selfishness gone awry

Sometimes when you're feeling down, the universe provides you with all the uplifting positive energy you could ever need. It has also been known to provide phenomenal amounts of negative energy as well, but in my mind, energy is energy and it doesn't matter where it comes from so long as it fuels the machine. To think of it another way, insults and compliments are both forms of observation. Someone notices something about you and remarks upon it in a positive or negative way. Since it isn't an actual charge, who determines that value?

I write like a "selfishly driven, narcissistic, overly sensitive woman, who has been hurt a lot" and I couldn't be happier. That's one hell of an observation and what different does it make how it was intended to be received? It's energy of exactly the type I need for this here digital endeavor. After all, I'm certainly selfishly driven. I've never shied away from that label because whenever I can wear it proudly, it's a nice fit. When it's a bit shameful is when it's offensive. 

Selfishness is a necessary survival trait, obviously, you need to consume enough energy to survive another day. That energy needs to come from somewhere. Ultimately, all energy on earth comes from the sun but the only truly selfless entities in the chain are plants. They absorb the freely given sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn it into stored energy in their leaves and roots. Along come the animals that consume these living creatures in order to survive. Then come other animals that consume those and so on and the life cycle is interesting and all but not the topic of today. Every thinking creature exists at the expense of others. A little bit of selfishness is necessary, a lot of selfishness can be a bad thing. 

It's like anything else in life, moderation is key. However, experience and Oscar Wilde have taught me that "nothing succeeds like excess." Like the raptors in the original Jurassic Park documentary, you gotta know your boundaries. If you never test your boundaries, how are you going to know them? Can you know yourself adequately enough without knowing your true limitations?

I want to get jacked mostly because I've never been jacked before. I've been a great big fat slob that drank himself nearly to death. I've also been a bit skeletal at one point when I took things too far in the other direction. Then too, before all that, I was a chubby youth and then great big fat slob in college. The order might be mixed up there, but I've made two trips to one extreme and one trip to the other and none of them fit just right. This newest thing, getting strong, seems comfortable. I'm intimately aware of what my body is capable of now that I've made those trips to the extremes. I'm also amazed at what the human body is capable of in light of what this one has done.

Those are also good examples of selfishness gone awry. When I drank, I was thinking of how angry or sad I was. Selfish thoughts, to the last. When I turned my focus on getting fit, I was thinking of how good I looked and how much easier life is when you're fit. Also selfish thoughts, but with a hint of narcissism. Aren't all our notions of self image tinged with selfishness and narcissism though? Or is that just me?

As far as my health progress goes, I'm done. I'm where I want to be and I'm ready for the next thing. I have some cutting left to do and I need to continue to increase my cardio health but that's just more diet and jogging. I'm happy with what I've done and I'm even starting to ease out of my cutting down but there's just a bit more I need in order to fit in my favorite pair of skinny jeans. 

That last paragraph was the perfect example of selfishly driven narcissism. Or was it? How serious am I about any of this? I certainly had that in the past, where I even went so far as to look up the exact characteristics of different eating disorders. Then I stopped looking into it because I disliked what I was reading about myself. 

I think that's the perfect segue into the "overly sensitive woman" part of the ongoing energetic compliment from before. Typically, eating disorders are something you might think of as being a woman's burden. And statistically, that's true, I think. A higher percentage of folks that suffer from these problems are women. I definitely exhibited anorexic and bulimic tendencies when I first got "fit", but now I chalk that up to just not knowing anything about anything. My calories were too low and sometimes I'd binge and purge. That's something you might imagine an overly sensitive woman doing. I said might because it's 2021 and I don't think you should assume the gender, even though probability, or something. 

I'm not getting too deep into my similarities to a hurt woman because I've done that comparison before, but I would like to make sure the "hurt a lot" is noted. Maybe I have been, maybe I am. It's 2021 and you shouldn't assume the gender, even if the author takes it as a compliment. I do, obviously. Enough to think of it as one of the best compliments my writing has ever received. I've received praise for things before but never so genuine and authentic. And amazingly accurate. I'm in love with the idea that these words have a different tone than I, because of the implication.

This voice is different than my own, but that may be because of the hormones I'm dealing with because of my period, since I'm a hurt woman. Or because of the great changes I've gone through over the last year. I've uprooted and replanted myself, seemingly for good. It fits like a tailored suit but it hasn't been through the wash yet so it still chafes a bit. Deep down lurks another kind of me that wants to get out. Just rip off my new bespoke outfit and really live for myself for a while. I've spent the time earning a "vacation", after all. I haven't really hurt anyone, myself included, for months. I wonder if that's what I miss. I wonder if I miss anything at all or maybe this is just nostalgia, just some passing thought.

Having another voice is new and the implication is that maybe there are others I have that I can channel in the future. Maybe not, maybe I've just changed myself so much that this has changed as well. Or, perhaps I've always been this way and I'll never be able to change. I suppose that's a nice implication too since I wouldn't mind writing raunchy romance novels and I feel like I'd be great at writing smut. That's essentially what this is at times, if I'm being honest, so maybe I have always sounded like such an interesting lady and I just had no idea.