Sunday, May 25, 2014

My fitness level, taking a longer view

I found some of my 5K results from back in 2005 and 2007 on the web. This distance is relevant because I ran a 5K on Saturday morning. All 3 races were run on pretty much the same course (same starting point and some of the same stretches of road, but there have been a few modifications made over the years). Both of my earlier times were over 31 minutes. That's a 10 minute mile. I did the run in 24:29 on Saturday. If you had told the 29 year old me that I would be running a 5K in the just under 8 minutes a mile at 38, I would have been very excited. I'm pretty sure that time is a PR for me, at least in actual races, so I'm actually pretty excited about it now! 

Training is such a now thing, it's interesting to take a step back to see just how far I've come over the years! (And the irony is not lost on me that I'm looking at race times, the epitome of a quantifiable goal, while giving myself a hard time for focusing on quantified goals a few days ago.)


Saturday, May 24, 2014

Shut up!

My new resolution is to ignore the voice in my head that tells me that my feelings/thoughts/opinions about a particular topic are wrong. Part of me thinks that sentence is wrong. It's too...obvious. There must be hundreds of self help books that contain a similar sentiment. Shouldn't I try to make that statement novel and MY OWN! Why should I do that? Doesn't the fact that the sentence reflects my thought at the moment be sufficient? Well yes, of course it does.

Why should I feel the need to put this sentence out on the internet where anybody can read it? Because I feel like it. It's just something that I want to do. I used to tell myself that I wrote things here so I could go back and read it later. These entries would be some kind of record of my thought process that I could go back and mine for insights or to see how I change with time. (It's important for me to see how I change with time because I'm in a constant struggle to keep getting better, a struggle that I'm struggling to understand. Maybe I should just accept it as part of me and be done with it...) The sad truth is I have a hard time rereading many of my entries. I get bored with them. I find myself a little boring and pedantic.

Perhaps those boring and pedantic entries, where I so earnestly wrestle with weighty career topics or offer myself pep talks for getting better, are the ones that appeal to the voice that tells me I'm wrong. Those entries reflect a topic with substance and significance. If that voice makes its impact here, it make its impact in other places as well. It's everywhere and unavoidable.

That doesn't mean I can't ignore it. That voice is the self-stealer. It makes we do what I think I should rather than what feels right. It aims to protect. It wants me to do what it feels is safe rather than letting me do what feels right in the moment. It wants me to fit in and do what is expected rather than to do what I want without really worrying too much about if it's the accepted thing to do.

I'm tuning that voice out, or at least recognizing it when it tries to put in its two cents. It's been drowning out the other parts of me for way too long.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

It's all about the numbers

I've been struggling to prove something to somebody for most of my life. The motivation to do something, play football, completing a video game, applying for jobs I have no intention of actually taking, trying to beat my best time during a rowing or running workout, a considerable chunk of my motivation to do those things was driven by a need for a sense of accomplishment by achieving something that other people could see. Activities that should be about having fun, playing video games for example, became a contest. I immediately grasp onto the competitive aspect of any activity rather than focusing on what I find inherently appealing about it. 

A good portion of the entries in this blog are about getting better, pushing your limits, constantly striving for more and better. That endless striving for improvement, a constant seeking of some edge over an ambiguous other outsider, constantly hangs over me. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve, but that drive to get better has skewed my priorities. Those things that I do to feel like I'm getting better have far too much importance in my life. I neglect the people I love to keep striving for more. 

Chasing after something to make me feel like I am winning, that I am better than everybody else, that I am adequate, has in many ways prevented me from really getting to understand what I enjoy. I never stopped to look at what appeals to me when I was looking at colleges. Even now, a key motivator for me in getting my workouts in is making progress towards a distance goal. I want 2 million lifetime meters in rowing by the end of the year. I've resolved to run 500 miles this year. This blog was started to track my progress towards a number of quantifiable goals. 

Until I started writing this post, I didn't realize how I've built achieving a numerical goal into so much of my life. That effort to achieve an arbitrary number goal, a certain time in a race, a certain number of books read, so many blog posts written in a week, is at the center of pretty much every "leisure" time activity that I pursue. Why do I deny myself the inherent pleasure of these activities?What do I really like to do? Am I missing out on something that I would really enjoy in the constant pursuit of tracking my progress?

