Week 15

Identity Crisis

It’s 6:17am on Tuesday morning. 02/08/22. Mum’s birthday! (Shout out, Anne!) I am 15 weeks or 105 days sober.

I’m sitting at my computer at work. I like to start work an hour before everyone else. I find that being time poor is stress inducing. Why make things harder than they already are? Why apply that extra pressure to ourselves if we can avoid it? The answer is, because sleep is fucking fantastic and most of us don’t get enough of it. Also, winter…

Two years ago, maybe? I started getting earlier than I had to. I’d done it before and I knew it was what worked best for me especially in terms of managing my ADHD. Having an hour by myself to punch out all my daily, monotonous admin before everyone else gets in and start slinging shit at the fan is invaluable to me. It means when a nugget does collide with the fan, I’m better placed mentally, to clean up the shitty mess. Fantastic.

The tool I have used most to manage my mental health though, is and had always been exercise. I found though that when I started getting up an hour earlier, I would lose my desire to exercise by the time I was finished work. Maybe it was having all day to talk myself out of it. Maybe it was that running 100k a week in the middle of summer in the middle of the afternoon was some kind of unhinged horse shit that I have no intention of ever doing again. Whatever the case, I got to a point where I wasn’t happy with the regulatory of my exercise.

So, what could I do? I refused to sacrifice that first hour at work in place of exercising. That hour is far too valuable to me. It sets me up for my whole day. 97% of days where I started an hour earlier than everyone else, my mood was better through out the whole day(60% of statistics are made up on the spot). I was happier, had better focus and able to dodge nuggets flinging off fan propellers much better.

Then I had a brain fart. Imagine, if you will, exercising before work! Fucking crazy, right? I was already getting up at 5am. I thought that was early enough. I tried for to convince myself it wouldn’t work, that it was a bad idea, that there’s no way I could do it and stick to it. I struggle to get to sleep, I don’t struggle to stay asleep and being neurodiverse I depend heavily on sleep to reset my brain each night.

Basically, I was being a little bitch.

I’ve always had this terrible fear of not getting enough sleep. Since my childhood. Mum is a midwife, bless her, who used to work shift work. She often recalls taking phone calls from me as a six year old at 11am, hysterically crying down the phone, terrified that now it was so late, getting up for and going to school the next day would be torture(trauma?). Dad was a welder at the time. 7am starts. So, like I do now, he’d go to bed early, around 8:30pm, fair enough too. I can’t be scared that I would be too tired for school the next day yet expect Dad sacrifice his sleep when he had to be up at 6am for work. You’d think a six year old would understand that! One thing that you could guarantee though is that if I wasn’t asleep before Dad turned the TV off, I wasn’t sleeping until Mum got home. Usually around 11:30pm. If however some selfish prick went into labour at 10:30pm, Mum would get held up. Cue hysterical phone calls. Primary school aged kids should be getting between 9 and 11 hours sleep per night. I reckon I averaged 7. It’s almost as though I had an undiagnosed developmental condition!

Anyway, to this day I harbor that same fear. It’s not as prevalent as it once was. I’ve learned a lot since then and most nights these days I tend to get to sleep pretty easily thanks to a combination of medication, lifestyle choices and accepting that I just won’t ever get as much sleep as I want. I still have the occasional night though, where I’m thinking about who invented the first word and what were they thinking when they did it, at 2am.

It wasn’t until a psychologist I was seeing dumbed it right down to me that I realised it’s not the end of the world.

Psychologist: Have you been to work on not enough sleep before?

Me: Yeah?

Psychologist: And what happened?

Me: Nothing really, just kinda… worked all day, but a bit tired.

Psychologist: So… what’s there to be so scared of?

Me: SHUT UP!

I didn’t tell her to shut up. She explained to me that when you’re more tired than normal your brain will kind of take over. Like having a mate drive for you for a bit on a road trip. It’ll get ya home. It might suck, but it’ll be ok. Sometime I forget this, and still have an irrational fear of being slightly tired the next day, but it’s getting better.

Now I get up at 4am (approx) every day, go to the gym for an hour, have a shower at work, and I’m at my desk by 6am ready to #STDD (IYKYK). Now that I am sober, I do the same on weekends. Occasionally I might sleep in until 5-5:30am but I try to stay consistent with how I start my day. I tweet about it every day. Not because I think I am awesome. Quite the opposite, actually. I use tools to help make myself accountable to something. A lot like this here blog.

It sound stupid, but, I gotta get up, because I gotta go to the gym, because I gotta to the #STDD tweet and then get to work. If I don’t the world will spontaneously combust. That sounds super dramatic, but who gives a shit, BECAUSE IT FUCKING WORKS.

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Bogues Ⓥ 🌱 @bogues2zoners

#STDD

1, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

It was a fucking difficult routine to establish and some times people ask me how or why I do it. The answer is simple, it works for me. my life is better this way. It is easier and more manageable, this way!

Should everyone do what I do? Fuck no!

I’m an idiot. Plus I don’t want all you pricks at the gym when I go there, that’s why I go early.

