What now...

Right!  First entry down now to the meat and potatoes.  What will this "makeover" consist of ? I will be making over my whole being.  Physical as well as spiritual. 
     The physical part of the makeover is easy enough to define. Now I am rapidly approaching 40.  I am not in the best shape of my life (or anybody else's either apparently) and my social life is non-existent.  Lets face it the boys are skin deep when it come to attraction.  Most gay men have deathly terror of any age over 30 so they tend to only value the perfection of the young.  So over the age of 30 and not a Greek god among men leaves me with a very empty social calendar.  So if I want to be healthy physically and be able to at least date another gay man, a major change is in order.  I however have taken the first step on this front.  I have hired a personal trainer.  We will from here on out refer to him as "D" (the sadist...just kidding I think).  This is my last weekend as a free man.  Monday afternoon is my first workout and my introduction to my new eating plan.  Hopefully I will rise to the occasion and perform like a trooper, but lets face it I will be a disaster.  I do have resolve and with my friends help and I am sure much money spent on spa treatments I will at least get to my goals.  I will document my progress here.
     The spiritual?  This is much harder to define.  I think its time for a little history.  You see I have never really expected to find true love.  Maybe that is my internalized homophobia but its true that is how I truly felt maybe still feel.  To be quite truthful I am not a very adventurous person.  I never make the first move and when it comes to men I am very shy.  My friends laugh at this as I am a very extroverted person in every other aspect of my life.  I never expected to be like those characters in a movie and boom struck with uncontrollable love.  I always thought I would find a guy who liked me enough to want to stick around and share my life, no great passion, no thunderbolt of true love, but a nice contented existence.  In my 20's I clung to this belief and just partied along with the rest of the tribe (my word for all my gay brothers and sisters).  I had many chances with some great guys.  Some which I was too timid to act fully upon and some that I did manage to have a nice time with.  Needless to say you could have knocked me over with a feather when I met, we shall call him "X".  He was totally hot and seemingly into me.  For the first time in my life I threw caution to the wind and became a right forward player.  We went on a couple of dates in the 2 weeks that followed and we were not separated much after that.  We dated almost a year before we moved in together.  A couple of years and re-locations before we bought ourselves a house and settled down.  Unfortunately we weathered some pretty rough times at first.  He saw me through one of the worst times in anybodies life,  a time when I lost a parent.  I returned the favor when at the end of our first year when I helped him resolve some legal issues.  All and all we were very happy for about 5 1/2 years.  Then on the day after my favorite holiday after we had started what was supposed to be a fun filled mini vacation he told me that he was not in love with me anymore and had found somebody that intrigued him much more.  I was devastated.  He told me that he had not acted on anything but needed time to think.  All the time we were on the vacation he kept telling me over and over that he loved me.  I guess I knew that things were definitely over.  When we got home all things came to light.  It turns out that he lied and had been seeing this other man for close to 6 months and that he had talked many other people about what he could not say to me.  He even talked to our friends, told them and even went to functions our friends gave with the other man.  He even lied to me when we met.  He said that he had not been seeing anybody for a long time when in fact he was seeing me while still in a relationship with his ex of 8 years.  I was inadvertently a cheater too.  So after I found out all of this he simply walked out of my life literally, I have yet to speak to him about any of it to this day.  There are of course many are other sordid details but this is hard enough to write these.  I have probably over shared but somehow if feels therapeutic to write this.  Anyway that is the moment I stopped being an active player in my life.  For the next 2 years all I did was just exist and let everything else slip away.  About a year ago it was like I woke up.  I ditched the job I hated and relocated to a new place.  I desperately wanted a new start.  This new start did not quite happen like I thought so here I am. 
     So spiritual?  I am not sure how to attack this part of my makeover, so I am going to experiment.  I am going to take my last vacation of the year and spend it working on me.  I will be taking daily sessions with my new personal trainer and then I will be going to some day classes and seminars to see if I can spark some new hobbies and interests.  This should, I hope, energize me to make new friends and get me off my duff and get into life.  Wish me luck. 


I will post as to my progress so until next time...

My first post...

Alright here goes.  This is officially my first blog entry (I know, I know I'm all excited too!)   I am sure that by the time anybody reads this I will have re-written it about a 100,000 times.  Not a perfectionist but sometimes I just prattle on, so I am sure there will be many sessions of editing.  I am not quite sure how to make it all sound cool.  Really I am not sure what's cool and what's not.  That is why I rely on my teenage nephews to point it out. So maybe I will let them read this and critique... on second thought maybe not.  I think I have given them enough blackmail material to totally pay for their colleges and weddings already.
    OK so back to this inaugural post.  If anybody reads this they might ask why "Making over the Soul?"  Great question (I am so glad someone asked).  Well here I am closing in on the final years of my 30's and I find myself at a crossroads.  Not a mid-life crisis, I think, but a place now where I cannot see to far down the road.  I know what your thinking "OMG--not another sob story about someone who needs to overcome some life threatening, insurmountable, Oprah cause."  No, quite the contrary.  I am very blessed.  I have a job I actually like, working with people I actually like.  I have very good friends, a loving family (a tad dysfunctional, but I guess that's actually normal), and an overall secure life.   The problem is that with all these blessings I am just content, not happy.  I found that over the last year all I have done is ask the question is this all I can expect?  After careful examination and much blog reading I found some truths about myself.  About a year ago I starting reading a blog called "Much ado about Monty."  In this blog a young man was embarking on some very extensive changes in his life and embracing whatever that meant for him.  I found this blog to be very inspirational.  He was coming out somewhat late in life and was endeavoring to navigate the new course, that meant, his life would take.  He went through a veritable roller coaster of changes and was very candid about how he was feeling and how his psyche (Yippee got that word of the month in so check another off the list) was changing.  Now I may be making more of it than what was intended but it made me look at myself.  I am roughly the same age as he but am way more stagnate.  During the time that I was reading this blog I was always thinking what do I need to change to make me happier.  I never could figure out just what was amiss in my life.  Then suddenly one day I realized it wasn't the things in my life that were  wrong like my job, my house, my family, my friends,  it was me.  I did not like me very much.  Then things just kind of fell into place.  You see just about 2 years ago I weathered one of the most traumatizing moments of my life.   Things would never be the same again.  I say I weathered it but really I just sidelined it and myself.  I realized that for all the time since then I have been a bystander just watching my life happen and not really participating.  Now that I understand that, I think I know how to proceed.  I have spent the last few months preparing and now is the time. I am putting myself back into the game!  So first up the blog.  I am hoping that by writing this blog I have a way of holding myself accountable, to follow through with what I hope to accomplish, a healthier and happier me.  One I hope to learn to like and maybe love. 


Now commencing the soul makeover....