I mentioned in an earlier post (more like fixated on) how much easier it would be to stick with a fitness plan if I were totally isolated. Living, eating, and existing in solitude would make for a lonely life, but I would essentially only have to face one struggle: me versus me.
In recent days, I have found myself encountering an unexpected foe: Dan. I'm not talking about the "oh, he likes to be sedentary" stuff, where his natural state is counterproductive for my rejuvenated ("You hear that? Rejuvenated. He was juvenated before, lost it...and got juvenated again. Rejuvenated!") enthusiasm for a healthier lifestyle. And it's not as though he's secretly switching out my 1% milk for whole, or fucking with my scale's calibration...nothing nearly that intentional or direct. In fact, what he is doing, he probably doesn't even realize. Dan has never been extremely conscious of the emotional effects of his words and actions (look for my next investigative series: Is Dan a Cylon?), and it always seems to confuse him when I tell him that something he did made me upset. In fact, on those relatively rare occasions, he gets defensive and takes the (unstated) position that essentially any negative reaction I am having is either a misplacement of feelings or an overreaction, or a combination of the two. It's a pretty good mindfuck, and I'm 90% sure he doesn't realize he's doing it. If it is a coping mechanism to help him deal with people who are inherently more emotional than he is, which I think it is, it's hard for me to think of a more subtly damaging one.
But I digress. Now, Dan would have to be blind, deaf, and mostly retarded not to have noticed how much I've been exercising in the last month or so, and how much I've been using the food scale for that matter. He's working his normal schedule and I'm at home, so he doesn't often see the work being done, but when he asks what I did that day, I tell him, including any exercise. So he knows. Let me relate to you a brief exchange we had (paraphrased). For reference, the cruise I refer to leaves on August 14th, and this conversation took place around July 27th or so.
Amber: I'm trying to work out and do as much as I can before the cruise.
Dan: *sour face* Isn't that kind of...like...isn't is not going to really matter? Since the cruise is so soon?
Amber: *momentary surprised silence* Yeah, well, isn't that kind of go fuck yourself?
Dan: *arches eyebrows, walks away confused*
Of course I understand what Dan is saying. My clothing size is not going to change drastically over the course of fewer than 20 days. Even if I tried some extreme diet plan and never got off the elliptical, I would still only drop like 10 pounds, which would be unhealthy for such a short amount of time (unless we're talking water weight or something). So I understand where he is coming from. Objectively, unsentimentally, technically, he makes a good point. Working out and eating right for a little over two weeks, in the long run, is not going to have a huge effect all by itself. In order to see the kind of changes I want to see, I would need to maintain this for 6 months or more, and that's just to lose the weight initially; to keep it off, I would have to incorporate many of these habits into my life everyday forever. What's 2 weeks in the scheme of forever?
What Dan didn't understand, and probably still doesn't, is that a lot of the work I've been doing recently has been mental and emotional. Getting myself into the mindset of long term health and forming healthy habits. Working on the emotional eating side of the issue and trying to extricate my biological needs/urges from things like "yay for good news, I want chocolate!" and "oh no, bad news, I want chocolate!" Making my health and wellness (which right now almost exclusively means weight loss and proper nutrition for a more active lifestyle) the first thing I think about in the morning and the last thing I think about before bed has been difficult, and it's a big change for me, and not without its challenges.
I have been, almost always successfully, fighting back against all the pessimistic, negative, hurtful things I think to myself when I think about losing weight. I'll never get to a healthy weight. My metabolism won't let that happen. If I don't start dropping pounds soon, I'm not going to have the willpower to stick with this. I'm not going to have time for this when school starts back up. Keeping "skinny clothes" around in the closet isn't a symbol of hope, it's a reminder of repeated failure. I'll never fit into that awesome bomber jacket I bought on sale despite it being a size too small. Nobody is going to want to see me in a bikini on the cruise, and I don't particularly want to be seen in one. It's so pathetic that most naturally-skinny people would cry if they had to go up to a size 10, but I've got size 10 shorts hung up as my goal. By the time I lose any significant amount of weight, assuming I do, it's going to be winter and I'll be wearing big bulky clothes anyway, so it won't mean as much to be thinner. Losing weight will mean losing boob fat, which means I'll go down a cup size; my boobs are the only thing I like about my body right now. I'm going to have to work against this my entire life, and I don't know if I can do it.
I could go on like this for pages. I know you know I could.
