Side effects 1

Being uncomfortable with the way you look and feel has odd ways of creeping into your life in strange and subtly destructive ways. It can wear away at your pride just as efficiently as any river grinds away at its river bed until there are whole portion of your life so feel so shameful and embarrassing you hide them with the same kind of zeal a closet drunk hides his bottles. Forgive the comparisons I am just trying to explain how bad this made me feel over the years.

I think some of the best examples of these are the lengths I went to too hide or just out and out ignore the fact that cloths weren’t fitting the way they used to. There is a very “final nail in the coffin” moment when a certain shirt or pair of pants becomes so uncomfortable you just can’t wear it anymore. For most people it would be the wake up call they needed to make some drastic and immediate changes for me it was just a particularly big dust bunny to sweep under the denial rug.

I guess I start with the belts. This is something I do not believe I did completely on purpose, at least I don’t remember making a conscience decision to do so any specific time, but the fact remains that it kept happening every time I got a little to fat for a belt. What that is, is that when a belt could no longer contain my every expanding waste line it would somehow get lost, left, break, or accidentally thrown out. Thus forcing me to have to buy a new one. When I went to pick a new one up somehow the styles in the smaller belts just didn’t suite me, but the perfect looking belt would always be in a size 1 or 2 up from the one I lost. I need to get on thesaurus.com and look up synonyms for embarrassed. The recounting of this leaves me thoroughly abashed (gotta shake things up a bit). I think what bothers me the most about the belt thing is that it is only in retrospect that I see this trend. At the time I really didn’t think about what I was really doing, that is not the case with the next example.

The thing with the clothing is something I have recently admitted to my wife, whom I assume knew exactly what was going on from the first time she asked, she’s insightful like that. Here’s what has been going down for the last several years. I have been essentially collecting cloths, not because I have some desire to add to my collection, but because there is apart of me that can’t admit that I have no business owning the sizes that are neatly folded and stacked in ever growing piles on that shelf in my closet that never moves. Old jeans, shorts, shirts, dress shirts, pull overs, coats, sweaters, thermals, and just about everything else that is size specific was stuffed back there under the auspices that I no longer liked the way it looked. So every few months my loving wife would ask me in an exasperated tone why I wouldn’t just get rid of all this old crap I never wear? I would divert the question, or flat out ignore it until dropped it, and that is the way it went until recently.

Very recently in fact, just the other day I pulled out an old shirt from that pile and with severe trepidation pulled it over my head, and come to find out it fit. I won’t say it was loose, but I didn’t feel the inside of a sausage link, and if I wore it out I don’t think people would wonder if I was trying to make a statement. It was then that I came clean with my wife about why I stockpiled clothing. For me throwing it out or giving it away was akin to an admission that I was never going to be small enough again in my life to keep it. I think that would have been the proverbial nail in the coffin, not for me getting healthy, but for me to give up on ever fitting into those items again. I think that’s why she never just threw the stuff out while I was gone, or forced me to toss it out. There are still plenty of things in that corner that I’m not yet willing to pull on, but now it’s just a matter of time before I need to build another pile of stuff with to much free space, and I don’t think I’ll have any problem letting Good Will have it all.