I was never good at keeping at my exercising routine. I would start, be at it for a couple of months regularly and then something would happen and the routine was broken. There’s wasn’t much needed. A bad night, feeling a bit down, a warm afternoon, anything could keep me from it. Until I’ve started exercising in the mornings. It was a game changer and I’ve discovered it quite accidentally. I had do some stretching for my back every morning and I realised that it was never a problem. I would get up, roll out my mat and just do what I had to do. And so I thought, what if I moved my workouts from the afternoons to mornings?
I’m not a big working out lover, I exercise because I have to. I have something called hypermobility, which means that my joints are very flexible and slightly loose. I have to exercise, as per doctor’s and physiotherapist’s orders, to keep my muscles strong, so in turn, they can keep my joints in place and spare me quite a lot of pain. But working out is something I’ve never learned to love and I could easily skip a workout just because I didn’t feel like it, or because when the time came, in the afternoon, it grew in my mind to this gigantic effort I would never be able to survive.
My body responded accordingly, giving me pain and discomfort of joints not being firmly held together, until I understood that it’s something I have to do, because it’s necessary for my physical health. And since I’ve discovered that exercising in the mornings is the way to keep it up, because my mind doesn’t have time to keep me from it, I’ve fallen into routine and just do it.
And now, almost four months into working out like this, a thought struck me, what if I treated my writing like do with my exercise? While I’m not sure what, and if anything, working out does for my mental health, I know for sure that writing is very important to it. Writing is keeping me whole, not letting me to fall apart. So why do I have so much trouble in keeping the routine of it? Is it like with exercise, does my brain make it seem impossible?
While I don’t fully enjoy working out, I do really like writing. Putting my thoughts down on the page (literally, as I always write in a notebook first and then type it out), making sense of what I’m thinking while writing. Also, this is something I want to do, something I don’t need holiday from, something I can imagine myself doing for the rest of my life. So why do I allow the smallest insecure thought to keep from it? Why can’t I keep the routine of sitting down at my desk every day?
There was a time when I was writing regularly. I was coming up to my room after breakfast to write and I was actually doing it, putting words on paper, filling the pages. But then, something shifted (and I know what it was) and I fell out of the rhythm and could not find my way back to it again.
I want to consider the necessity of writing and give myself space to build up my routine. Same time, (almost) every day, be there, do the thing, think about it as a necessary exercise for my mental health ans see where it will bring me from there.