The main thing I’ve been doing to combat how awful I feel lately is to put more and more effort towards my exercise routine. I’ve let it slip almost completely over the course of this year due to the bodily pain and exhaustion I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been struggling to get back into it thanks to how burned out I feel and how much I’m struggling to adjust to waking up an hour earlier every work day. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning, still, let alone push myself to get out of bed immediately when my alarm goes off at ass o’clock in the morning and then go do my morning workout routine. Especially because I know it’s going to be miserable for the first few weeks of actually doing that. I’m out of shape and the general aches and pains of every day life aren’t going to help. Working out will, fortunately, help with those. It might even help with the neck tension and pain I’ve been dealing with, assuming I can work on my neck and shoulder muscles without straining myself–that would have the opposite effect of what I’m aiming for. I want to feel better, not worse. Which is why I started working out as extensively as I do in the first place.

Back in 2021, when I had my three day sleeless-anxiety-attack, I started riding my exercise bike in order to help myself feel tired enough to sleep at night. My workout expanded from there, first to add some stretches to help cool down the muscles I used while biking and then to help deal with some joint pain that had been creeping up on me. All of which worked marvelously. I used to get bad shoulder pain from sleeping on my side (it was bad enough that I used to need to change which side I slept on ever couple weeks, weird-inability-to-sleep-on-one-side or not) and adding in a bunch of stretches and light muscle exercises helped me a great deal. And super broadened my shoulders, which I did not appreciate (I do not want to get any bigger than I already am, in any dimension, since I already struggle to find shirts that fit comfortably and don’t look like tents). I also learned how much core exercises could do for my back and what standard side-and-hip muscle stretches could do for for my core, so I already know that all of the aches and pains still plaguing me will probably be worked out if I just… worked out. They’d get briefly worse, which is why I’ve been struggling to make this happen (my last attempt to start up working out ended with a pinched nerve in my shoulder/neck), but pacing myself and slowly building back up to my old routine will hopefully get me past this particular hurdle.

It will also help that physical labor testing is making a return at my job. Not in as focused a way as last time, thankfully, but I still need to spend a few hours every day or two doing something related to it. It’s helping to get my muscles back in some kind of (incredibly uneven) fashion, but I really need to get the morning workout routine back into my work days to help loosen my body up for my work days and balance out the rather uneven muscle growth from doing this work. I need to get back to my solid baseline so that I can actually narrow down what pains are inactivity and lethargy rotting my body away (easily fixable) and what pains are the slow decay of existence (not easily fixable but still worth at least trying to address). I’ve been putting off a final few physical therapy appointments until after I’ve gotten this figured out, so I can get a better exercise routine or maybe work on slowing or delaying the inevitable decay of existence, and I really need to get a move on that. It won’t fix me or anything as ambitious as that, but it would certainly contribute to fixing me. Hell, it might even improve my energy levels and I sure could use a few more spoons a day since I keep running out partway through my work shifts.

Plus, it’s not like most of the rest of my problems are things I can so “easily” control. My financial situation, the collapse of society, the end of the world (and whatever that means these days), finding a new job, building new relationships, ending my feelings of isolation, and so on are all things that are much more difficult to change in a way that would have a substantial impact on my life. I wish that weren’t true, I wish I had more control over the larger problems in my life, but this is all that’s more directly under my control and that’s only if doing the workout routine actually improves my physical condition. If it makes it worse or even just slightly exacerbates any of my current on-going pains, then I’ll have to stop and even this will be beyond me. I hope that won’t be the case. I don’t think that will be the case. But the last year has left me more ready to expect things to get worse rather than better and all the “keep on keepin’ on” in the universe isn’t going to suddenly make me an optimist. It’ll just make me a pessimist with the discipline to make room for positive outcomes. Which, now that I’ve written it out, doesn’t feel super great to describe myself as. I really hope this works out. No pun intended, for once.