Cake Club Cancelled – The Climb #250

Thursday 28^th September 2017

Today was supposed to be a cake club meeting.
I’d been looking forward to it for a couple of weeks. Despite not writing anything this month due to my enforced break after handing in my edits, I’ve felt very stressed this month and the thing I felt I needed to do is hang out with friends to get my spirits up a little.
Of course, whilst it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be… going out to eat does take a couple of weeks of preparation. I have to adjust my diet accordingly or I’ll end up with stomach cramps the next day and my weight massively fluctuating for weeks afterwards. And whilst I can be guilty of saying screw it, eating something and then suffering for ages afterwards, it’s nice to be able to eat normally once in a while and not have to worry about how ill I’m going to feel afterwards. It’s no lie when I say my stomach feels like a tumble-dryer full of knives at times. I’ve been stabbed. I know what it feels like.
So I was all adjusted for tonight. My stomach was ready, my head was in desperate need, and I was feeling really excited and upbeat about it.
And then fate happened. Friends were unwell, friends were so delayed at work they couldn’t make it… and I was left walking to the supermarket in the dark to get in some food for the night.
It was nobody’s fault but of all the nights…
I’ve got a lot on my mind right now and I’m feeling a bit low at the moment. Some of this is book worry. I’m trying not to think about it too much because I’m stressing like I did earlier this year that all my dreams will come crashing down around me: my agent will hate it, I will prove myself talentless, no publisher will pick it up. That’s not healthy thinking and so I’ve tried really hard not to think about it.
The day job’s stressful and I feel this constant conflict between the day job and trying to pay the bills, and keeping my head focused on my art. It’s as if they were once in balance but now they are both trying to squabble with me stuck in the middle. I know the reason I feel slow is because in the last 2 years the day job has taken huge swathes of my brain’s processing power. I’m too exhausted of a night to be as productive as I once was with my writing. And whilst I’m confident I could do a novel a year, I do worry about going forwards. And let’s face it, who can afford to give up the day job on their first traditional publishing deal?
At least the swordfighting is going well. Part of the reason for having dual things I’m trying to achieve is that if one thing is struggling, I can look to the other to keep me positive and moving forwards. But even here there are worries. I’m fast and fighting at a level I’ve never fought before. But I know if I dropped a stone in weight I’d be quicker. I keep thinking of my sidestep void and how I keep getting hit in the shoulder. A little quicker and I could do it. Drop a little weight and I’d get quicker.
Yet, as I said today, the problem with dropping that stone is that my skins starts to look loose. I look better at this weight, which helps my self-confidence. But I know I’m ripped under this weight and IF I could somehow manage to lose it with enough muscle to keep the skin relatively tight, it would do wonders for my body image.
Which of course means not eating cake… which I didn’t do… but damn, I really needed cake today!
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