Wednesday Thoughts: Writing About Epilepsy
Yesterday's post about creative nonfiction was a bit cathartic and was actually very helpful for me to process some information and thoughts about my writing in general. Ironically, I would NOT consider yesterday's post to be "creative nonfiction" even though I posited that blogs might be considered as such ;) Anyway there were some thoughts I realized after I hit "publish" that I left out.
One of them was related to the epilepsy essay I mentioned working on. While I said in that post that I've come to terms that the structure of it is fine, I can keep writing that way, in journaling over the past few days I realized that perhaps the reason I'm struggling with it so much is due to the fact that - for the time being anyway - I feel like I've already written everything there is for me to write about on the subject of epilepsy. I've written about the topics I wanted to write about, and it's possible in the back of my head I know that I'm not interested in basically taking all of my previous writings and experiences and reworking it into one big piece of writing. That's probably why I thought about changing the structure. But maybe the more prudent thing to do would be to abandon the project - even though I have a problem with starting projects and abandoning them (that's been a blog topic amongst a few people this month but I don't have any groundbreaking new thoughts about that).
And that's fine. I think there's value to recognizing when you're abandoning a project because of various internal feelings that are lying to you and trying to convince you to quit, versus continuing a project simply because you don't want to abandon yet another project just because you keep abandoning projects and therefore wasting your time on something that isn't going to give you satisfaction.
I feel like that's worded awkwardly, but I hope I'm getting the sentiment across.
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I'm about to start a weight loss regimen - tomorrow, August 1st, in fact. I try not to talk about it too much on the blog, because it would 100% dominate every post, I know this from experience. That's why I have relegated it to an offline text file so I can still write about it, and geek-out over my stats, but I don't need to bore anyone with it.
Speaking of stats, that's another thing - I've struggled with using my smartwatch lately. For a long time now I've felt very disconnected from the health information it collects (steps, sleep, activity time, etc.) rendering the numbers meaningless. I think about not wearing it and turning to my collection of regular watches. I've written about this so I won't go on too long here.
Anyway in the last few days I've been trying to put some context behind the numbers. At first I was trying to take a weekly overview, but found this didn't work if I didn't look at things right away on Monday mornings. And often, Monday mornings are busy, so it goes out of sight, out of mind. So the most recent attempts have been to look daily, when possible, and compare the raw data to that morning's weight, and how I'm feeling in general.
For instance, am I feeling the 5 hours of sleep I got the other night? Is what I'm doing affecting how I'm holding onto water? That kind of thing.
Wow I got off track from what I meant to indicate. For the past 3 months I've been trying to get back into the habit of food logging. This month (July) was the last step - making sure I log every meal, every day of the week. I think I'm back into the habit now. The next step - beginning tomorrow - is to actually follow my daily calorie budget. I get a checkmark if I stay within my goal, and nothing if I don't.
I don't need to be perfect and I don't expect to be, but on average I hope to get the job done. If I can I'll increase my exercise, but with how busy we are between softball and personal training I'm not sure that I can actually fit that much more in on top of what I'm already doing.
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