5 Lessons From My New “Voice Quieting” Exercise
It’s not Crossfit. But I want to talk about it like how someone who does Crossfit brings it up in conversation all the time.
Do you know that feeling when you wake up of not knowing precisely what needs to be done but you know it’s everything.
You know it needed to be done yesterday, and you know, for no reason, you’re inadequate.
By the time you get to the last thought your throat has already constricted enough that any sort of oxygen flow has completely stopped and you are paralyzed in bed.
You can’t move.
Great, yet another thing you must do but have already failed at.
Your heart beats faster. Perhaps this is the morning it finally bursts out of your chest? That would be an accomplishment. Finally, one.
I’ve been trying to escape these thoughts since 2005.
I thought being happier would change my state of mind. When I first tried being happy, I thought happy looked the way society said happy looked:
- 2.5 kids
- a house with a white picket fence
- and my MRS.
Society said a man was the key to my freedom. So, I had to get a beau, but I had to tick off boxes to do that.
This became a, “If you give a mouse a cookie” scenario to my very insecure 18-year-old brain. I believed if you want to have that I must look a certain way. But to look a certain way I also had to
- Weight a certain amount.
- Which meant eat a certain way.
- But also exercise a certain way.
- And also dress a certain way.
- Yet also act a certain way
I was so uncomfortable trying to make myself a certain way that I drank to make it “fun”. A lot.
- 2005 was college, that’s acceptable, it’s what kid’s do.
- 2009 was acceptable; that’s what 20-year-olds do.