Drowning

May I just say, before anyone starts to read this. This is a chance for me to openly share my struggles, obstacles, and adversities. It is the five minutes I take to feel sorry for myself and once that's out, I start my day and go and live my life. Because that's all I allow myself, five minutes, to get out everything I hate and dread about my size and then the rest of the day commit myself to putting steps in place to change the things I don't like. Life is too short to waste sitting, wishing, and hoping that the weight will magically come off one morning when I wake up. I need to do this for me, and no one else.

Here's my story..

I feel like I'm drowning. Drowning because every time I step on the scale I hold my breath, scared that the number is going to do it's little dance between the 3's and 4 hundreds until finally stopping at a number that is almost too hard to bare. 412 it says. In an almost mockingly fashion, pointing to it's owner, me. I am 412. This number, this definition of me that society relentlessly accepts at face value as my worth is.. drowning me. Can't you see? I've been through, what feels like the gates of hell and back for my size, and here you are still.. mocking me. If food was a captor, I'd be it's a prisoner. Walking down the streets is no easy task. The man outside the liquor store smirks while my neighbor lights one up, looks at me and shakes his head. All this instead of just a "Good morning" or "hello." I wonder how they could be so hypocritical. I wonder, but how is that any different from that 40 oz you carry that seems surgically attached to your left hand, sir? How is the smoke you inhale from your pack that sits faithfully in your back pocket any different than the addiction that swallows me whole? No, addiction only has one face apparently, worthy of commonplace ridicule and disdain. Fat. My being fat gives others the permission to take whatever insecurities they may have and use me as their means to make themselves feel better. Still drowning. Drowning because I've tried everything from fad diets to working out 7 days a week and am still here in "morbidly obese", my doctor says. "You're barely at a weight to keep your heart from going into cardiac arrest," he says. There it is again, the drowning sensation. My head is barely breaking the surface and I am about to go under and there is nothing, I feel, I can do about it. I walk away, contemplating the depths of taking one's own life. This is the darkest place I have ever been and not many do I let see it. A moment of reflection I see my life, no husband, no children, a dead end job where if, my having a pair of breasts doesn't keep me from promotion, my weight definitely does. This, a look into what my life as a morbidly obese woman looks like. Constantly thinking about one's actions to avoid any additional attention that could mean being subjected to ridicule, this is what that the life of the fat woman you sneer at looks like. And if you are, God bless you, one of the few kind souls who treat myself and people like me as equals. Thank you, thank you for not being blinded by our size as to being the only thing that could define us as people. But know, that you who judge us in this manner are the minority and the encounters we have with kind spirits is sparse. It hurts, everything hurts, the physical, emotional pain those burdened by extra weight must endure. Amidst all of this, I have seemed to take something positive from this ordeal. I have made great friends, who I know like me for who I am wholly. That genuineness is harder to find when you aren't considered obscene and large. It's possible but it's harder. I've grown to not let the words of others define me. When you've been beat up for so long you eventually stop listening and define yourself by your own terms and I think I have become a courageous person in leu of it. Heck, I think anyone battling large sums of weight is incredibly courageous. They have most of the world telling them they're not going to make it and then we succeed. Take that world. I believe we're all capable of change. When we're ready for that change is for ourselves to decide but we shouldn't wait too long because life is ticking by. An obstacle, by many means, but an obstacle, nonetheless. Meaning we can overcome it. So I guess in the days I feel like drowning, there are some reminders to give me hope to keep swimming. Swim and fight to not let something like weight take my life. And sooner than you know it, you start to see shore in the distance and realize that no one can hold you back. Drowning. I was, but not anymore.