Make Good Art.

-Neil Gaiman

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Workout

There's a point during every single one of my workouts that I'm convinced I'm going to puke. Sometimes, especially when I'm running, I will run into the ditch and get the dry heaves.

Before you get worried about the fact that I'm pushing myself too hard or that I'm secretly a bulimic (although, you know, a round one at that) let me hasten to assure you that this has happened to me my entire life. Running the mile in gym class in grade school would make me almost puke. When I was getting ready for the Bjorklund half marathon and was at the best shape of my life I would always feel like I wanted to hurl at the eight mile mark. Always. It happens when I'm on the bike at the gym or when I'm biking on trails. If I raise my heartrate at all, I will inevitably feel like I'm going to yak.

The sensation, blessedly, only lasts a moment or two and is probably psychosomatic. In a moment of true confession, I actually kind of enjoy it.

***
There are days when it feels like there are three people living inside my head. 

There first one is the Kelly I like. She's the Kelly who responds appropriately to things, is wickedly motivated, who has a sharp tongue, a sharper wit, and is interested in everything from space to quantum mechanics to environmental law. 

The second one is a Kelly I can tolerate (barely.) She's nervous and unsettled. She's convinced constantly that she's about to get sacked, that because someone close to her has been diagnosed with high cholesterol she has high cholesterol. She's afraid of most things, from heights and enclosed spaces to strangers and germs. But she's still capable of making a joke and calming down. I mean, eventually. 

The third one is a Kelly I would gladly evict if I could. She's OCD Kelly. She wakes up with a song in her head every single morning. She takes anxiety to a whole new level and just because someone close to her has high cholesterol she has high cholesterol and is going to die right this minute. She can't stop thinking about any number of things, none of them fun: the calories in her muffin, how much weight she's gained in the past 24 hours, whether or not her birth control is giving her a blood clot, if the stove is off, how the entire world is completely and totally fucked. 

That Kelly is Such. A. Cunt. 

Life with anxiety, life with obsessive compulsive disorder, means that during every single fucking day of my life, these three inner monologues are chattering away and I have no control over which one is going to be the loudest on a particular day. I never know what's going to trigger OCD Kelly to start checking the stove or the front door, or what's going to let normal Kelly let rip with a really good joke or what's going to cause GAD Kelly to chew her nails and worry about nothing for six hours straight. The past six months have been learning coping mechanisms to dial down the volume on Kellys two and three and turn up the volume on Kelly one. They range from going to see friends to meditating to making sure I'm eating right. And I practice them with varying degrees of success based on what's going on at work, how much sleep and sunlight I've had, whether or not I remembered to take my vitamins in the morning. 

For the record, when I was diagnosed with OCD, I never thought that the solutions to my anxiety would be so, well, plebeian. Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sunshine. See your friends. Find a community. This, I suppose, serves me right for actively participating in a culture that romanticizes or ignores mental illnesses.

The truth is that even in the six months that I've been actively taking care of myself, going to therapy and doing everything my therapist tells me, I've learned to make the Kelly voices in my head a little more bearable. I've managed to instill a modicum of control in my life. I'm slowly feeling a little better, a little saner. 

I just wish I could make all three voices stop chattering. 

***
I have a love/hate relationship with exercise. I mean, doesn't everyone? Despite the fact that we know it's good for us to get up and move our bodies after sitting all day long and despite the fact that we know that we'll feel better, less stressed, happier even after a bad workout, we skip 'em. Sit on the couch with a bag of potato chips and wallow. Go out and have a few beers. Do anything except head to the gym. 

If you're one of those people who manages to effortlessly adhere to an exercise program, well, screw you.

Today I hit the "Oh shit, I'm about to hurl!" moment in my workout somewhere around 30 minutes, or halfway through my session on the stationary bike. When it kicked in, I found myself smiling grimly. I have incorrect reactions to a lot of things in life, laughing when I should be weeping, getting angry when I should be celebrating , but for whatever reason, this smile in the face of gastrointestinal distress was really jarring. I'm a masochist, I thought to myself, but even this is going a little far. I shook off the rumination and continued concentrating on my mileage and rpms. Thirty minutes later when I hopped off the bike and starting stretching my quads and started thinking about what to make for dinner and whether or not I had any clean clothes to wear to work the answer slapped me upside the head. The reason I smile when I start feeling sickish while working out is because that is literally the first time during any workout that I start thinking about something instead of rpms, mph, or total distance. And it intrudes so briefly that it's gone before I have time to acknowledge it. 

Put another way, during a workout all three of the Kellys have finally shut the fuck up. They're drinking tea or taking a break to talk about sexism in comic books or getting drunk or doing something aside from making me crazy. In the hour or hour and a half everything inside of my head is quiet. 

I want, desperately, for the big things in my life--finding my life partner, attaining enlightenment, understanding quantum mechanics, finally punching OCD out to happen in specific ways. I want them to be huge, novel-esque moments in my life. Meeting my one true love when we both pass our Buffy season five DVDs to Joss Whedon to get signed. Attaining Enlightenment while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail at dawn. Outsmarting OCD by becoming a neuroscientist. 

I was wrong when I said there were three Kellys in my head. There are four, and the fourth is such a pretentious bitch. 

The truth is that biking or running do for me what meditation or prayer or $120/hour sessions with my therapist haven't been able to--they kick all of those Kellys out of my head and teach me what it's like to actually live in the moment, to thinking of nothing but the next mile to run, the next hill to climb, the next person to pass. 

Plebeian? Absolutely. But fuck it. I'm going to go have a celebratory drink with the four other people in my head.