The more I hang out with my obstacles, the more I realize just how many of them I seem to have created for myself as a compensatory strategy. The default obstacles, as I mentioned before, tend to be limited time, funds, or energy.

Diving deeper, I even named the obstacle as a fear of wasting my time in light of a past relationship experience in which I thought we were building toward marriage and family, only to realize this person didn’t want children and he didn’t want to get married. In his words: “It’s not that I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to marry any woman.”

Naturally, I still carry some resentment toward the man I seem to have wasted the best years of my reproductive life, especially now as I find myself entering into a pre-perimenopausal stage of my life as my body goes through changes.

Now, as I reflect on another personal goal of mine to slim down, I can see all the ways the obstacles show up for me. Maybe not all obstacles are just fears holding me back. Yes, there is certainly a fear of failure, especially after losing 40 pounds and gaining it right back. And there is also a fear of success—because if I successfully obtain a hot girl body, then I’d be a hot girl, and I’d be left in the same predicament I’ve always been in my whole life as a woman being sexualized by men. I thought getting fat, it would stop. Nope. It just happens less but it still happens where now “thick” gets fetishized. I digress.

Not all obstacles are fears. Some obstacles are rooted in a lack of experience or knowledge about how to do something, so then the obstacle becomes the learning curve required to accomplish a goal. Other obstacles are rooted in a fixed mindset about how things should be.

I think for me, a big obstacle is getting hit with the spirit of laziness. But am I really being lazy? Instead of doing 15 minutes on the elliptical as I intended, I opted to blog instead. I’m still being productive in another area of my life that is important to me, which is to get back into writing and publishing again.

At the end of the day, the obstacle is me. I am the one getting in my own way. I have this unique blend of OCD and ADHD-like tendencies that seems to have gotten misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder when I was in my early 20s doing a bunch of drugs and lying about it. I’m going to see if I can articulate this, mainly for myself, so I can develop better strategies that work with my special blend of neurodivergence.

Lately, I have been having all sorts of flashback memories from my childhood of what I now recognize as early signs of OCD. I’m pretty sure I inherited this from my dad who referred to his flavor of it as being meticulous. The ADHD I didn’t realize was a hindrance in my life until graduate school one winter break when I noticed I had some anxiety that lingered long past the semester ending. I could definitely see how in my younger years that could be misconstrued as a manic episode. I’ve always been described as a high energy type of person by my peers because how much I had going on.

In the context of my fitness journey, the OCD part of me gets activated when following a meal plan or workout plan. When things get hard, or don’t make sense, the ADHD part of me takes over and I get distracted by something else. Now this is where there is overlap and I haven’t quite figured it out for myself but when I end up going down a rabbit hole researching recipe ideas or learning about the three glute muscles and which exercises activate each one vs all three at the same time, I’m not sure if that’s an obsession or a hyper fixation. This is the point where I schedule an appointment with my therapist who has known me since I was 18 to help me explore differential diagnosis.

The root of most of my anxiety is generally related to one of these two presentations. They both protect me in different ways. The OCD part protects me from the humiliation the ADHD part sometimes causes with being late to a meeting because I decided to make a coffee pit stop or forgetting my keys to the office, or where I parked my car. Meanwhile, the ADHD part protects me from the boringness of a rigid and monotonous lifestyle that the OCD part rather enjoys.

I’m sure there is a lot to unpack here but I’ll save that for my own private therapy.

All in all, I don’t think all obstacles are necessarily fear based. I think some obstacles are simply limitations of the mind and it’s a matter of learning how to function optimally despite the limitations of our own mind.