I decided to take a day off of exercising today.

[disappointed_lesbian]

skincare

It was my day off lifting anyhow, but I haven't done any cardio either (I've been doing cardio everyday; 45 minutes on my spin bike plus roughly an hour of walking).

I wouldn't have a problem taking another day off from lifting, but I'm not liking this skipping cardio (even though cardio gets boring). Without the cardio, I'm hungrier. I've noticed this in the past as well. Somehow cardio moderates hunger. Also, I've been bored, more bored than usual. When I exercise, I at least have post-workout fatigue to ease the boredom; I'm not as bothered by having nothing I can do when I'm too tired to feel like doing much.

Part of the reason for my boredom is that my general level of fatigue, with or without exercise, is so high, presumably because I'm sleeping about four hours per night. It's been goddess-knows how long since I stopped studying. I cannot muster the energy or focus to keep up with the foreign languages I was working on (French, Arabic, Russian, German).

The insomnia is destroying my life. Working on my physique and the endorphin release of cardio is about all I have in my life right now, and insomnia is going to destroy that as well. I can't recover from workouts if I don't sleep enough, so I'll have to decrease my exercise volume to avoid the crushing fatigue I've been having, the fatigue that is the reason for this day off.

I want the weekend to be over so that I'll be closer to getting a call from the sleep medicine department. I don't expect my sleep study to have provided any useful results, but I'm expecting them to suggest what I should do next to resolve my insomnia.

So I spent the day watching videos on Invidious and playinig some computer puzzles. BORING. When my hunger started kicking in earlier than it should have, I was very tempted to get on my spin bike and do my regular 45 minutes. It's the lifting, I'm sure, that, uncompensated with sleep, results in the most fatigue, so I thought that doing cardio wouldn't compromise my rest day too much. I ended up resisting this temptation.

I experienced very similar fatigue when I was recovering from a vitamin deficiency a few years ago. I stopped lifting and cardio and began to feel better, but the lack of exercise was killing me, so I tried to do cardio alone, and the fatigue returned. I needed to have patience with my recovery, as I need to do now.

I've been thinking more about how ambivalent I always feel about making friends. I think I've figured out the reason for the ambivalence: I never really feel the need for much social interaction unless I'm bored aka too sick/tired to keep myself occupied. I guess that I crave the interaction because I know subconsciously that talking is a relatively low-effort activity, something that I can manage given my state of health. I don't really want a friend so much as I want to be occupied in something satisfying. I don't really even have much to say to anyone, and so I have trouble imagining how the interaction would transpire.

I've also recently lost much of my desire for a girlfriend. It's because of the sleep-med-induced obsessive thoughts. I guess I will not say what I was thinking about, but the thoughts made me feel that I never wanted to be touched again, certainly not sexually. Even the feeling of my clothes against my skin disturbed me. I'm no longer having those thought obsessively, but they haven't gone away entirely. I'm still reminded of them, even when I accidentally touch myself in certain ways. It's a nightmare.

I don't have the energy to properly manage my own mental health. If it weren't for my insomnia, I don't think I'd be having these thoughts at all. I've reflected on these issues in the past and they didn't have such an effect on me. But the insomnia seems to have left me with weak psychological defenses.

So I have trouble seeing myself in a relationship or even pursuing a relationship. I have sort of an inward cringe reaction to the thought of bodies being touched in certain ways, even the bodies of the characters in the little stories I use to help myself fall asleep.

All I can do is live day by day. It helps that my cognitive abilities have degraded so much that I can hardly think beyond one day anyhow.

Speaking of pursuing a relationship...I wouldn't be doing that right now anyways. I've given myself a medically benign but very visible skin problem, and I wouldn't dare present myself to anyone so long as it's as bad as it is. I'm scheduled to have a laser skin treatment next month. It's going to cost pretty much every penny I have. I'll be paying with the last of my stimulus money and however much of my monthly income that I need to afford the whole bill. I'm not paying a cent towards my energy bill this month to make sure I can afford the treatment.

The problem is that the dermatologist recommends 2-4 treatments. I can afford only one, and it'll be a loooong time before I can save up enough for another. Maybe I'll get lucky and be ok with just one treatment. Probably not! I'm not a lucky person. But the problem will fade with time even if I get no treatment. I'd just have to wait and suffer. The treatment is a pico laser, and each application costs seven hundred dollars.

So my life is pretty much shit at this point.

One good development is that I can now do about 75% of a chinup. If I extend myself all the way down, I cannot pull myself back up, but I can pull my chest up to the bar if I start higher up than a dead hang. I wasn't able to do anything remotely like this a month ago. I followed the pullup progressions explained on Crhis Heria's youtube channel (which I watched on Invidious and not that viewer tracking, ad-filled garbage youtube.com), and they worked! I've been amazed at my progress. I had it in my mind that maybe I (being female) wouldn't be able to develop sufficient upper body strength to pull of this exercise at all, but I'm so close so soon it's weird, particularly given my lack of sleep/recovery.

I can't remember how I ended up on Chris Heria's channel; probably I just followed a series links from some other fitness-related video. But I got interested in calisthenics by watching his channel, plus his tattoos are fascinating to stare at. He has some classy looking ones and some trashy ones, and the combo is intriguing. I started doing pullups, chinups, and pushups because of his channel. I'm still terribly at pushups; I don't know why.

My current physique goals are to grow my upper chest, obliques (the side abs), and forearms, and to lose fat.

My lower back is still sore. DOMS never lasted this long for me, so at first I was worried that I'd injured myself rather than just over-worked my back. However, then I remembered that I'm not recovering optimally from my workouts due to lack of sleep. That means that maybe I did simply over-work my back, but it's been sore for longer than it would normally be because I'm not recovering as well as I normally do. Normal, there's no normal for me because I've been an insomniac for most of my adult life.

Sometimes I allow myself some vague thoughts about having a girlfriend, vague in the sense that I view it as if from a distance, without getting up too close, too detailed and vivid in my imagination, so that I won't be overwhelmed. I have to face the fact that, now that I'm pretty much 100% decided to never date a white-privileged womon ever again, my dating pool has pretty much completely dried up. I don't like typing 'white-privileged,' especially not repeatedly, so let's just call them paleface people from now on.

Bizarrely, most of the romantic interest I've gotten in my life has come from these people, so I expect slightly above zero dating prospects once I (will I ever?) decide to try dating again. It's not just that which so gravely decreases my dating prospects, however; I also act "weird." I'm not neurotypical. Times two. Or negative two, I guess; I got two diagnoses.

Anyways, enough for tonight.