28: Progress Reports: 1.

27. Image 6

So something else has occurred to me about that point at which I decided to change, a factor that with all the big stuff I was thinking on slipped my mind until I was talking to another race volunteer at the barefoot 5k I attended last weekend. We had the awesome job of standing at the 2.5k mark and telling the people who wanted to run the 5 to go left and everyone else to hang a right. We also had to go to that point about 30 minutes before the race actually started, so we had time to talk.

Naturally, given the event, we talked about how and why we started using barefoot shoes. He had been a long time running and didn’t really use them much, but got back into running to drop 15 or 20 pounds he’d put on since college, which led to me explaining my own experience with barefoot running and weight loss. After a lot of back and fourth on the topic he mentioned something that jogged my memories on how I felt in my own skin when I was up at my heaviest. He was joking about how it must feel like I was suddenly without a winter coat, and it made me realize that I had felt something very close to just that.

People with my type of body have the ability to put weight on all over. You don’t really develop a gut, there isn’t any one part that gets super huge, you just sort of swell all over. It makes it easier to carry and ignore extra pounds. I got bigger and bigger, but I had never really had that idea that my gut was getting a little to big for comfort, or I really needed to address my love handles or moobs. I was swelling but everything remained proportionate and I was told I carried it well. It did in fact feel like I was carrying it well. Until it didn’t.

Around the time of my daughters birth there was a distinct change in how I felt in my own skin. This was not a mental feeling or some self conscious nonsense, this was purely physical. One morning I got up and noticed my body. That is a weird sentence, but I don’t know how else to say it. Prior to my feet hitting the ground that day I knew I was big, but never really felt like it was a burden to me. Once I hit that point though, I could never not notice that layers of fat I was hauling around.

It went from me feeling like me, to me feeling like I had a snow suit on 24 hours a day. Except this suite was weighting, and jiggled when I walked, pinched when I tied my shoes, and made moving through attics (part of my job) a nightmare. After a day or two of dealing with this new found self awareness I did something that will stick in my brain forever. I got home from work, stripped down to my underwear, stood in front of our full body mirror and jumped. I had thrown cinder blocks into lakes that make fewer ripples. While this alone didn’t tip me over the edge to make the changes, it certainly put a bit more weight on the fix it side of my decision scale.

26.

I get angry. I get extremely angry. I am not sure all of the roads that led me to being like this, but the point is I get really, really, mad. I do not take it out on my wife, I do not take it out on my child, I am not prone to yelling, and I do not start fights. When I get extremely mad I tend to be very biting, and short with everyone around me. You can see it on my face, but I am not going to blow up on you, I may belittle you somewhat, but will probably apologize quickly and feel like an idiot and get even madder for letting myself get out of hand.

Like I said I don’t know when it started. I have vague memories of my Mom telling me I had a temper and yelling at her that I didn’t, which is a great illustration of the problem. I kind of wish I got angry in the traditional way, pressure builds, you blow up, everything goes back to normal for a while. With me it’s better to think of it more as a reservoir. I can hold a massive amount of it before it spills over, but it seems to always be slowly filling and filling, the pressure getting higher every day. For a time it’s not noticeable because there is so much room to fill before you can even tell it’s on the rise. Because of this once I realize there is a problem it is more often than not, to late to calm back down. I know it’s coming when someone starts talking to me and I am picking their words apart in my head looking for some point of weakness to exploit, something to say back, or trying to find some snide tone in their sentence. I am primed for conflict.

What drives me most crazy about this is that like a reservoir it’s not something that can just be undone with the realization that the problem is there. It will be with me for days once I get to the breaking point. I work very hard to drain the rage, but once it’s topped off there is a lot of frustration to rid myself of, and not to many outlets.

More than my weight, this is something I want gone from my life. From a health perspective it pushes my blood pressure all over the place, keeps me awake for hours at night, and causes me to make certain decisions during work outs that cause a variety of minor injuries. From a life perspective it makes me hard to be around and generally unlikable. I want to break my things when I get that way. In the past I did, I believe a power ranger or two suffered a terrible fate, to my immediate regret. Shameful.

I have been making strides to fixing this, and I was/am doing really good, but the last two or three days I find myself in that state of agitation for no good reason. I am frustrated, finances are tight (this will never change), my job is in a slump (frequent), and I am hitting another work out wall (like clockwork). I am getting mad. I know this because my wife asked me to do something and my brain started asking “what’s that supposed to mean?” questions about everything she says. So far I have been able to shut it down, but I find that every time I do I stack another Jinga block of rage on the tower.

