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As a longtime writer, author, poet, editor and publisher, and at the age of 55 I’d say I’m basically happy with who I am, or at least content with my lot in life. I’ve had a lot of bad luck in life, a lot of chaos, painful loss and heartache, but I’ve also created my own luck, which I could say has been partly good, simply due to my own ambition and hard work. None of us are ever where we want to be though, are we? No matter the age, we often strive to better ourselves and transform into the butterfly we hope we can become, evolving from the tender and defenseless Chrysalis, the “quiescent insect pupa” of our beginnings into something grander, and more noticeable, perhaps even beautiful.
But when your hair gets as silver as mine has, you sometimes have to start facing things you have been avoiding for decades. I read a great article from a Medium writer named Khadejah Jones and it got me thinking about how we assign blame for innocuous reasons, when we shouldn’t, blaming others, even entire segments of society, when we should be looking at ourselves instead of searching out convenient scape goats to lay the blame on. I’ve done this many times in my life and after reading Khadejah’s article, I realized that I need to look deeper when assigning blame, looking more at circumstances and how they have impacted me, particularly trauma I survived as a child.
Looking back on my life, I can say that a history of sexual abuse as a child has made me feel afraid, almost all of the time in my life, though for years I never honestly accepted or understood this was how I was reacting to the daily pressures of being alive. If you asked me if I was afraid, I’d laugh and tell you that nothing scares me. But that’s not true, for one simple reason. I weigh well over 200 pounds and have for the better part of 25 years. I’ve also learned that approximately 40 percent of women who were sexually abused as children weigh over 200 pounds.
As I got older, I’d say when I turned 25 that was the year I began to slowly gain weight, and despite having been a string bean as a child and teenager, I really didn’t’ seem to mind that I was getting fat. It just didn’t seem to bother me.
People would always say, “But you have such a pretty face!” I can’t recall how many times I heard that. Obviously, I’m not a great beauty but it is what people would say. And so I just let it happen. I didn’t necessarily overeat, I never binged in any way, but I did eat later than I should, late at night and I didn’t pursue any form of physical activity after about the age of 20. I’d been involved in ballet for many years and came really close to going professional but I allowed myself to slowly fall out of ballet. I focused on other things, namely two marriages and then the birth of my daughter.
Taking care of others became my focus and trying to create the perfect family. But that is a much harder thing to create and maintain than most people know. In fact, its almost next to impossible. Even after my second divorce, I didn’t want to face the reality that I was using my weight as armor.
It wasn’t until I got together with my third husband, Don, who is also a writer and author, (and much older than I am) that I even considered how I wear my weight as armor, but that’s how he put it when he told me once, in a very kindly way and without any condemnation at all: “I know you wear your weight as armor.” When he said the words, it was like a cliché how the light went off in my head.
Armor. I wear my weight as armor.
I wish I could release my fear of being small, of being thin again, like I used to be, but its not so easy. I wish I could release it like so many small birds released from captivity, but understanding something on an intellectual level is not the same as understanding something emotionally.
The difference now is that I’m 55 and I can feel myself slowing down significantly. I’ve been feeling that sensation for years in fact, since I turned 40 and it only gets stronger as I age. I can feel how time and the bodies physical decay slowly leave their indelible imprint on my body and my sense of personal safety for the simple reason that I just can’t do the things I used to be able to do.
As my mother likes to joke: “Ain’t none of us gettin’ outa here alive!” and while I can accept that death is what we all face, and is the inevitable conclusion to all our lives, I also see that I do have considerable time left and that I must change. I must change the way I’m living and slowly try to come back to physical strength, like when I was a teenager and running around the ballet studio at 125 pounds, so young, so determined, like the Energizer Bunny, with the switch turned ON and going at Full Blast.
There will never be another Full Blast for me again. I’m 55 and I must accept that, but I can change my life, I just have to do those things that will help me achieve real transformative change. I am a work in progress and with hope, maybe I’ll be able to do it. Realizing that my body has now become a prison, I hope to recreate that prison into something else and step out of the confines of what I allowed my body to morph into — armor.
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