Forty-six

I decided to turn 46 today. And, honestly, I’m having a bit of a hard time with this one. I’m not sure why really – there is nothing particularly significant about this age for me. Maybe it’s the fact that in the last two weeks I’ve been affected by no less than four deaths (three patients at work [two were mostly expected], and one, a colleague that I admired, which was very much unexpected). But even without that, ever since the Winter Solstice on December 21, 2023 (oh wow, exactly 1 month ago!), I have felt the need to withdraw, to be introspective, to hibernate essentially. Not in a “feeling the blues” kind of way, but more of a feeling the need to protect myself in some way. Protect myself from what, I couldn’t tell you. It feels more like the need to wrap myself up in a safe cocoon and turn inward – to give myself the time, space, and energy to examine what’s there and to decide how I want to move forward with my life.

I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern. My job is going well. I think I’m fairly good at what I do and I’m happy when I can be there for someone, or be a kind, listening ear, or just brighten their day with a smile. I have not been dating, nor wanting to date, but yes, feeling the sting of loneliness. I haven’t been exercising since last October and I feel the weight I’ve put back on, which makes me sad sometimes. I haven’t been writing or painting or photographing or really pursuing anything creative. I’ve been busy though. I don’t really know what all I’ve been busy with, it just seems to ebb and flow, you know? Probably lots more T.V. than I should admit to watching. I don’t have a bad life. I actually recognize – and I’m grateful every day – for the good life that I have.

But I also just feel like I’m not really living either. I don’t know if that makes sense. I keep asking myself what I’m working toward in life; what I want out of life; what do I want to accomplish; what do I want to be? These questions have been consuming me lately, because I don’t know how to answer them.

If you had asked me when I was 16 what I wanted my life to be like at 46, I might have said the following: “I want to be thin, married, have some kids, have a good job, live in a good ward with a good calling.” You know – the plan! Growing up there was only ever one plan. There was only one path. It was clear that this one way was also the only RIGHT way – anything else, anything that deviated from that in even the slightest way was wrong, and the type of wrong that borders on sin. But I didn’t need to worry about that because I wanted “the plan” right? That’s all I’ve ever wanted, was that plan - to fit in; to be normal; to be like everyone else.

And yet…

I’ve had something inside of me that’s haunted me since I was young, as young as 6. And believe it or not, I’m not talking about being gay. Of course, that plays into it, but there is one struggle that I’ve had throughout my life, that in all honesty, and just for me personally, rivals the excruciating experience of growing up a “closeted gay” in the LDS faith – being fat.

You see, what church gave me was something clear, and something simple – the plan. Grow up, go on a mission, get married, have kids, be a productive, good member of society and serve others. Simple, right? And in a way, this plan gave me a direction so that I no longer really had to think for myself. The plan was laid out and I didn’t have to think too much about it – I just had to follow it. I was promised, in fact, that if I did follow it, that everything would be okay – that all my problems would be addressed, that all my challenges/obstacles would be removed, that I would receive miracles that would change my heart and mind, and a myriad of other promises. I was taught, that when something is right, God prepares a way, he lightens burdens, he makes things possible, and he makes them easy – that’s how you know they are the right things to do.

You might imagine my confusion then, when going to the temple, going on a mission, following the counsel of my priesthood leaders, etc., did not yield the results – the miracles – I was asking for and was told I would receive. I remained fat, ugly, disgusting, unwanted, repulsive, weak, pitied, looked down on, dismissed, devalued, etc. (and yes, gay).

I was 6 years old when I knew that I was fat and that being fat is bad. I still remember the experience, which I won’t relate here. This was also the age where I was molested for the first time (that I can recall, anyway), but I don’t remember how closely these two experiences occurred, though it makes sense that I might feel more self-directed body hatred after having my body violated. In any case, as I say, I knew I was fat and that being fat was bad. From that moment on, I just wanted to be thin, to be normal, to be like everyone else so that I could fit in and be a part of things, and not singled out and picked on as something detestable, gross, unwanted, ridiculed, and unworthy.

So, I prayed. And I promised God that I would be so, so good - perfect even, if that’s what it took, so that I could be worthy of this blessing. This blessing that never came.

