Aren't We All

I'm keeping the faith. Hit the gym again today and sweated my ass off on the elliptical, then almost pulled a muscle in my shoulder patting myself on the back. Eating the things I should be eating, not eating the things I shouldn't be eating. Not obsessing about the scale, but weighing myself every morning to chart my progress.

Also: Since I've come back from vacation, by and large I've been  grumpy as hell. I have cruel thoughts all the time about perfectly nice people and on occasion I find myself actually giving voice to those thoughts without even realizing it. I'm quick to feel slighted and disregarded and superior in most conversations, and I struggle to recognize and transcend those instincts. I am easily overwhelmed by a kind of lazy cynicism, or maybe it's laziness disguised as cynicism, that seeps into and affects the quality of my thinking and intellectual and creative output. I am not suffering fools gladly these days, as my mother used to say. And I'm really tired, all the time. I'm seeing difference, not unity. I'm feeling feisty and combative. 

And somehow I think it's necessary for me to feel all these things right now in order to get myself to something else, if that makes any sense. I'm inventing a running narrative, as we all do, all the time, and right now my narrative is the kind of  shitty, self-reflexive, snarky black comedy that I would have no interest in actually sitting through. Except that I am sitting through it, because it's all around me.  I'm working something out, I think, and I kind of don't want to rush it. I don't want to nurture it either--I don't want to actually *be* this guy for any prolonged period of time--but I don't want to be who I'm not either. I want to earn a positive outlook, not try one on like a new hat. This is how things tend to work for me--everything kind of seems shitty even though I know it really isn't and then suddenly everything doesn't seem so shitty anymore. Or else it still does, which means it actually was shitty and it's time to change something. That's not what's happening this time, I don't think, but either way, something is propelled. It's all a step forward.  

Right?