no, i'm not dead. 2017 was just a rough year. a really rough year. by the end of it, everything had gone down the drain. i'd written just over 32,000 words (the first year i started tracking, i wrote over 175k), i'd stopped working out or watching my diet, my routine was a wreck. there were a lot of days when i was lucky to function. and it wasn't your standard depression, though i'm sure that played into the mess. it was more being incapable of dealing with more than the nightmare president, having my grandson and dealing with getting him settled somewhere, a lot of family things going down, hell, i can't even remember half of what was going on. just a rough year. and a lot of that will continue to play out this year, but i'm ready to try to work around what i can and get back on my feet.
i'm trying to be thoughtful about moving forward this year. i want to set goals, but i need to think about them, especially when it comes to my health. my weight seems to have settled, and i'd still like to lose, but i don't want to make my health journey about that this year. i think i want to focus on rebuilding my strength (an injury to my elbows last year has had me off lifting for about as long as i stopped updating) and stamina, maybe getting back to yoga. but i have to think about it before it settle on my goals for this year. i just know that right now, it can't be about weight. not entirely. i can't let my health journey become as frustrating as it was getting over the last 18 months.
what i do know for sure is that i need to get back to some kind of workout. my workouts helped set my day, get me into routine, and usually helped with my mood. somehow, those workouts became the most stabilizing part of my day. i also know i need to push a little less. not be so pedal to the metal, so to speak. focus on the process. build a bit more slowly. i was lifting 12s before i tweaked my elbows. i'll be starting around 4s again. slowing down will be hard for me—i don't slow down—but i need to. and i need to watch for the signs that i'm pushing too hard and focusing on the wrong things. i'd say i should avoid the scale, but i also have to keep an eye on intake. i've gained my menopause 20; i don't want to gain anymore. and i'm still working on learning my body cues when it comes to food, so it'd be far too easy to over indulge.
so, yea, that's a lot for me to process and figure out just by itself.
goal 1: get back to working out. weights three times a week, yoga twice. for now. that should work. i'm not planning to do long drawn out workouts either. so, 30 minutes, give or take. that sounds good.
i also want to get back to my writing, but again, i need baby steps. during my lowest count years, i was averaging about 500 words a day, but i suspect after 6 months of doing next to nothing, that's still too high. so, i'm going to aim for 250 for now. get consistent with that before i move it up. i have four projects i've been poking at: two are revisions (one which was previously revised but hasn't done well on the market-go-round), one in mid-early drafting (basics done, now being filled out) but that is also unlikely to sell, and one that's been a headache from the get-go. i'm dropping the headache one for sure—fighting the story won't help. for now, i'll rotate these as i feel like it, build up the writing muscle again before i become more focused.
goal 2: baby steps back to writing.
both of these have a chance of being upended if i end up caring for my grandson again. but if that happens, i'm going to need to find a way through. i let challenges stop me last year.
goal 3: step up to this year's challenges. if i need to stop, i get back to my routines as soon as possible, but i'm going to try to not let them derail me.
i also want to get back to reading before bed. that has fallen off quite a bit recently. but i'm not going to goal it for now. i'm trying to get back on track, and to do that, i need to avoid overwhelming myself with too many goals. goal 3 isn't anything i can really measure, but goals 1 and 2 are challenging on their own. so i'm going to keep the reading thing vagueish. try to read a bit before bed. no specific pages, no specific number of books for now. just make an effort to pick up the nook and read. lord knows i have more ebooks than i'll get through in my life, so i have plenty of material.
i also want to make sure to not lose new things i started doing this past 6 months that i enjoy doing. i've begun playing with and coming back into my own with makeup and i've started a tiny (and without all the bells and whistles of others) youtube channel called domy tries this. i want to continue with those. and there are things i want to reduce my time on, specifically things like influenster that eat time without too much benefit to me. i've kind of let that (and similar stuff) take up the time that used to be spent on writing and whatnot. not all of it—there's also been some plain laziness and lack of motivation involved—but enough of it that i'll need to go through the sites i tend to peruse these days and decide what's staying and what's going. i suspect as i find my footing again, a lot of the time wasters will fall to the wayside naturally. i also want to get back to baking again, but that too will have to wait until i feel like my elbows can take the pressure of kneading and whatnot.
so, yes, taking baby steps forward. as i make progress, i hope to reevaluate and figure out the next thing i want to bring back into my life. i really did let so much go the last 6 months of 2017, it's kind of hard to see everything that got left behind. i do think i needed the time off (maybe not as much as i took, but definitely needed to not push myself on anything for awhile), and now it's likely to be difficult to get back to even the things i love doing on a regular basis because there's no momentum. they're old routines, comfortable things once i'm in them, but i haven't been in them in a long time.
goals 1 and 2. those are what matter now. no overwhelming myself, no pressuring myself to do it all. one day at a time, one step at a time. meandering my way out of an unexpected vacation. i can do that.
~*~
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