So, how is your health? By health I mean physical, mental, spiritual, craftual, and all the other health’s. Over the last year, I have made a bigger commitment to my health. The two Covid years were fraught with lockdowns, fear fatigue, anxiety, and fractured relationships. I found that I needed to make a lot of changes in my life and body in order to live a more healthful life.
Physically I made some large changes. I have always lived a very sedentary life between my desk job and my sit-down type hobbies. I have never been one to get up and move for movement’s sake. If I did, it was sporadic and goal oriented. Once I met my goal, I would let it go. It has been a little over a year now, and I am planning to continue my exercise routine as a new part of my daily life. That is really my goal, creating my new normal and sticking with it. I started walking 3 nights a week, last February. I would walk a mile or two. I slowly bumped it up to 4-5 days a week, walking 4-5 miles. Once the weather started to change and the days got shorter, I didn’t feel as comfortable walking alone in the dark. The darling Husband did some research and found an amazing gadget that transformed my regular road bicycle into a stationary bike. This has allowed me to do my workouts at any time, in our garage. It is also a very portable stand that doesn’t take up a huge amount of space. Once I am done with my workout, my bike gets hung up and the stand folds up and is put on a shelf. We then have our garage back and don’t need a designated workout area. I am currently riding 4-5 days per week, and I ride 35 minutes or 7 miles, whichever comes first. I have also incorporated standard push ups and sit-ups or supine bicycles into my workout. I started with 1 standard pushup, and 10 sit-ups (Feebs loved this because she would stand on my feet while I did them). Each week I would increase 1 pushup. I am now up to 20 standard pushups. That was my goal and now I am just maintaining it. I do a rep of 10 standard pushups, 15 supine bicycles, 10 standard pushups, 15 supine bicycles. In total, I would say that my total workout equipment investment was less than $130. I also own a yoga ball and mat and am a subscriber of SarahBeth Yoga on YouTube. She is amazing and has such an all-inclusive channel that covers so many goals, challenges, abilities, and accommodations.
I have also made some mental changes over the last year. I am a very put your head down and push through issues kind of person. I don’t ask for help because I always figure that I will find a way to work through it. Anxiety has always been a part of my life, as has insomnia. They are things that I just dealt with. Last June I was averaging 2 hours of sleep per night, and I had to sleep alone in another room. I finally decided to ask for help. I saw my doctor and she decided to put me on medication that not only helps with my sleep, but also alleviates some of my anxiety. For the first time in my life, I am getting regular sleep. I also started talk therapy, to help unpackage the anxiety itself. Currently, I am working on the relationships that I have in my life and “cleaning house” on some of them. I want to really nurture and grow the healthy relationships in my life. I want to be a better friend and be more accessible to the people that I love. At the same time, I am giving to relationships that give back. I am putting less of myself into the relationships that are one sided. I am getting better at both putting up and taking down barriers. I am working on opening communication and verbalizing my needs to the people around me and trying to better at meeting needs. I am changing the dialogue so that we all feel like we are getting something positive from our interactions.
I have also been pushing myself to suck it up more with some things that I don’t enjoy doing. For example, I am not a fan of camping. It simply isn’t my jam. I loved it as a kid but having “camped” in the Army kind of killed my love of sleeping outside. Once you routinely share a tent shelter with herds of tarantulas, the shine of camping dulls (and I am not even afraid of/ dislike spiders). The Husband loves camping. He loves it! Feebs wants to camp. She thinks it sounds like an amazing adventure. So, we went camping. We went to the coast and camped at Dillon Beach. It was chilly, sandy, rainy, and our air mattress died on us, and we had to sleep on the ground one night. I am too old to sleep on the ground. I flat out refuse to sleep on the ground. The Husband was sure that I was going to pull the plug and demand that we go home a day early. He was mentally preparing himself for me having a shit-hemorrhage and turn the trip into a whine-fest. This was a valid concern. Historically, I would have done that. Or I would have suffered very un-silently and made the situation tense. Instead, I decided to suck it up and make it work. We had to take an hour out of our day, but we drove into town and found a Big 5. I went in, purchased cots, and all was well in the sleeping world. We stayed out the rest of our trip, the packed up our campsite in the pouring rain. All in all, it was a fun trip. Feebs lived her best beach life with her little BFF and came home with her first batch of camping memories. She is ready to go again! By making myself be a little uncomfortable I was able to give my family an enjoyable trip with fun memories that we will always have. And I ended up being less uncomfortable than I thought I would be. Note to self- the world does in fact NOT revolve around you. (Bonus: we saved a beached starfish!)
