Lara

Let me ask you one of the most controversial questions in Spain: the tortilla, with or without onion? I'm sure you will have the best thanksgiving of your lives! Good cooking! At least we're sleeping better. She made a huge change in august. From barely talking to having conversations, grew a few cm, and began to look less like a baby and more like a child. And right afterwards she began to wake up less and less, and now it is not unusual that she sleeps the whole night or wakes up only once. It seems unbelievable after all we've been through with her sleep. I can't believe I'm back to 7 hours a day. How are yours going? The older must be 5 now, am I right?

I’m still a mess. Holidays were a mixed bag. The day we left, our car broke, and we had to pay first a mechanic, then a tow truck, then again a mechanic. We went back home and called a friend to borrow his car. This car caused some trouble too, while we were in France, and I had to spend more money on another garage. My holidays’ budget went through the roof, and I’m still trying to recover from all those expenses. Holidays themselves were quite good, although I was plagued with terrible anxiety for most of the time we were in France. Then we visited my in-laws and it was awful. We spent 12 days there and it was the worst experience ever. They’ve bought a house that is 500 meters away from a cowshed which basically means that the house smells like cowpat, your clothes smell like cowpat, your hair smells like cowpat, and it doesn’t matter how many times you get to shower, you always smell like cowpat. It didn’t help that my FIL was a perfect asshole. Then we spent a month in my appartment in north Spain, and things began to get better. We all calmed down, made time to go outside and walk in the sun, read, write, play some music… When we arrived home in september I was feeling well, stronger from all the yoga I had done, and eager to start therapy and work. As soon as work began, my scarce free time disappeared, and I started to feel less and less motivated to do things. I was feeling sad because I was doing “nothing”, but at the same time I was so mentally tired I didn’t want to work on anything when I had some free time. I kept repeating myself that doing yoga, eating healthy, practicing my flute, were things that would make me feel better, but I still refused. I talked about this to my new therapist (I’m happy with this one. I had to wait almost 3 months until she had time for me, but it’s worth it because it seems she can help). She asked me if I wasn’t doing all those self-care activities because I didn’t want to or because I just couldn’t. Her advice was to relax and stop telling myself that I had to do any of those things. In her opinion, I want to control too many things in my life, it’s a mechanism I built long ago because I needed it, but now it looks like I’m tired of using effort and willpower to go through my life. For whatever the reasons, those mechanisms that were useful in the past no longer work, and I have to find a way to build trust and let myself just go with the flow. She asked me to trust myself, the process I’m in, my child, everything. She also pointed out that maybe my perpetual tiredness and sadness are symptoms, attitudes or emotions that are protecting me from deeper fears that might pop up if I face what is ahead of me. She said it would be better for me to stop pushing myself and instead take the time to explore those fears and work on them. What doesn’t fit in there is that I can understand having deep fears regarding my career, or my child, or some other aspects of my life, but I don’t know which fears can surface linked to nourishing myself, exercising, or getting out of the house. She says that for some reason, self-care is on standby and we need to find a way to get back into it. But not by forcing myself to do things. It seemed like something I could try, and the result after more than one month is that I’m still not doing any activity, but I’m feeling less stressed and less worried. I also feel like I have no personal life, though. I go to work, take care of Wolvie, go grocery shopping, cook, tidy up, do laundry, start over. It’s been worse recently, because boyfriend caught a stomach bug and then he hurt his back (he is still in pain), so I’ve had zero help for 2 weeks. I sometimes feel like I need to stop and just cry, but I have literally no time for that, since I’m either at work, or with Wolvie, or doing chores (with her around too). I’ve also arrived to this point when I feel so overwhelmed that I don’t even want to eat, and I skip meals until I feel like shit and then binge on carbs. I hadn’t had an hypoglycemia for 12 years, and I had 2 this year. The last one was yesterday. Not very bad, but enough to make me feel like crap. And when I thought “I’d rather take better care of myself”, the immediate answer was “you are not capable of that”. This is the answer that I get the most whenever I think about doing anything. And at other times of my life when such thoughts have appeared, my reaction has been to prove myself they were wrong thoughts. Now I just accept them and do nothing. On the brightest side, Wolvie has changed a lot through the summer, like it usually happens with toddlers. She runs, jumps, talks, and I really enjoy my time with her. We’ve found out she loves water, so we got her into swimming lessons and she has the greatest time on every class. Her hair still looks like fire, she's the cutest thing 🤩

