A graduate student, a serial ruminator that has 20,000 thoughts in her brain at any given moment, a PM intern at a cybersecurity company, a wannabe startup founder with a million ideas and low motivation to execute, a gym girl, a healthy chef, an emotional mess who gets overwhelmed with her own expectations and cries every other day. This would be the description on my tomb stone if my exhaustion finally gets to me one of these days. I hate it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I moved to be-au-ti-ful Boulder, Colorado a month ago and have developed a little bit of a love-hate relationship with it. Here’s what I love so far - the mountain views of course, my charming little sub-leased house, and the proximity to EVERYTHING - the office, the gym, downtown, and the people I’ve come to love playing pickleball and enjoying Nepali food with. The one activity people pay thousands of dollars to come to Boulder for is hiking, I did one single hike to Rocky Mountain National Park in the peak June heat and decided that the view of the Emerald Lake (as pretty as it is) and Bear Lake, and Nymph Lake and Dream Lake, is not worth the pain my stupid 60-year-old knees had to endure while coming down. This was also when I realized I had the lung capacity of a chainsmoker, god you take a break from Crossfit for 4 months and your body loses all the endurance you built like I lose scrunchies.
So that pushed me to get back into it, I was a serial Crossfitter for 3 years - madness that started during COVID and fortunately continued. Then I decided to turn my life upside down and get a graduate degree at one of the most rigorous universities in the world at that (easy stuff? we don’t do that here). Here in Boulder, as luck would have it, I’ve found myself a nice lil’ gym that’s a nice lil’ 20 min walk from my work, during which I ruminate and make myself miserable, then I reach the gym and make myself even more miserable by finishing my workouts with burpees :) But, it’s been going well, for the most part. If you zoom out and take stock of my life — I eat pretty healthy most of the time, workout 4-5 days a week, walk a lot, uninstalled the Insta app (now I just browse through the browser which has a shit experience that makes me want to stop browsing), read more than I’ve read in the last 2 years, have good relationships with people all around, things are mostly great. So why am I kind of anxious and sad every 2-3 weeks, my lazy person explanation is PMS, and that it will be till I can find the energy and the mental bandwidth to go see a therapist.
After some self-therapization facilitated by the interwebs, I’ve now figured out that my brain likes to do things that seem fun in the moment but make me extremely miserable on a macro scale — eating junk, doomscrolling, potating on my bed and exhausting myself with thoughts about the future that I can’t really do much about in the moment. And the way to work with my self-destructive brain is to pair a slow-gratification activity that I enjoy doing (but not in the moment) with a small reward, which is why I’ve found myself writing this piece of brain dump while sipping the best coffee I’ve had in Boulder (Shout out to Verb Coffee!). I’m trying to do more of this - listening to my hype bollywood playlist while walking to the gym, dressing in a cute work fit to make it easier to step out of the house and go to work, picking a cute gym fit and clicking a selfie at the end of my workout.
These things I’ve started doing again sound like a no-brainer to any normal person, but when I moved here, I was stuck in this weird rut of trying to make up for the last 6 months or so of not doing much except apply to jobs, interviewing for jobs and thinking about starting a job, alongside surviving grad school. So when I came here, I was trying to be my “best self” every living breathing moment of the day, I was trying to be productive while listening to a god-awful AI podcast while taking a shower, heck I was even policing myself from relying too much on entertainment so I would reprimand myself for listening to music while walking, I was being anal about my eating habits and feeling sucky when I would falter even a little bit, and this all just became too much one day when I literally couldn’t leave the bed one day. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. I’d burnt myself out with all this policing, so I had to cut myself some slack, enjoy the moment, drink coffee with a lil bit of sugar, listen to frivolous music that makes me want to dance, eat some ice cream in bed, skip a workout, and GOD just be 20 (26 but whatever)! I’m doing much better now, if you’re wondering. But I’m also a self-improvement dude-bro that always needs to be better, healthier, more intelligent, so I still listen to podcasts but now I also listen to my dhamaka playlist, I go to the gym but I’m okay to skip it sometimes to go play pickleball and not hate myself for missing it, and I have started this practice of enjoying my favourite treats but adding something a lil more healthy to it and it makes the experience so much more fulfilling like adding strawberries to a lil bit of ice cream, adding cookie crumbles to greek yoghurt. When I’m hard on myself I feel like Preity Zinta from Kal Ho Naa Ho before Aman came into her life - grumpy, annoyed at the world, cynical and depressed, but when I’m kind to myself and let life be balanced, I feel like the Preity Zinta after Aman came into her life reminding her that life is meant to be lived and being happy is as simple as 1-2-3 eeee!
What a read, I feel like you explained my life and then fixed my life.
Reads like an NYT article 💖