Self-actualizing

I have been somewhat successful with my plan to wake up early and exercise. There were a few days when I was exercising before 7am which is an amazing feat for me! Before I had kids I was the type of person who went to bed at 2am and woke up at 12 noon (if I didn't have to work and if I did, I still went to bed at 2am!). One day I made it to the YMCA for a Boot camp class at 6:30am! I still am far from my goal of doing this every day of the week but I'm off to a great start.

One thing I am really going to try to push myself to do is to bike everywhere instead of taking the bus. I vowed to do this in March, as part of my yearly eco-resolutions,  but the weather in March was still fairly wintry so I didn't. Now it is April - a cool April but still it is no longer winter - and I have not started biking. It is hard to get back into the habit. My legs feel sore after short bike rides because those particular muscles have not been widely used over the winter. I am working at the edge of the city and like to wear pencil skirts and high heels so it just seems inconvenient. But there are always hundreds of excuses for not being physically active. Winter makes me a bit lazy and I need to wake up and get moving. So, I'm going to start biking to work every day (except not tomorrow because I work at night and don't want to bike home in the dark on a route that is unfamiliar to me).

When I am trying to create new habits, I always think about my goal which is, ultimately, to be self-actualizing. Now this is a somewhat academic term that I probably don't fully understand or use properly. But, to me, it means that I am creating my own reality, my own self. Of course, there are things that I have no control over that affect me all the time. But, when it comes to the things I do have control over, I try to acknowledge and exercise that control. And it feels quite liberating. I feel like I can take control of things that feel out of my control. I can change the way I think about myself and my life and I can actively resist the things I do not like. Now I am not a believer in the "law of attraction" at all. I think that in a capitalist, patriarchal society there are some really awful and negative things that happen over which people have no or little control. However, I do think that sometimes folks have more control over their lives then they think they do and can take really positive and libratory action. In terms of fitness, I was what you might call fat from age 8 until age 30. I was never fit in any way. I did not participate in any sports; I thought of myself as someone who would never be athletic. I was ok with being fat until I became single when I was 30. And, actually,  I think I had better self-esteem when I was fat then I do now. A topic for a different blog post. BUT, when I decide to start exercising, I really deciding to change something I had thought of as unchangeable; to become something I had never been. And although there are problems with having lost lots of weight (I alluded to some above), getting fit was a really fun, empowering thing to do; something of which I am quite proud. It makes me feel like I am a self-actualized person and has given me a lot of confidence in other areas of my life.

That is why I changed my blog name to Simone. Wrongly or rightly, I associate self-actualization with existentialism (I probably misunderstand both theories but who cares?) and Simone De Beauvoir is the only existentialist I find compelling. I don't agree with all her ideas AT ALL but I do like how she argued that women could break out of the box in which society tries to place us.

So, I will try to remember all this week that exercising at 6am and biking to work everyday in my heels is a libratory act of self-actualization: I can and will be who I want to be!