I hope I'll feel better soon. We're leaving tomorrow, to the pyrenees, and I hope we'll have a nice time there. At least, it's a change of environment for the better. Sleep depends. She has nights when she'll sleep 3 or even 4 hours in a row, and wake up only 2 or 3 times, but then she easily gets back into her 1 hour wake-up pattern and it gets harder every time. I hope she'll get better during the summer, because in september I'm going back to work full time and I'm not sure I will be able to handle it if I keep getting 4-5 hours of sleep at night. Thank you guys, for your words, and your time. It always makes me feel better when I come and pour everything in here, because you always have a nice gesture. Enjoy your summer!

It looks like that's what's happening. I hope I'll feel better in a few more days, because I'm really not enjoying any of this. That is great advice. I am sure that despite not getting into music college, they had an awesome time in my class. I managed to make a tight team, they're all close friends, and they're all trying to keep their flute playing going on although not on a professional level. But I'm also aware of how it looks from the outside, from the point of view of those other teachers that may look at me and think "she gets no one into college, that's not a good teacher". And I appear to be quite sensitive to other people's opinions recently That's what I try to say to myself. But then I look at my flute, or at my reading/writing projects, or go into the kitchen to cook something healthy, and I do nothing in the end, because I feel I lack the physical strength to do any of that. A lot of it might be mental, but there's also something wrong with my body. I do feel very tired.

This would make sense, because really, I was in a very good routine. I know I've been depressed and it's been hard, but this feels different. It's like everything is wrong, like there's no hope, that anything will change. I can be objective and see it's all false. But still I just want to lie down, waste my time, and feel bad about every aspect of my life. I hope that since we're going to spend the next two months away, the change of scenarios will help, and that I'll be in a better place when I get back to work in september, when I'll also start therapy again (fingers crossed that I can get an appointment). Oh, I know so many musicians, not just flutists, that are lousy players and yet they succeeded to get the very same job I have... I guess they were lucky, but it doesn't help to my state of mind right now, because I align myself with them and think maybe I didn't deserve it either. It doesn't help, either, that after 10 years of work here, I had several students ready for university level, and things went totally wrong: one of them was harassed at her high school by her teachers about music not being the right career for her, she got anxiety attacks, her jaw got blocked, never played well again; another one was convinced by her father that music wasn't right for her, she quit; another one got his flute stolen right before his entry exams and had no money to buy another one until a year later; another one has a weird pain in her arms due to bad exercising advice, can't lift her arms without pain, so no more playing the flute; another one got so depressed after a year with my substitute that she didn't want to follow with her music studies... These were all brilliant students, beautiful players, A grades and honour degrees every year, and well, nothing came out of it. And I know nothing of this is my responsibility, but it makes me think I might not be such a good teacher if after 10 years I only got 1 student into college, instead of 1 every couple of years, like many of my colleagues teaching violin or piano. Sorry for the rant, it has been around my mind for a few days. Thank you very much for your nice words. I know I will get through this. I have to. I don't want to live like this. It's awful.

