Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

I’ve been mulling that thought over for the past weeks, for after reading various blogs, forums and weight loss-related websites, I know it’s something that tends to surface often enough.

Putting one’s life on hold because one is fat. Telling oneself “I’ll do that when I’m thin”, or “I can’t do that yet, I’m still too fat, I’ll never be taken seriously”. Or “I need an excuse to not go to that gathering because I’m too fat, I’ll feel ashamed”. Or whatever else fits that category.

I’ve been wondering about it, because this is one of the overweight/weight loss aspects that I cannot relate to. I have tried. I have thought about it. I have questioned myself and my motives. Somehow, it feels like there’s something I can’t grasp here, something I can’t understand. Hah. Isn’t it weird, on top of it, to be a little bothered by this, when in fact I should be damn happy I’ve never had to struggle with such feelings?

But this is the truth, this is my truth. I’ve been overweight since childhood, I wasn’t so good-looking at all when I was at my highest weight, I’m not even sure what it truly is to be thin, and yet my weight has never once got in the way of the circumstances of my life. It’s not even that I haven’t ‘allowed’ it to interfere; no, there simply never was anything to create an interference to start with.

Still, I’ve been wondering and pondering some more, particularly about one thing I’ve posted on a forum a few weeks ago, and I think that I’ve finally put my finger on the major reason behind that:

From the start, being fat has never been my biggest social downfall/reason for shame.

Because, you see, I have Tourette’s syndrome in lieu of that.

I’ve had it since before I started to put on unwanted pounds. Compared to that, being overweight, for me, isn’t such a biggie in and of itself. Or I should rather say that it’s less… complicated, in a way. You’re still a talking head over a body nobody wants to acknowledge, but the sarcasm and mockery is from the start focused on something else more than on that.

When you pull odd grimaces, odd gestures or emit odd noises, people don’t know anymore what’s happening, you attract really unwanted attention, irritated adults tell you to control yourself and to stop being an attention whore, complete strangers look at you with pity in their eyes or ask you bluntly if you’re normal, and you get nice lessons of how you should go to see a psychologist because you may have underlying issues. All the while, you’re standing here helpless with your silly tics, feeling guilty, feeling that something is definitely wrong with you, desperately trying to suppress the tics, and irremediably failing after a while, when too much pressure has built in, which in turn makes you feel even worse about it all. It took me 20 years to muster the courage to look at that in the face, and finally learn that psychology could kiss my ass in that regard, because it’s a neuropathology, period.

So, yes, come to think of it, being overweight was just icing on the cake, but not the kind of icing that will detract the diners’ attention from the dessert under it. Nobody has ever told me such things as listed above on the account of my weight.

However…

However, in a way, was that really so much more different? Aren’t there things or events in my life I’ve put on hold because of those tics, of being afraid that as long as I have them, I won’t be able to ‘make it big’ and ‘be taken seriously’? So I don’t have recollections of being ‘the fatso in a bikini that is laughed at by everyone at the pool’, but hasn’t it left me with very humiliating memories as well?… (I remember a video from a school trip, at the age of 12, in which I can be seen displaying my monkey-like grimaces all the way to the bus. All the class watched that. Pathetic.)

I can’t relate to putting my life on hold because of my weight, but I can relate to being very frightened and ashamed all the same because of my disorder, of thinking that I shouldn’t even attempt to take theatre classes because everybody would laugh at me if I were to have a role in a play and display my tics… Of being sure that no guy would ever want me because I’d make them ashamed… Of fidgeting for hours before applying for a job–or not daring at all, convinced that I’d get quickly fired after my boss would realize what misfit he had hired. Having to lock myself in a bathroom because I had attempted to control the tics for too long, and then had to let the steam off somewhere very quickly before the pressure-cooker I had become was to explode in the middle of that dining-room.

Maybe it’s kind of like wearing only dark colors and shiny bling-bling earrings in the hopes that people won’t notice that you’re fat. You hope that you’re hiding your tics well enough, you think you’ve found clever solutions for people around you to not notice. But they do. They notice that you’re fat, and they notice that you’re having bouts of clearly dysfunctional gestures in the middle of that office meeting. It’s useless and hopeless. You can never really hide.

So… I can’t relate, but I can empathize. I can’t relate, but I can close my eyes and imagine what it must be like. Feeling that things can only be really good once that defect is gone, once it won’t be the first thing about you to jump into people’s faces. Feeling like this is diminishing you as a person, so much that it obliterates everything worthy in you, leaving only the apparent ugliness for the rest of the world to see, mock and scowl at.

Fortunately for me, may I say, my personality was and still is strong enough to sustain the damage. Out of spite, perhaps, or out of some dsire to ’show them’? I’m not sure what is true. I just know that regarding my tics, I consciously did not allow them to stand in the way for long. I took those drama classes (I even got the lead role in one of the plays). I went to sing during a local music festival, when the singer picked random people in the audience to jump on the stage with them for a short while. More recently (after I’ve finally become at peace with my state, though), I’ve resumed studies to become a teacher, knowing full well that the first tic I’ll display in class will be the bone tossed at the hyenas to open free laughing-fest at me forever. Now, I couldn’t care less about who my presence and attitude would be offending. I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. I’m still overweight, and I even used to be mildly obese, and I still have my tics, probably bound to be with me until my dying day.

We can do something about our weights. Even if we never end up with a super-thin-model-size-perfect-up-the-wazoo body. We can do our best at making healthier food choices and walking for just twenty more minutes each day. Yet we can’t catch up on all the things we’ve missed due to being ashamed and insecure. The rest of the world has gone on turning without us. It wouldn’t have cared either way if we had taken that dancing class or wore that swimsuit while chin-deep in the water at the beach–or it would have cared in such a flimsy, temporary way that it wouldn’t have mattered either.

Again, I know I can’t exactly relate, but to anyone reading this… Please, please do your best to not put your life on hold, to truly accept that weight isn’t what defines your true worth, no matter what those assholes in the mainstream media industry want us to believe, no matter what insult some moron in elementary school threw at you or me or him or her some twenty years ago.

Life is really too short to be put on hold, and we’re all worth SO much more than that crap!

Tags: life on hold, weight, shame, perspective, tourette