Mister Chest-Always-So-Puffed Guy

 A few weeks ago, I noticed that some of my pants were getting a little snug around the waist.  Not all of them, and not even most, but enough to draw my attention.  I'll admit it.  I having been exercising as much over the winter as I should have been.  I also haven't been watching what I eat as closely as I should, either.  For comparison's sake, let me detail just one exercise.  As recently as two years ago, I was able to do a unilateral floor press with a 120 lb. dumbbell for four-to-six reps, minimum.  Yes, I used my non-working hand to self support, but this still put my 1RM for the bench press in the 250 lb. range.  Very respectful.  I used similar, comparative weights for other exercises and body parts.  However, I haven't used that weight in a fairly long time.  It all started during last year's lockdown.  I was planning on adding extra lifting sessions to help fill my otherwise empty schedule.  My plan was "working out" (sorry, bad pun, but worth it), until the Easter power outage.  After that week, I just started to lose interest and energy to exercise that much.  By last fall, I rarely used anything heavier than thirty pounds for any exercise.  In fact, over the winter, I usually used five or ten pounds for any lift.  I was having trouble sleeping, leaving me too tired to do much more than a minimum, token work-out most days.  Consequently, I guess I put on a little weight. At least all the worrying and pacing I did helped out.  (Pacing is just walking, and walking is exercise, right?)  Anyway, I started to progress back to my max lifting weights again.  As of this week, I am back up to ninety pounds for my floor presses, for ten reps.  I am using about the same amount for other large muscle groups, and about half those weights for smaller one.  Most of my training still is comprised of light weights though.  I train thoroughly, but safely, since I'm working out at home and not a gym.  My pants have already started to get looser.  However, I been noticing bigger changes with some of my shirts.  Some of them are refusing to stay tucked in my pants.  More so, many are getting loose across my stomach and tighter elsewhere.  Namely my chest and shoulders.  Yes, my chest in sticking out more than my tummy.  Not all the time, but it is happening more frequently.  Sure, sometimes it is only for a short time a day after a great session. but it is still a great feeling.  Any time a man my age has a bigger chest than stomach is a great day.  And I have something else to admit.  I flex my pecs sometimes for pictures, or just to look more impressive.  They're not that big, yet, although I strongly suspect that I would have the right body type for great development, if I just ate clean and worked out all but non-stop, but every little detail such as that can build confidence.

Disruptions of Services

 Next week, I start a term of jury duty.  Every night, I have to check in to see if I am to report the next day.  Even then, I won't know if there will be a trial or if I will be selected to serve until the actual moment.  This will be the only time I will be mentioning my service anywhere on social media.  Of course, I can't comment on actual cases, but I won't even mention things tangential to serving, such as having problems finding a parking space.  I'm just too cautious for that.  Two weeks later, I will be taking my first online graduate school class after a two year hiatus.  Normally, I wouldn't do such work in the summer, but I found an authority on the subject who thought it would be a good idea to go back and finish what I started, even if it isn't the exact degree I wanted.  I'm currently planning on taking two more classes this fall.  Both of these facts have a bearing on this blog.  First, it means I will have less to talk about here. Don't worry about this part too much, though.  I already have ideas for my next two posts.  Secondly, and more importantly, I might be facing less time to write my posts.  When I first started this blog, I didn't own a computer.  I would close of my store a little early and go to the public library and use one of their computers to type my posts.  Wednesdays just had the best fit at the time.  Once I joined Facebook, I would post a link to my blog there.  I didn't have much time, so I limited my early post to only ten to fifteen minutes of writing, rarely going over.  Even after I got a computer, I maintained my Wednesday schedule, ultimately choosing mornings between ten and eleven to type.  I would also start including the actual hyperlink to a post on Facebook, as opposed to just the blog.  With the possibility of spending an entire day in court, two days in a row, this schedule might be changing.  Now, I could easily pre-write my post and schedule it to publish at the regular time.  In fact, I did this just last week, when I knew I wouldn't be near my computer at the right time. (Google apps, such as Blogger, can be touchy when you don't use your regular devices.)  It took me two thirty minute sessions over two days to compose that post.  I could do this again if I know I won't be by computer at the right time.  However, if I had been in court the day before, I will have to cram a day's worth of computer work into a few hours.  I might have to limit my typing time back down to under fifteen minutes gain.  This will mean my post could be half to even a quarter of their usual length.  Furthermore, I might have to delay the Facebook posts to later in the day.  Possibly that evening.  Juggling so much is going to be tricky, but I don't see any other way through this.  If worse comes to worse, I might have to move my blogging to the weekends, where I might have a little more time.  I will do everything possible not do to so, but it might be the only option.

