Cliché Title No 26: My Journey

As the title of the post alludes to, I've been on somewhat of a personal journey.  I didn't know what to call the post, so decided to stick with the tried and true cliché, because that's what this has been, a journey, one that is by no means finished either.


About a year ago, I started down a path that slowly led me to where I am now.  For quite some time, I won't say I struggled with my weight, because, looking back at it now, it was a conscious choice I had made for myself, but I was in a pretty deep state of depression regarding it.

However, the problem was that I couldn't recognize that I was depressed about my weight.  Over the years, I'd created a facade that I would project to the outside world, this facade had been crafted over the course of many, many years, back when I was struggling, this time I actually was struggling, with my own personal anger issues.  In the course of learning to manage those issues, I learned that people don't really like to deal with someone who is angry.  So I slowly built up a facade of a false, happy and bubbly personality that I would project in front of my real self.

I began to rely on this facade more and more over the years.  Eventually that facade took the place of my actual state of mind, overlaying it and blocking out the depression I was feeling.  I started to believe that the personality I was projecting to the outside world was what I was actually feeling and I went about like this for many years.

Then, about a year ago, something changed in my life that made me look at what I had become and I decided to do something about it.  Over the course of the year, I've been working toward a goal weight and recently I achieved the halfway point.  It was over this period time when I came to several realisations in my life, one of them being able to see that facade I was wearing and to tear it down.  I realised what I had been doing when I started to genuinely feel those feelings I had been projecting outward for the first time in years.  I had never realised how deep I was mired in depression until I recognized it for what it was.

Now that I'm on a better course in my life, I'm finding that the weight loss was the easy part of the journey.  For me, the hard part is what is going on inside my head.  For so long, I'd trained myself to see only the fat me when I looked in the mirror, it's hard now to see anything else.  When people say how good I look with all the weight I've lost, while it's nice, I still don't see it.  Oh, I know I've lost weight, I've got the number tracking to prove it, but at the same time, my mind still only sees fat me.  Because of my size, I was forced to shop at the few places that would carry those larger size clothes, I'd resigned myself to feeling like I was wearing so much material you could erect a circus tent.  Now, I'm having to try and train myself that baggy does not equal better, but after almost a decade, it's a very hard habit to break from.  Once again, my mind sees me in something that looks smaller and instantly says it's bad, take it back and get the next size up.  One of the worst though, is getting up the courage to go into those specialty clothing stores.  I would yearn for the day when I could walk into those stores and buy those clothes.  Now that I can, I find I'm scared, that the shop assistants are secretly thinking "What is he doing in here, there is nothing in here that will fit him" so I don't go in.

So yes, I have lost a great deal of physical weight.  Now I need to work on shedding the mental weight that went with it for so long. And so, my journey continues.