Warning: continued introspection

I'm still thinking.

Feeling much better though, which is good. Or maybe it's bad, if you don't like me and want me to suffer. Everything's subjective.

I'm now wondering something that I used to wonder a lot when it came to boyfriends, and which I'm now wondering about just in terms of life. Are you ready? This is it:

How much is enough?

In relationships, sometimes boys would drive me mad. And I'd say to myself, 'Stop criticising them. You're never going to meet anyone who never annoys you - some degree of compromise is always necessary.' And then I'd think 'But how do I know whether I'm making the right amount of compromise, or whether I'm just ignoring the evidence and staying with the wrong person?' My argument was that, if you compromised on everything, you could persuade yourself that you were lucky to be with a vomit-covered tramp. So where should one draw the line? How could one know if one was being too critical, or whether one just wasn't suited to the boy in question? Eventually, in every case, we broke up, and I look back now and, without exception, it was absolutely right that we did.

And now I'm thinking about me in my life, and how much is enough. We all have flaws and character traits we don't like in ourselves. Some people are intolerant, or prejudiced, or hot-headed, or stubborn, or lazy, or prone to fat. I am several of the above - and I am also (as previously discussed) hungry for praise and recognition. I need more recognition than the average person. This is annoying, as it means I don't generally remain happy without lots of praise for very long, which makes me overly-reliant on third parties and means that doing regular things like having a normal job and normal friends isn't enough for me, and I need more stimulation and more applause, so I write about my normal life in a blog and still crave more readers.

Now, I have a choice. I can either put this need down as a failing, and try very hard to learn to be content with the norm and stop striving for further recognition, or I can just say 'Oh well, that's the way I am, I'm a show pony,' and just go with it, push myself to be recognised and grow comfortable with that part of my character - hopefully while keeping an eye on it so that it doesn't get too out of hand.

The important thing at the moment is that I start to respect myself, as I am right now.

Meh. I'm boring myself now. Anyone who's still reading, well done to you, you're made of kinder stuff than I am.

I weighed myself on Sunday. I am basically a million stone. So I took advantage of the clocks going back and the associated jetlag to get up earlier on Monday morning, do my meditation and go for a run. And then today I meditated and did yoga. And tomorrow I will run again. It is all going terribly well and I was so smug with myself that yesterday evening I bought myself a reward jumper, which I'm wearing today. My legs still look like rolled up duvets but I think that the jumper briefly distracts the viewer from my lower half. So that's also good. Unless you don't like me, in which case you should ignore my talk of my nice jumper and just focus on the bit about my legs. Also, you might enjoy finding out that yesterday evening, despite there being nothing I could think of that was wrong, I still walked through town, new jumper in hand, feeling like sobbing. It's a funny old world.