You're an actor who doesn't like the
way he looks. This means you've got some work to do.
You start with a cup of coffee and
probably the news and thus probably some rage and after a few minutes
of that, you put on some music and step away from the computer. You
can't get enough summer jams and girly pop lately – you're into
autotune, into synthetic drums, into treacly lyrics about modern
western courtship rituals. Twenty year old you would be ashamed but
twenty year old you wasn't any fun. These Ke$ha songs are fantastic
and that's why millions of people love them. Do some yoga.
Your room is small but arranged in a
clever fashion. You have exactly enough floor space to lay your body
flat and expand at least partway. Therefore, you have enough space
to change your body. The window stays open because it gets too hot
otherwise and if the neighborhood doesn't like Ke$ha there's only so
much to be done because you're pretty sure she's helping save your
life right now. You do a sun salutation and thread in some extra
poses where they fit. If you skip a day, your back and legs will
complain of that now. You stretch slow and listen to your limbs and,
in time, they settle down and straighten out. There's a Robbie Fulks
song on now. It isn't a summer jam but it is about courtship rituals
and the fiddling is just wonderful. Do some cardio.
This shit is the worst because it
involves sweat and when there's too much sweat on you, you're at risk
of feeling here in your room the way you often feel about your body
out there in the reality. Too much fat clings to it, hangs off of it,
jiggles around it. It fucks up your shape and the way your clothes
fit and makes it harder to move through the world. Your body has
converted a lifetime of poor dietary choices into a surplus of this
squishy, useless flesh that no one, you most of all, ever wants to
touch or look at. When you move your body, it converts this fat and
this fear into sweat and those first few moments of it running all
over you can lead to despair because you're skinned in this liquid
reminder of how far you have to go.
When a fellow is round and sweaty on
TV, he is never the hero. He is some jerkoff that's in over his head
and probably fucking up. His absurd corpulence is there to provide
contrast for the hero's square jaw and flat stomach. The upshot is
that he usually gets funnier lines. It's the whole Falstaff thing and
you hate your place in that equation like poison. You're beyond tired
of being a chubby goofball for anyone. You're a comedian but you hate
being the punchline.
Anyhow, sometimes you do some burpees
til you heart pounds then you go just a little longer. More often,
you just dance around to whatever dumb shit your Grooveshark station
feeds you. This is less efficient than the burpees but you seem to
stop hating yourself and start having fun much quicker this way. A
day may come when you dance this freely in public, around people
even. Not in 2013, obviously, but maybe once the rest of this gut is
gone and you're sure you won't be the spectacle of the dancing slob.
For now, do some strength training.
You like this part a lot. The same
genetics that make you so apt to gather fat also mean you build
muscle like a maniac if your body is given the proper inputs. You can
input fifty pushups like it's nothing nowadays, so long as you divide
it into two sets. Fifty is your minimum - you stop counting when you hit it and just concentrate on completing the motion over and over.
Likewise situps – you don't count these at all anymore, you just go
for a couple songs or until your upper abs finally get tired. Then
it's leg lifts or pullups or squats or planks or some compound motion
like that. The only weights you own are these little twenty pound
dumbbells that you don't use anymore because they really only get the
arms and buddy, you've got problems all over. The upshot of being
heavy is that your body itself is a challenging weight to lift and if
you lift it and resist it enough, some of that fat weight becomes
muscle weight and thus helps you hoist the rest of it. Sometimes,
while doing plank or pushups, you'll look down and see your gut and
hairy man tits hanging off you. They're all smaller than they used to
be and beneath them, you can see the shape you want to take beginning
to form. Nonetheless, you do a lot of this strength training with
your eyes closed. When your form or endurance begins to falter, you
picture Kirby Crackle enveloping your arms, legs, hips and spine to
pull you back into alignment. You imagine the life of a loved one
depending on the completion of the set you're on. This usually does
the trick.
Some days you finish all your sets and
do a little extra on account of being so jacked up. Your Grooveshark
feed is easily 75% funk and soul which, combined with testosterone
and endorphins, makes you feel like you're made of light and sexy
saxophone. Other days you do most of your sets but get tired or bored
or distracted and wander away. Yet other days there's too much shit
to handle and not enough time so you try to at least walk up some
steep hills inbetween errands and and appointments. When feeling
especially ambitious and powerful, you take these hills at a sprint
and imagine the Crackle propelling each stride.
You eat lean protein cooked in coconut
oil. You eat salad and make your own vinaigrette because the stuff at
the store is just a bunch of corn derivatives mixed up in a bottle.
