I woke up yesterday with the intention to run, but the PSI had entered unhealthy ranges due to the seasonal haze that comes in from Indonesia. When I was younger I used to ignore these things, but now I’ve learnt too much about what bad air can do.
In an ideal state of mind I would just shrug it off and make other plans, but I felt more disappointed and frustrated than I should.
Because of my health issues I’ve been living life with strict routines. I am afraid to break my routines because eating the wrong type of food or having a sudden change in my day can trigger a migraine. I am now a person with many fears, and the pandemic has made it worse by instilling even more fears. I have lost the natural spontaneity (or recklessness, some might say) I used to have.
It is probably not a big deal if we look at it superficially — there is nothing wrong with having strict routines if they reap a different array of benefits. But lately I’ve been noticing a kind of unhappiness or anxiety when I can’t keep to my plans or when unexpected events happen. Have I lost my flexibility or have I always been like this? I’ve been suffering from chronic anxiety for so long that I don’t even remember if there was a version of me who existed before.
I think I am concerned that if I break my routines I’ll start descending into a dark pit of chaos — a sort of giving up. There is a fine line between spontaneity and recklessness. I used to live a life where I did whatever I wanted, including eating supper at 3am, sleeping at 5am, drinking 5 cups of coffee a day with zero exercise. I sought to avoid every staircase, had extra pumps of syrup with my iced lattes, and I ate candy like a kid who never got to grow up. All of those probably led to my body breaking down in my mid 30s, which led me to realise the cliché that health is wealth is really true.
The habits I’ve incorporated over the past few years have given me probably the best health I’ve ever had in my life — apart from that bout of covid. I still suffer from migraines, but they are so much less frequent and have way less intensity. I used to feel sleepy and foggy all the time which is probably why I self-medicated with caffeine.
I could probably afford to introduce more flexibility now, except I don’t know how anymore. It seems like there are only two versions of me in my mind: the person living like a nun or the person living like there is no tomorrow. I only know good or bad – moderate is not a word in my dictionary. For example: I usually eat dinner around 3-4pm so my body is no longer in digestion mode when we go to bed at 9-10pm, so I have become very reluctant to eat dinner at 6pm (especially because the “late” dinner reflects on my oura ring metrics). Which is culturally weird because 6pm is considered an early dinner time. Recently we had to catch a flight that arrived late at our destination which meant we could only sleep around 1am and it really stressed me out. Like I spent days worrying about it. It is quite ironic because it seems like trying to make my body more resilient has in a way made me less resilient?
I wonder if the capacity to be flexible is something that can be developed. If I can even be aware that I am being inflexible in the first place. Also I have some accumulated trauma from some events in my life, leading me to always feel like something catastrophic is bound to happen soon. There are reasons why I live with so much fear: the accumulated experiences that comes with age has destroyed the carefree innocence I had towards the safety of this world.
But even if I am right that the next catastrophe for me is bound to happen soon and again, I should still try to find some form of aliveness in between — or what is the point of living a life where I am just waiting in fear and anxiety in a frozen state?
Macro events are also leading me to do some serious rethinking of how my priorities in life. My health and fitness used to have an outsized priority because I don’t want to suffer unnecessarily should I have a long enough life. I want to have enough creative energy available for whatever work I may undertake. But now I am unsure I will get to live that long, or that the world will continue to be hospitable in the next decade or so. Reading my writing must be depressing for most people? But I think gauging from current events my concerns are objectively reasonable.
I am not saying that I am just going to give up and live in hedonistic excess from now on because I believe the world as we know it may end soon, but I am hoping that between hedonistic excess and a monastic existence there is some room for me to explore.
Maybe I don’t need the best health especially in terms of longevity, but good enough. Or maybe like seasons this will change as I encounter different challenges. What I think I need right now is the capacity to see possibilities instead of only walls. It is not just because I desire a wider range of life, but also to reduce my suffering each time I don’t respond well to unforeseen circumstances.
In a similar fashion I also have these imaginary weird rules in my head when it comes my creative output: how often I can publish, what sort of posts I should publish, the type of posts that can exist on my instagram feed, etc. I am really glad I’ve developed a drawing practice because I don’t just want to be someone who writes. I want to keep on developing new curiosities, new skills, new areas of my life I’ve never encountered before. But it is just so easy to get stuck in the mud, to only do what is comfortable and expected. I joked with my partner that I should start food blogging soon, and every post will come with a drawing or a poem. I meant it as a joke, but why not? These squiggly drawings that appear so often now on my blog posts never used to exist before. It would be a delight to be capable of creating things in unexpected forms that are an outcome of the multiple dimensions of me. I am just really far from that place, now.