Why am I so reluctant to talk to people?

I go out for coffee or lunch on my own

(like I’ve been doing for, you know, the past twenty years or so - not always alone but mostly; I read, I write, I write a tonne. It’s normal for me.)

and I always get a little bit nervous ordering, I’m quietly spoken.

(I’ve gone through periods of being more overtly confident, louder, making more eye contact. I’m not nervous or anxious except that it’s just a habit to be that way).

Other people can seem so loud, so confident, their voices carry, the baristas get their orders the first time around. They take their time talking.

And then I sit down and look at all the people and think, they all look so interesting, why would I not want to talk to all of them, hear their stories. I wish I could find a pretext for it, get their attention.

Do I find men more interesting? I think I know what the women will say. I guess there is that added thing of potential chemistry with men, that extra layer of testing whether I’m still attractive. Some men love to talk to women, some don’t I guess. Sometimes I just look at a guy and wonder what it would be like to run my fingers through his hair. Some men look like lovers I’ve had. I’m not looking for lovers right now but I’d still like to hear their stories.

(I wish it was easier to just talk to people, to start conversations.)

Anyway, that whole train of thought is a diversion. I am reluctant to place my order because I am in my internal bubble, the world of my own thoughts. I just don’t want to break the silence. And the wall of glass that kept me captive all those years, is now the window that protects my whole internal world and keeps it all mine.

(You could sit opposite me and not say a word, just make eye contact, and I could look at you from inside the bubble and that would be fine. Just don’t speak. Don’t ask me anything.)

New Moon: Mode B

Today I wouldn’t say I’d “achieved” a lot - health baseline hit and a couple of other bits done, but hardly productive. But in a way I learned something totally new: how to relax well, without going back to sleep, without fretting, without getting down on myself. In a way, I took a step towards preparing for my new life, the life I just live, happily.

Resting Well included:

• A long walk

• Hot coffee

• Excellent home-prepared meals

• Soaking up the sunshine

• Cuddle time

• Painting

• Reading a book I wouldn’t normally say I “had time for”

• Learning a new meditation/relaxation technique from the book

• Calling a friend

• Pottering around the flat - I can really see how small changes and bits of tidying up can cleanse the space

• Little bits of new hobbies for the fun of them, without having to achieve anything

• Wrote up some affirmations

I stayed off the laptop and TV shows until normal time in the evening. Learning to subsist in the semi-silence was actually really lovely. I just enjoyed existing, took the weather as it came and went, did what felt right.

All these days are steps in the right direction. Coming out of addiction and depression is like learning how to live all over again.

Change for Good?

I’ve been on a health/weight-loss kick since the start of the year (not my first time! and I expect I’m not alone here). I’ve been doing Noom and while I’m not going to share Noom’s tips and tricks here I will say it’s well worth the money - I have never enjoyed losing weight so much or lost it so consistently - or been able to maintain a calorie deficit for so long so uninterruptedly.

I feel like I was just “ready” this time - there could be lots of reasons for this, including that the isolation of Lockdown and being left alone to my own thoughts and values actually resulted in me seeing how much I wanted to change. I was granted a blessed, almost unbelievable amount of acceptance out there in my work, among my friends, in public, but actually what I was doing wasn’t good enough for me and in the end I felt I had no choice but to change. Being on my own so much made that crystal clear and inescapable. So notwithstanding that I’ve had an eating disorder for most of my life and been treated and lost and regained weight and undergone every kind of disastrous failure when trying to attempt this in the past, I really believe it’s still achievable and that I’ve made irreversible changes (I’m about 13% of the way towards my ultimate goal) because this time it was so internally motivated and part of a much wider process of willing my life to be how I’d like it to be.

I’ll share some of my own meal hacks etc. as we go along - strong as the will may be, the logistics of ensuring a calorie deficit are the same puzzle they always were - but the biggest success factor for me has been this:

My body’s needs from food are only part of what I use food for.