Last time you checked labels, the phrase “maltodextrin suck my
dick” came flying out of your mouth before you knew you were
getting upset. Cargill and ConAgra and Anheiser-Busch and Yum Brands
and Pepsico and Mars and Hershey and Monsanto and all those evil
fucks have been attacking your mind, body and soul from birth. Sugar
and pleasure and reward are powerfully bound in your brain – the
knotwork of synapses began tangling when you were still very small,
when colorful cartoon characters offered you salts and sweets and you
would get so angry at your parents for protecting you from these
treats. General Mills sent Lucky the Leprechaun and Captain Crunch to
turn you against your parents and since you were a toddler who didn't
understand what these multinationals were up to, you fell into the
trap and played along. You grew up a fat kid and assumed that
everyone hated you for it. Today you know that your parents love you
and that Monsanto recently began working closely with Acadami,
formerly known as Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, which is
a company that fields armies of killers for money. The thought makes
you want to do more pushups for some reason.
You avoid beer and bread. You try to
eat almonds instead of salty stuff and fruits instead of candy. Your
ice cream habit is still pretty bad but it's the last bad habit you
haven't trimmed back yet. The clothes you wore on a different body
look absurd on this one so you bought a new wardrobe, almost all of
it in black. The image in the mirror is changing – you can tell
because you're not blind and looking right at it. Your jaw is
squaring up, your shoulders expanding, your man boobs now B cups at
worst. You know this because you can look right at it and compare it
to photographic evidence from before you started your program. The
image in the mirror is different. The image in your mind has barely
changed at all. When you're out dealing with the world and lack the
psychic resources to keep your brain attuned to reality, you default
back to this idea of yourself as a big sweaty bag of fat and shit and
gross. You still feel like apologizing to everyone who has to look at
you. Your reflexive posture is still that of someone trying to hide
his squishy middle. You know that your body has changed but you also
know that when women talk of the men who catch their eye, those guys
never, ever, ever look like you. If you stay on your program though,
someday you might look like those guys.
Courtship anxiety is of course a
terrible driver for a health program so you try not to think about that stuff too
much. There was a time not so long ago where you had to get damn near
black out drunk to not know or not care that you were really gross.
You can still remember one such night more than ten years gone when a
woman you knew tried to introduce you to a friend of hers and before
you could say a word, her friend made a face and a noise and walked
away. It made you feel the way those games of “You Germs” tag did
back in grade school. You can't remember a year or even a week of
your life without that feeling but you do pretty good at evading and
managing it nowadays. You don't think about dating or intimacy very
much because your job and your art are vast enough to fill your whole
head up if you let them. You hate being looked at or photographed but
you love being in plays and doing standup comedy. You love putting on
shows. It doesn't make any damned sense but you're going with it in
the same way a drowning man will lunge for even the illusion dry
land. Keep this up and you might survive.
Seven months ago you realized you were
dying and were paying corporations for the privilege. The booze and
the food were killing you and you were broke because you thought you
needed them. And of course, the drinking you did because you were ashamed of being fat was in part keeping you fat which is just fucking perfect, right? Seven months ago you decided to try something other than
slow, pathetic death. You're close to escaping now, closer than
you've ever been. You like when people notice but you don't like to
talk about it too much because you've been close before and you don't
want to jinx it this time. You're in your thirties and might not have
another chance to escape if you don't seize this one.
You didn't have comedy and theater
helping you last time you got close, you had mere health and courtship
anxiety. Not enough to do the job, turns out. Now part of you thinks
that Shakespeare is counting on your strong quads and it's working so
you don't question it. In the real world you disgust yourself but
you've played characters who thought they looked okay. You've played
characters who have flirted as if it could go somewhere; you've
played characters who don't mind taking off their shirt somewhere
they might be seen. You've played with the concept of being
acceptable and attractive in imaginary – that is to say, safe –
settings and some of that seems to have bled into your real life.
You've accepted that the training of your mind will lag behind the
training of your body but you know that it can be trained.
You don't try to bury the way you feel
under food or drown it in booze anymore. Indeed, you can't recall the
appeal of drinking yourself blind or eating yourself sick any longer.
It stopped making sense and you thank god for that. These thoughts,
these ideas that have been with you for decades, you know them now
for the injuries they are. You train against them sure as you train
against the stiffness of your limbs, with patience and resolve. You
like being strong for its own sake – to leap, to climb, to smash!
It feels good to know you can lift most stuff; it changes the way you
move through the world. You know that this feeling isn't available to
everyone and you try to live in awareness of that.
You had to drop off the face of the
earth for awhile to get this ball rolling. When you run into friends,
they ask what you've been up to and you give a glib answer (“living
the dream!” or something equally dumb) because the real answer is
not compatible with small talk. The real answer is that you're
spending part of every day making art and teaching yourself a new
idea of yourself. You're learning to like you and everything is
changing because of that. You don't know why it's working but for now
it's enough to know that it is.
Thank you Morgan. As a person of girth, you have moved and inspired me. I also know this takes courage to post. So thank you.
ReplyDeleteWell said, Morgan. You've always been an amazing writer; adding this pinch of realistic vulnerability in there makes your writing that much easier to identify with. More, please!
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has loved you just the way you are, don't be so hard on yourself. Make yourself healthy, strong and happy but realize that you are already amazing. You are sweet, funny and kind ....and a man that can talk heartfelt about body issues and stand up for Planned Parenthood, you're a catch! Any woman that can't see that doesn't deserve you.
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