What motivates you?

Hey everyone! I've got a question for the community - What motivates you?

Motivation is something everyone here has likely struggled with. Part of the journey is overcoming the myriad of excuses our minds can throw at us at any given time. We do this in a number of ways. Establishing the comfort of a routine, rituals, brute force willpower, or the support of others. Sometimes a combination of them.

What gets you out of bed and onto the mat? For me, it's a forceful drive. I've had a bit of a ride in my young life and none of it has been particularly great. I come from poverty and abuse. From a place where "grinding" is how you live from day to day, not something you do for a short time when things get rough. When I was a teenager I crushed depression with sheer will and drug myself out of the hole I'd been in since grade school.

I had my problems. Emotionally immature, being a bad student, petulantly self-absorbed. When I had what I think is a God given epiphany finally as a seventeen year old - Certainly I wasn't smart enough to have it on my own. Take your pick, God or aliens - little did I know many more would follow in my mid-20's, and only a year apart! What gives me this drive is not purely some hard knocks story where you feel sorry for me, but rather the realization that not all of my problems were someone else's fault. The point?

What gets me out of bed is the knowledge that I'm not done having those epiphanies yet. The knowledge that while I understand who I am better than ever now, there is more to discover about who I am now and how I can be what I want to be as a man. I've always been overweight, and it was my own doing. It isn't easy not to be now, I admit I love food too much for my own good. Heck I don't even like getting up. I like sleeping, because I have so much energy it's a nightmare to get to sleep in the first place!

It's the push, the need, to reach for a vision that I can't even fully comprehend yet. It's why I taught myself what I didn't pay attention to in school. It's why I tackle academic nightmares like Linguistics -without a college - just to create languages for a flippin' fantasy universe. It's why I seek to ever expand my skillset, because in knowing myself I know I love to create, to do. I get on the mat, and on the bench, and in the weight room because I have to. I have to overcome my weaknesses, even while accepting I'll always have them.

Although I can be a protective little jerk and maybe it's just a superhero complex. Who knows! Now, not to be intimidating. While I just like to write and put out a verbose and grandiose assessment of why I'm motivated, that doesn't make your hows or whys any less important. It's all equal in the eyes of this family. Mine really is just a fancy brute force kinda thing. How do you stay motivated?