Journeying back

Writing here about this part of my life might be new, but I have been doing the yo-yo dance of diets and exercise for quite some time. Previously, I had catalogued some of this stuff over at PeerTrainer, which was an awesome place to get some community support, though that part of it eventually took up too much time to be useful. But I do have archived food and exercise logs there, going back to 2006!

It would be nice to travel back to 2006. Back then, I was training intensely to be on a roller derby team. I was down to 172 pounds, but man was I working hard for it! Not only was I walking a lot during my daily commute (1 mile plus a million stairs), but I was going to the gym at least three times a week for cardio work, doing Eight Minutes in the Morning for core strength plus 90 crunches, and going for long walks after dinner with my sweetie. All that PLUS two team practices every week, which was over two hours of intense skating drills for endurance, skills and strength. No wonder the pounds were dropping off each week!

But isn’t it funny how even with all that weight loss, I still didn’t think it was real? My instinct now is to say that my analog scale must have been wildly inaccurate. But is that true? The real problem is that my mental image of myself is so fixed that I don’t think I look that different today at 212 lbs than I did back then at 172. I was just as unhappy about how my body looked back then; even though I was incredibly proud of my muscles, I felt all my wobbly bits were just as wobbly. To my mind, even at a lower weight, I’m still the same: I have always worn fat pants. I have always disliked my arms. I have always had this belly that gets in my way, and these thighs that rub together when I walk. I have never been able to cross my legs comfortably.

Here’s another key part of that sad litany: I never got that good at rollerskating.

The awesome time I spent training with the roller derby team was cut short by a really bad ankle break and surgery, forcing me to spend all summer in bed and a whole year recovering the strength to walk. Well, at least, that’s the simple version of that story. The more honest version of that story is that my self-esteem was still so fragile back then. I didn’t even think of it as a problem. But it created so many problems, after that one simple injury.

When I was carried out of roller derby practice on a stretcher that fateful afternoon, I was in such intense pain and shock from my broken ankle but I waved to my teammates like a beauty queen, smiling at them. They cheered me on. My captains visited me in the hospital and brought flowers. And I was determined to put on a brave face. It was only later, when the reality of my injury set in, that I started to break myself down in retrospect, blaming myself for the injury, blaming the team leaders for not protecting me, feeling stupid and alone and vulnerable, hating acquaintances for offering support, miserable from the pain and the immobility all summer long, and my hobbled attempts to walk all that next year. I stayed away from roller derby like the plague. I told myself they didn’t want me, they were glad to get rid of me, and they didn’t understand my injury at all. I completely erased myself from the team, the better to pretend I had never tried at all, I thought. I berated myself internally for having the audacity to be a moving, happy, experimenting human being. I let my lack of skating skill stand in for a lack of worthiness – even though I was a complete beginner! With potential! Picking up new skills quickly! I let my one mistake, my one wrong turn that led to a bad injury, become symbolic of what I felt was an essentially flawed self, who had been justly and severely punished for daring to aim high.

What I had really done was to punish myself for being happy. I didn’t get injured because I was stupid, and my injury didn’t damn me to some eternal hell of unhappy Never To Skate Or Dare Again, though I let it do that for a long time.

Before my injury, I was training to do full pushups! I wore a skirt to work one day and my thighs didn’t rub together. I learned to do crossovers and turning toe stops the week before my injury! I had not remembered this stuff at all, until I re-read it in my old logs. I was happy, positive, sweaty and alive. But having zero self-esteem, I thought I deserved my accidental injury, and I broke down all my memories to convince myself I had never made any progress.

I remember feeling very resentful of the world when I was injured, because I didn’t think anybody understood how bad it was, how much pain I went through, how it complicated even the simplest things in my life. But the real problem was that no one understood how this injury had laid bare all my hatred for myself, all my self-recriminations and anger and vulnerabilities. I wasn’t just caring for a healing ankle, I was trying to live through a crisis of spirit. I truly believed I had been stupid, that it had been my fault. That one injury allowed me to unleash my worst feelings toward myself, and that is what made everything truly difficult. Not the crutches, but the feeling that people were justified in ignoring me and not holding the door open. Not the swelling in my leg, but the feeling that I was so ugly that everybody would be disgusted if they knew. Not the physical immobility, but the fact that I was stuck inside my own head, and I didn’t like what I saw.

I want to say that two and a half years later, I have climbed out of that internal darkness, but it is still something I struggle with. The simplest explanation is that I gained weight last year because I couldn’t exercise due to injury, and I was in graduate school so I couldn’t devote a lot of time or energy to eating healthy. But the truth is that I was also struggling with a deep void within myself, and I was covering over that void with class work and good grades and planning for life after graduation.

I don’t want to be driven by fear or boredom, and I don’t want to build a “happy” body that is incapable of sustaining emotional setbacks. It’s tricky when self-love and weight loss are so closely tied together. The steps I’m taking today don’t feel radically different from before, but I suppose they are animated by more love, a greater desire to be out in the world and see things, by the knowledge that loving myself allows me to love the world. It’s a lesson to me that I am so shocked to re-read of my successes in roller skating before my injury, just as it is shocking to see old pictures of myself in which I look downright cute (when I know for a fact I hated my body back then). If I can’t love myself, it won’t matter how much energy I put into losing weight – because it won’t feel good and I won’t sustain healthy habits if they’re not rooted in something much, much bigger and deeper than simple numbers.