Well, this week’s essay definitely  won’t be as good as others.  It won’t be my best work.  It will be short, and it probably won’t make a lick of sense; which is why I decided to name it “Ramblings”.  With everything going on, I didn’t really have time to separate my thoughts and choose a specific topic to write about, so I’ll just throw all my thoughts into one post.  Here goes nothing….

Today is the last day of the month.  The last day of the first month of 2017, and my has it been a rough month.  I have gone through quite a few things with my family and personally (that I won’t go into full disclosure respectfully), and it has taken a toll on me in several different forms.  I have suffered a lot of things emotionally in the first month of 2017 (and it’s ONLY the first month of 2017); things that I would have never imagined feeling in my lifetime.  With all that being said, I made it to the end of the month in one piece, and luckily with my sanity halfway intact.  It wasn’t easy, but thank God, I’m here.

I haven’t been in the gym consistently in over a month, and that really sucks. Especially because I love the gym. It’s become a huge part of my life now, so when I felt myself slipping away from it, I felt like I was losing a piece of myself :-(. There was a point where all of my eating was at the hands of fast food, I was sitting on the couch being lazy, nothing was getting done!  I just recently told myself that I had to get it together, that I was losing myself in all the drama going on in my life, and pushing the things that actually help me, to the back burner!  So I started my routine back.  It’s been very hard waking up at 5am again, trying to muster up enough energy to make it through a 90 minute workout. I’m also trying to find a routine for myself and a muscle group rotation that’s new and fun and I think I found one! I have a goal for my 30th birthday I will be down to around 170, so I have a pretty long way to go, but I don’t plan on quitting anytime soon.

I also discovered something horrible about myself.   I am a stress-induced/emotional eater.  When my anxiety gets too high, or I become overly stressed out about certain things, all I want is comfort (or what feels like comfort) food and Pepsi.  I tend to make excuses for it, when all it really is, is emotional eating.  I never thought I was an emotional eater until some recent events in my life led to an overwhelming amount of stress and roller-coaster type emotions.  As a result of that, I either wanted to eat crap or not eat at all.  I also fell into a nasty habit that I hadn’t been in in a long time; drinking more than one soda a day.  When I was younger I used to drink at least 3 Pepsi’s a day.  Nowadays, I have cut back tremendously to the point where I can only really handle 1 can maybe every couple days.  Once again, stress and overwhelming emotions were rearing their ugly head at me, and I fell off the wagon (I tend to think of myself as a recovering Pepsi addict, lol).  This week, I started back on my gallon-a-day water regimen and trying to cut caffeine out of my diet.  In case anyone was wondering, it’s not fun and I have a headache that won’t go away; but I am going to slowly but surely ween myself  back off of this caffeine (hey! That rhymed, lol).

Overall,  I’m getting better.  I feel like I have to wash out January 2017 and start my year off at February.  January just had a lot of things going on; however, with every trial in my or my family’s life, I learn something new.  Over the last couple months, I learned a few cool and not so cool things:

• True friendship is something rare and genuine.  Please treat it with the respect it deserves.
• People who are most persistent, care the most.
• Find someone to talk to when you’re in pain.  Communication is the major breakdown of relationships.
• Hold fast to faith and prayer.
• Sometimes, people will not have your best interest at heart, and they will not understand your pain and suffering.

Like I said, this was random;  unplanned and not put together nicely.  It’s just a reflection of my thoughts and how I’ve been feeling.  Sometimes, you just need to take some time to free write.  This is it.

-Whit C.