I need to find constructive ways to deal with the anger. For most of my people related triggers I am getting better at dealing with them. I am trying to really look at things from the other persons mind set. They still might be an idiot for doing what they did, but in their mind it was needed, it was appropriate, it was justified. Nothing I think or yell out a car window is going to change the fact that they thinks they’re right. So why waste the time in being angry that they aren’t as smart as me? This has gone a long way and helping me remember that I am in fact not superior to everyone around me, which keeps me from losing my mind do to other peoples actions (mostly).

Life however, is something that seems completely out my hands, and not being able to exercise control over it frustrates me greatly. Frustration can boil over into rage quickly for me (see: simple drum pattern that escaped me). More than over eating, more than blaming my weight issues on genes, more than any of that I wish I could change this. It is a point of shame for me. I should be able to keep a level head, let the little things wash over me, let go of the things I can’t control, and think before I react.

I have decided to approach this in the same way I approach weight loss, as it has affected my eating habits for years. For example I may be going along following some diet, then something makes me really mad, well I don’t destroy me toys anymore, so maybe I just destroy my chances at losing weight, and in anger eat 6 hot and ready original glazed (has happened). So I am going to take the anger apart where it starts and try to rebuild a functional human on top of it. I will most likely not be posting in as great of detail on this topic, as it involves people at a level I don’t think is appropriate to just dump on to the internet, but I am going to fix this, because I don’t want my baby to grow up wondering why her dad is so mad all the time.

25.

There is a post I have been writing for the last several days, weeks if I am completely honest. I have been writing and re-writing it, to keep from having to post it. I am working on trying to stop the over reaction and rage that comes over me from time to time, and much like losing weight I am using the blog to figure things out with that. However, my weight gain was something that I couldn't really hide from the people around me so it wasn't so hard to write about what was always on display. The anger and frustration are completely different. People probably get hints of the how I am, but the depth to which it goes isn't something I spread around because it's something I am ashamed of. I will be writing it anyway, and now that I was able to write this I have no choice, I will post it. Not tonight, but soon. The more I write on the frustration the more I realize all the big character flaws I have feed into each other, each a building block of my overall failings. So every-time I remove one, I find another right below it. The anger thing is getting better, but everytime I get a handle on it, it seems like some interaction or something that comes out of my mouth lets me know just how little progress I've made.

My habits and flaws didn't take a day to form, they wont be gone in a day either, but I am not going to let it take me years, I am going to go after this with intensity, I am going to take apart everything that will be a bad example to my daughter and change as much of it as I can.

24.

Something I have been thinking about a lot lately is the man I would’ve been. The kind of person I was on the path to becoming before things took a turn. It’s a topic I often hear about from my family, namely when the refer to me being like the old Rob. The old Rob being the one who never experienced the anger, depression, or sadness of losing a friend. The one without the weight of debt, insecurities, and general lack of confidence. I have invested a lot of time into trying to figure out what that kid would’ve have grown into, and the conclusion I think I’ve come to is that he would’ve been a very pleasant young man, but he wouldn’t be me.

Before I was jaded I was a much friendlier sort of person. The kind of person that made eye contact with everyone, the kind of guy that always used your first name and gathered up friends like grain. I was up for anything with anyone at anytime, which is so very far from how I am now. I think if I had continued on that path I would be surrounded by a veritable hoard of friends, constantly in contact with all of them, and there is a very real part of me that regrets not becoming that person. However, I’m not sure I would ever had developed the extremely close relationships I share with those few friends I have now. I don’t know if being everyone friend would be better than having a few friends that I know without question will always be there for me.

I think I would’ve been a person who had a lot of convictions, without really fully understand them. That may not have been the case, but that’s how I was before. I knew all sorts of things about life and the way a person should live without ever really exploring why I “knew” them. I knew that certain things and people were bad and wrong without ever taking the time to understand their problems or life. I don’t think I would like being that sort of person. I may not radiate the warmth I used to, but I do make a genuine effort to understand why people are the way they are, and even when I truly can’t stand someone I do not wish or want to see that person fail or suffer. This still confounds me, because in the not too distant past I wished all kinds of bad things on the people who I hated, but as I continue to change I may not want someone involved in my life, but I still hope they can be happy in their own (so long as it doesn’t involve me). I don’t know if I would have kept my holier than though attitude of my youth, I want to believe I would’ve become empathetic, but I don’t know.

I think what I really want to do by looking at who I was is find ways of bringing the best parts of that person back into who I am now. I want to find a way to let go of that instant suspicion I have for everyone I meet, I want to have that infectious good nature and humor I once did. I find it coming out from time to time and it makes me feel great. I want to be able to walk into a room of people I barely know and make everyone comfortable with me, rather than be the guy that hides at the edges and rarely falls into an awkward conversation only to bolt at the earliest opening. I was never that person in my past, but over the years I have built this shell up so thick I get tongue tide and strange to the point of absurdity when I am with a group of people. Or what’s worse is the trend that has been getting stronger and stronger where people see me looking around and actually get freaked out. Apparently I often look like I am about to break with my sanity and start throwing haymakers at anything that moves when I am in crowd of people.