But when these thoughts crop up, I eat some veggies. Or put in TurboJam (I know I bring it up a lot...it really is that good. Come over sometime with your yoga pants and I'll indoctrinate you). Or write a blog post. Or meditate. Or go for a walk. Anything except put in a movie and eat junk food, which is my default response. I have been working very, very hard to identify the sources of these feelings, work through them, and find healthy responses to them. It has been incredibly challenging.
So then when Dan says what I've been trying NOT to think for the last month, it kind of fucking destroys my soul. To hear my own venomous negativity come out of his mouth, in a matter-of-fact, amused-by-my-naivete tone...it's hard to explain the effect of that. The hardest part to reconcile is that I know he wants me to be healthier. He has never been judgmental or negative about my weight in terms of attractiveness or anything (though, when I bring it up first, he does carefully say that he wants me to be a healthy weight so that I don't have a heart attack when I'm 32...at least he goes with tact on that one). He has only ever wavered between supportive-but-not-that-helpful and oblivious.
So in order to put his reaction in our conversation into the same person who wants nothing but the best for me, I have to fill in the blanks with some rather unsettling and/or disappointing assumptions. Maybe he doesn't understand that his objectivity came through as negativity. Maybe he doesn't understand that there is an emotional component to my weight. Maybe he thinks my effort is temporary (which wouldn't be unwarranted) and thinks I'm being foolish to expect results in the short term. Maybe he doesn't think I can do it. I don't know. But I don't want any of those "maybes" to be true, because none of them paint him in a particularly good light.
A more amusing but similarly demonstrative exchange occurred last night, when a friend of mine responded to my "hang out?" inquiry. He was already with another mutual friend of ours and they were planning to go out for dinner. He asked if I wanted to join, and I told him that I was trying not to go out to eat as much and that maybe we could hang out after. He said okay. After dinner, he texted me to see if I wanted to join them for JP Licks.
Sigh.
Even if I begged off earlier because of money and not nutrition, JP Licks is like the most expensive fucking ice cream around (okay, maybe not as bad as Coldstone, but at least those bitches will put a whole Kit-Kat in there). Yeah, $7 is less than I would have paid at dinner, but it's still more than I paid for the ice cream in my own freezer that I still haven't eaten. They ended up skipping JP Licks altogether (you're welcome) and coming over to hang out, but by then it was like 10pm, and my normal bedtime is between 11 and 12. Not the most comforting social experience when I'm trying to believe that my new goals won't interfere with my friendships.
While the aforementioned friends were at dinner, I expressed my sadness to Dan that all anyone ever wanted to do socially was go out to eat. He asked, again matter-of-factly, "what else is there to do?" I wanted to shake him and cry, "Are you fucking serious?!?" but I didn't want to put myself out there, not after his comment the other day. My friend Jen came over Tuesday and Thursday of this week. We went on a walk both times, did TurboJam both times, then parted so we could each rinse off the unattractive sheen of sweat we had acquired. At neither occasion did one of us suggest going out to eat. Or ordering in. Or even eating the junk food already present. To answer Dan's question, here are all the things I can think of off the top of my head that I'd like to do: go to the movies, watch a movie at home, lay on a blanket outside and read, go to the beach, go to a pool, go to an amusement park, go to a water park, go to a state park, drive someplace and look at the stars at night (I have mentioned this desire to him many times yet we have never gone; I am psyched to be able to do this in the middle of the ocean on the cruise), window shop at the mall, take a class (there are too many subjects I'm interested in to name them here), or just sit around and talk. None of these activities necessitates a meal. None. Some of them would probably last long enough that we'd have to eat, but the eating is not the center of the activity, nor is it the purpose for gathering. Yet Dan, and apparently most of my other friends, find it impossible to think of just one thing that doesn't involve shoving fried food into our faces. (And yes, it has to be junk food. If you don't already know about my weird pickiness issues, look for the next episode.)
