It’s been well over a month since my last journal entry. Something that I’ve been neglecting is hearing, listening and actually heeding what my gut tells me after a pretty fucking tough 2018.
The main theme of 2018 is that I’ve coped with stress in unacceptable and unhealthy ways that impacted my energy and the people around me. It was something that was something that slowly crept up on me. Sparing all the gory details, I think I’m on a much better path after taking stock of my situation and viewing everything through the lens of gratitude, with my trusty and dusty 5 Minute Journal that’s the cornerstone of just feeling like I’m on solid ground.
Something I revealed to two dear friends of mine was that I was just tired of disappointment. Setbacks professionally and personally felt a bit too much to handle and I didn’t have the outlets that I previously had to maintain some semblance of emotional resilience were whittled away from the boundaries and stresses of work I was ever so slowly ceding. It wore away at my self-worth. I created threats in my head. There were also countless things that I had started but never followed through on which put me further down a spiral and the self-created pain had created such a heavy burden that all I could think of escaping and placating myself with sleep and other unhealthy ways of dealing with stress.
It all led up to me having to reach out personally to trusted friends, and eventually seeking professional help in the form of a therapist.
But this post isn’t about all the little fuckups and set backs. This post is about the little victories and wins. Every hard fought inch that is slowly helping me turn around and navigate back into not so stormy weather if you will.
As with my previous reviews, I’ll be covering categories of improvement, which for me are:
- 💪Fitness/Mental Health
- 🤑Personal Finance
- 🤓Learning.
💪Fitness & Mental Health:
This category is a hybrid one that encompasses not just fitness in the traditional sense, going to the gym, the consistency, the meal planning etc. It’s also everything else that doesn’t take place in the gym, the rituals, the sleep for recovery, the mental health practices that involve meditation and self reflection. All of that adds up to overall health and a healthy outlook on life and having the resilience to deal with whatever fucked up shit comes our way.
This past week was awesome, not because I went to the gym 3 times, but because I once on my own without much cajoling and twice doing some workouts from P90X with my partner. It was really fun and I highly recommend it working out with your partner!
Other than that, I made an emphasis to sleep earlier to give my body some time to adjust and recover, but to also allow myself to not be a complete grumpy rat bastard when I’m running on only 6 hours of sleep (or less).
Most importantly, I’m carving out time for myself in the evening to wind down before bed to reflect on my day, do a rough plan of my day ahead and then give myself a dose of 7+ hours of sleep.
During my mornings, I’m finally putting to use my Muse meditation headband that has been lying around and collecting dust for the last 2 and a half years. I squeezed in 4 sessions, starting off with 3 minutes, and the fourth session being about 12 minutes. I’d like to meditate every weekday for at least 15 minutes before heading into work.
🤑Personal Finance:
My relationship with my finances hasn’t been the best, but after having paid off my student loans and now that I’m on the last bit of my line of credit, I’m starting to build up savings again. Roughly, I’m planning for saving at least $1500 a month as a conservative amount after I factor in all my expenses and vacations.
Might go further into to detail, but I’ll definitely be sharing more details about my consumption, savings and approach to building wealth later on.
🍜Learning :
One thing I’d like to do is focus on learning a new thing a week. While it has never been a consistent thing, I’d like to actually write about what I’m learning and how it’s bringing more structure and happiness to my life. One of things that I’ve often neglected is doing creative things with my hands(tm). That may entail cooking or some sort of art like origami or gloving or learning how to DJ, which is most likely next week..🎛
This past week, I learned how to make traditional Vietnamese pho (beef noodle soup) for the first time after my mom sent me a pretty decent recipe. If anything I should be learning more things from my mom in the future.
This week, I’m going to be digging into wrapping my head around some SQL queries for work.. maybe I’ll abstract that and turn it into a mini blog post.
Going forward…
My goal isn’t to be relentless and beating myself up for not being able to hit all my high falutin’ and lofty goals. It’s more so being more gentle to myself and the language and internal dialogue I have with myself, while still moving forward. As cheesy as it may sound, I’m more interested in the journey that’s more kinder and gentler to myself. However, that’s not to be confused with flip flopping or backing down on the promises I make to myself. Consistency and resilience are things to keep in mind for myself.
Not much to write about or anything earth shattering. Today I’m not going to share code because while going through C Programming – The Absolute Beginner’s Guide – it goes through the basics in a way that is approach for the, well, absolute beginner. But then I just realized, at the moment I wrote “earth shattering”, that we really shouldn’t feel that way because when we’re learning programming, it’s all derived from the foundational material, be it loops, arrays, strings or if/else statements.