Hello to everyone, and to no one. My name is Matt Prior, and my life has not gone in the direction that I had hoped…
At 5′ 7″ and a little over 230 lb. I am more rotund than I have ever been in my life. I have been almost entirely consumed by the demons of food and alcohol; most days consisting of a cocktail of meat pies, burgers, fish and chips and a plethora of other stodgy meals, all washed down with a whole bottle of vodka.
Things are not much better with my career. I have successfully used by degree in Visual Design to reach the lofty heights of Mobile Cleaner, crippled as I am by an overwhelming anxiety for social situations that has plagued me for my entire life. An aggressive father and a controlling mother took care of that in my early years, and I’ve never been able to shake it.
That is, until now…
I’m sailing towards destruction in a sea of temptation, and I have to change course, lest I capsize completely.
I’m terrified of leaving my wife and daughter due to my own selfishness, yet by continuing down that road will lead to that inevitable conclusion. It almost seems that as soon as I get something pure and good in my life, I proceed to destroy it.
In fact, the whole act of facing my own mortality, of going to sleep genuinely thinking that I’m going to die before I wake, is the whole inspiration for the lessons for my daughter (LFMD) section of the site. If anything were to happen to me, I want to know that I have supported my little girl as much as I can, and writing down the things that I want her to understand about life and about people is my way of doing just that.
Why Timetable Mind?
When I was 21 years old I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (later renamed ‘low level autism’), however, by then I was already well on my way to achieving my degree. It is for this reason that I will never label my daughter, and why I am strangely glad that my parents didn’t label me. but even without the cheerful diagnosis, I had always noticed the apparent computerized nature of my thoughts.
And it was this organized compartmentalization of my thoughts and actions, together for my ability to see patterns in everything around me, which led me to say that I had a ‘timetable mind’.
If I am to achieve any marked improvement in my life, I will only be able to do it in a way that is organized to me, and which harmonizes with the many obstacles provided by my condition. This is why any improvements that I actually make happen in an incremental fashion, and it can feel like any tangible change can take an eternity.
Change, however, is something that must happen.
A declaration to myself…
I have noticed that my life has slipped of late, coinciding with the changes in my life involved with meeting my wife and starting a family. Change has always been a difficult thing for me to deal with, and its important in these situations for me to control the things that I’m able to control, as well as controlling my feelings towards the things that I can’t.
And herein lies the problem…
The things that we put into our bodies are not out of our control, they are conscious decisions and choices that we make for ourselves. Obviously there are certain things that have come about from situations and people around me – my social anxiety, for example, which has effectively created huge obstacles for me in almost every area of my life – however, I have to be honest with myself and realize that my inaction when it comes to addressing the problem is a choice that I have made for myself. I have never run from my own responsibility, as I have always known that life is not something that happens to you, it is something that happens from you.
If I am going to make genuine improvements to my life, without moving at the runaway pace of an old arthritic donkey, I have to make the decision to myself to take control. And Timetable Mind is my way of doing exactly that. I must take control of my social anxiety, my alcoholism, my health, my career, and even my hobbies, and to begin to move in the direction of my choosing, instead of fluttering in the winds of temptation that surround us all 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
I cannot and will not expect the world to change for me. I must change for myself.
So who am I?
Is this me? Am I just an obese, alcoholic, anxious, autistic cleaner?
Of course, these are things that I am at the moment, and nothing that I can say or do can change the present moment. But these are also things that could be anyone and is a situation that many people may find themselves in – even partially. But that being said, I am more than that.
I have always been incredibly inquisitive and ambitious, and this has led be to becoming fairly intelligent. I am, however, wise enough to know that in the grand scheme of things, I know very little. I would definitely class myself as a geek, without any negativity whatsoever. After all, without geeks, the would be pretty much nothing usable in this world.
I have also had a strong desire to help people, and, while I may struggle to do that on a massive scale due to my own personal difficulties, I try to do what I can for others in my daily life. I firmly believe that if everyone cared about each other, instead of attacking each other for their differences, it may be possible to find peace in this world.
In true geek style, I am hugely interested in science, and the use of science to improve peoples lives. I love learning about nutrition (how ironic), and am the sort of person who keenly swats up on scientific studies on how what we eat affects our bodies. I think its so important not to just soak up everything that we are told like a sponge, and to see for yourself what the research actually says.
For this reason I am also interested in biohacking, and will definitely be using science in order to give me the edge in improving my life.
Finally, I would say that I am a conspiracy theorist, but I’m not crazy. I would rather say that I am awake, and that history has shown that governments and the media almost always have an agenda outside of helping the public, and I am far too independent a thinker to follow the pied piper into oblivion.