So I started working out.
Trying to be fit. Wanting to get
the body back I left behind when I stopped trying. When it all got very bad.
I like working out, and I am trying to slow down and enjoy
the process which is not easy as I am so rabidly impatient for the results.
Once I realized that I was going to keep doing this until
the goal was achieved I immediately started to feel anxious about what my
reality was going to be as I got closer to it, and what I might experience when I
looked the way I wanted to look and felt the way I wanted to feel.
It should all only be good, right?
I have never known a time when who I am, and what I look
like hasn't caused some kind of drama. From
a very, very early age it was all I was made aware of. And when it should have long stopped being a
thing, in the worst way possible, my own daughter had to be constantly reminded
of how “hot” her mother looked her whole adolescent and teenage life. Who the fuck wants to hear things like that
about their own mom. Ridiculous.
It got so much easier the fatter and more out of shape I got,
even though that took a really long time.
So as I started to see an incredibly faint glimmer of a
suggestion of what I used to look like, all the self-loathing about that body
came flooding back and I felt so unsure of how to be at home in my hypothetically improved body if the best possible outcome of training happens. Who will I be? How will it shape my situation? Never mind that this body is now almost 50 so…
seriously? Why is anyone going to care
this time around? It's just not a big
deal anymore. I am not 30, not even
40. First world problems.
Yesterday my trainer told me to go home and write down a
list of things that were stopping me from believing that I should be getting
healthy & fit and have the body I want, not realizing how fucking neurotic I
was being, of course.
What I wrote was
You can’t move a
plank you’re standing on.
The same person I heard that gem from also said, “The last
thing a person will do is give up their neurosis, because even if they are
wrongheaded, or crazy, or harmful, they are familiar.” They leave us safely with our labels
intact. Staring at the plank and
thinking about it doesn't make it go away.
Neither does pulling at it or smashing it if, in fact, you are still on
it.
So, why on earth would I obsess for even one moment over
something that I've never been able to control in the first place and that isn't a reality anymore in the second place? I don’t need to write a list, I just need to
get over myself in a big way and it doesn't take time. It takes about two seconds. As long as it takes me to just move forward,
one step at a time into a future that has no fear in it for me. If I believe, as I say I do, that the only
life worth living is the one that you live present in the moment that is
happening, without all of the baggage of yesterday and the anxieties of
tomorrow, then that life is fearless. It
is free from anyone else’s influences or harms and hid safely in God where He
holds it in trust for me.
Either I believe that or not. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I just know I am going to be healthier and
happier. I know I am supposed to be
doing it. Because I am doing it. I am so over this.
Just get off the fucking plank.
