A question that was asked of me today by our marriage counsellor.
The last two sessions have ended (maybe even started) with me in tears and a rubbishbin full of snotty, teary & sweaty tissues (yes I use tissues to wipe the sweat from my awmpits rather than spray anitperspirants, what of it?!). I think our sessions have taken a bit of a turn from dealing with communication issues in the marriage relationship to recognising and responding to my increasing misery (Her word).
Misery.
Wow!
Yeah that will wake a person up. If someone who sees me for 50 minutes every 2-3 weeks just whips out the 'M' word in the middle of polite therpaeutic conversation then I consider that something has gone terribly awry in my world. I didn't fight it though. She was goddarned right! I am miserable. A lot of the time. That is when I told her that I believe that I was very happy around 18 months ago. I had been out of the church for also about 18 months and life had never been more exciting for me. I was my own boss in every sense of the word and I was loving it. So she asked me the question that I should have been asking myself (had I had my head out of the Zabrowka and into some restful sleep then maybe I would have thought to ask the question!)... but someone asked and now it's time to answer. In the session I rambled on about how overloaded I currently feel but never really identified anything that was missing.
The first thing that comes to my mind sitting here in the library is exercise. Although I do still teach my Body Balance classes 2-3 times a week as well as practice at home, I have all but stopped beach walking and I haven't been to any RPM (spin) classes or used the gym equipment for months (18 months??). I have allowed many things to take over what used to be my precious workout time. The most obvious would be one of my 4 part-time jobs. Time to cull.
The next and far more trickier to fix IMO is the drinking and late night rascality. When my weekend exercise time was being carved out in the early hours of the morning, that then became a little difficult to reconcile with the mind bending late night awesomeness of the local talent at various live music venues. I had heard the Pied Piper and followed like a little lovesick heatseeker. I research (yes all nerdy-like with multiple windows open, googling and myspacing the bands who will be in Perth that weekend) and then gather willing companions for late night romps into the dingy and the dodgy... in the hunt for that magical drug, Nirvana. I have found it enough times that I am now fairly addicted. But as Jerry Seinfeld so sagely illustrated:
JERRY: I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I'm Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. 'What about getting up after five hours sleep?', oh that's Morning Guy's problem. That's not my problem, I'm Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you're ..... (?), you're exhausted, groggy, oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There's nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.
So I will need to let Night Girl and Morning Girl have at it and then we'll all go out for coffee by the beach and pick up the pieces. Some compromising and canoodling will take place and then I am confident that we will have before us a sensible and concrete plan for ulimate health and fitness as well as stellar witching hour trysts with the rock gods of Perth.
I also asked The Rockstar if he could think of anything that I had stopped doing and he thought of this blog. Which is why your eyes and brain have just been tortured with this increasingly superlative blog post written whilst I was supposed to be doing my taxes. Yes today it the last day to do my taxes. Yes it is nearly 3pm and the tax office closes at 4pm... but I'll let Morning Girl sort that out.
