A few months ago, right after the New Year, I stopped biting my nails. I also started working out again, quit drinking so much and began eating healthier.
About a month later, thanks to my profession, my cut-back on drinking fell by the wayside. Then went the healthy eating and working out. Before I knew it, I had bitten every single nail off. I went to sleep most nights, conscious of my failures, and woke up everyday with good intentions of starting all over. Yet somehow throughout my daily choices, I strayed from what was best and gravitated toward what was easiest.
Our bodies and mental health should be the most important things to us. So why is it that the things that are considered 'bad' for us, are the easiest to come by? We skip a work out and instead eat four pieces of pizza. We are exhausted and should sleep, instead we go out for a drinks and climb into bed as the sun comes up. We do things that test our relationships, even though we know it could end up hurting them in the end. We run away from the people that are most important in our lives because relationships, much like everything else, are never easy, require work and are more likely to fail than to succeed.
It's often easier to be cynical and pessimistic, rationalizing that most efforts to better our life will somehow be wasted eventually. Within the last few weeks, I've realized that if you don't make a positive effort to kick a bad habit, it isn't going anywhere. And if you don't do something to keep the good things in your life, they leave as quickly as they came.
So I've made some decisions to better my life, along with the dedication to make it work this time around. I visit a personal trainer at the new Boxing Gym three times a week. I stopped putting so much shit into my body, am attempting to keep the drinking under control, and plan to have my nails back by the end of this month.
I also recently told one of the most important people in my life exactly how much I care about him. I'm a little disappointed at how long it took me to be able to open up, and I'm still trying to put the cynicism about the whole situation out of my head. But I'm working on it.
I guess old habits really do die hard.
Leigh-Anne writes 'La La Land' every Friday. Question or Comment? Send an e-mail to Leigh1333@gmail.com.