come back from time to time, taped up and tender but ready to be received.  And I say, "Yes, I think I can believe in this again" but it never lasts too long.  Some days I feel God is good and other times I think He doesn't care and sometimes I struggle with whether He exists at all.  Some times I feel something good happening inside of me, as if my heart is showing signs of life again.  It shifts around inside me, hoping to find a comfortable place to beat and grow but those moments are fleeting.  I feel like I want to love but it seems so hard, so incomprehensible to my screwed up mind.  Maybe all I really want is a connection.

I still struggle with being an ex-vegetarian.  I've managed to make it a few days at a time without thinking about the harm I'm doing but it still comes up often.  It's weird because it seems like I shouldn't make such a big deal about it.  I think one of the reasons why it is is because it deals with food, which has always been a big deal and the other reason is when I found my Christianity crumbling, vegetarianism was almost like a substitute for me.  It was something to believe in, something I could feel good about being involved in.  It was comforting in some ways, made me feel like I belonged to something, that I was doing something for the greater good.  If my views on food weren't so screwed up, and if I wasn't so fat and vain, I'd probably go back.

Am I the only one who feels haunted by people?  And I don't mean former lovers.  I mean just everyday people that come and go from your life.  It's not that these people weren't special to me but it's not like I had this incredibly deep connection with them.  Okay, maybe some of them I did but I can't seem to let them go or allow their memory to leave me in peace.  I still think about my rude ex-roommate and all the girls who left me for other guys (or other girls).  I always wonder what I did, what I said to make them just not care anymore.  And I wonder if they even realize the profound effect they've had on me, how they've shaped the way I see people and why they are the reason I don't think love can work with me.  All because they simply cut me off, these people that I thought would never leave me, people I thought were in my life like oxygen.  But they are the reason I don't breathe.

I used to be one of those people who never understood others who swore off love because of a few bad relationships.  "How dumb," I'd say.  "Just because one or two people hurt you doesn't mean you should close off all potential love in the future."  But, now I think I get it a little bit better.  Sometimes it's a deliberate attempt at shielding yourself and other times it's just a subconscious bout of self-preservation.  And as for me, I don't feel so much like I'm trying to protect myself as much as I just feel too exhausted to deal with it all, the way people can be so flaky and moody, the back and forth of jokes and jeers, the constant dance of building up and tearing down each other.  Uh, human interactions.  How do you all do it?

I think the only love I have left is in my imagination.  In fact, I'm falling in love with a fantasy that will never actually happen.  And you know what?  I'm okay with it.  I don't know whether that is comforting or devastating.