What Motivation?

I'm mostly getting over my weirdness about people calling me inspirational. I still don't feel very inspirational, really, but I have mostly stopped objecting. Ok, if I help someone else get motivated to work out or to clean house or to eat right or whatever, that's great!

On the other hand, I don't really have a good answer for the question that people ask me, all the bloody time.

Where do you get your motivation?

The first time someone asked me that, I blinked a few times. Huh? Wha...? Motiva-blah-de-blah?

I'm sure I made something up. It doesn't sound good to have someone say "What motivation?"

I suppose I have some sort of motivation. I was unhappy with my life and wanted a change. No one changes because things are going well! But they're all very personal reasons, you know... My A1C was worrisome. I couldn't pick my daughter up and carry her any further than across the room. My mother had breast cancer. It's a stupid thing to decide to lose weight about, don't you think? My mother had breast cancer, so I decide to lose weight. It's not like the two things are really related. But I couldn't fix her, and I couldn't fix my chances for getting breast cancer (my grandmother and aunt on my dad's side had it too, and boy, does that make me high risk!) and all I was doing was fretting. May as well change what I can change.

I don't see how this helps anyone else. I have a couple of friends who are large ladies, but can easily carry their own kids around. I have large friends who have don't have diabetes looming in their future. I have thin friends who do. We're all different and whatever inspiration we have has got to come from inside.

You can become inspired by someone else. Someone else's success, or someone else's reasons can get you started. But in the end, what you're doing has got to come from inside you. I can't do it for you. Your mother, your child, your spouse, your friend. We can help you, you have to make the commitment.

It can be a lonely place, making the commitment.

It doesn't matter, at that point, how many people have been exactly where you are now, standing on the teetering cliff of some enormous life change. (I don't care WHAT your life change is; quitting smoking, losing weight, changing jobs, divorce, whatever.... life changes are frightening, lonely places.) You are alone. Even if you're not, you certainly feel like it.

Alone.

It's the most terrible word in the English language.

There's you and there's the cliff and there's a lot of nothing else. And the cliff is so huge, and you're tiny.

It's scary. And you think you can't do this, you can never possibly... It's not too bad, standing on the top of that cliff, you're safe. You're just speculating this crazy thing... It's pretty easy to just stand there. "I'll do it tomorrow..." "I'm not ready..." "Well, at least I'm aware..." "I'm getting ready to..."

At some point, you have to take the leap. Or walk away. Or just continue to stand there.

Any of those three things is a choice.

Motivation isn't a medication; you can't take 2 pills and call in the morning. It's not easy. There certainly isn't some mystical wellspring of it, untapped inside you, with unlimited inspiration. It's more like the tiniest trickle that leaks through two awesomely huge boulders, and it may be sweet, but it's also dusty and a little bit too warm, and there's certainly never enough of it.

I was talking with a friend the other day after a morning of huge amounts of cleaning.

"I wish I had your motivation," she says. "Or, I could steal it from you for a while. Long enough to get my own house clean."

"You get out of bed every day and go to work, right?"

"Yeah."

"Same stuff."

Sometimes there just isn't any motivation. There isn't any inspiration. There isn't even some lofty goal at the end.

Sometimes, you just do it.

Because that's what you have to do.