Know Thyself

Introspection can be painful but pretty enlightening. It can not only help you learn useful things about yourself going forward, it helps you put a stop to things that haven't even happened yet. If you know how you're going to react under certain stressors, when those stressors hit you can fake right instead of left and finally experience a different outcome.
It also means facing up to your repeated patterns and stupid quirks and really, really annoying habits. It's not fun.
I'd like to think I am pretty self-aware in general, and in my more cocky and snide moments I'd like to think I'm more self aware than most of the populace. (Probably entirely untrue, I'm just aware of different parts of myself than they are.) For instance, I know that seeing anything to do with damage to eyeballs is going to freak me out. So is anything with rape, implied or happening right there in front of me. I loathe being told I'm an idiot or I don't know what I'm talking about. I ~will~ stop dead to hug a stuffed animal if it's big enough and soft enough, and it is an involuntary reflex to talk baby-talk to my cats when they stop by to collapse on my lap.
There's lots of other really tiny piddling stuff, but I'll spare you. You get the idea. When X is applied, Y results.
So I had been sitting here lately trying to figure a few things out, namely why on earth I keep not exercising when I have a lot of free time in the mornings suddenly. In the evenings I had felt like I was taking 30-45 minutes away from time with Bob, but I really liked walking outside in the dark while listening to my music. Here we are in a probably MUCH safer neighborhood and I am not walking during the day. Go downstairs on the treadmill, then? Nope, that's not happening either.
And in one of those little introspective moments that smacks me upside the head, I realized... I just have an aversion to daylight, not exercise. I WANT to exercise. Hell, I looked damn good when I managed to lose all that weight. I want to do it again, and then some more after that. I just seriously and truly hate doing it while the daystar hangs high in the sky for some reason. Probably because I just generally hate being observed, and part of me thinks some pervy neighbor might have binoculars to watch me trundle away on the exercise equipment. Not even pervy, the thought of ~anybody~ seeing me makes me nervous.
So I'm going to try something tonight since it was so successful the last time I did it - I'm going to saddle up the iPod, put on my beat up sneakers, and I'm going to do a once-'round the neighborhood to see how things go.
It'll be a chance to listen to music, 30-45 minutes of exercise, and a chance to wind down after work. I've been feeling like brain mash for the past 2 weeks since switching to 2nd shift, and it bothers me that I haven't yet developed a map of how to troubleshoot hardware stuff effectively now that we're encouraged to go the extra mile for folks in the evening. In the back of my head I'm wondering if the whole mind-body connection thing might not be the reason, since I've been very sedentary since moving with all the stress.)
Either way, we shall see, as I'm planning on strapping on the shoes and the 'pod tonight and giving it a go.
Yeah, sometimes these things start out seeming really serious and then I'm just talking about jogging.
In other news, the Sky Scarf is looking awesome even though we're only on day 5 of it! Wrangling all of those tiny little mohair strands is a pain, but thankfully I only have to do it once a day for about 5 minutes. Otherwise this project would never be completed.
And in the realm of furtherly knowing thyself, I am acknowledging that I'm going to forget a day here and there and I've already given myself permission to make up for it by doing as best as I can remember for those days. With as excited as I am about this project, this is me we're talking about here. I'm going to forget an entire week at some point after the novelty wears off, and I have a hard time carrying anything for more than a few months. It's just who I am. I'll set reminders and use up a billion post-its to help. The post-it industry LOVES me for that very reason.