I feel like I could just write forever. I have so many thoughts and ideas to work through. I just finished writing my 1,667 words for my June book, and I had so many thoughts still bubbling away after I’d written the 1,667 words, and I know I have other things to do right now instead of writing this, but I just want to write.
I have just realised that I may enter big scary sporting events like ultras and triathlons as a distraction from my disappointments, fears and failures in life. It’s like when you have an injury, it takes away all the other pain, and only when the injury’s gone do those aches and pains come back. When you have a 40-mile race to do at the end of the week, you literally can’t feel any fear about all the other stuff that’s going wrong in your life. All the other stuff is dominated by the immediacy of the upcoming terrifying event. While you are running it, too, you literally have all your worries taken away from you except for getting to the end. Someone described ultras as problem solving and that’s accurate. You are constantly checking in with yourself. Do I need more food, more water, shade, to take off a layer, the loo, should I run or walk. How far to the next checkpoint or the top of this hill?
So it’s just another distraction from my real concerns in life: money, safety, fulfilment, meaning. Am I safe? Can I get by? Can I make sure as well as possible that my life will be reasonably comfortable going forwards? And am I living in the most meaningful and fulfilling way I can? When I was earning reasonably ok money with plenty of freelance work coming in, I was ill-at-ease because I wasn’t really fulfilled, and I didn’t have love in my life, and I still hoped to have children but time was running out. I was also still mildly worried about money because I wasn’t earning much more than enough to get by and I wanted to be able to save for the future, live even more comfortably, and quit doing work I didn’t enjoy. Now that I don’t have enough freelance work coming in, I’m terrified about running out of money, having to do a dead-end job for even less money and even more hours, if I could even get a job at all after so many years away from the job market, and I’m still frustrated at not living a meaningful life.
But I’m long-practised in finding ways not to have to look at these failures and worries and disappointments. TV, sugar, alcohol, even running. Crises of a more urgent if not necessarily important nature, such as bees’ nests or messy gardens or just having stuff to do for friends and family, or as I said above, crazy stupid sporting events that take my mind off real life for a while, while also wrecking my bank balance, and maybe even my fitness and health.
I even think that one of the reasons I’ve never been able to find truly good and consistent health is that, as long as that worry is still there, seemingly the most important issue, I don’t have time to, or I have an excuse not to, focus on becoming a writer, finding love, and even becoming enlightened.
I think to myself that, if I can just get this one thing sorted out then it will make everything else easier, but that’s also kind of terrifying, because once my diet is sorted out and I’m slim and energetic and clear-thinking, and my running is consistently ticking along, not too crazy, not too tiring or time-consuming, just nice and easy, 40 miles a week, I no longer have anything left to do except write. Because keeping house, despite my utter failure to do so (again due to turning to sabotages like TV and alcohol), doesn’t require a great deal of time and energy, nor does gardening, and neither actually in the end does proofreading, despite all the times I’ve used it as my excuse not to live the life I wanted. If I continue to tell myself that I’ll get to that more important but scary stuff (writing and living fearlessly) only once I’ve sorted out my health and fitness, then it stands to reason that my fearful mind is going to do everything in its power to stop me from ever truly sorting out my health and fitness, because what’s on the other side of that is far too scary and unknown, in fact, because it’s a place I’ve never really got to.
So I think I may have had it backwards all this time. Instead of seeing writing as the prize I get to do once everything else in my life is sorted out, I need to see it as the SOLUTION that will make my life so good that I’ll no longer feel the need to sabotage my health and the rest of the trivial parts of my life to give myself a distraction and an excuse not to write.
In all this, you can substitute living for writing, whatever your true idea of living is, whether that’s building a life with someone you love, or travel, or adventure, or whatever your dream life truly is. It’s taken me a long time to see this. Maybe I’ve had to hit rock bottom, and discover that nothing is going to give me the happiness and safety I desire so I may as well just do what I love NOW. I feel like this (health and fitness) is the last thing to fall away. The last false hope. The last thing I clung to that I thought I couldn’t live without. When I tried to simply believe and trust and go with the flow, I kept being drawn back into the need to follow rules when it came to health and fitness. I thought I NEEDED this no matter what. So I could never really be free. I could never really just relax, let things be and float downstream. I always put this first and foremost, above happiness, above living, above enlightenment, above faith. It was the thing I couldn’t let go of, preventing me from believing that everything could be bliss. It was a sabotage, hiding in plain sight as purpose.