I’m in a dark place right now. Things went awry a couple of weeks ago. I was doing fine. I was meditating, journaling, doing yoga and the WHM, and walking barefoot, and playing my flute. Baby steps, good attitude. I had this thought that this crisis I’m going through is a great opportunity to get some things better, to get to enjoy life more, to build that self I’d like to be. Then one of my boyfriend’s student came to his class with covid and didn't say he was sick, and he passed it on to my boyfriend, who passed it to the kid, and then to me. The kid had a really hard time, and we had to go twice to the ER because she couldn’t get air through her throat due to inflammation. I was calm about it because I knew the reason it was happening and I knew it wasn't serious and that she would be ok in a couple of days, but as a result of this adventure, I spent 22 hours without any sleep and it cracked me. When they were better, I was the one sick, and I haven’t fully recovered. I feel tired all the time and my mind has taken a very dark switch. I feel I should not bother with anything, because anyway I’m not capable or worthy. At work, things are getting better, there are lots of good things coming, and the only part of it I can think of is “this will mean more meetings, less personal time, more problems to organise my life, and anyway I won’t have any good ideas and they will not want me there”. With my colleagues it’s all about “they don’t like me, they think I’m not a good teacher, they think I’m weird”, when sincerely it is the opposite with most of them. With music practice is all about “I’m trying to get better again, why? Isn’t it clear after all these years that I’m never going to play the way I want to? Is it not clear that I am not talented enough and that I should settle once and forever?” I want to eat healthier to feel better, but I feel like I have no willpower to change anything, and in the background there’s the thought that anyway it won’t help, that my body is screwed for good. I had one hypoglycemia recently, it wasn’t fun. But I keep eating things that damage my body. Why to try. Nothing is going to change. That’s my overall feeling on every aspect of my life. I ditched my last therapist because she wasn’t being helpful at all. I met one at the children’s park, and since we’re getting close because the kids usually play together, I asked her to recommend me someone, and told her about my recent bad experiences with therapists. She gave me a phone, I called, the woman is too busy, she’ll call me in september and we’ll try to set an appointment. Does anyone know if this is related to covid? Because really, I was doing fine. Things were getting better, I was looking forward our holidays in the Pyrenees, I had switched to mantra meditation and it was having such great effects on me*, and suddenly it's like every aspect of my life is shitty, and I know is not true, but I have this fatigue, and this feeling that everything is wrong with me. * After a few days, my automatic negative inner talk had began to change. It's not that I was consciously doing anything, I wasn't arguing with any of my thoughts, there were just new positive thoughts that were running on automatic too. Like: I have time to go for a walk now, but I'm tired, and I have to have breakfast first or otherwise I'll feel sick and too tired and so on, and suddenly, without me having even time to argue or dismiss the thought, another came in "you're stronger that you think. You can go take that walk in the country and then come and have a nice breakfast". And I was so perplex that I did what it said. (This was all before covid)

Hi, Elastigirl, no, I haven't checked recently. I remember an e-mail, not long ago, regarding an update, but my thought was "oh, no, new videos" 😅 I didn't know that you can choose the length now, so I'll take a look to see if it can fit in my schedule. I've taken a look at those programs. I opened a couple of them, and they included only a couple of exercises a day, no equipment, so I'm thinking it could work for me. Thank you girls! Have a nice day!

Hi, I'm looking for a recommendation. I'd like to ask if anybody knows about some bodyweight beginner program that is straightforward and not very long (around 20 minutes per workout) and with minimal or no equipment needed. I own GMB's Integral Strength and Parallettes 1, which I enjoyed a few years ago when I was way more active physically. But althought they're great programs, I don't have the time right now to go through the endless videos and variations to try, and assessments and all. I'd like something simple: do this x times x sets, something that will help me get started so later I can get back to other activities I used to enjoy. Thanks, guys!

To be honest, I don't know, and I don't care anymore. It feels like it happened ages ago. Things are better. More or less. We've been sick lately, which means less sleep, less personal time, and so on. But I'm feeling better inside my mind. I've been reading. Books that made me think. I decided to change my attitude. Towards life, people, everything. It came to a point it was obvious the problem was me. And not just for the past couple of years. I mean for way longer. I've examined my life, my career, what makes me who I am (well, it's still in process). I've thought of my career mistakes, the turns where I could have moved in some other direction... I'm changing things, I'm growing up. Above all, attitude. I feel like I have a purpose now, to live life in a different, deeper, more intense and open way. Thank you for asking. I haven't been here for ages, and it feels warm and nice to log in and find that you took the time to send a message *hugs*