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Living in a fantasy world

My brother once told me he was a sex addict. I thought he was talking about compulsively having sex with loads of women, but he was really talking about being a porn addict. I'm not surprised that one of us ended up developing that habit. The more I look at my prototypical adults, my parents, the more I see the template of my inward orientation. Watching your parents either pull on head phones to read a book about Patton or sit and do cross stitch all night doesn't exactly set the stage for me to pour out my feelings at the first opportunity. A porn addiction is about as inward as it gets. You sit alone and satisfy yourself with fantasy images. There's no complexity or depth to the experience. It's stunting rather than expanding. 

Something like a porn addiction shrinks your world. You get so fixated on what's in you, you don't get a chance to really interact with the world. That's the inward orientation. The world gets filtered through whatever need you're trying to satisfy with your fantasy world. My brother turned to sexual images on the internet. I turned to the promise of jobs in Boston or the potential of pursing a law degree. My dad dreamed of being a powerful military leader. 

These were just fantasies. Fantasies are distractions. I can't rewind my life to see what would have happened if I hadn't spent pretty much one year applying to law school. Sure my employer was going through a bit of a transition at the time, but that was really just an excuse. Law school was something that I could pursue without having to worry about how things would actually turn out. There was little risk, but there was plenty of reward for somebody who puts a great deal of stock in what strangers think of him. It felt really good to get accepted into all those schools, but who knows what I would have done if I had been focused on something that would actually improve my life. I could have done something to improve my career prospects. I could have gotten a paper published with a comparable level of effort. I could have started digging into all the crap that I've been plowing through for the last couple of weeks. I could have worked out harder, read more books, or done something that would have had some kind of measurable benefit on to my life. Instead, I spent tons of energy on something that wasn't going to really going to change anything. 

But the fact that I spent so much energy on that project must say something about me. What drove me to spend all that effort for a few emails offering me a spot in their law school class? I wanted validation that I was better than all those other people who also applied. I wanted to win at something. I wanted a little badge that noted that I was able to do something that others couldn't accomplish. Maybe it was comparable to training for a marathon or an Ironman, to distinguish myself from those who were unable. That's overly generous. I just wanted something of little consequence to strive for. I didn't want to do the work to make my life better, but I wanted to do something that made me think I was doing something constructive. 

My Boston saga (I'm really going to need to add some links to this post) is another good illustration of how I've shuffled energy into something that doesn't really matter. I liked the idea of something different, a fresh start, because it saved me the trouble of confronting the real issues that I was facing. Rather than finding a way to improve my situation, I took comfort in finding the possibility of a way out, a route that I never would have taken. I can dig deep into my history to find where I used the allure of an unreal fantasy to help me deal with the struggles of my life. The alternative world of a video game was preferable to actually confronting high school or college life. I could have been out trying to experience something that college life had to offer, but instead I retreated to the comfort of Tetris. Predictable, safe, and risk free is always better than risking your ego to the whims of other people's fancy when you're entire orientation is inward.

Going out is too risky when all you do is look in. Every interaction with the outside is a challenge to who you are. I wanted the world to tell me that the image that I had of myself was real rather than interacting with other people and trying different things to find out who I really was. I avoided what was around me in order to make sure I didn't find out who I really was. I had to stay the same so the people who mattered in my life would keep loving me. They made me who I was to serve their needs. Becoming who I was meant to be would put an end to their fantasy. 

Saturday, May 3, 2014

My father, the emotional blackhole

I've been struggling to write this post (and it's not only because my shift keys refuse to work consistently). A powerful insight hit me while I was reading Fear of Intimacy. My first impulse was to get my thinking down here before it left me. Maybe I could deepen it a bit in the process of just getting it out of my head. (I question why I feel compelled to write about these very personal insights in such a public, albeit not widely read, venue. I just need to get some of this stuff out of my head. If I write it here, I'll be able to find it later.) I avoided writing the post because I don't really know how to approach the subject. I keep avoiding the real subject matter. It's painful. I've certainly dug up an important piece of my self-perception.