My relationship with food has been so major and involved, with all my daily routines, much of my mood and much of my thinking absorbed in it. It’s dictated how I use my time, how I feel, what I allow myself to do, for as long as I can remember and it has overshadowed almost every other form of pleasure. But really, my body only needs so much food, it’s only designed to deal with so much food, and that amount will never change no matter how I feel - so while I’m not saying it’s not normal to enjoy food and use it to an extent as comfort, celebration, and reward, it doesn’t deserve this supreme overarching role. It doesn’t deserve to be my first (mmm well brunch though… ;) ) last and every waking thought. It’s fuel, plus a bit of what you fancy. So all that other space it was taking up is my life and time to do other things with.

It feels odd to say that I’m allowing the role of food to diminish.

I felt quite lonely to start with.

I’m still in the process of working out what else in my life I can build stronger relationships with in its place.

I’ve realised I can start using my Gemini nature to keep me from getting too obsessed in any one direction. Being naturally interested in a wide variety of things, hobbies and learning come easily and adding new things is never the problem (adding too many at once might be!) So in the aftermath of the one true obsession I did have, I’m finding there’s a natural attention span to activities and tasks and that I’ll naturally flow between them. A richer life all round? That’s probably why I can’t see myself going back to being who I was. The role my eating played is no longer necessary; it’s run its course, and although all my life I wished things were different, I’m now enjoying what I’m learning from the process of change so much that I’m grateful for the chance to go through it. It’s an adventure I would never have had otherwise.

Sleep

Sunrise this morning - worth getting up and out for.

I’ve been round the houses with my sleep pattern - I’m guessing this is a general Lockdown thing and would love to hear about other people’s random sleep habits. I’ve been reading Matthew Edlund’s The Power of Rest intermittently - it’s about much more than just sleep - and though (like most things I read) I’ll only apply a portion of it myself, I do find people’s experiences around sleep fascinating.

I’ve never been an amazing sleeper, I always notice when I’ve slept through the night because it happens very rarely (maybe a couple of times a year) and it’s always taken me a long time to fall asleep, though this improves with a tonne of exercise and anything I do to address background anxiety. I have given up caffeine in the past and I don’t believe it plays a major role (not enough to be worth giving it up!) and I’m extremely undisciplined about electronics in the bedroom although I have all the bluelight filters on now. I also currently have a significant distance relationship where our only currently available chat time is sometime between 11pm - half-midnight - so these are the parameters I’ve been working within.

These are the Lockdown-specific factors:

• the ability to conduct almost all my activities around any chosen schedule and lack of daytime scheduling. There are restrictions on shop opening hours but even that is only overnight between 10pm and 6am here.

• wanting to sleep more or finding it harder to wake up because there’s not enough to do, the days feel long (I get lonely and would rather be asleep) or there aren’t enough plans

• it’s very difficult to wear myself out completely; I’ll get emotionally weary but not physically exhausted

• general mood issues affecting sleep

• it’s also quite hard to justify getting overly tired when being home all the time (bed is right there!) - whereas outside of home I would have mostly just kept on pushing through if I got tired, it’s harder to do this at home

• I basically never have to wake up to an alarm - I do set them occasionally if there’s something I’ve got to match schedules with but because I tend to wake between sleep cycles anyway I just get up at the nearest one to the alarm time rather than letting it wake me

Mostly I have slept as much as I’ve wanted to and when I’ve wanted to and after years of a packed schedule and feeling pretty much universally under-slept, I finally came out the other side of this luxurious sleep allowance to where I only wanted (physically wanted) to sleep for a normal amount - somewhere between 7 and 9 hours of actual sleep.

Over the winter I did chase my sleep around the clock once; for some reason I do seem to sleep better (more contentedly) during the day and having to try to sleep at night is something I grow a bit resentful about - but I have to balance this off against missing the daytimes and the light, especially in the winter here where it’s easily possible to sleep through entire days and never get any daylight. For a while I was going to sleep around 3-4am and then one day it was 6am and it just kept going from there. After that I settled on an extended bedtime starting from around 1am until late morning, give or take, during which I’d try to get the right amount of total sleep but sometimes with a break in the middle.

