Tetris

Ever done one of those quizzes where they ask what sort of animal you see yourself as? I don't know what I currently am but it would appear that I have spent rather a lot of time being a beaver (oy, stop sniggering at the back there!), building my little dams and trying to coerce the flow of life into going where I want it to. As a short term coping strategy, this is just dandy but long term it's more problematic. You reach the stage where everything becomes static and stagnant and you feel hemmed in.

That's very much how I feel right now and I need to get things moving again. Too often I have focused on my fitness - it's my way of convincing myself that I'm making progress - while very obviously ignoring other things that I would be better attending to. Well, the body is pretty much in order so it's time for me now to focus on the other stuff instead. It's frankly a bit scary. I would far rather face the discomfort of infinite hack squats than examine my emotional issues but I know that's not a useful approach ;) If I am going to be an Action Babe then I need to stop being such a scaredy cat!

Stage 1: declutter! This process has already begun. I do not throw anything away, ever. Also, I like to buy stuff. This means that I have a very messy house indeed. It means that my house never feels like a restful place to be because no matter where I look, I see things that need attending to - laundry to be folded, books to be squeezed back onto the over-stuffed shelves, piles of paperwork that needs filed. That's surface clutter which it won't pain me too much to attend to. The stuff that really bothers me is all lurking in the bedroom; clothes of various sizes that I never wear, things which were gifts from ex-partners, frankly more clothes (oops)

All the things that need cleared out of my bedroom pull big emotive triggers. I feel guilty casting aside gifts from an ex. Why? If I saw him in the street, I wouldn't feel inclined to go up and say hi, so why do I want to hang onto things given to me by someone who now means little to me? I have a horrible feeling that I keep them as a reminder to myself that I am capable of forming romantic attachments. I have no idea what to do with these things - burning love letters etc just seems so callous.

Clothes are obviously the other big issue. I have some truly fabulous frocks from my time at university. It appears that I went to a lot of balls :) I don't particularly want to part with them (mostly because I'm just really impressed that they still fit!) but I simply don't have the space for them and I never get the opportunity to wear them these days. The other clothes that need to go are the ones from when I was too thin. Not long after I started strength training, I made myself a promise that I would never again let myself get smaller than a size 8 (US size 4). That's the smallest my body naturally goes without extreme effort and diligence and the slimmest I can be without looking too skinny. I'm just over 5ft 7 so I think that's reasonable. Today I (re)discovered a large bag of clothes, nothing bigger than a size 6 and a lot of them much, much smaller than that. Looking at them, I couldn't at first imagine how they ever fitted me ... and then I remembered how boney I used to be and that kind of answered my question. I don't think I could even get a leg in any of them now! I had a brief moment of feeling bad about how I look now and it's churned up a lot of emotions. Nonetheless, all those clothes are now bagged up and outside my door waiting for the recycling man to come and collect them in the morning. It might have taken me years but those were the last vestiges of my struggles with disordered eating and I am finally letting them go. 

Stage 1, just about done.