I am a rock.....

Growing up this used to be one of my favorite "theme" songs.  As a kid I was often hurting, sometimes looking back on it now, it was just normal kid drama but sometimes it felt like more and for reasons I still haven't understood, I kept it to myself.  I was bullied at school due to my size, not just being a little chunky, but also being a giant.  I am 5'10" on a short day and my entire time in grade school I was always towering over everyone else.  I even remember looking down at the principal of the school because he was much shorter than me.  Being a giant of child was hard and I don't ever remember turning to anyone when I felt upset.  Don't get me wrong, my parents are awesome people and would've been there for me had I given them the chance, but I never did give anyone a chance, I was going to do it on my own.  I could handle it, I think because I thought in some strange way since I was "adult-sized" already it meant that I could do it.  

But what did this personal pain lead me to learn?  And actually I'm just starting to get the handle on this lesson...we need others.  It only took me almost 30 years to figure this out but we need to share ourselves with others.  When we feel emotions of any kind we need to let those out for people to know us.  Being emotionally balanced is part of being healthy.  You cannot be physically healthy and emotionally not.  Eventually your emotions will wear into your physical and your health will decline.  There is plenty of research to back up the mental-physical connection between your spirit and your well-being.  

So over the course of the past few years I have vowed to shed the "island" attitude.  And looking at this, I think this may be part of my roller coaster problem I've been experiencing.  Ever since I've started doing this, I've been up and down, up and down, with weight.  And I think part of that is because the sharing is hard!  Breaking out of my built-up isolation unit is not easy and sometimes leaves one open to the potential of hurt and pain.  I think each time I chip away at that, I subconsciously get scared and it causes a mini-breakdown and I go back to unhealthy habits as a way to combat the fear.  However, as GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.  Now that I have identified part of my problem I can be aware of it and use it to my advantage.  

Sometimes, being self-aware is so damned difficult....but without knowing yourself you can't achieve what you want so it's always a positive thing to learn something even if it sucks to hear it.....

Perfect for the moment....

I told a student today that "we are never perfect in the 'we're done' sense, but we are perfect for the moment."  There are things along this health journey that I do REALLY well sometimes and things that I don't do nearly as well.  And on different days, those things can be the exact same.  So while I was incredibly profound for my student (I think...), that statement resonated with me today. I can only be what I am at that moment in time and that, by nature, is perfect.  I can improve on my actions and my responses to life after the moment has passed, but the decision I make in that moment is perfect.

What does that essentially mean to me?  I can't beat myself up over what I did three hours ago, yesterday, last week...etc...  This journey of healthy lifestyle is just that, a journey through life.  It is a journey that has a finite destination, because how can you go somewhere on a journey if you don't know where you're going?  It is not the direct path between two points in time and space but a winding road of ups, downs, and side-to-sides.

Words are powerful tools along this journey; both words you say to yourself and words you say to others.  Recognizing that I am the most perfect me I can be at any given time in the present makes it so I don't brood over the failures of the past that will cripple my future successes.  I cannot be successful if I've already given myself the handicap of being pre-occupied by all the things I didn't do right.  It allows me to be kinder to myself in spite of my mistakes and allows me to forgive myself for my shortcomings.

I'm not saying that this should make me stagnant in the fact that I can keep repeating the same bad things over and over again, but what I should be able to do is look at what I've done and objectively identify what went "wrong" and be able to fix it for next time without feeling bad about what I did last time.

I'm not sure I really have a "conclusion" to this post today, I just have thoughts that have fallen out of my head.