Week One
honestly somewhat proud of myself for sitting down and writing this, despite the lateness of the entry.
I had meant to write this week’s entry at least two days ago, and for anyone who knows me this should maybe not come as too much of a surprise: one of my super fun neurological problems is that I have a hard time sticking to deadlines because once a task is out of sight it is truly and completely out of mind. And then sometimes you can couple that with when I have to do something that I think is going to be daunting in some way, like writing an email where the person receiving it has the opportunity to reject me in any way or maybe its like when you’re writing a post about your mental health and anyone could read it and think differently of you than they did previously.
Either way. Week one. Here we go. Just do it.
One of the things I’ve learned about myself as I venture deeper into my 30s is that I need to be outside. I don’t necessarily want to be outside, but I need to be outside. Anyone with depression reading this would be the first to tell you how easily you can fall into the known comfort of your couch/bed/chair and that at the end of the day you will feel like shit about it but in the moment it is safe. No one can perceive you if you’re not out there to be perceived.
Contradictory to this: being outside feels so fucking great once you’re there. I learned this too late about myself, when I had just turned thirty and we were living in New York City and my wife got me an apple watch for Christmas and I was so grateful to have this little video game on my wrist that would force me to get out of the house and walk. It might sound weird but the gamefication of my well being can really be tracked by looking at how much I’ve been exercising. What’s that famous saying?
“Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make people happy. Happy people don’t kill their husbands.”
But in this case I am both the ‘happy’ person and the husband. This is a topic for another time, but I could genuinely write a full dissertation on how little points on my wrist have made me… well, not happy but at least less sad.
Where was I? Walking. It’s something I wish I had realized more about myself when we lived in New Hampshire, because whichever of those studies about spending time in nature being good for your mental health was truly right on the money. Its a regret that I do carry with me and something that I’m working through, again with the help of another gift from my wife: this time it was Alltrails. For those of you who are unfamiliar, its a service that does what it says on the box: it shows you all the trails. You can search for walks or hikes or bike rides of different lengths, and then with the paid subscription you can access it offline in case you’re in an area of poor service and you want to make sure that you stay in the direction you mean to be heading. Also it has the option to live share your location so since we are somewhere entirely unknown to me if I do get lost I can get picked up (which has already happened once and it has only been a week).
I am supposed to be using the service to help with the scheduling of a small weekend excursion for a very close friend’s not-really-a-bachelor-party thing (something I’m supposed to be doing right now but instead I’m writing this so please shhh don’t tell him) but as a test run I’ve been using it for myself to spend as many hours outside the house as possible. Since moving to Providence I have been trying to be outside, but there is not a lot of within the city walking that can be done without going over the same routes or risking being hit by a car. So the subscription has been a game changer for me, living in a new place and trying to find orientation feels somewhat daunting to me each time we get somewhere so its been great to have the impetus to just learn by doing. However, it has also caused me to neglect writing this which I had promised to all three of my subscribers to be a weekly newsletter. Which means, here I am, punching this into my notes app instead of looking at the nature I am surrounded by. Well, “nature” is a stretch at the current moment since I am on a paved bike path and a good chunk of my scenery has been shrubs, mcmansions, and barbed wire fences around what looks like some kind of decommissioned (or at least severely neglected) electrical substation. But at least I’m not sitting inside playing a video game or mindlessly staring into space; I’m listening to a backlog of podcasts and trying to wait for that moment of clarity in my brain, or at least learning about why they accidentally built a bridge in Texas in the perfect way that a bunch of bats wanted to move in.
That feels like a very defeatist note to end this on. And that feels like a sentence fragment. So does that. I don’t want to end my first (very rambly) issue on a dour note, so here is another way to look at it. The best parallel I can draw is the story of a woman named Diane Van Deren, an ultramarathonner who got started running as a way to pre-empt her epileptic seizures. When she would be presented with the sensation she associated to be a warning that a seizure was coming, she would lace up her shoes and go for a run, and she found this would trigger something for her brain as a way to out-run the seizure. I try to do the same thing when I feel that my brain is going to start to spiral into Bad Brain Day territory; if I’m in a place where I can get outside and take a walk when I feel like my spiraling thoughts are going to whirl into a territory that might be very difficult to pull out of, I will just throw some headphones on and pick a direction. Sometimes it’ll only take half an hour and sometimes it may take a lot more than that, but it’ll help me put my thoughts into perspective.
That’s it. Week One in the books. I know its not perfect but If I don’t just publish it right now I will find a reason not to. Also, please let me know if there are things you think I can do better here. Not like, grammatically because I am aware that is terrible, but some other way that you think this would be a more readable experience. Hopefully the takeaway this week is this: find something that reminds you to take a step out of yourself. For me that is nature, or at least very long walks. It might be something different for you, and I sincerely hope that if you haven’t found that; you will soon.