I guess the point is, fuck around with your routine until you naturally find your way into one that works for you. I’m about to turn 34. I was only diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD at 28. I’m far from an expert and I am still figuring a lot of this shit out for myself, but whether you have your routine down pat or not, tomorrow is still coming, just as quick as today came. So why not try to adjust your routine to something better suited to your life? It can be hard, it can be real fucking hard, but it’s about forming habits, which then become behavioral changes, just keep plugging away and before you realise, you’re doing these things automatically. Do it incrementally, exercise for 5 minutes, three days later exercise for 10 minutes. Start waking up earlier 5 minutes per day, you’ll barely notice. Or be an idiot, like me, get all pissed off at yourself one night and decide fuck it, I get up at 4am every day from now on.

Whatever works for you. The point is, if you feel as though you are stuck in a rut, only you can change it. It’s hard at times, but as I’ve said in previous blogs, so is everything worth having and it gets better and easier each time.

For a long time, I always thought I couldn’t do what I do now. You do too. Think back 10 years ago. There’s things you do today and every day that you from 10 years ago would be petrified of doing. You’d think there’s no fucking way!

I was fuckin’ terrible for this. I often still get imposter syndrome. Even in my job, that I do competently each day. I have thoughts along the lines of, “bro what the fuck are you doing here", you’ve got all these people fooled. You don’t know what you’re doing!”

We just have to hang in there. Trust that by doing the right thing the results will come. Practice makes progress. That’s what I have been telling myself for 105 days now and it fucking works. Each and every day it gets incrementally easier. I get better ad dodging nuggets off the fan, because my head is in a place just slightly better than yesterday. It’s thanks to having and sticking to a simple routine. It sounds boring, but it actually enables you do to more with your day, because once you automate the monotonous daily shit, you know it’s taken care of and you can focus your energy elsewhere.

As I touched on last week, I have been feeling like I am out of the shit storm and starting to walk through the last little sun shower in regards to sobriety. With less of a focus on not drinking, I have been looking forward. I’m kind of feeling like as the sun shines through the clouds and the rain dissipates, I’m just kind of standing there, like what the fuck do I do now?

I think this could be a part of why people relapse, or criminals reoffend. There is comfort in what we know. At times, I am tempted to chuck a u-turn and run back into the shit storm. It fucking sucks in there, but it’s familiar. I am comfortable in there. Out here on the brighter side, I don’t know what to do.

I’m trying lots of things though. I’ve spoken in the past about making more of an effort at Running 4 Resilience, which has been fruitful but I feel like I am at a point where without drinking, going to the pub or whatever, I don’t know what I like to do. Better yet, I don’t even really know who I am?

I mean, there’s the basic shit, I like running, I like going to the gym and I like growing veggies. Cool, welcome to 41% (approx) of the population, mate. As time goes by, in a new town, I’m sure I’ll organically stumble into something I enjoy and pursue that. For the moment though, I’m feeling a little like I lack a bit of identity. Not publicly, not on twitter. Within myself, like I don’t truly know who I am, what my values are, what my passions are and for lack of a less wanky word, what my purpose is. I’ll figure that out.

It’s led me to think about it some more though. Why, at almost 34, am I still struggling to understand what I do and don’t love? What I want to do. I don’t even mean career wise, I like my job enough and it pays me enough to do what I do, but why am I so lost? Is it because I prevented myself from discovering my passions over the last 18 years by spending every weekend getting shit faced?

Maybe it’s my low self esteem? Have I been too timid to try things and meet people because I’ve always been so self conscious that I was too scared to do things most normal people do out of fear of what others might think of me? Which is ridiculous because I know that no one really gives s hit about anyone else and what they’re doing, but you can’t help what your brain tells you sometimes. There’s a few things, like writing this blog, that I have considered doing in the past. Creative kind of things, but absurdly, I’ve been too fucking scared to ever give anything a go.

I think it might come from the social attitude in middle class Australia about what a man should and shouldn’t do. Mix that in with a self conscious, impressionable kid, and you wind up with someone afraid to discover who they are and what their passions or purpose are. I wonder if that stoicism that Australia was built on, is hindering preventing some young people from chasing their dreams. I can’t speak on anyone’s behalf here, but I know for me, I was always afraid of admitting that I wanted to try certain things out of fear that I would be “soft”. I think we are headed in the right direction though. Although not perfect, we have never lived in a more accepting and inclusive world and I think we are definitely on the right trajectory.

While I think stoicism has it’s place in society and is situationally absolutely necessary, I think it’s time we no longer use it as a baseline foundation of our society. Particularly in males. Thankfully, this will come as old news to most but the below graph shows what we all know. Too many Australians are dying by suicide and the difference between men and women is substantial. I believe growing up in an environment where stoicism is revered and emotional vulnerability scoffed at has created an environment where men don’t feel as comfortable as they should talking about how they feel.

I don’t know that anything I’ve said above is fact. What I do know though is that this is how I feel, through lived experience. Don’t be afraid to follow leads in a bid to discover what you love. Irrelevant of what other think about it.

Fuck ‘em.

Be nice to each other this week, please.

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Cheers Wankers.

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