Trigger Warning: alcohol abuse, suicidal thoughts.

Winter's hitting hard, and for once I mean the weather and not my heart.

It's sometimes annoying how good advice can help so well, and in my experience exercise and stable sleep and decent dieting and keeping to my social and creative habits has actually restored me.

Consistency is one of my weaknesses, as my high school history teacher remarked. The way I generally have spent my life doing things can be described as bursts of effort at the last minute, which has had decidedly mixed results. My high school girlfriend also remarked that it was an annoying character flaw.

Being consistent is something that takes a lot of effort from me, and for most of my life I didn't see much of a point to it. I started asking myself why I didn't try more after I finished my first associate degree at the community college.

I found that the old cliche was in play: I was afraid to put in some effort and fail anyway. I was encouraged by my girlfriend at the time to go for something big, something I could fail at, and so I started trying for the first time around 2011.

Of course in hindsight it was less consistency and more constant maximum effort that eventually led to extreme depression and burnout when I eventually did get to the end of the line and failed anyway due to circumstances outside my control.

For the longest time I found myself resigned to the bottom of a bottle, lamenting that I seemed to be destined for failure whether I tried or not. A little self pity can be a healthy outlet sometimes, but this was more than a little.

When I quit drinking and started exercising, I had a big part of me constantly asking the question "why bother?" I'd done exercises before, cleaned up my life before, bounced back and showed the world I'm still alive and kicking. And it was hard to ignore my civilization embracing nihilism and all the things that come from that.

But with every medication I tried just making things worse, and me worried that all my drinking may have already shortened my lifespan, I kept at it. Kept lifting and running and taking my vitamins so that my body had something to make the needed dopamine from.

My body started to repair itself and give me signs it was thinking about forgiving me. All I could do is keep hoping, and keep trying.

Every day I found myself on the running path my worries kept racing through my head of what happens after the election; what happens if the world decides to set itself on fire? I told myself to put it away and to think about it when we got there.

And we did get there. Sieg heils on national TV and all, which I found a little heavy handed but perhaps more of the audience could stand to be sieg heiled upside their heads to take it seriously.

Around the same time, I found a lump on one of my testicles. It sent me into a spiraling panic, and I relapsed pretty hard for a few days. I even considered ending my life again.

I'd given up once more, like I always do, like my brain told me I would. I came very close to leaving Vampire LARP because of all the anxiety I felt for my character, and I found myself not caring how much of a fight my Mom picked with me, I welcomed more excuses to leave. My body looked like it indeed wasn't going to forgive me, and that my time had been ultimately a waste.

I can't tell you how much I had to drink, it felt like a small ocean. Having been more than six months sober it was hitting me harder than it had in years, and as predicted most of it ended up on my floor.

I watched the movie Flow about a dozen times, Snyper seemed to really enjoy it. She worried about me in those few days, seeing that something was very wrong.

But then after a couple days, I just was too tired to drink. Just felt like it didn't even wipe away whatever it was I was hoping it would. Maybe it did in the past, maybe it didn't, but it wasn't good enough anymore.

So it turned out it was a mild infection that happened probably because I wasn't going to the bathroom often enough after masturbating. It cleared up in a few days.

Y'know what else lasts a few days? Acute alcohol withdrawal. And let me tell you, this was one of the worst ones.

Alcohol withdrawal is never fun, but this time I got to have a more cognizant head on me that hadn't been hazy and drunk for multiple years. So I got to experience the emotional hell that I'd been able to miss the last few times.

Once my body could move without the pins and needles tearing me apart, I got back to lifting.

When I first started lifting in 2018 or so, I made a lot of progress very quickly. But not much since. While my Dad was sick, I became very depressed and my workouts just did not respond the way they had before, and it never really bounced back. It was disheartening.

This time, I decided to just have faith in science and physiology. If I kept working out my body would *have* to give me the dopamine and get stronger. So I stuck to the smaller weights even when it wasn't as satisfying as the heavy ones, and I continued to keep myself alive.

Eventually, I stopped asking myself "why bother?" Eventually I just was doing this because I'm doing this. And eventually, I was lifting heavier weights with more repetitions than I ever had before.

Eventually, the consistency paid off. Little bits at a time over a long period of time changed my body and it seems to have changed my brain as well. I'm approaching the darkest time of the year which usually means I'd be knee deep in sadness and depression but instead I find myself staring at the parted waves around me threatening to devour me whole and I'm okay.

Hope isn't easy. I'm not a naturally hopeful person. I've been through losses that most folks I meet would be hesitant to believe when taken all together. I have hope because it's the only way to survive.

Having hope means feeling my brain screaming "why fucking bother" every single time I pump iron, with every single rep I can feel it biting at me screaming at me to give up. It says to me I'm too old and I've already ruined my body. It says to me that I'm too tired and I've already ruined my brain. It says to me that I'm too alone and I've already cut myself off from human connection. It tells me I'll die to fascism, or I'll die to disease, or I'll die for no reason at all, and it would say there's no point to trying so hard for so long.

My partner (I have a partner, isn't that funny) says that my workouts are my medication. That's been more motivational at keeping up with them than any other advice I've received on the subject. I once told my therapist that the thing I owed the people closest to me, the people who cared for me and helped me when I needed it, what I owed them more than anything else is doing my best to take care of myself.

I play this kinda macabre game with myself sometimes. I think back to the last time I seriously thought about ending my life and I think about some of the cool things I've gotten to experience since then, and then I say to myself, as if I had died "Rest in peace Cob, you'd have loved the 2025 Superman movie." I find it heartening how many ways I can permeate that epitaph.

So I've found myself experiencing things I'd never knew were there with a little bit of persistent consistency. The way my muscles look, the way I felt, for certain, but also just how life looks.

I'm not saying I don't get depressed, I definitely do. But I haven't found myself lying in bed waiting for nothing for a long time.

Hope isn't easy, it's downright gritty and unpleasant and it feels like dirt under my fingernails sometimes. Hope that my body stays well, that my mind stays sane, that fascism will be beaten back. It's not like I'm some divine creature sitting pretty in my grace, I'm drenched in the sweat of sorrow and bent by the calamities of outrageous fortune.

Every day I have some new problem that my Mom has laid at my feet, or something too expensive, or my job wants me to do yet another thing. Just this morning the battery in my car died in the cold and I had to take a damnable rideshare into my job.

But I do know that I've got so much to live for. And these are all fixable problems and once I fix them a new set will be provided for me. It's never been different.

One of the things that killed my Dad is he lost hope. He never expected good things to happen to him and when they finally did he only got a handful of years before he died because he didn't take care of himself. He never prepared for the best. His cynicism gave him no reward, only robbed him when he finally got lucky. I have to hope I don't end up that way myself.

So here's to consistency and persistence; to having hope even when it feels pointless. Here's to lifting heavy plates and being among fellow human beings even when it'd be easier to lie down and die. Despair asks for nothing and promises nothing, while hope asks for everything and won't make any promises at all.

Keep your hands and your heart warm.