The truth is far less edgy. I am honestly extremely nervous about making myself look like an idiot. Maybe I do this by dropping a joke that bombs, spinning some fish tale that gets so out of hand no one could possibly believe it, or in recent years just believe that everyone was starring at my shirts and jeans that were obviously to tight for my bulk. I want that easy comfort and confidence I had before I built up such a hatred for the world at large.

I have been trying on that old smile lately. At first I think it was more of a twisted facsimile than the genuine article, but with my little baby at home I think she has reached in and drawn it out. That in combination with the confidence and comfort I am starting to feel in my own skin have let me get some shadow of the former thing back.

23.

Not knowing what to do with a truly huge amount of anger can have some pretty negative effects on someone’s personality. Following the loss of my friend I was a lot of things, but what I hid behind and fueled was my anger. I denied that I was angry, insisted that I was torn up, sad, and missed him, but I was not angry. After all I had been taught from a young age that god only took people when it was there time, and that he had a plan for everything, so being mad at God was only foolish, and if I couldn’t be mad at him who could I be mad at?

This was the question that occupied the primary processing time on my conscious mind for the next few years. I tried to be angry at the doctors, but I couldn’t maintain that because they were nameless and faceless, and besides I truly believed they had done everything in their power to heal him so the fire I was trying to light under them refused to kindle. I tried to turn it on my fast dwindling number of friends as I purposely drove them away, but I knew it was me leaving them not the other way around. So I ended up turning on myself.

Hating yourself is a complex business. You have to find new reasons and new things to hate in order to keep the rage going, and when you use that rage to hide from the depression that’s on the other side of it you have to keep going. I wont get into too much of what went through my mind, much if it truly absurd but I think an example may be useful. It started with a constant beat up session about how fake of a person I was, how I was play acting at being a good little Christian boy, how I was dressing the part of one of the cool kids when I was just an outcast (self imposed), and why couldn’t I just be the piece of crap I really was? This led to me changing everything about the way I dressed and interacted with people around me, hiding several of my habits, telling lies to friends about things that didn’t matter, only talking to perfect strangers about things that really bothered me (yes I was that person for a time). I would change myself completely for a time, then get fed up with how fake and stupid I was, how much of a lie I was living, how ugly and horrible I was becoming, and change everything again.

During this time I starting getting picked on and beat up by several of the juniors at the school, which gave me a pretty good place to seat my rage for awhile. I would be all smiles and jokes whenever anyone talked to me and when I was alone I would be angry, burying it a little deeper every time, forcing the smiles and jokes to the surface, getting more and more ridiculous in with groups of people, making sure I was the class clown. Everybody knew me and like me, but I would never hang out with any of them after the bell rang. I can remember starring at myself in the mirror for nearly an hour at a time my face set in hate and murmuring all the reasons I didn’t deserve to live.

Eventually I worked up the nerve to talk about the anger I had with a few people older than myself, and inevitably they would tell me I was actually angry with God. I refused this for the longest time. My pastor told me I was wrestling with God, digging my heals in and refusing to listen and understand (I have this problem with many authority figures lower on totem than God). Slowly it wore me down until I did a test run on aiming all the pent up fury towards him. When I did I found it flaring white hot, I didn’t understand why he would do such a thing to him, me his family all our friends, it wasn’t right, or just, or fair, and didn’t seem like an act from a loving God. I don’t know if you would call what I did prayer, it most consisted of me screaming at God while I was driving around when no one could hear me. It took a long time but eventually the anger started to cool and I started making strides to understand that I would never really know why he was taken.

When that anger started to fade it let the flood gates open on a whole host of emotions that had been completely ignored for years. All the sadness I never dealt with was back like it was the week after we lost him. I got very depressed. I think this is when the comfort eating really began. I had been sneaking (so I thought) off to fast food joints and to get soda for a long time, but things got truly out of control when I started getting a little relief from eating, or having a coke or three. For awhile it was no problem, but as I got older and less active I think the results became obvious.

I think whats so hard to this day about that entire scenario is that I still have to deal with all the ghosts of that time. My temper is still one of my main problems, depressions is something itching at the back of my head right next to anxiety and a huge lack of confidence, my faith has taken a hit that on darker days I am not sure I can recover from. However, as I’ve been exercising control over one very specific part of my, namely my weight, I believe it’s time to start working on the rest of these problems, not simply because each one could drag me back down into weight gain, but because of the person I want to become, the man I have to be for my wife and child.