So This Is The New Year, And I Feel So Very Different

I hesitate to write this. It’s only been a week. A week is nothing. But it feels like more, it feels like longer. I was shocked to learn two days ago that it has been less than three weeks since Christmas. And that illusion of time slowing down counts for something. When life was like what it was like last year, it goes by very quickly. But when life goes as it has gone so far this year, it goes very slowly. Life slows down when you make a change, when you take some control over it. And apparently taking some control over your life is possible. I know, I know, not for everyone. Taking control over your brain when you have a mental illness such as depression or anxiety is near-impossible. But somehow I’ve done it this year. 

So I guess I’m on a diet, for the first time in my 32 years. I didn’t really think of it as a diet, but my therapist labelled the changes I have made as a diet and I suppose it is one. I’m going vegan before 6pm (for health reasons), eating whatever the fuck I want between 6pm and 9pm and then eating and drinking absolutely nothing until the next day. I’ve largely stuck to this diet for several days now. I’m using our elliptical and doing stomach crunches every day. I’m weighing myself several times a day and have lost 5 lbs in a week’s time.

But that’s not all. I’m getting up 2.5 hours earlier than I did in early December, and earlier each day. I’m reading for about an hour a day, watching quality TV again, am on top of the kitchen, have a tidy apartment, am making vegan lunches from scratch again. If I can get my writing going again, I’m pretty close to, within a week’s time, living my best life. 

I doubt it will last. In fact my therapist told me it wouldn’t. It has been a week and I am shocked at how many times I have stuck too it when normally I would have given in to temptation. I was anxious and sad last night and wanted to feed my feelings. But I resisted and went to bed hungry.

The important thing, and the thing that makes this different, is that I know the key to it all: self-forgiveness. Strange words to be in my emotional vocabulary. But they’re there. I don’t know how they got there, or where they came from. And they’re certainly not an emotionally global phenomenon for me, but when it comes to self-discipline, they have made an appearance. The key to self-discipline is not not falling off the wagon, and being perfect, but allowing yourself to fail and then giving yourself the chance to succeed again tomorrow.  

So how’d I do it? I have two answers to that. First, I have no idea how I did it because I’m as shocked as you are that I’m doing it. And second, here’s how. 

I cried hard and deep on New Year’s Day. The truth was, at least in my head that day, that 2013 was a shitty year because it was the year I got stuck and did nothing for hours each day. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Why did I get stuck every day? Because I stopped caring about the activities I care about. I still care about people and my cats but that’s pretty much all I cared about. I stopped caring about television (my passion) and reading and eventually writing (my “job”). So each day when I had finished breakfast and caught up on Twitter, I had nothing to do. I had existential, depression-based boredom. I got psychologically, emotionally, stuck. In a literature class I took once I believed it was called something like mental paralysis. It’s a hard concept to understand if you’ve never experienced it. And it’s a hard state of mind to get out of if you have. 

So I cried hard on January first because I was certain that this year would be no different from the last. Then, two days later, I went to my regular therapy appointment. You see my husband and therapist look at the year I had last year and see a good one. They see progress in me, they see day to day happiness, and the many things I actually DID get accomplished last year. My therapist explained to me that my lack of caring is emblematic of two things, both of which show incredible progress. First, my 2013 dearth of caring was a welcome change from my previous life of caring too much, caring so much with my highly sensitive self that I was getting hurt constantly. And when he pointed this out, I realized that there is a very large part of me that doesn’t just not care about television but also does not care about the bad shit that’s happened to me. I still care but I also don’t anymore. At the same time. Yes it’s possible. Second, when your anxiety/depression/what-have-you goes away, you’re left with nothing to motivate your every move. By that I mean that you’ve been motivated all your life not by the healthy, normal factors (whatever those are) but by things like fear and sadness. Take that motivation away and you’re left with no motivation at all. That’s what happened to me last year. 

So my doctor told me I had to build new, healthy motivations. My new motivations are out of wanting to be healthier and happier and not wanting to escape the hatred I feel for myself for not being healthier and happier. It’s a subtle but major difference. The self-hate is gone from the equation. It’s still there, in me, but it’s not my main motivator now.  My motivator is to build a life that replaces the self-hate with pride of self. 

Yeah yeah but what actions did I take? What are the mechanics of this new if temporary me? I carefully selected two self-help-type books I hadn’t read before: The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal which is teaching me how to cultivate willpower from scratch, and Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert which is reframing my conception of happiness. So far, both are very good. I’ll let you read them on your own, instead of outlining what I’ve learned here. 

I’m taking a very simple approach to the hardest things in my daily list: getting up to an alarm and exercising. I started small, very small. Get up at 11am, spend 30 seconds on the elliptical, do 15 stomach crunches. Then each day I get up a minute earlier, do 5 more seconds on the elliptical and 5 more crunches than the day before. It’ll take time to build up, but it’s slowly building over time from something minimal to something real, and my body won’t notice. 

I also signed myself up with the free service Wunderlist which is essentially a beautiful and easy way to organize your life into the lists I am already so good at making. Each day it generates a list of things I have to do in my day. Most of these things are recurring tasks such as using the elliptical, not eating after 9pm and reading. But I can also add other tasks like groceries and “watch True Detective.” When I click on the box beside each item, it disappears for the day. This daily list leads to the one and only real daily goal I have in life: tick those things off the list until I get down to nothing. 

Like I said, this new found energy and motivation in life won’t last. But also like I said, the key to it, is knowing that after I fall into my next depression, I have a place to go when I get out of it: back to these habits, back to believing that I can. It’s only been a week but this one, this one feels different somehow. Why? I believe in myself, possibly for the first time in my life.