My Anxiety

 As I mentioned in my last post, I am prone to overthinking and thinking all the time.  One of the consequences of all of this thinking is that I become prone to anxiety/panic attacks, alternating with bouts of depression.  I had one such attack just last Friday morning.  I woke up about two hours early to the sounds of rain.  I tried to go back to sleep using my usual techniques, but it wasn't working.  I didn't have anything too pressing on my mind.  I finally found someone who advised me on my plans for going back to school.  I had no pressing issues about my forthcoming jury duty, although I would receive news about both later on that day. It could have been a premonition of sorts.  I tried my regular calming thoughts, but they are making me more jittery, not calmer.  I didn't really fall back to sleep, and I stayed in bed until my normal wake-up time.  I watched some news, checked social media, had breakfast.  The usual.  By the time I went to work at nine, I was more-or-less myself, but barely.  See, I have known triggers that can set off these attacks:  changes in my routine, even minor ones can start them off; loneliness, even by not being around people at all, not just by myself; and talk of death and dying, destruction and endings.  Regrets aren't as frequent a trigger, but they can still bring them on.  I've been this way even since I was a child.  For instance, one time in third grade, school was let out just before a half-day due to the water being off.  We were sent home early in a light rain.  I didn't get to see my best friend that day.  We were in separate classes that year, so I only really got to see him at recess.  That was also the year that we began to drift apart.  Anyway, when I got home, I didn't feel like doing anything.  Nothing was on television.  I felt so wrong.  I even tried to throw up once, just so I could feel something.  Maybe get the bad emotions out of me.  By the late afternoon, when I would have been home anyway and my shows were on, I was feeling better, and I was myself again by the time my mother came home from work and dinnertime.  Second and third grade was when I started to get panicky about death.  Things were better for a few years, but college brought my first bad attack as an adult.  It was 1992, about a week after my birthday.  I had been playing a new video game for much of the afternoon into the early evening.  It was getting me pretty wired up.  Just before bed, my mother mentioned hearing about the son of some celebrity committing suicide on the news.  For some reason, that got me thinking about mortality, and I started to get an attack.  I barely slept that night, just so consumed with worry.  I was lucky that I didn't drive to the college that day.  As it was, I stopped my mother from passing a slow car just as a coal truck would be speeding by.  Maybe another premonition?  So, I went to my classes, without really talking to anyone.  I only had three widely spaced classes that day, so I had too much free time by myself.  I tried to do some work, by my literature class had me reading quite a few morbid stories lately, so it was just another trigger.  I would have talked to someone, but my closest friends there had transferred out the previous year, and I had made the conscious decision not to get too close to anyone new, as I felt that I wouldn't be seeing any of them ever again.  Somehow, I made it through the day.  I managed to talk to my mother a little on the way home, and I was calmer.  We decided that I should make changes to my schedule.  I would go out with her on her lunch break once a week on my only non-conflicting free time.  She would also come and pick me up soon after my last class on Friday and take me somewhere with more people, so I wouldn't have to wander around a nearly deserted campus for an additional ninety minutes.  It still took me a few weeks to start feeling like myself again.  (I've mentioned by big 1996 attack many times before on this blog, so I'll skip it this time around.)  I started developing techniques to help me calm down.  They mostly still hold up.  I try to go outside or into an air conditioned room. I always feel better when I'm colder.  I try to walk or pace.  Later on, I added weightlifting and other types of exercise.  When my body is active, it allows my mind to focus on a problem, so I  can come up with a solution. Since I haven't met any new close friends since high school, I sometimes imagine myself talking to them, especially when I have problems that I can't talk to with anyone else.  I frequently have done this just before I go to sleep.  Fairly recently, I found that going to the bathroom can help.  I'm not sure of the exact cause-and-effect relationship between the two, but if it helps... When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, came out, I read it all in one day.  I finished fairly late,  and was still a little hyper when I went to bed.  I couldn't stop thinking about how this was the end of the series.  It wasn't about not having a guaranteed top seller or that there would be no more books, but that Harry got a happy ending in an epilogue set in the future.  Why couldn't I have a happy ending?  I fretted over my problem for hours it seemed, before I finally went to sleep.  It was still worrying me for much of the morning, and nothing could slow my anxiety down.  Until I made a quick trip, that is.  After that, I became calmer, and was okay by that afternoon. I should be fine, for the moment.  As I said at the start, I don't really have anything really big happening to me right now, but all of the little stressors are starting to add up to something almost big.  One of these minor stressors has been the string of posting about deaths showing up in my social media, particularly of parents.  It happened to one of the people I considered "close," at least in my mind.  He had returned to the area for the first time in I'm not sure how long for the funeral.  Yet I didn't try to go.  I missed what might be the last and only opportunity to see him, all because of my aversion to death.  For goodness sakes, he was one of the few people I messaged about my latest failed application to my favored grad school program!  I waited a week before I felt I could tell my mother.  I should have tried to go.  I didn't realize how I "betrayed" him until I began composing this post in the days after this last attack.  I haven't been able to have my "talks" ever since, not even with other friends.  All because I mentioned that fact in last week's post.  I failed to mention that regrets are a trigger for me too.   What I need is just to physically talk to someone, get everything off my chest all at once.  Yet, I have no new close friends.  I never got around to figure out how to do so as an adult, how to socialize.  Let's face it.  I don't even know how to "adult."    I am still getting around to learn text.  Email.  Phone calls.  I can barely even make face-to-face conversation any more, outside of basic transactions, and even then I'm weak.  My biggest wish, maybe in the next year or two, would be to get those friends together in the same place and the same time so I could just be with someone.  To say, "I need your help.  I need your support and understanding.  I need you to teach me to be a man, a better man.  I need you to help me remember who I am, for I have be broken and lost for so long.  I need to know that I am liked, to be loved."  At the very least, I will be able to move on and let go of this past anxiety.    But the hope for more?  That's why I wrote this.  A chance to heal, and clear the air of my problems.  Composing this post initially made me a little nervous, but actually writing it has calmed me a lot.  I hate that I have to be so open, almost anonymously like this, but I will use whatever means I can to get better.