I'm going through a rough time again. It all started, like in november, when I got sick. I caught a cold, and then another one, and then Wolvie caught a bad one and spent a week sleeping even worse than usual, and then she passed it on to me, and then all my routines and everything went to hell. Also, she's in a totally new stage. It's like someone had switched on the next level. The very same week she became 20 months old, we had to start dealing with tantrums, fears, and the worst part for me: separation anxiety. Tantrums are not that difficult to manage, and are usually short and related to hunger or need to sleep; fears are a bit weird, but understandable. But separation anxiety, I can't deal with it. It's hard. It's not only that I hear "mamá, mamá" like 1500 times a day, it's that her not being with me means crying and probably a whole tantrum. I'm sitting by her side, and if I get up to go to the bathroom, or to switch on the lights, she will be crying. If I'm not in the same room, she's screaming, calling me, or crying. And it doesn't matter if I take her with me to wherever I go, she wants 100% attention, which means that I won't be able to do anything (cooking, tiding up, groceries shopping...) without a cry as a background. And of course, we're still sleeping like shit. Right now, I'm writing to this, while my boyfriend is with Wolvie in the next room, and all the time I'm here I'm listening to her crying and her "mamá, mamá". It's fatiguing, and it drowns my patience quickly. I don't feel I have any direction, or purpose. And I don't have energy to do the things that would make me feel better. I've arrived to that point where my only question is "why even bother". I feel I'm becoming a bitter person. Not that bad yet that it's affecting my external life, my job, or how I treat people, but in my head it's awful. I'm resentful, and I can only see the bad side of people. I usually use sundays to recharge, because it's the only day we can both take care of Wolvie, and no one works, but lately, there's been no recess. Boyfriend wanted to go out with friends, which means that on sunday he will want to sleep, and he's probably sick because they ate crap. Next weekend is his birthday and he wants to celebrate, so people will come home, which means more cooking, more cleaning, no rest. And this past weekend was the weirdest: one of my boyfriend's uncle died. Of covid. Because covid doesn't exist, so why to bother using masks. And vaccines are all made to put crap into your body. This said by someone that had spent 40 years smoking around 20 cigarettes a day, and that was 40 kilos overweight. In my opinion, all the crap that could be put into his body was already there. Well, the thing is, he died 2 weeks before his birthday, and his wife wanted to celebrate it. I can understand that she would like to honor him somehow on his birthday, in the privacy of her home. However, I find it weird, and even creepy, that she chose to call the whole family, around 25 people for a birthday party. 25 people in a room, celebrating the birthday of someone that died of covid. Nope, she hasn't stop crying yet.

As I wrote the other day, I had began a post about how my career developped and in how many ways I’ve never felt like I was a good musician. I wrote about all the things that went wrong, and about my lack of aptitudes and talent, and how all of that has always left me feeling I was a poor musician, but today, suddenly, this thought came to my mind, that I could see my story in the exact opposite way. Here: I didn’t have an ear for music, but I built it through effort and practice. I didn’t have a good sense of rhythm, but I built it through effort and practice. I wasn’t a natural, but I worked. I had these terrible teachers for most of my career, speciall during the early years, and yet, I learnt. I wasn't good enough or had the money to get into some fancy college, but I bought books, and read them, and applied what I had learnt. Nobody ever supported me. Not at home, not my teachers. Those who talked to me were all about taking the idea of being a professional musician out of my mind. But I persisted. When studying in Paris, and faced with an easier or a more difficult path, I chose the difficult one. When in my former job, I had to face awful colleagues and work harassment, and fell down completely, I got up on my feet again. At my 40’s, instead of thinking, ok, the parade has passed by, let's leave it here, I decided to contact an international soloist and began taking lessons with him. Yes, I’ve struggled. I’ve spent 30 years of my life struggling, fighting against myself and my insecurities, fighting this instrument I find so damn difficult to play. All the odds were against me, and nevertheless, here I am. And now, a new stage. I have to be humble and accept where I am. Only from the place I am, I can grow.

I've been thinking on what could have changed. I've spent months doing the work, and some things were different, but not that much different. I mean, what the guy describes in the book is an amazing experience where you're just one with the music and it flows without effort by itself. I wasn't experiencing that. At all. I was more relaxed, and I had stopped fighting with getting things "right". But that's all. I think that on one side, maybe I'm reaping the work from these past months, but as days go by, I see more clearly, and I'm guessing that the key here was to finally accept my real level of playing, and focusing on building from there, not from what my past playing has been. I feel a bit down, but at the same time it feels like a release.

What a curious expression. Thank you for explaining it to me. I had no clue about where did that come from.

Thanks! 🥰 I never expected such a crisis, to be honest. I knew some things would change, and I knew having a kid would change me, but I wasn't prepared for all this turmoil.