I hesitate to talk to Dan about this for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I have great difficulty initiating uncomfortable conversations (or, at least, ones I presume will be uncomfortable) and I would honestly rather not talk about something than have a painful conversation about it. It's not a healthy way to approach communication and it's not going to strengthen our relationship by any means, but in my head, I would rather live with tension for days than have a 20-minute conversation where someone might get mad. God forbid. Additionally, I have not had mainly positive results when approaching Dan with the aforementioned types of conversations. Of course, there are many factors in this issue (the nature of the conversations being negative to begin with, how I approach Dan/how he perceives it, et al), but honestly, Dan's own communication and interrelation issues make it very difficult to approach him about things because, well, he does get mad, or at the very least, extremely defensive. He sees disagreements as things one wins or loses, not things that people work out together to a mutually satisfying conclusion. I think he is so uncomfortable with the feeling of being in the wrong (whether he is being "accused" or "blamed", or if he just feels that way) that he allows his perceptions and feelings to become tangible "evidence" that he uses to make a case for whatever we're discussing. I don't think anyone has ever accused Dan of being too ready to compromise or not interested enough in arguing, so I don't think he'd disagree with me entirely on these points.
Where was I? Ah, yes. Another reason I don't bring this shit up with him is that I worry about the fallout. I doubt anything obvious and certainly not anything disastrous would come from such conversations. But I do worry about Dan talking to me awkwardly and being unsure how to proceed, trying to insert himself into my wellness goals without really understanding them and certainly not joining them for his own health, or avoiding talking about any of it altogether in order to avoid hurting my feelings accidentally. If all my meals are designed for a specific purpose, and my activities are altered and scheduled for that same purpose, how does one have an open and communicative relationship while not incorporating the reality of those changes? It's like the Dursleys trying to talk to Harry about Hogwarts and Voldemort without mentioning magic.
Finally, and perhaps most abstractly, I worry that Dan will never really be able to get me. What I mean is that....I am, sometimes unknowingly/unwittingly, a total participant in everything around me. I empathize with people unintentionally. When I'm talking to someone (or watching someone in a movie) who's making a sad face, I make a sad face. I don't do it on purpose. I automatically put myself in that person's shoes, and then I express what I imagine they are feeling. I don't mirror their expressions; it's not quite so autistic. I'm not aping, exactly. It seems like I feel everything, I have to relate to people on that level. I've never had any difficulty taking another's perspective or imagining the reactions of others to different situations; I always do it. When I see someone ahead of me trying to get on the T and they're fumbling with their bag, trying to find their T pass, I realize that the driver must see this all the time and get annoyed that people didn't extricate their passes when they saw the T coming. I assume that they must hate it, so I do too. I do the same thing in basically every situation I'm in. It can be exhausting, but it's how I interact with the world. It's also why I cry when I watch sad movies. It's not that the situations are sad, which does pull at my heartstrings, but it's that the characters are sad. If they start to cry, I'm done for. Music does the same thing. I can be profoundly affected by music in a way that is sometimes embarrassing (if only internally, since this is not something I share often). If a singer sings a mournful tune, or even if an instrument plays something sad (in D-minor, for instance, which is the saddest of all keys), I feel that. Deeply and completely.
So interacting with Dan, who seems so numb to everything, especially compared to how I feel, is pretty challenging. Food isn't an emotional issue to him because very few things qualify as emotional issues for him. It's not that he can't feel or anything; I've seen him be sad, frustrated, joyful, excited, nervous, and all the other things one would expect to see in someone. But if his emotional state were a number line, he would rarely stray very far from the zero in the center. He is even almost all the time. I don't know if it's a strength that things don't "get to him" or if it's a weakness that he's so closed off. Maybe it's both, or neither.
But I do know that this gulf between how we each operate can make communicating about emotional issues incredibly challenging. I can't expect him to empathize with me or feel what I'm feeling, nor can he expect me to be objective or to "take myself out of the situation". I'm in it, that's the deal. It's like we're shouting at each other from two distant mountain peaks, both eager to communicate but also frustrated with the other person for not yelling loud enough.
It's hard for Dan to understand this, I think. Much like it would be hard for him to understand how a very specific moment (our conversation about my cruise-related exercise) really represents a piece of a whole host of other intertwined and messy issues that are much larger than this conversation (and yet, the conversation is still important to address specifically). I suspect it would also be hard for him to understand that this post isn't really about him. It is, but it isn't. That's why I'm not announcing this post via social networking. If someone wants to read it, that's all well and fine, but the main point of all this was the writing. The publishing gives a sense of accomplishment and purpose, yes, but frankly my darlings, this one is for me, not you.
I'm tired. It's past midnight now. Dan's already in bed, as rare as it is for him to beat me to it. I don't this post is a very good piece of writing, but I also don't think it needs to be. It was helpful to write it. I hope I still feel that in the morning.
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