A couple of years ago, I went to my mom's house over Memorial Day weekend. My aunt and uncle were there, my brother would be there, I knew that before I left my house that morning. When I was about 10 minutes from my mom's driveway, she called me to let my know my dad was there too. I hadn't seen him in years. I don't think I've seen him since. The visit was horrible. I felt nothing but disgust when I was around my dad. All I could see was how weak and ineffectual he was. He was intimidated by my kids, afraid to interact with them, to talk to them, to see that my mom's husband was their real grandfather. I was happy to see him go. He sucks the joy and pleasure out of everything he touches.

I hate my dad. I don't think I've ever expressed it in quite that way until this moment, but that's how I feel. I hate him because he has never loved me. Not once, in my entire life, have I ever felt that my dad loved me for who I am. I've never been enough for him. No matter what I did, he couldn't find it in himself to show me any affection. I've just been there, an obligation and a burden. I have a constant sense that I'm not enough in my personal relationships. I can't help but think that I don't feel like I'm not enough because I was never enough for my father. If my own father couldn't love me, why would anybody else care about me? If I couldn't earn his affection, why would anybody else want to have anything to do with me?

This was my big insight tonight. That my life long sense of inadequacy is likely rooted in the fact that my dad rejected me over and over again throughout my youth. I rarely talk to him now. Tomorrow is my birthday. I may hear from him. He might send me a text. I'd be shocked if he called. Of course I want him to reach out to me tomorrow. As much as I dislike him, I still want his approval. I've been spending my life hoping that other people would give me their approval as some kind of replacement for the absence of my dad's acceptance of me for me. 

That way I described how I feel about my dad a few paragraphs ago, in many ways that's how I feel about myself. I know I'm not my father, but his imprint on my emotional being is very deep. How could a disinterested and neglectful father have any other impact on me? It pisses me off that somebody who I hold in such low regard has had such a profound impact on my life. My other parent has made her contribution, but my dad's disinterest set the stage. I was primed to think that I wasn't enough for other people by my father. I need to get out from under this burden. I have plenty of evidence that I'm not inadequate. That plenty of people accept me for me. I need to focus on that and get over this vestige of my childhood. That's the past. I don't need that armor anymore. It didn't really work all that well to begin with.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Relationship, with food

When I started this blog, I was trying to get my waist measurement to half my height. That seems to be the magic ratio for protecting your heart. Four years later, I'm no closer to getting to that measurement than I was when I wrote the first post in this blog. I'm wondering if I gained a great insight into why that is the case earlier tonight.

I'm currently enamored with this book about the way our psychological defenses prevent us from connecting with one another (a consequence of my effort to not fail as a husband). Like most psychotherapy books, there is frequent discussion about the role of the parents in shaping our emotional lives. I've been watching my mother for the last couple of months. I've seen that a few of my relationship patterns are her emotional legacy to me. Thanks Mom (in a tone dripping with sarcasm).

Given this awareness of my mother's impact on my emotional life, I've been looking for other patterns that may have their origins in the role that I was assigned very early in life. A role that I am currently under absolutely no obligation to keep playing. I noticed a pattern tonight that may account for why I haven't been able to shed my gut despite a stated desire to do just that. I was the good eater in the family. My mother provided food and it was my job to eat as much of that food as I could with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. Being a good eater is a critical part of my identity. Eating is a primary part of who I am.

I can find other evidence of the key role food had in determining my value to my mother by looking at the way she treats my kids. Almost every time she takes them for the weekend, I hear who ate a "good" lunch or dinner or whatever. Eating lots of food is somehow associated with a positive outcome. I'm sure I ate plenty of "good" meals because I wanted to be a good boy. I liked getting approval from important adults. (Being a "good" boy is another part of the identity that I was given rather than being a natural expression of who I am as an individual.) Eating lots of food is one way that I can be a good boy. I eat to feed that emotional need for acceptance. Eating a good meal, with good meaning lots of food, makes me feel content because I'm earning praise for the kid I was 30 some years ago. I've confused the voice telling me to eat more, a voice placed there by my mother, with my own voice.

How many other aspects of what I think is me is really just something put there by somebody else before I knew what was happening to me?