Dec

22

Diversion

Weight gain, pros:

• Boobs no longer look like half-empty icing bags

• Rounder face = fewer places for pools of shadowy haggardness

• “Dimpled butt” sounds cute, even if it’s not particularly when one is 42 as opposed to 8 months old

• …. Extra padding in the event of falling from a great height?

The truth is I hate the weight I’ve gained. I hate it, and I am so tired of hating it, of being so painfully self-conscious and convinced everyone is assessing me through the same lens I use on myself.

I once read that Meryl Streep was asked what advice she would give her younger self, and she answered,

Don’t waste so much time thinking about how much you weigh. There is no more mind-numbing, boring, idiotic, self-destructive diversion from the fun of living.

It’s that word diversion that really jumps out at me. In what ways might I be a happier, healthier person if I weren’t caught up in this punishing cycle of criticizing my body and strategizing how I can change my body? How much easier would sobriety be if I weren’t forever tempted by a substance that strips away the pounds (along, of course, with everything good in my life)?

What could I offer the world if I wasn’t pouring so much energy into the way I look instead of the way I live?

What would it be like to accept my no-longer-skinny body?

What would it be like to love that body?

19 Comments 

Dec

15

Fool’s gold

Romanticizing is one of the more devious pitfalls in addiction. It’s an upside-down fantasy land, a combination of selective focus and outright fiction. It is as nonsensical as pining for the bars after one has escaped the cage, but this is where logic gives way to lies.

There are times when I hold competing stories in my head about what it was like to be using. There is the truth: that I was sick, obsessed, unhappy, and eventually so lost and hopeless I wished I were dead. Then there is another version.

In the first story, I am better now. In the second, I am worse.

When irrational thoughts start creeping in, I take a breath and square my shoulders. Identify, refute, substitute; repeat as necessary. I have to listen instead of turning away, even when it hurts. Even when everything starts closing in and I have to fight my way back out into the clear, over and over and over again.

This is the work that holds the first story close, where it’s supposed to be. This is how I defeat the shimmering memory of what never was.

14 Comments 

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