Hit 5,000 steps today and drop your achievement here — we’re cheering you on!
I cannot stand the numbers. Not the step counts, not the graphs, not the glowing little rectangles on everyone’s wrist telling me whether I “performed” as a human last night. They are ugly, they are loud, and they lie. They turn the only thing that actually matters—how your body feels when you open your eyes—into a report card written by engineers who have never had to relearn how to stand up.
If I wake up and feel like I could take on the day, that is a good sleep. Full stop. I do not need some algorithm to grade my brainstem on a scale of 1–100. I lived through the real thing. I know what broken feels like.
The same rule applies to movement. You do not need 10,000 steps to prove you are alive. You need to get your body off the chair and into the world in whatever broken, limping, half-assed way it currently allows. Sitting in front of a screen all day while your legs atrophy is not natural. It is slow suicide dressed up as “work.” I know, because I did it for years. College turned into a black hole of heartbreak and takeout containers. I ballooned to more than twice the size I am now. No one was tracking my steps back then either. The only metric that existed was the mirror and the way my clothes stopped fitting.
When you cannot move more, you eat less. That is not complicated math. That is survival. Bodies are built in the kitchen long before they are ever sculpted in the gym. I dropped over a hundred pounds while completely sedentary, because I decided the fork was the only variable I could still control. Willpower is not some cute hashtag. It is the ugly, daily choice to put the food down when every instinct is screaming to numb the pain with it. I did that. No app congratulated me. No little trophy popped up on my phone. Just me, in a body that finally felt like mine again.
Brainstem hemorrhages do not mess around. Ninety percent (90%) of people who get them die. I lived. Barely. And every single day since has been a negotiation with a nervous system that still thinks it is under attack. People love to throw the word “lazy” around like it is some moral failing instead of a medical reality. They have no idea what it costs just to exist in this body right now—how much energy it takes to simply stay upright, to speak without slurring, to keep the depression from swallowing the progress. Calling that lazy is not just ignorant. It is cruel.
Whether it is a relationship, a recovery or just a pair of skinny jeans, you should never have to force it. Anything. It is not lazy when you are simply putting your trust in the universe’s power to turn life around while also standing up as much as possible and walking around (with help). The universe responds to our vibrational energy not by how much energy and force we exert.
So no, I am not hitting 5,000 steps today. I am moving as much as this body will safely allow and eating like someone who respects the fact that food is fuel, not therapy. That is the entire program. No pretty graphs. No weekly reports. No optimization.
The quantified-self crowd wants you to believe there is an optimal human being and that their little devices will show you how to become it. What they never tell you is that the second you hand your body over to the data, you stop listening to the only sensor that actually matters: the one between your ears and under your ribs. That sensor is loud, it is inconvenient, and it does not come with a subscription. But it has kept me alive through things that should have killed me.
So keep your ugly wrist device. Keep refreshing your sleep score. I will be over here working on my body until it begs for sleep,; deciding how I feel, moving what I can move, and eating like my life depends on it—because it does. The numbers never saved anyone. The quiet, stubborn decision to keep going when every metric says you should not have survived is the only score that has ever mattered.
PS I am taking some much needed personal time. My man is coming over for a couple weeks and I am devoting every second to him. It is such an honor to dedicate myself to my man. This has become a major part of “getting my life together.” Track that.
Kat’s Musings 