From a making and lifestyle point of view, I have been making changes too. I have started eliminating unreachable goals. I am not going to be a size 4 by summer, but I am going to start eliminating some of the crap I eat and get more movement through my day. I am not going to save $20,000 by the end of the year, but we are going to cut back on eating out and start putting more money away each month. I am not going to sew every single piece of fabric in my stash by then end of summer, but I am going to finish the skirt that I have cut out so that I can wear it while the weather is warm. I am also going to stop setting repetitive and unreachable goals. I am going to approach the things that I want to accomplish in a healthy and sustainable way. Compassionate deadlines and “bringing joy” are a big part of that. I am a goal setter, to the extreme. I like to make grand plans and gather all the supplies and figure out the logistics of accomplishing it. I love the plotting and planning of a project. Once I have collected all the necessary information/ supplies I often lose interest or hit a snag that I don’t have the courage to work through (I am looking at you, white denim skirt). Honestly, I love getting organized, but suck at staying organized. #MeMadeMay just ended, and me Did Not make much. I completed 3 makes. For. The. Whole. Month. That’s all! That is very un-me of me. I didn’t complete 3 hats for charity. I didn’t complete a single sewn garment. I didn’t even fix some of the stuff that is on my “fix it” list. Life was busy in May, but life is busy every month. When I sat down to write my All the Makes for May, I started to get very discouraged at my lack of finished objects. I didn’t even have a significant number of new starts or WIPs. I just didn’t do much making last month. When I started to give myself crap for this, I decided to take a step back and acknowledge that 1. I know that I generally have to take a minute after completing a large and complex project (Betty Cardigan) before I really dive into something new. 2. I generally shift away from thick heavy knitting once the weather starts to warm up. 3. I haven’t had a dedicated sewing space for a long time. Taking stock of this, I have lightened up on myself. I do think that goals are good and necessary for me. One of the three FOs from May was a baby sweater, for a baby that is going to make their arrival very soon. I knew I had to get this done so that I could get it to the mother-to- be before she left for maternity leave. I set the goal and met it. I delivered the sweater today. The charity knitting will get done in spurts. One month I knit 9, another I knit 1. Big deal. At the end of the year, I will have a big bin of knitted garments to donate. I will keep my eye on the prize and try not to be so rigid about the bottom line. And… If something isn’t “bringing me joy”, I am giving myself permission to either set it to the side or let it go. This may mean ripping out a 99% finished sweater or packing a certain white denim skirt into a basket and putting it in time out. It’s okay to do this. It will not affect the rotation of the earth, and sometimes taking a break or a new approach will yield a better result. Somehow this even has worked its way into my possessions. I have started going through my closet and making myself wear everything in it. I am getting rid of the things that I don’t like, that don’t fit, or that I am not comfortable in. Why have a closet full of clothes when I only wear the same 7 outfits? Same thing with my fabrics and yarns. Will I ever make something with it? No? Okay, then send it to someone that will love it. I have even done this recently with knitting projects. I loved working on the Shik’is cowl, but I knew even before I started it that it wasn’t something that I would wear. So, I went ahead and made it with the plan to put it in the gift bin. As it turns out, the Female O needed something around her neck while were camping, so I literally bound it off, wove in the ends and handed it over to her. It worked out great!
So, this is where I stand right now. I will continue to make goals and plot and plan out my life, because #TypeA4Life. Some goals I will reach, some I will not. I commit to being kinder to myself. I hope to keep doing touch-bases like this, as time progresses. I want to check in and make sure that I am still in a healthy place. Health matters, and we all need to take ownership of our healthfulness.
Loves,
M
Mrs. Collins Makes Stuff 