Consequently, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up or what I wanted out of life – I dutifully recited “the plan.” That was after all the only acceptable answer they wanted – whether they voiced that expectation or not. And I said it for so long that I fully believed it myself. But there was also another want there, a deeper want. One that I didn’t think was as acceptable an answer, because compared to “the plan,” this desire of mine was superficial, selfish, vain, prideful, etc. This desire to be thin wasn’t ever really about a bodyfat percentage, mind you. It was about what “being thin” means. It means, being approved of. It means being acceptable to everyone. It means being wanted or desired. It means being attractive and confident. It means being included and being valued. It means being seen as a person worthy of love. But superficial because I also just wanted to be, like, super hot, you know? Hahaha! (*rolls eyes, shrugs shoulders, sighs...*)

Looking back, coming home from my mission and going to college were probably more significant turning points than I realized. Even though I was working my way through “the plan,” suddenly, there were parts of this plan that weren’t established. Yes, get an education and a good job, but a good job doing what? Suddenly there were all these choices that were up to me that I didn’t have “a plan” for. What DO I want to do for work or a career? What are my interests? What do I really want to do?

And I didn’t know, because I had never thought about it. And I never thought about it, because all I could think about was how I wanted to be thin.

Sure, I have a million different interests: writing, photography, cooking, hiking, drawing/painting, music/singing, life sciences – biology, anatomy/physiology, botany, astronomy, etc. But do I love any of those “interests” enough to turn them into a career? Every time I tried something, I found that the answer was, “no, not really.” And to a much greater “unconscious” degree it didn’t really matter what I did - as long as I was thin doing it. Because the reality for me is that anything else I may have wanted didn’t really matter as much as the desire to be thin.

I know, I know – I mean, to hear me talk about it this way makes it sound like I would have put all my heart and soul into making weight loss happen, right? But I couldn’t because, for one, it wasn’t part of “the plan.” The plan doesn’t say you need to be thin to get to the celestial kingdom. So I was left feeling that this one thing, this one important, all encompassing thing to me, was something that I shouldn’t want. And because I tried to be so good, I tried in fact to be perfect, but still didn’t warrant this blessing, I felt that this was God’s way of saying, “no, I’m not going to grant this to you because you don’t deserve it.” And that’s what I’ve believed my whole life – that as much as I wanted thinness (and everything that comes with it), I just didn’t deserve it.

Surely, if I had deserved it, I would either have it as a natural condition (like most everyone else around me it seemed); or I would have been given that condition as a reward for my faithfulness. And not only that – and this point is critically important – but to really have been worthy of it would mean that I had obtained it “easily!” Because, after all, in my spiritual arithmetic, God’s blessings (i.e., his approval) make obtaining blessings easy.

Consequently, I also learned the inverse of this rule – that if good things are easy, then bad things are hard.

Have you ever tried to lose 100 pounds before? Guess what? It’s hard. It’s really, super, f******g, agonizingly hard. Which meant that – because it was so hard – that it wasn’t right for me to achieve. I could WANT it, sure, and I absolutely wanted it, as I said, because of all the desirable things that come with it, but to actually HAVE it? No way. It’s hard, so it must be wrong. It’s hard, so it must not be what God wants for me; it’s not what He thinks I’m worthy or deserving of. If it were, He would have made it easy. Do you see the confusing loop I’ve spent my life in? And most likely why I still feel like I’m spinning my wheels now?

I can see now that my rules (easy=good/hard=bad) were flawed, but I’ve been conditioning my brain with these beliefs for 46 f*****g years!! I have made this my default setting. This is just how I approach life; and no wonder I feel stuck, stagnant, and busy but with no real purpose.

Letting go...

Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash

I’m scared, I guess. I’m scared to change – I know I need to; I know it will be good to; but I’m scared. I’ve lived my whole life doing what’s “easy” because I thought it was the right thing to do. Facing the prospect of now needing to do hard things challenges every core belief I’ve had ingrained in me for as long as I can remember.

Ugh, the irony, right? Just facing that I need to do hard things is the hardest thing of all! Laaaaaaaammmme!

But letting go of old, ingrained beliefs – even when I know it’s the right thing to do – is still undeniably hard. And I even feel a bit of some shame and embarrassment that it’s taken me 46 years to figure this out.

