Health issues -- thinking out loud

One thing that recent events really brought home to me is how badly my own health has deteriorated in recent years.  It's partly or largely due to my own neglect, which is actually a good thing, because it means it's within my power to do something about the problem.

What I suffer from is a kind of general debilitation to an extreme degree.  I have severe muscular weakness in the legs, such that I can't walk or stand for more than a few minutes at a time.  I'm sure this is a muscle problem and not some general circulatory issue, since I have no similar weakness in the arms.  My energy level is usually very low and it's very difficult to get down to actually doing anything, especially if it involves real physical activity.  Much of the time I feel severely anxious and depressed (my near-constant obsessive thoughts about death and suicide are probably related to this), and often mentally foggy.  I have insomnia and usually sleep only in snatches of an hour or two at a time, totaling on average about five hours out of every twenty-four.  Some readers may have noticed that most of my blog posts appear between midnight and 3:00 AM.  That's because I typically wake up from the longest period of sleep a bit before midnight, so it's then that I feel most mentally alert.  The level of mental coherence in my posts here is not typical of how I am during most of the day.

When I learned of my father's diagnosis, I started thinking about traveling to visit him.  Driving there would have taken at least ten hours, and I knew I simply did not have the physical stamina for a drive of that length.  Going by air or rail would have involved booking travel, booking a hotel at the other end, actually getting to the airport or rail station, making my way to a car-rental place (there would be no one available to pick me up when I arrived), renting a car, then navigating through an unfamiliar town in an unfamiliar car to the hotel and to the residence where my father was staying.  I could not remotely have coped with something that complex and energy-consuming -- the very thought of it made me feel completely overwhelmed.  The possibility arose of having another person drive me there in June, so I decided to use that option.  At that time my father was expected to live another two months.  That prediction turned out to be wrong.

It also made me realize how much I've let my life become constrained by my physical limitations.  Essentially the only places I go to any more are five stores where I shop for necessities, all of them less than four miles from home.  In each of them I know exactly where everything is and can get in and out quickly (I can also walk longer when I can lean on a shopping cart).  My occasional temp jobs have been more of a challenge, but the type of work I do is done sitting at a desk, with no real physical exertion.  My life has shrunk down to this gradually, over several years, and I never really thought of it as something abnormal.

Only once in probably several years have I ventured outside this limited range, about a month ago when I drove out to a town a hundred miles away, then back on the same day.  There was an opportunity I really didn't want to miss out on, and the place I was going was easy to find, right next to the freeway exit.  Even so, driving on the freeway for that distance was something of a white-knuckle experience.

I'm pretty sure I know what the underlying causes are.  Since the start of the pandemic I've increasingly neglected walking for exercise, which I used to do diligently, and I now get hardly any exercise at all.  I still drink too much and have allowed a certain limited amount of meat to creep back into my diet, because it's cheaper (eating only the cheapest vegetarian options gets monotonous).  I weigh about two hundred and thirty pounds, which is fifty pounds over the maximum healthy weight for my height of 5'11".  I have most of the symptoms of something called "nervous system dysregulation", which can be brought on by prolonged and severe stress, which I've certainly suffered from.  My counselor believes I probably also have clinical depression.  All of these things can be addressed, but it takes willpower, which I have not had in abundant supply.

Nevertheless, it's obvious I need to do something serious about this, so that is going to be my focus for a while.  The drinking and the lack of exercise can be addressed immediately -- it will just take effort.  (It won't mean I need to post here any less, though typical times of day may change.)  My counselor has had some suggestions for dealing with the other issues.  As it is, I have almost no ability to react to anything outside my normal routine, and that needs to change.