Last night I suffered a terrible nightmare.

Last night I suffered a terrible nightmare. 

I lived in a similar house to the one in Hull that was so vulnerable to being attacked. I felt threatened. Moving to the back, I saw a tall, thin man stalking the back alley. His arms were seized up and he wore old clothes, a striped shirt barely containing his warped form. 

I felt he could attack me. I froze. He smiled with sharp teeth something malicious. Was I capable of defending myself? 

My later dreams saw me threaten a teenager who threatened me. I think one of them was unstable because he then harmed himself, perhaps fatally. 

These dreams caused me to wake up early, perhaps 2am. Even now I feel tired and duly so. 

Dream interpretation guides suggest the man represented some part of my subconscious that I cannot accept. That is an interesting and empowering observation. 

What parts of my subconscious can I not accept? Am I in an emotional and physical state that allows me to do that? 

I imagine the ways I have dealt with my family's dynamic could do with looking at. Accept some of those negative emotions as old friends would also be ideal.

The negative emotions I speak of perhaps relate to my awkward dynamics with my family and elsewhere. Short relationships, defensiveness - the defensiveness that comes in a threatening and unstable environment. Dubai was a place that will perpetually affect me with its memories. Fortunately, I do not feel admiration for its people. I do wonder how it operates. 

Several emails I would have sent before rest instead as drafts, their sentiments reserved for political expediency. Is that an ideal thing? 

All I can be sure of at this moment is that my habits will be fulfilled today as they have been fulfilled everyday for months, seven months indeed. Those habits create a lifestyle. That lifestyle can be reflected in its external measures of success, not least in the body I shape now. 

I have lost 5kg without significant pain. My portion control is real. My waist is now 37 inches, down from 40. My current weight is 75.1, down from 80.5. More importantly, I feel this is the path of least resistance. 

The habits I live now are the same as that kingly me

 Often I imagine my mind as many men in a theatre, a circle with different versions of me holding court. A young version of me might speak to us all, shouting with zeal, urging us to play or love with passion in the now. He often argues with elder versions, one a bleary-eyed adult demanding sleep and rest. 

Ruling over these men and boys is the eldest and wisest version of me, his head crowned and his voice gnarled. He is my height but his clothes impress. He is me. 

This me does not have a 39-inch stomach. 
This me plays music daily. 
This me reads daily 25 minutes. 
This me speaks warmly to a range of friends. 
This me enjoys personal wealth but could stand to lose it.
This me leads a court where the negative emotions are welcomed as old friends. 

Whoever I am now is only part of that man. But the habits I live now are the same as that kingly me. 

I am coming to terms with what happened to me in Dubai. It was not a pretty experience. It was a real one though. It is hard to express what it meant to those who did not share it. Two people have told me to not express schadenfreude at the plight of old colleagues. Is it really damaging to do so? 

It seems that several people tried to destroy my career in Dubai. They did so not for any hatred of me, but rather for personal gain. 

My lack of social capital in Dubai also made me vulnerable. I did not make a rich enough network. A place like that is a child's playground, with vicious rules for those who cannot lead the others or be led themselves. That unwillingness to lead does not let someone like me fade but instead marks me as a target. Whatever weird and tricky dynamics exist in the tiny circles of Dubai were like the school playground unleashed, and on steroids. 

But a younger me chose to move to Dubai. The context of my moving was for love. All of me appreciates that. Several teachers, likely many, admired me. Students loved me. I achieved tangible measures of success in debate, my teaching and my leadership. I left with a good amount of money. Some consequences of ill-health followed me, but I will be dead in decades. 

Shedding my fat is to shed the sin of my time there, of my lonely movements and my hyper-focus on work. I won a 5k in November 2016. I trained for that with love and pain. Four years later, I am ready to move like that again, but 

The negative emotions do not disappear though. Instead I welcome them to my court, as difficult as they might feel. 

Sometimes I can feel them as old friends, familiar states that have earned their right to be accepted (they would be here anyway). Anxiety feels like passion and vigilance, anger like righteous determination. The dull burnt ground of Dubai is a landscape of my past, tedious and unrealised, but real. Like my time in Hull, it led to suffering, some of it needless, but likely. 

My golden life in Manila is a smooth and easy flow of love in comparison. 

In this place I can recognise some of my harder-to-define emotions, of the gaze for Ruth-Sarah-Tish, that distant yearning for a muse. I welcome that negative emotion as an old friend, give it its place, listen to its qualms, and redirect its heat into the movement of this new day. 

 

Losing weight to shed my past

In over week two weeks I have lost 2.5kg, perhaps more. I am in the best lifestyle, perhaps of my life. I have a vision of dropping below 70kg by February. 

This is not simply a mission to see my ribs. I am shedding my sin, removing the weight of my survival in Dubai. 

I am increasingly able to live with the spikes of emotion that jump behind my eyes when I sleep. What might seem insufferable is actually very sufferable, at least afterwards, 

There is more to this ambition than simply losing weight. I need to feel the flexibility I once did. The body is consciousness in the world, the chance to change the world, to move within it and to affect it, and for it to affect me. 

I need to affect some of the suffering of my parents, and to grow from it. What lesson am I being given by my father? That is my next step. 

Speech and Pacing; Language and Concepts

Yesterday the last thing a colleague said to me was ‘some people think that you go on a bit’. That barb stuck in me with its painful truth. My brain is not stitched to my mouth as easily as I desire and my emotions run free reign, with feral yelling of adrenal spikes common in my mind.  

For the rest of yesterday I spoke in a more measured way. 

Will this continue?

This morning, 'bacon' affirmed my desire to make each word count. I intend to speak well this morning in each of my classes. I intend to continue this structuring of my day, and to use the 'concepts' of my thought as musical bars.

Each note will have its meaning.

Is this what I sensed about my reading when I was younger?

Fitness for My Sakes

For over a week now I have comfortably eaten below 1500 calories. My water intake has improved and I move everyday. I have lost 1kg of weight and have a plan to be fit by February. 

That would an inordinately short time to be cleared of this sin. 

I see the folds of fat hanging from my body as fleshy signs of my past life, of my indulgences. Whatever context may have once led me to live with such huge calorie counts has now passed. 

And here now? In the past I have become fit for reasons outside myself. At the age of 38/9 I have no reason to be come fit other than my own. The weakness of my body these past two years will be reversed. 

Five weeks will see some good progress. For the next day is my focus. 

Live longer and appreciate nature. 

What does it mean to have self-esteem? 

The world outside the home is a competitive place and in that I have some victories. Not that the home was an easy place in itself with my father actively destroying us and my mother pulling us together. 

I have some skills in that competitive realm not commonly found in others. 

My understanding of history and philosophy surpasses many of my colleagues. My will and self-control, although variable at times under the time-pressures and loneliness of Dubai, are in a good place right now. 

Every day I invest in Brain/Book/Bacon. For three days, and now likely four, I will ensure my calorie count is kept 500 below my expectations, ensuring a deficit of 3000 a week and therefore 1 pound of fat. 176 pounds of body is not powerful. 

A Diet of the Mind

 I sit here three weeks into the new school year with a better position than most. I save a good amount of money, even with my taxes. My current relationship is nourishing. 

Of most importance are my good habits. The TickTick app is like a mentor, guiding my intentions and showing interest in my future. 

I wrote about lifestyles recently. A lifestyle is no more than a collection of habits. Occasionally something out of the routine of life will arise, something to tackle the boredom of the daily grind. But my habits now are putting me on the path to being the most stoic version of myself. 

To what do I have the strongest emotional experiences? Remember the enemy of promise - the strongest emotional experiences of the privileged was their school days.