Too Many Apps Open

2.20.21

As the quarantine has dragged on, I seem to spend the first five or ten minutes of my sessions with incredible trainers Barbara and Chip at Body Dynamics by bitching.

Just out and out complaining about my state of looming discontent and feelings of isolation and distraction and self-pity for consuming anything even remotely considered foodstuffs. Both Chip and Barbara—because they are kind, compassionate humans but also because they deal with clients five days a week—have told me that I am not alone.

A lot of people are trapped in an endless February. The vaccine is coming, but it isn’t here yet. Hope’s right around the corner, but new varieties of COVID are even more catching. It’s chilly and grey in Virginia, but across the nation the cold is actually dangerous.

There are reasons to be overwhelmed.

Chip told me about one of his clients. She was having a tough time getting an exercise right, and I can relate to that. It’s taken me three years to actually feel anything at all in my glute mede—so the idea that I can’t always make my muscles move the way I’m supposed to? Yeah. That rings in me like a bell.

Chip’s client apparently sighed and said to him, “My brain has too many apps open.”

He told me this and I came to a complete halt. Just locked in place, lying on the matt doing bridges.

OH MY GOD.

That’s exactly the feeling I have when I can’t sleep for all the ideas in my head—or the To Do list is long and growing. That’s what it feels like when I’m trying to use my glutes and abs but the shoulders are somehow trying to help, or a diamond-shaped cluster of various muscles at my low back, or my feet, or anything else miles away from where the center of effort is supposed to be.

I HAVE TOO MANY APPS OPEN.

Does it ring with you, too? Can we figure out the way to hit that tiny X at the corner of the app and shut down a few of them? Most of them? ALL of them? God knows, we can fire them up again tomorrow. What do you think?