On the brink of a breakthrough I grew fat with despair
A year into the ongoing tragedy of the Trump administration I had packed another fifteen pounds into my fat suit, the one I’d been working on diligently since my twenties. This is the fat suit most Americans don as they age, swapping a pound of muscle for two pounds of fat each and every year.
I felt like shit. I wasn’t sleeping sleep well, I had gastric issues, but eating three to four thousand calories a day helped stave off panic and kept my depressive mood swings barely in check. My mental state induced a suite of symptoms leading to expensive medical tests which showed nothing deeply wrong with me… besides the thing my doctor had begun to mention at my yearly checkups. I was, at 240 pounds and five foot ten and a half inches, clinically obese.
I didn’t really feel obese, though, and when I mentioned this people said I wasn’t, meaning, really only that I didn’t look morbidly obese, which is really what we commonly understand that word to mean.
I’d been a skinny kid and an average weight young man…. what happened? Was I cursed with some metabolic slowdown? Bad microbiome? Thyroid condition.
No. I ate too much. I have alcoholism in my family, but have been spared that, but food has always been my weakness. I’m a good cook… and an even better eater. I love food. All food; organic, healthy, vegetarian, vegan… and factory food, fast food, snack food, meaty and fatty food. Ethnic food from every nation. American diner fare. Crappy-crass parodies of ethnic food. Lousy New England Chinese restaurants.
Taco Bell.
Hey what about the writing?
I knew another three to seven years of this was going to kill me. I’d also realized, after publishing a dozen stories and novellas in the SF pro-press (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Interzone, FSi and others), that if I ever wanted to do this writing thing, I had to do it now. Time wasn’t on my side. I could stroke out, become demented, or die, at any minute. Of course anyone can pull a Stuart Sutcliff, but I’d reached an age when, as the late Louis CK put it, there would be no candlelight vigils at my sudden unexpected passing.
Most of the writers, artists, scientists, important people I’d read about had done their best work long before age 55. If I was ever to do anything, I’d be an outlier. Any success was growing more unlikely day by day, week by week, year by year.
The remnant of the energy and excitement at my big magazine breakthrough at age fifty was washed away by the national tragedy, and my work failing to trigger any observable, measurable change in my life. No awards, nominations, TV or movie options, no interest from agents for anthologies… all things happening to friends of mine with similar credits. I’d passed one hurdle but this proved just another milestone in a long slog that again disappeared to the vanishing point on the horizon. Still, I couldn’t stop now. I didn’t want to. I was publishing regularly in the top magazines in the field.
But I was grinding to a halt. Writing wise, I’d picked at a novella for months, while doing my usual freelance design, a little activism, a ton of Facebook Ranting, and nothing else worth mentioning.
But with the support of friends and long-suffering family I began to shakily, fitfully, pull myself out of the mire.
Pysch meds, which I had long avoided, were the first step. While I know from personal experience that pysch medication can save your life I’m agnostic about their ability to fine tune one’s mental state; chemical intervention is always a double-edged sword, and I’d hoped to treat my various borderline clinical issues in other ways.
Trump changed that, in the first months of his ‘presidency,’ while viciously attacking, debasing and insulting almost everyone who wasn’t an aging white ultra-rich guy. Non-aging-white-ultra-rich guys, IE, 99% of my friends, around me were regularly dissolving into tears, fits of screaming rage, or near catatonic despair.
I alternated between these three states myself.
As they say in the airplane safety dance, first put on your own oxygen mask, then help others paralyzed with fear.
I started reading what I have always called ‘self-help crap,’ fitfully, in an annoyed fashion. Reading the blogs, the books. Successful friends recommended to me what had helped them. I held my nose and entertained the notion that I didn’t know everything about how to live my life.
Apparently.
And I became obsessed by a recent study of meditation and its effect on the amygdala, a brain region associated with panic, depression and despair.
If you speak science-ese you can look at the study here. The TL:DR is this: A bunch of random people were given index cards with a mini-course on mindfulness meditation, and in 8 weeks, they changed the physical size of their amygdalas. In fifteen stinking minutes a day.
Not reduced electrical activity in the region. They shrank the gross physical mass of this nightmare inducing part of their goddamn brains.
They didn’t have to scale mountain tops, or learn how to speak Martian. They read a card and sat in a chair and did a certain special kind of nothing for, and yeah, I’ll say it again, fifteen lousy stinking minutes a day.
So I added meditation to the medication. And one day, while looking at myself in the mirror, I pivoted to that sideways view that is always so, so disturbing and thought to myself, grabbing the thick pad of fat that now filled out my silhouette transforming me into a barrel of man—
Fuck this. Fuck this shit. Seriously. What the fuckity-fuck. Who the fuck is that? Having just meditated, I said all this calmly without throwing things or clawing at my abundant flesh. (have I mentioned the Zen is a work in progress?)
I asked myself, ‘how did I get here?’
Letting the days go by. That’s fucking how. You fuck.
And I remembered a moment as I approached the age of thirty where I thought to myself, “Considering the alternative, I have to turn 30, but do I really need to get heavier than 200?”
I have fat friends, and I have embraced, and still do, the basic tenets of fat acceptance, that shaming and judgement of others based on weight are bullshit. I had unfriended people for preaching the gospel of universal weight-loss to some of the larger bodied friends in my feed.
But the body in the mirror didn’t look like me, to me. Nobody was giving me much shit about it; even my Doctor. The advancing case of Old I could do nothing about. But the fat? Maybe. I could get under 200 pounds again. Maybe it wasn’t going to make me healthier. Maybe it was arbitrary. Maybe it was vanity. A mountain to climb for no reason.
But to tread that lightly on the Earth again. What would that feel like?
And maybe, as another article I had read in the NYT suggested, I might reduce my chance of becoming demented by 30% if I got my waist measurement under 40 inches.
The writing thing? Same basic plan. Use a scale. Measurable goals. Read the work habits of Very Successful people. And Try. I had already set a word count goal for the year. Successful pulp writers crank out between 500,000 to a million words a year. (five to ten novels). I’d shoot for 300,000.
The mental health thing? Medication and Meditation baby. And maybe progress on the goals would help, too. My writing program, Scrivener had a word tracking system built into it.
Which was good, because I suck at data entry.
Okay, it’s worse than that. I suck at any and all forms of discipline, any and all regularity of pattern, any and all structure. In short, any time I am compelled to do anything like a metronome I feel the desire to stick it to the man, and not do the thing.
Even if I am the Man!
So I was going to have to build new habits. I’d learned that one recipe for failure is to try to turn your life around all at once. To use force of will to simultaneously tackle many weaknesses. Because you don’t have that much willpower. Trying and failing to adhere to fanciful work plans had proven that already. What I hadn’t known, until I did my reading was that nobody has that much willpower.
What successful people have is habits, cultivated over time, which they added to gradually, habit by habit. Being creatures of habit (supposedly) their ability to become ruthless self-actualizing world-beating success machines grew exponentially, as they built habits inside of habits in nested epicycles, hung habits on top of habits, and habitually kicked the sorry asses of seat-of-the-pants, winging it, late sleeping slackers like me.
Or rather people that acted the way I was acting.
How do you start? How did I start? One habit at a time, dude. With the keystone habit. The first habit. The mother of all habits. Unbeknownst to me, I’d started the work. With a pill. And an index card of meditation instructions handed to me by a scientific study via the NYT. With a selfish grasp of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as illustrated by the Airline Safety Dance.
Put your oxygen mask on first.
Build a better life one habit at a time.
Start at the bottom of the pyramid… and work you way up.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Gamifying Everything: On Becoming a Cyborg and the Quantified Self
