a beautiful thing

Every day, I get up at 5 am or before to walk the dogs. Most days I actually wake up before 5. This morning I woke up at 4 and tried to sleep again, but wasn't able to, so I got up at 4.30. 

As soon as I wake up, I'm stressed. That's why I can't go back to sleep. It's not the same as the stress of having a lot to do. It's the stress of my inner drama - anxiety, depression, rumination, benzo withdrawal. 

I keep thinking, how can it still be like this? If there was some knowable process of recovery happening, that would be reassuring, but there's no end in sight for this. 

I do see improvement though. About a year ago, even going for a walk outside was difficult, and going into Coles and buying a couple of things was extremely challenging. People who have experienced agoraphobia and extreme anxiety will understand how those things could be challenging. 

But now I can go into Coles and buy multiple things and I just take that for granted. For a while it was like, I could go in and buy one thing and quickly go through the self checkout, feeling dizzy and like I was going to pass out, but I got through it. Going to another aisle, away from the checkouts, and then walking back to the checkouts was extremely challenging. Anxiety makes it hard to walk. Now, like I said, I can buy multiple things. 

I noticed the difference in stages. At first, it was hard to leave my room and leave the house, and I would walk up the road and back home, and feel no sense of achievement or relief. But I kept doing that every day. Then I noticed that I felt good about going out for a walk. In the midst of depression, feeling good about something is really noticeable. 

Around that time as well, my doctor suggested that I do something crazy, so I decided I was going to run every day. I'm still doing that, and it's been about 9 months of running nearly every day. 

I'm eating better than I ever have - eating lots of fruit and vegetables and other unprocessed foods, doing a lot of cooking. One bad habit I've developed is eating too much chocolate. 

That came about because it was one of the things that made me feel better. I'd spend my days engulfed in the stress of depression, anxiety and, I guess, the effects of benzo withdrawal, although I don't really know. Who knows? I just know my experience and that that experience is shared by some people and some people show some understanding of this issue, and that I'm tapering and making gradual progress but it's really hard. 

So, anyway, the days were a lot tougher than they are now, and I would walk to the shops, and buy some chocolate, and come home. In those days, I liked watching positive videos. As I've written before, it was like being cold all the time....all the time, 24/7, but these little things would warm me up a little bit for a while. 

I'm really faltering, and just doing normal things is still challenging, but I'm starting to do some really worthwhile things. I'm starting to live and do stuff. I'm starting to create. 

I once saw a man in the city and he was selling pens. He had a very eclectic mix of pens, and he was walking around asking people if they wanted to buy a pen. He was wearing a sign that said something like, 'I've been knocked down, but I'm getting up again.' 

There was something so moving and inspiring about that, to me. It's more impressive than someone doing well by hard work or ability. That's admirable as well. But when you've been knocked down, to decide to get up, and to be open about it - to say, yeah, I've been knocked down, but I'm getting up, and then to get up - to get up! It's awesome. There's nothing more inspiring. 

different Bible translations

I remember the first time I read the book of Romans, first and second Corinthians and Psalms. It all really resonated with me. I didn't really understand what I was reading. Like, in Romans, how Paul writes a lot about the Jews and the Gentiles and how they're different. I had no idea about that. I thought he must be talking about different ethnic groups.

At that time, I read the Revised Standard Version, which was quite difficult, and sometimes the King James version, which is even more difficult. Because the RSV was difficult and the KJV was even more difficult, which had a lot to do with the fact that I was pretty young when I read them, that impression stayed with me. I really liked the RSV because I was able to draw some pretty profound meanings from it, even while I struggled to make complete sense of it. 

So, in recent years, I often thought and said that the RSV was my favorite Bible translation. It seemed to represent the ideal balance between the accessibility of the more modern translations and the richness of the KJV. But then, when I started to read the RSV again recently, I found that that wasn't really the case for me because now I understand it a lot better. I still like it, but it's one of a number of different translations that I like. 

I find that all the different translations have strengths and weaknesses, although the weaknesses aren't really flaws. As with people, the weaknesses come with the strengths and the strengths and weaknesses make sense of each other. Like, for example, I really love the way the NET Bible uses very modern terms for a lot of things. It really brings the Bible alive. When you use more eloquent language, as a lot of older translations do, it makes the message seem more distant. 

But the weakness the NET Bible has - at least in my opinion - is that, because it uses such modern terms, it sometimes pulls right out of the original context because you know that people in the original context wouldn't have expressed things in that way. It's not too bad. I still think it's a good translation, but it is noticeable. 

blog craziness

Something weird happened with this blog. I didn't write a single post so far for the whole month of august. I wanted to focus more on Medium, and that has really paid off. Out of interest, I checked my stats. I actually wasn't getting as many views as I used to in July, so I was thinking that the numbers would be really down. But my views shot up like a rocket. So far this month, I have received twice as many page views as the now second highest month since I started this blog at the start of 2020. 

Another noteworthy fact is that the vast majority of the views are from Singapore. Singapore has leapt up to second place, behind the US, for all time views, and I don't remember it even being in the top 10 before. 

Around half of all the views I received this month were on a single day: 16 August, 2023. 

It's nice when you do literally nothing and your stats go through the roof. Let's see what happens when I start posting again...standby. 👊