I die if I don’t train.
It’s my job, my hobby, my physical- and mental health.
But first I want to tell you about my anger.
I’ve been writing about my anger in earlier posts and it's been an interesting emotion to explore this past year. I notice myself holding it in to the point where I don't make a noise even in extremely frustrating situations: a whole bowl of food spills, i stump my toe or slip on the ice and come surfing down several meters on a surface of water and ice. This suppression of anger comes back to bite me, but these small incidents doesn't induce something long-lasting. It comes and goes. Lately I've noticed the thoughts that set my anger in motion. And the most recent one was not having written a Substack post for the past weeks.
If I had made the decision to stop writing to focus on something more important to me, I wouldn’t have had a problem with not writing. The reality however, is that I’ve told myself again and again “I will write a new Drop on Sunday” and not followed through. I have, in these situations, broken a promise to myself, infringed upon my own boundary. And the anger is there to help me realize that I have broken an important vow.
I have started changing the perspective on my body's signals, where I used to ignore pain or emotions I now try and hold space for them, asking the pain or the anger “what are you trying to tell me?”. I see the emotions of the body as a guidance, a bodily compass, which doesn't have a needle pointing north, but other tools to tell us what to do and not to do. I don't mean to follow what feels good at all cost as it would turn us into dopamine fuelled phone scrolling cocaine rabbits, but to hold space for the abnormal. The small signals that diverge from the baseline.
“What is my back trying to tell me by sending a signal of pain to the brain?”
It's obvious to see what the body is telling us when we put our hand on a burning kitchen top, and a bit harder when there's deeper, underlying long-term pain.
I cannot skip a training session.
It would be to indirectly hurt myself; break a boundary and make myself sad or angry. Long-term. And this year it all came crashing down on me. All the things I have skipped out on, which in reality I wished to do, but I couldn't make myself do.
Whenever I work out lately, there’s so much anger that wants to come out my body wants me to scream out as loud as I can while I’m doing push-ups, and it’s really inconvenient when I’m around people, because I’m scared of how it will look. So I’ve felt I couldn’t train because I was scared of this anger come out, so whenever I’ve been alone, I’ve made sure to let out as much steam as possible, and it’s working. Working out is working. I become much more relaxed when I have been using my body physically and anxiety got nothing on me in these states. I just scoff even at the thought of it.
And juggling for me is so many things. Work, passion, friends, creative expression, and to cut this out of my life is to make me unhappy.
Willpower
There has been some great discoveries in neuroscience lately, which Andrew Humberman explains in this snippet from their podcast with David Goggins. It’s awesome to hear how the only way to train your willpower muscle is to do something you don’t want to do. It doesn’t matter how hard the training is, it’s all relative to where your comfort zone is. And that’s exactly what brought me into circus in the first place - getting pushed out of my comfort zone physically and mentally. I think training willpower can be a tool against procrastination, to ask myself at least once every day “what do I not want to do right now that I know will be good for me in the long-term?”. And this makes it into a fun challenge for me, because I’m an underdog, it’s a hard challenge and I know that managing to do the task will make me feel great. I recommend watching this 13 minute clip about willpower. It’s awesome how Huberman manages to explain the most advanced topics in such a simple manner.
As always, thanks for reading and share with your loved ones!
With love,
Julian