Effortless mastery. I think the way my music career developed has a lot to do with my doubts regarding purpose, and also with the loss of my spiritual side. But I’ll start solely on the musical side, and what the effortless mastery practice has brought into light. I began writing a long post yesterday on how my career developed, but sincerely, it can be summed up into two main points: · A huge feeling of not belonging. I never had real musical qualities as a child, such as a good ear, or good rhythm, those were things that I developed as I practiced, but I always felt like I wasn’t the real thing. · A progressive strangement from music itself to focus almost exclusively into technique, because I never seemed to be good enough. This has led me to build a career mainly on insecurities and a feeling of inadequacy, with a few bright spots. When the effortless mastery book came to me, I wasn’t ready for it. What the guy was talking about there were my very own thoughts and feelings, but I wasn’t willing to change. Then Wolvie was born, I stopped having time to practice, and put myself instead to re-read the book, and take notes, and reflect on all those things that resonated so strongly with me. Then I began playing again, and I followed his plan. I stopped fighting and began to play in a more relaxed way, but I had a lot of trouble with focusing on “the space”, as he calls it. Later on, I realised that I had unconsciously been avoiding one of the necessary steps: understanding which was my actual level of playing. I finally got the courage to do it, and realised that I can only play effortlessly, I have only mastered, the repertoire going up to my 4th or 5th year of studies. Given that my formal training lasted for about 14 years, this was quite a depressing and humbling result, and I’ve spent the past weeks discouraged and feeling I have no reasons to keep going. How many years would I need to invest now, to be able to master and play effortlessly the repertoire that goes up to professional level? I was thinking, I’m 45 years old, I don’t have the energy, I’m old, what for, do I really want to go through all that again? Then yesterday everything just… I don’t know. Changed? I did what I do everyday: breathing, relaxation, affirmations… But when I began to warm up, something was different. I was IN “the space”. Every note I played sounded like the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. I continued with scales, and they were coming out with such an ease, and were so beautifully played I enjoyed them as ever. Then I played the two lines I’m working on, and there! Music! Sometimes they sounded shy and sweet, then I repeated and a totally different character would come out, affirmative and serein. And it wasn’t ME. Like he always says in the book, the music was playing itself, without me doing anything. The experience was so intense, I needed to stop, sit down, and cry a bit. Then I took the flute again, and decided to try Taktakishvili. I had been working on that piece for a whole year, a couple of years ago, and I never mastered it. It was clean, and fast, and technically good, but despite the intrinsic beauty of the piece, it always sounded dull when I played it. I couldn’t make it sound the way I knew it could sound. So yesterday I began playing and… technically it was a mess. The difficulty of the piece is several years ahead of my actual effortless level, so there were wrong notes, missed passages, awful sound, disasterous articulation… but in the middle of that mess, there was music! So much of it! It finally sounded the way I wanted, and it was just coming out without me thinking anything. It was just happening. There was joy, and drama, and action, and such freshness, and I thought at the end that it someone had listened to me playing like that, they would have said “wow, what a ride!” I took the flute again this morning. I couldn’t find the place again. I was relaxed, and content, and I could accept that it was not happening, and it feels a bit sad, of course, but if what I got yesterday is what I can really get from this work, that’s a game changer.

Thank you, WhiteGhost. That was a nice hug 🥰 I don't know about other people, maybe you're right that all those mid-life crisis people experience might be a consequence of not having done the job. In my case, this is a huge crisis. I'm rethinking my whole life, and althought I'm trying to be nice with myself, sometimes is depressing to see how many opportunities I lost, or to think that might have completely missed what was the point. Anyway, as time goes by, I'm able to see this more as an opportunity rather than a depressive downhill. I feel less lost and more positive about which could be the outcomes of this turning point. By the way, I had never seen or heard that expression, "flying by the seat of your pants". Is it common?

