Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I'm easing myself slowly, oh so slowly, back into training and it's amazing the difference that it has made to my outlook. Just getting my body moving is calming my mind. It's like I've been away and am now coming back into myself. It's a huge relief but it has made me aware that I rely far too heavily on my training as a source of confidence and as a coping mechanism.

The fact is that stressful things will happen anyway and I need to have a bit more in my response arsenal than simply running, cycling, swimming and strength training. There are mental reminders that I need and physical things that I can do but most of all I need to remember that there are options!

I think it's easy to get bogged down in the day to day stuff you have to do, sometimes to the point where you forget what the things you actually enjoy are. This means any chill out time you get to yourself is often wasted and the stress mounts. There are lots of things which I enjoy and I'm trying to remind myself of that. During hard times, I withdraw and end up as a hard little ball of unfeelingness, a little stone, a kernel which is part of me but not the full story. It takes work to reawaken the rest, I forget that I am capable of feeling more, of being more. The pathways back to yourself are not always complex, momentum can be sparked by the smallest of things; a book, a film, making something, just being with people. I won't lie, I have had an absolutely foul week but in amongst it all, I have gathered some things to me which will help me in the next few days:

Reading Bath-time reading is The Catcher in the Rye. All other reading has been supplied in digital format by the lovely and generous Taff-man. Thank you sweetie :)

Watching I treated myself to a Hitchcock boxset. I still have some Twin Peaks to watch and there has been some proper anime geekage with the boy. I have to confess also to the watching of cheesy horror flicks! Shamed as I am to admit it, I have also been watching far too many re-runs of America's Next Top Model. It's my guilty secret.

Doing I've been cooking up a storm. We're mildly obsessed with Italian and Spanish food at the moment so there has been paella and a whole lot of tapas, gnocchi, focaccia and pasta as far as the eye can see. Everything features either olives (sorry Neil!), chorizo or both. I have a huge appetite at the moment but only for savoury things and generally, the hotter the better. We had Mexican food for dinner tonight at Pancho Villas and I scoffed all the stuffed jalapenos. They were lovely. Mind you, our very non-trad Easter meal will be chickpea curry - love it! I've also been getting stuck back into some more crafty/artistic endeavours.

The head stuff I guess this is where I often get stuck. I have a tendency to blame myself when things go wrong but this week has opened my eyes a bit. There has been a difficult situation going on for a while now and the longer it went on, the more worthless I felt. This week, I brought it to a close completely. I was tolerating things which made me feel horrendous simply because I was too conscious of not wanting to give offence, of wanting to remain civil, of trying to make things easier for everyone. In the end, it wasn't worth the effort and in all these months spent feeling progressively worse about myself what it comes down to is that at worst, I am guilty of poor judgement and naivety. The older I get, the more straightforwardly I present myself - this is me, some bits are kind of crappy and I have my faults but overall, I'm a decent person. It simply didn't occur to me that someone could get to my age and have such a lack of insight about themselves and their behaviour. Surely the rest of us gave up blaming the world for our own faults by the time we left our teens? Ultimately though, freeing myself from this situation has left me feeling better than I have in months.

It's also given me the conviction that I need to stay single (and celibate) for the near future. I want to get my fitness back on track, focus on getting my nutrition qualification and a million other things. This means complicated relationship nonsense has to go on the back burner for a while. Priorities!