I stepped on the scale Friday morning and found I’m twenty-five pounds down in two months. Congratulations to me. Not eating the prior forty-eight hours may have contributed to the number on the scale, but that was just a one-off thing. The weight loss is very noticeable to me now. Even though I need a few more pounds to make it out of the 200s, this is still a good chunk of weight off the human body. I want to keep losing, and I have every intention of making that happen. I’m tired of the moments where it’s uncomfortable to sit, or feeling far too lumpy in clothes. It’s fine, though. I’ve recently ‘tried’ enough ‘normal’ foods to know that I just cannot tolerate them right now. I can’t even eat bread, one of my favorite things ever. Everything but meat tastes like synthetic chemicals to me. Once in a while I can pick at a french fry, or nibble on a piece of lettuce. But on the whole, it’s meat or bust for me. Condiments are fine, and I can keep trying to tolerate eggs, but the point is what I’m doing is working. And for the first time in my life, there’s no end to any of it. It’s just how it’s going to be until it’s not.
One thing I did not anticipate was losing my ass in the process.
That day, I was spinning. My stomach hurt, I couldn’t keep food down, and my thoughts were all over the place. I was at the point of speaking out loud to myself, trying to find reassurance, working through something as I took inventory of what I had left. And at that moment, I was focusing on my figure. I told myself not to worry; that I was still beautiful and had a lot going for me. And the weight loss was helping. My face was slimmer, my stomach was flatter, my tiny waist was finally being emphasized, sitting above my ever-increasing flared hips, that if I turn around will lead way to…
Lo and behold, there it was (or wasn’t). I spun around to find my hindquarters were flatter than ever before. And I could do nothing but laugh and laugh my ass off.
This new derrière development can be chalked up to a number of things. Weight loss, yes. But I live a sedentary life. I’m constantly sitting; at work, at home, while eating, on the computer, on my laptop, in a park, at a cafe, on my roof deck. I just go from one place to another, finding new places to sit and write. Until I go horizontal, on the bed or the couch, the only exercise my butt is getting is spreading further into each seat I occupy. I’ll mention here that I’m not working out regularly, even though I pay eight dollars a week for the privilege of using the gym at work. I’ll go when my girlfriends there want to, but we’re all a little lazy after our morning shifts. And I feel I’ve been the biggest lump of all, as evidenced by my newly-flattened lady hump.
If I may say, it’s somewhat understandable, especially for this month. I’ve been putting a lot of my time into NaNoWriMo while maintaining the daunting task of producing news five days a week. I’m typing a lot of different things every day, trying not to strain my eyes while doing so. I’m in the market for some blue light glasses if you’ve got recommendations. And all the while I’ve got to sit to do it. No fancy custom standing desk for this girl yet. Still, here I am, thirty two-thousand words later, staying on track to complete my monthly goal. If I can incorporate a ten-minute ass workout into my day, I’d be on Easy Street, and at least I’ll have something to swing as I walk.
But that’s not what’s happening at this juncture in my life. Over the last few days, my thoughts over certain circumstances have been vacillating between bewilderment and utter revulsion. My body has been physically reacting to things in ways that surprised even me. All day Saturday, I remained in the dark. I shut all the blinds and acted like the sun did not rise that day. And while my apartment doesn’t get great natural light to begin with, something was telling me I didn’t “deserve” to see it regardless. I still kept a light on while writing all day, and I’m glad I got to experience whatever mood I was after. However, I do know that brooding too long about what’s in the past can sometimes cause me to do harmful things in the present, as evidenced by not eating, staying out of the sun, and frying my brain into oblivion.
Still, my ass made my ass laugh. It was just pure, unadulterated evidence that I’ve got to make a big change, and fast. I’m a proportional hourglass-shaped woman, dammit. It’s my duty and my right to maintain this figure to its fullest potential. And I cannot do that if I’m focused on all I’ve been forced to leave in the past as of late. It may have been the right thing to do, but it doesn’t mean all body parts came out of it unscathed. Right now, my heart is just too raw to pick up and carry with me. It’ll get there. It just needs some time to heal, now that I know the real story here, and have seen just how much of an ass some people can truly be.
I don’t really know what the future holds for me at this point. I’m less than six months away from turning thirty-seven, and I see nothing on the horizon after that. It’s like I can’t picture a life, it all just feels so blank and cold. And the ideas I’ve had lately are so mean and selfish that surely they deserve to end in a spanking. But I’ll get over that. It’s just all part of the brooding process. If in six months I’m still in denial, I’ll kick my own ass just to prove a point.
Instead, all I’m doing is wishing for the right things to happen. I just want wherever God said our lives would take us to be the place we all end up. And the only way I know how to get there at this juncture is through my words. They’re the only truth I know right now, as they always come from a place deep within me. And now, more than ever, I know that I’m never going to stop sharing them. This is what I’ll be doing long into my sixties, and if I’m lucky, well beyond that. It’s all I want to do. It’s all I’m going to do. And it’s got to be the new thing I build this life around. Because what I was hoping for has not come to pass. Therefore, I must put it behind me. But I can take all I want and learned from it, and keep writing about it to you and all who read it. Putting them out to the world in any way that I can is enough to keep the magic alive. To crack open all that goes on in every corner of my body, making it tangible enough for you to know what I’m thinking. There’s no end to this either, just like eating meat, or working on exercising my slab o’ meat.
I’m working on another writing challenge for the last month of the year. It’s My December to Remember Part II. Working title, haven’t solidified the rules yet. But it’ll be an echo of my daily entries from last year. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be coming off another writing challenge that has so far proven there’s no such thing as “too much writing.” And I think that by doing all this, I’ll be able to really turn it around going into the new year. The uphill climb is not always going to be easy. I’ll fail sometimes, just like I’ve gone a day or two this month without fulfilling my daily word quota. I shake it off, I start again. It’s all I can do at this point, really. I just have to keep going, since I was the only one who ended up choosing me.
It’s fine. It’s all fine. This is just the track I chose, I suppose. I’ve already got a lot on the agenda for the new year. Nothing is over, I’m just sitting this one out for now. Thankfully I’ll be productive at the same time. My words are my ticket out of here, with the potential to lead me somewhere new. Because what was old just wasn’t working. I can see that now. There’s nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t have a seat at this present table.
And so behind me it all goes, to be left alone until the time comes to pick it up again, whether in this life or the next. No hard feelings. Either way, I’m sure it’s meant to happen one of these days. In fact, I’d bet my bottom dollar on it.
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