I Overthink Too Much, Too Much

 I have been having a hard time sleeping lately.  This goes beyond the normal difficulties I face involving lights shining into my room, or the almost incessant chirping of some animal nearby.  Seriously, it can last for minutes at a time, or start and stop a few times for half an hour.  No, much of my latest problems stem from thinking about what I'm going to do about school.  I have many choices to make, some need to be addressed quite soon.  Admittedly, my problems aren't as severe or devastating as other people's, but it is still stressing me out.  (Condolences to those that are facing worse lately.  R., I should have, could have been there.  I was only three miles away.  However, I don't do well in such situations.). My main stressor is that I have no one I can talk to about how I can get answers to my problem.  When I first went to college, I knew I wanted to become a professional writer.  However, I wanted some financial stability before I started out.  I was going to explore various possibilities, but I wound up not getting to do anywhere near what I wanted to do.  Because of that, it took me almost thirty years to come up with a plan that suits me.  Unfortunately, I don't have the contacts that could help me figure out what I should do.  I have ideas, but I don't know if I'm correct about my assumptions.  There are just so many variables, some of which I can't mention, that I can't see my way.  As I mentioned, I need to decide about a few things; the first is if I should take a summer class, and I need to decide soon.  I fear I might be dropped from my school if I don't take a class.  On the other hand, I don't know if I should even continue to try to go for a degree I might not need, even after all of the time and money I'ver already spent.  But if I don't get a way to get the degree I do want, should I try for the one I am currently on track for?  When I first started thinking about this post, I came up with some ideas about how to get help.  I just don't know if it would work.  I've put my entire life one hold for so long, waiting for a way to move forward.  I'm almost fifty.  If I don't do anything soon, it will be too late.  I just wish I had someone to help me out.  Someone to talk to. Someone who knows the answers to my questions.  I need you, whoever you are.