Recently, I have been making progress with my mental health. My anxiety has lessened, my depression has been subdued, and my overall mental state seems to have improved. But here is my dilemma: my body does not feel like it is healthy anymore and my brain feels like it is not retaining anything I have learned through the first half of semester. Although my mental health is doing fine, other parts of my being are feeling attacked. It does not seem to make too much sense, I know, and it is a mess to me too, but I am hoping there are others who have felt the same way. I have spent a lot of my energy trying to keep myself in a good mental state so that I do not break down in the middle of a class or have to leave the room during a meeting. So far, it has been going well. But in the process of all that, I have lost the motivation and energy I need to keep up my physical health. Although I have not been pushed to any physical extreme, to me as an athlete, I feel like my body is at its weakest point, that I am cannot perform any kind of athletic tasks I could a year ago.

This has led me to be more wary of going to the gym and working out; doing anything physical psyches me out now. This is counterintuitive, yes, but I feel as it if it requires too much effort and not enough return to go to the gym and work out. There are some days where I manage to break out of this mindset and I go work out at the gym, but I generally cannot keep it up for more than 3 days at a time. I try to find time, but as the week wears on, it gets harder and harder to keep up with things. Perhaps it is my numerous activities and responsibilities that are getting to me. I feel like I am at a standstill because I want to be able to do all of the activities available to me because they make me happy and fulfilled, but I also feel that they are taking away from as well. Try as I might, I cannot find solutions to this except to let go of some activities and that is what I have done. I haven't given up, but rather stepped back. I have not been as active in my organizations as I wished to be or been able to find the joy in them as I once did.

I have tried to keep up another solution though. I have started journaling, but not so much formal journaling as simply spewing out my thoughts about how my day went. The one thing that I always do at the end of each entry is write down my blessings. It may be 2 one day and 10 the next but I have to do my blessings. My thought is to keep my days in perspective and appreciate the opportunities that I have been given and the people (and animals) in my life. Even though I only recently began journaling, I have seen a little bit of a change, so I think that this is something I shall continue to pursue. I have also read many other people’s experiences on the way that journaling has helped to revitalize their energies and stay positive, so it's definitely something I would recommend.