The spanner in the works now is that this is my favourite time of year and I love to see the spring dawns - in the past when I’ve had office hours I’ve been known to get up at 4am across the summer (not daily but at least a couple of times a week) and I’m not willing to miss out on that completely; it’s also my favourite time to exercise. It’s not compatible with the post-chat 1am bedtime so I have to choose - ideally I’d like one shorter night followed by a longer one where I sleep in and then I’d get the best of both worlds, if my body could adapt to this.

What I’ve learned about my own preferences:

• I’m not a fan of naps any more - I used to love them and you’d often find me curled up peacefully on the sofa during the day, but now I’d rather go to sleep properly, in bed, for a good chunk of time and then have clear awake times. Maybe it is worth thinking about your Awake Pattern more than Sleep Pattern?

• I get naturally sleepy about 3am - I am both an owl and a lark, in fact at some times of year my ideal sleeping and waking times would only be an hour or two apart!

• I am OK waking up in the dark if it’s pre-dawn but hate it in the evening.

• There’s nothing I dislike more than trying to force myself to sleep at specific times; the most relaxing thing is to allow myself to sleep when I’m ready to and then work around it within reason.

• I want to be awake! I am enjoying life more and there are things about the daytimes (especially mornings) that I really want to get up for.

• If I’ve got a particular time in mind to be awake for I will generally naturally wake up around that time, without an alarm.

So for this week I have been trying a bi-phase (split sleep) schedule that goes something like this:

• Sleep when I’m sleepy at night (between 2:30-4am) but don’t make myself go to bed until I’m ready

• Get up when my sleep splits (around 6-7am) and enjoy the dawn, take a walk

• Stay up until I’m sleepy again - this part can be hazy as I’m “under”-slept but nice for reading, writing, pottering around.

• Sleep another 3-4 hours in the middle of the day

• Wake up and start what would have been my normal day (so maybe 12-14 hours between lunchtime and the next sleep)

• This has knock-on effects with other daily routines, mealtimes in particular - I’ll come back to that later

I don’t think I can split-sleep in the long-term but I’m comfortable with it for now. That alternating short/long sleep pattern is still the ideal I’m working towards but my quality of life is much better for getting my mornings back and hopefully I’m building a bit of discipline around getting up (and having things worth getting up for - twice a day!)

Re-emergence

I’ve been contemplating a return to blogging for a couple of months and finally I’m here! with lots to say on various topics; I have a Hundred Helpful Thoughts project I’m working on, and various thoughts about lockdown life which we’re still one-foot-in here. Like most people, it’s been a year since I was office-bound, socialising and travelling as a norm and I am trying to separate the ways that year has shaped me for the future into distinct threads - which I think writing will help with.

I live alone and lockdown has been a combination of getting insanely comfortable within my four-wall-fortress, and confronting the internal landscape of my mind. This mental world expanded to fill the space left by events, socialising, roaming, exploring, commuting, and all the outside-home things we’ve no longer been able to do - even when I’ve been outside walking I’ve been further into my head having conversations about what’s happening (or not). There has been nowhere to hide from parts of my own persona that I’d previously tried to muffle with my busy life, and like it or not I have had to face down discomforting trains of thought and self-conceptualisation that have dogged me most of my life. Regardless of how lonely and unforgiving that’s felt at times, I feel much stronger in terms of not hiding from myself (and no longer needing to), having a good think about how I want to combine what I’ve got inside and honour what I am with the life that I’m living, and settling on some pretty big changes in what I’m actually doing with my time. I would sum this up as a massive formative process and a shift in fundamental values and it turns out that what’s important to me is different from what was important when I was engaged in this cover-up web of a lifestyle. Many things have become vastly clearer.

My biggest takeaways have been:

• Values-wise, my priority is freedom, especially the freedom to live each day as it comes, let it unfold as it will and embrace the unexpected.

• Ironically, social distancing has given me back the power to determine how I choose to interact with the world and those around me.

• I have to take responsibility for myself, and I’ve learnt that I can trust myself to do the things that matter - this is a huge relief. Independence and freedom go hand in hand and I’m less anxious the less reliant I need to be on others.

Overall I see this as a tale of empowerment.

Things I’m still working on:

• Courage

• Self-expression

• Contributing, sense of purpose

• Balance

• If my driving force is no longer (or decreasingly) fear and anxiety, what is my life built on now?