I’ve been listening to The Mountain is You, by Brianna West. It is rare these days I learn from these self helpy books new things about myself. Not to sound arrogant, and also, I’ve done a lot of self work. Even though I’ve come a long way, trust me, even though I haven’t been writing, I’ve come far… I always know there is more work to do.

I’m about halfway through this book, and I’ve written so many ideas to ponder and think about further. The one that sticks out the most is, quitting something to self preserve your future loss. How this gets brought into perspective for me, and to expand on this more, is through exercise. Exercise has often been met with resistance. I have said “I have oppositional defiance disorder with it” I’ve gotten good at starting and maintaining for a while, but something always disrupts this process, which creates excuses for me not to continue to do something. I have a lack of follow through with myself and blame people, ideas, and other things for not continuing the process. Hi, I’m Rachael, and I’m a serial gym membership owner and rarely a goer. I’ve given my money to these places.

Examples of this: I was really good at going to the gym for 3 months, and then I got Covid and I couldn’t get back to the gym after this, OR back in the day I was really good at going to the gym and was really into running for a short period of time, and one of the people who worked there was bothering me every time I went in, setting unspoken expectations about why I was there. Both of these examples were about 10 years apart, and I had a billion excuses for not going back.

The concept of “quitting for self preservation” brought up more questions. Forgive me, as I’m not quoting her correctly, and some of this is mixed together from other things in her book. But the questions that come up for me were “Do I find the excuses to not continue to exercise because I want it so much, and I don’t want to keep failing at it.” and or, “Am I so scared of what I truly want, (I mean I don’t even know what that is), that I quit for self preservation of the fall (because I know it’s coming anyway).

Now that I’m writing this out and giving focus to this idea, is the question truly, What do I want out of exercising? Do I want to be fit? Do I not want to look good? Is this me self sabotaging to keep myself in a place of not being seen?

Here is what I know. I want to be healthy, and I want my body to be healthy. I want to feel better. More to come on this, as I have found out that due to my trauma I have fibromyalgia which impacts me almost daily (a whole other blog post).

What I don’t know: Are my road blocks because of these other things? Being seen? And, am I allowing myself to quit, for self preservation? That is something that I haven’t considered. The failure of working out, is too great, that I just give up quickly to avoid whatever feelings come? I don’t know.

More on this and also being curious about things, has been super helpful in sorting out things.