You know, it’s strange. When I look back over the last 46 years, I reflect on all the hard things I’ve experienced – and I’ve experienced some really hard things (for me personally, I’m not trying to compare to anyone else or win the “who has the worst life award” here!!). But those hard experiences seem to fall into one of two categories: 1 – victimhood; i.e., that the hard things I’ve been through were hard things that were done TO ME; or 2 – expectations; i.e., that the hard things I did do were expectations from being part of “the plan.” For example, going on a mission, or going back to school to get a Master’s degree, which was extremely hard, but because “getting a good job” was part of “the plan,” I didn’t stop to question it.

But now I need to focus on letting go. As hard as it will be. I need to let go of the belief that hard equals bad. I need to let go of the need to be perfect in order to somehow “earn” thinness (approval, love, etc.). I need to know, learn, and accept that sometimes, good things are hard – even really hard, and that’s okay. I also need to acknowledge that sometimes things are good even when they are hard and even when they don’t seem to be a part of “the plan.”

I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life. No matter what I decide, I do still want to be thin doing it. That desire has never gone away, right or wrong. Maybe my journey to find fat loss, weight loss, health, etc. is the training ground I’ve needed in order to challenge my beliefs about things being hard. Maybe, for me personally, and for whatever reason, this is the best condition for me to learn that I can do hard things, that sometimes hard things are good and that I can finally, perhaps, grow into the man I want to become, some day. I don’t know, maybe ask me again when I’m 76…

Why It Was Good To Hate Myself

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I eat. Weird, I know, but just go with me on this. I have a history of emotional eating/food addiction and binge eating. I recently had a relapse into this behavior and I kept asking myself why.

A conversation that basically went something like this:
“Micah, why are you eating crap when you know it makes you feel shitty and you’re only going to regret it? Why are you doing this to yourself? No one is forcing you to eat this way; this is coming from you. Why do you eat like someone who hates himself?”

And my reply was simple, “because I do hate myself.”

“Is that true?” I asked myself in genuine surprise. “Do you really hate yourself? You’ve been doing so much work on self-acceptance; loving and accepting yourself for who you are. Hasn’t that meant anything? Haven’t you learned anything from all that work? How can you still hate yourself?”

It took some time to answer this question, but I was finally able to answer it: “Because hating myself is the only way to be right.”

It has taken me some time to unpack the idea of what “being right” in this context means and it’s not any one thing, but a combination of things.

First, as an overweight kid I experienced a lot of rejection. I was hurt and betrayed practically on a daily basis. And then I realized something. Rather than waiting for people to make fun of me (and I knew they would), I would beat them to the punch and make fun of myself. And guess what? It worked! It was almost as if everyone was saying, “oh hey, we don’t have to make fun of him (as much), because he’ll do it himself.” And while the teasing didn’t end, it changed the way people reacted to me. Suddenly, people were laughing “with” me and I actually felt like I was getting along with people. Putting myself down, i.e., learning to hate myself, made other people “like” me. I learned that people like you better when you hate yourself. Therefore, hating myself was the right thing to do to have friends.

Second, I never felt like I was good enough to warrant my parent’s time or affection. I’ve blogged about all this before, so it’s pointless to hash it all out here again, but just to apply this to my current topic… People who are worthless don’t “deserve” their parent’s time and affection. Since I didn’t deserve my parent’s time and affection, I felt worthless. The only thing you can do with something worthless is to hate it, ergo, it’s “right” to hate worthless things.

Third, I thought the only way for me to be "right" before God was to hate myself. I believed that self-hatred was essentially the same as humility. Or, in other words, being humble by acknowledging my worthlessness before Him was the only way to be "right" before Him. Also, I was afraid of God’s punishment just for being me. (And YES, being a “gay Mormon” has everything to do with this, but that is a huge topic and a whole other blog post!!) I thought that if I could punish myself enough, then He would have compassion on me and not punish me Himself. It’s ironic. My whole life I have professed to know God as a loving Father, and yet, here I am believing that He only wants to punish me.

In every case, hating myself felt right because it was reliable, it was something I could count on, and it always worked. It satisfied every explanation for what was wrong in my life. And it allowed me to have some weird kind of control in my life because I couldn’t count on anything else. Hating myself was more than just a feeling, it was something I could DO; even when it meant that what I was doing was harming myself. