When I Feel Like I'm Failing

I woke up this morning so damn mad at myself.

For a lot of reasons.

One, I woke up late.

I needed to be at the waterfront pier at 5:30am today.

When my lazy ass finally woke up, it was 7:10am.

I was supposed to be running a half marathon right now. It was Santa Barbara’s annual Pier to Peak, one the world’s toughest half marathons that consists of an incline of nearly 4000 feet.

It’s told that almost no one manages to keep running pace for the whole route because the incline is so intense.

Two, I have been eating like shit lately.

Corn chips, chocolates, ice cream, sugary cereals.

It’s not even the poor-quality, processed foods, it’s mainly the quantity. I never eat 1 or 2 ice cream sandwiches. Yesterday, I ate 8.

If I open a fresh bag of Mission corn chips, odds are that I have mentally committed to finishing that bag. I’m a woman of my word and I like to see things to completion.

There was an underlying comfort to eating the junk food these recent days. I was not even hungry, I just wanted to eat something that tasted good and salty.

Three, my skin has been breaking out bad.

I’ve had bad acne since my senior year of high school. Last year, it got mildly better as my hormones started to get their shit together and balance out.

In general, acne and I are on and off. I've been traveling recently and while the airplane air is gross, I think my breakouts are because of the above- my crappy diet. Acne is inflammatory and it is a symptom of what’s happening inside the body.

Whenever I’m sick and I sleep 8-10 hours while only eating soups and water, my skin always clears up.

But once back to health, I’m in routine, sleeping 5-6 hours, drowning myself in caffeine and reaching for the quickest foods, which is often processed. The irony, I know.

Now, before I got my self-loathing lazy body out of bed, I grabbed my iPhone to turn off my 4:30am race alarms (that I somehow managed to subconsciously hit snooze for all 3 of them), switched those off, hit my home button, and pressed down my apps until they were shaking on the screen with tiny X’s in each upper-right-hand corner.

I remove my top suggested app from Siri for last 3 years- Instagram (at least for the long Labor Day weekend).

By default, when I unlock my iPhone, my right thumb already knows the exact position of my Instagram app on my 6.5” screen and taps it right away. Sometimes, I even open it when I actually needed to Google something!

I know myself- I was going to spend useless time on it and probably try to vlog an IG Story that would have been far from how I was feeling all day.

For today, I removed it. In its place, I put my Quora app - so now I get to read my Daily Digest of self improvement and James Altucher each time my thumb automatically tapped that place.

7:11am. I’m thinking to myself, the race kicked off at 6am, I would be at mile 7 or 8 right now, but instead I am still in bed and the sun is already way in the sky. Fucking shit, Kaila I cannot actually believe we missed--

Stop. And get up. Now.

By the time I actually woke up this morning, I was pretty committed to turning things around.

And I started the best way I knew how.

I laced up and went for a run. For the next 3 miles, I kept beating myself up about how I would have been running a half marathon right now but instead how I let myself over-fing-sleep.

My form felt off balance. It was like I was running with 2 left feet. I could barely even keep my breath.

I realized I was not only mad, but I think I was also relieved?!!

I haven’t been training or eating properly. 13.1 miles in distance with nearly a mile in elevation. I would have been straight up screwed for this race. There must have been a part of me that did not want to race and while I really, really, really, really wish my conscious self had overruled that this morning, my subconscious won.

After my run, I took myself to Lazy Acres, a California grocery store chain that is basically a Whole Foods on steroids. It has all of the rustic chalkboard vibes, overpriced organic superfoods, and beautifully organized shelving that just makes you want to take a happy sigh of relief when you enter through the double sliding doors.

For a Sunday morning, the place is rather empty and I take my merry sweet time adding high fiber, low glycemic, gluten-free, vegetarian, all natural, locally sourced, organic foods to my cart. (yup, your girl is riding that wave these days)

I figured that if I only pack my kitchen with healthier foods, I will help myself by not even giving the option of eating processed junk.

After restocking my kitchen with groceries that costed more than half my paycheck this month, I hit up Veronica to hangout with me. We were both working on books we wanted to finish. For the first time in long time, mine was not pure personal development, it was a nonfictional biography and real page turner for me.

We read for a couple hours.

I wanted to concentrate on where I was headed with this kick ass healthier lifestyle I just implemented in my life 3 hours ago but I was mentally occupied with mercilessly judging and criticizing myself for how I missed this morning's race and somehow, somewhere, started making terrible diet choices in my life.

And how my skin still hasn't cleared up since high school.

Like, what am I even doing?!

Why do I feel like I am just failing so hard these days?

I love being on top of my game.

I cannot stand to feel like things are slipping. Things like money, my mile times, my friends, my health, my work, my personal development, my relationships, etc.

I get shaken up and I have to go dark for awhile.

Reasons being that (1) I need to rebalance and put together a plan on how I'm going to fix said problem and (2) I get really embarrassed that I’m failing.

When I had to drop out of AP Calculus in 11th grade, I cried for 2 days.

I wasn't able to pull my grade up from an F and in order to pass my math requirement and save my high school overall GPA, I was "highly recommended to move to an Honors Math."

During my one (and only) trimester of AP Calculus, I spent it over-preparing for each quiz, doing extra practice problems, attending tutorials in the mornings and at lunch 3X a week. I watched PatrickJMT on YouTube countless times and studied with a peer who had taken the same class and aced it.

Being requested to drop the class felt like a rejection of my hard work, determination, and me as person. I felt dumb and humiliated that I couldn't manage to improve my grade so I drew the conclusion that because I could not “get” calculus, I must be stupid at math. I figuratively threw my hands up about this subject and primed my brain into thinking that I would never understand the material so I even continued to struggle with calculus well into university, too.

And I really hated myself for it. I convinced myself I was not "a math person" and I actively stayed away from math-heavy electives, only ever enrolling into the required courses.

I wish I had never done that.

Because as my econometrics and labor economics classes came to show, I was quite good with numbers once I understood the concepts. And you know, I found math to be fun.

ANYWAY, I really need to get my shit together.

Because rather than telling myself that I'll start eating cleaner later or that acne is all genetic and I'll have it for the rest of my adulthood, I really want to fix this and I believe that I can.

My mindset approach to calculus was to put the blame on the subject, to label it as challenging and difficult and an overwhelming abyss of formulas I'll never use again in my life so why bother? It was such a shitty mindset.

I believe that I can own the results of clearer skin and healthier diet. One hundred percent.