Honesty

Melancholy and the infinite Sadness

Oooof. What a title, right?  But let's be real. Sometimes it feels like that. When you are trying everything, you feel like you are sacrificing so much and then you still don't get the results you want. Or even worse, you get some results only to see them obliterated after an off week or day. You feel like you are on this hedonic treadmill of false starts, roadblocks and frustration. It seems never ending. “Is it even worth it if this is what it's going to be like for the rest of my life?” you ponder to yourself. 

This adventure isn’t all unicorn sparkles and easy mornings. It’s long and….well….difficult. Like Lord of the Rings. If you haven’t seen it, don’t worry.  I’ve seen most of it and remember less.  To all of you massive LOTR fans, I apologize for my butchered recounting of it.  I know each movie is like 60 hours long. I know the hobbits are played by my childhood crush Elisa Woods and Rudy.  They leave their home in search of adventure. They are so excited at first. We’ve all seen the memes of one of them jumping and saying “We’re going on an ADVENTURE!”  But soon things go south. There is danger, peril, fire? Gollum appears. He’s good?  But when he gets the ring or thinks about it he turns evil and into Smeagle and messes everything up.  A bunch of stuff happens in between. It’s good and then it's bad, people die and more stuff happens and honestly I’m not really sure how it ends. It probably ends good, or at least not bad?  The point is, this is how most health and fitness journeys are.

Still wondering where the hope is in this blog? It’s coming. Drum roll please!  The secret to all of it, is to know that it's hard. To know that it absolutely sucks. You will cry, you will yell, you will be happy, sad, excited, all of it. You are changing your life. You will struggle. You will quit. You will quit. You will quit a lot. But you will start again and again and again. You will wonder if it's with it. You will be inspired and scared. This is why I hate when people talk about going on a health and fitness journey. Do you know how the dictionary defines a Journey? Journey: an act of traveling from one place to another. If in the beginning they had screamed they were going on a journey, then you would have expected them to go across town and the move would be a normal time and not eleventy 60 hour movies. No, they screamed in the beginning, “We’re going on an ADVENTURE!”  The dictionary defines the word Adventure as: an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous experience or activity. This is exactly what changing your life is, it’s an adventure. It’s unusual that people change their life. It’s exciting! It feels hazardous to us, to our emotions, to our habits, to our insecurities. But this is what you have signed up for. It’s a great, glorious adventure. 

You are going to make it. You are going to make it through the hard times. You are going to learn. You are going to grow. And you are going to come out on the other side a person who has grown, who has been through an evolution. This adventure doesn’t make you a “different” person. I’m still me. I still struggle. But it’s a different feeling now.  And I think that's a misconception of this whole process too. It’s that false hope that you are going to be a “totally different person at the end.” You will have changed but at your core you will always be you. Think of a flower. Any flower. Imagine saying a flower is a completely different flower once it has bloomed. It’s still the same flower, it’s just evolved, it’s in a different stage of its life. That's where I think we get a lot of sadness and hopelessness on this adventure. That you get into and you magically don’t change into a different person. You will always be you, but you will bloom.

Thanks for reading. And thanks for putting up with my thousands of analogies. If this has helped you let me know. If you need anything let me know and I will do my best to help you! We are all on this adventure together. Check out more of my blogs or consider signing up for my Pateron for more resources.