Today I can’t find my balance. This morning I woke up at seven after having slept, I don’t know, four hours and couldn’t go back to sleep. I’m blaming my achy leg and keep telling myself, Be patient, Marcus. They put a drill through you, they put a drill through you. Finally, I fell back asleep. Still, I’ve taken two naps today. My tummy’s been acting up–who knows why?–and all I want to do is rest. Recently I watched a video that said that’s normal anyway. It’s winter. It’s cold out. Nature wants to hibernate. Go to bed, damn it.

After three days of clean eating, I’m officially over it. Not that I’m quitting, but EVERYTHING has gluten, dairy, sugar, or alcohol in it. (Especially alcohol has alcohol in it.) That being said, I have lost a few pounds. That’s exciting. I’m doing this diet for other reasons, of course (to give my body a break and help it heal), but I don’t know a gay man who wouldn’t be thrilled about seeing the needle on the scale go down. My thought: Who cares if my stomach’s doing somersaults? At least it’s gonna be flat. Sick, I know.

Don’t worry, I have a therapist.

This afternoon I dived into a book about pandiculation, which is a fancy term for yawning. Well, stretching and yawning. It’s basically what your dog or cat does when it wakes up in the morning, although they’re apparently not so much stretching their muscles as they are contracting them (so that they can then relax and lengthen them). Anyway, the book, which is called Move Like an Animal, says that pandiculation is our built-in mechanism for relieving stress, tension, and trauma and eliminating pain. Eeek. I’m excited to try the suggested exercises.

Currently it’s 9:30 at night, and I’m washing the sheets on my bed. I keep thinking about the various books I’m reading, one on pandiculation, one on Rational Emotive Therapy, one by Wayne Dyer. I get so eager to learn, to finish them, and yet I’m not inclined to read every damn minute of every day. Especially since so much of what I read is on a digital device, there’s only so much my eyes can take. Even now as I stare at my laptop, they feel like they’re going to fall out of my head and roll onto the floor. Plus, my brain is tired, full. If it could talk, I imagine it would say, Haven’t you had enough words for one lifetime?

It occurred to me earlier that I often try to do too much, too fast. Shocking, I know. That is, since I had knee surgery last month, I’ve started doing rehab, and that means I try to get to the gym several days a week. Then I started learning to knit, and then this weekend I started this diet. Now I’m trying to complete a read-a-thon. All this in addition to blogging every day. Granted, I think each and every one of these things is well and good; it’s just a lot at one time. I blame America. Everyone here is constantly on the damn go.

Another thing I thought about today is that my body always gets tired and wants to slow down whenever I cut back on carbs. It gets better after a week or so, after things switch over from carb-burning to fat-burning mode. So now it occurs to me that rather than push, push, pushing, the kind thing to do in my present situation would be to be patient. Because a lot of things have changed lately. My body’s been through hell, and it takes time to adjust, time to cool off after you’ve been through the fire. Sometimes, I think, you have to say, “That’s enough for one day.”

That’s enough for one day.