I’ll start with anger, because it seems to be the easiest subject to talk about right now. Probably because I’m feeling proud about how I’ve been managing it and because it’s apparently over. It began a while ago, I don’t know when, but I started to feel a lot of anger. And it was about Wolvie. I was getting angry easily, and for things that didn’t deserve such a reaction. It made me feel like crap afterwards, when strong emotions went away. Then one day, I had this epiphany. Wolvie was reeeally dirty from her painting, and I complained about laundry. And the moment I said it out loud, it stucked me: when in my life have I been angry about laundry? I’ve never cared. It never was a chore to take care of the laundry. Really. Why then all these strong emotions? And then I remembered who was angry about that. From then on, I began to observe my thoughts and reactions in those small moments of anger (that sometimes would pile up until I got enraged), and I made the discovery that those weren’t my words, nor my feelings. They were all my mom’s. I realised, not only that I was getting angry as some type of unconscious reaction to what was done to me back on the day, and that these were not my emotions, but also, that by keeping those words, expressions, etc. with me, I was blocking the way to experience things my own way. There was this coincidence that I listened to a podcast that week, an interview to a psychology researcher, where he explained what is anger, how it works, why it can even be addictive, and how to step down of it. It helped a lot to understand what I was going through. And this was the end of my rage bursts. It’s been 3 weeks and I’m being able to see Wolvie’s little mischiefs for what they are, and enjoy them rather than suffer them. Life has become lighter, and we enjoy better our time together.

I don't know. I feel so silly about some aspects of my fights and doubts. I think, this is the kind of stuff you work on and think about in your teens or your early youth; you solve it and then you run your life according to that. But my whole life I've been quite the opposite to the reflective type of person. I've just gone on, never stopping to think and ponder about relationships, or goals, or meaning. And now, it's like someone (Wolvie) slapped my face and made me realise how insecure I feel, how many unsolved things are waiting there for me, how many doubts about who I am and what I want. I swear there will be a day I won't end all my posts crying.

Writing my last message in the challenge thread gave me a bit of courage, so at least I'm going to make here a short summary of the things I'd like to write about and I don't dare to (some are easier than others): - Spirituality. I'm an atheist, but at the same time I used to have a strong spiritual side through a close tie to nature. It is gone. Nature, night, arts, poetry. I've lost the taste for things that were a huge component of my life. I feel empty. - Overcoming rage. This is going great now. I'm learning a lot about myself. My mom's sentences, what she disliked, not me. I need to get free of those sentences to be able to do and experience things my own way. - Letting go off of control. Each person Wolvie knows will have a different relationship with her. Bf won't do or understand things like me. - Purpose. I don't know mine. I asked myself questions and I come up empty. - The shock of understanding my actual playing level through effortless mastery. The coincidence that the things I can play effortlessly stop at the level I was when I started to doubt myself. - What have I learnt from every activity/exercise I've tried. What did they make me feel. What do I value.

As days pass by, I feel less and less willing to go back to therapy (with her). I have a session scheduled for the 25th of this month, and I'm starting to think about cancelling it. I wanted to give her a couple more sessions, but lately I've realised I don't feel comfortable enough to open myself to her and talk about meaningful things. If she doesn't listen to what I have to say, and her way to try to make me change my mind on a subject is to use these weird stories about other people, this woman is not for me. Her goodbye line was "and now this sunday, you go to the countryside, huh? And you make a list of the pros and cons of taking your kid to daycare". It is me or this just feels like being treated as a little child, "now you're nice and go do your homework"? I don't know, maybe I'm a disappointed now and as a result I'm being overly critical. I've thought about the challenge. I think that I can be more or less accountable when left to myself, if I have time enough and energy (5-6 hours of sleep), so maybe I don't need a challenge that much right at this moment. What I find I need is to put more order in my thoughts and my feelings, and to write about aaaall those things that are coming to my mind, about how I feel, my fears, the things I miss and who I want to be. I think my battle log would work better for this. But the reason I'm not doing so, is that I'm finding it hard to open myself. I feel like I need advice, and being listened to, and to be more open and share what I'm going through, but at the same time I'm having a hard time letting people know how I feel. I'm scared because I think I should have all of this figured out a long time ago, and nobody will understand why I'm stuck in such fights with my life.

My intention was to talk about the excuses I say to myself to not to go out. I miss my walks in nature, but I avoid them, and that makes me sad and frustrated. I was saying that I might not be able right now to disappear for 3 hours like I used to, but I could go outside an walk for half an hour or one hour, or take Wolvie with me and just take a short stroll and sit down to play with her. But I'm not doing it. And I wanted to talk about why, and why am I using silly excuses, and what is behind all that emotional block I'm experiencing with going outdoors. Her opinion was that I'm just too short on time for myself, and that the best solution would be to take Wolvie to a daycare place and go take my walks. She told me about a woman she knows and how her life changed after getting her kid to daycare (apparently, she exercised, lost 20 pounds, and passed a public examination for a better job). I told her why we decided not to use daycare as a ressource, and covid is not the last of our concerns (how can she consider that the best solution is to make the kid spend hours in a closed room with other 15-20 kids in the middle of a pandemic, and with the numbers we're having here?). So she focused on the time management part of the problem and not in the emotional/mental part, which is the one I want to work with. And finally she came with this awful story about that kid that wouldn't talk, and that was scared when people took their masks off because he didn't know that people have mouths. Seriously? I mean, pandemic and all, but what has that family been doing? And how does that relate to my child or my situation? I didn't understand where she was going with it, but after days have passed I'm thinking she was just making conversation or trying to impress me somehow, which is even worse, because I'm spending my scarce money on this. She went pretty far with this subject, til the point of making me feel uncomfortable, dismissing my arguments or not letting me talk about them. She also insisted in giving me the names of some daycare places that she thought would be better than the usual places here. And I must admit one of the places is really good, with plenty of open space, in the middle of a pine forest, with hens and rabbits, and a vegetable garden the kids work on, and ... unaffordable. I'm giving her a couple more sessions, and if she's still not helpful, I will start looking for another therapist.

I haven't decided yet what I'll do. I do think that updating here leads to more responsibility and more things done. I'm just a bit overwhelmed by lack of time and sleep. I may think about it again during the weekend.

I finished a book! It took 25 days to read 350 pages, but I made it. I'm superproud. I went to therapy this week and it was a bit meh. We spent most of the hour talking about why Wolvie is not going to daycare. I don't even understand why did she want to talk about this, it was a waste of our time. There were too many "you should", "you need", and "you have to" in that conversation. It suprised me that she wasn't listening to my reasons. Wolvie does socialise, since she spends 2-3 hours a day at the park with other kids; and I have no problem with separation, it's about knowing very well how daycare works in most places nowadays; also she goes to plenty of places without me, and I also leave her to go to work and I have no problem with any of that. She instead told me the story about a kid everybody thought had autism but the reason he wasn't talking was that he wasn't in daycare with other kids and don't know what else. I don't really know where she was going, since Wolvie doesn't have any problem with talking or talking to people. Seriously, if I had to worry about something with Wolvie it wouldn't be about sociability. She already has more friends than me and she's not even 2. Summing up, it wasn't useful at all. I'm not going to stop the visits, because we're just starting to know each other, and I really want to do this work, but she's losing points quickly. I came out of a cold to catch a worse one, and the week is being tough. I'm feeling quite well mentally, however, and things are going smooth, both at work and at home. If only I weren't this tired. I've needed to take full rest days again, and I'm losing a lot of my initial momentum. I hope I'll feel better after the weekend.

End of the challenge. Torn between doing another challenge or not. Doing this one has helped to focus, to take some good decisions and start doing something for myself. My daily routines are still fragile and any unexpected event (unscheduled meeting, even worse sleep than usual…) threatens to break my commitment. I’m already seeing how after a few weeks, its getting harder to keep going. Coming here helps. And maybe if I don’t follow the challenge I’ll stop coming and following my routines. However, my thought is to keep doing the same for a long while, so there would not be an actual new challenge. And I also find it difficult to keep updating, even once a week, and following anybody is an impossible mission. I might retreat once again to my battle log and try to update now and then there, but I'm afraid I might disappear and then eventually stop working.

Week 5. · Basic level yoga. 3 days. Posture has improved a lot. · Journaling. 1 day. · Effortless mastery. 3 days. · Mini-actions. 4 days. The weakest week of the challenge. Not surprisingly, since there have been a couple of harder days with Wolvie and sleep. And I've also had to face some angst and anger feelings that were surfacing. Also experienced some sadness again, trying to cling to who I was, daydreaming of the old days: boxing, running, whm... It was really cool to be The Wolverine. It's exciting to find my new self, but I guess there's still some grieving to be done.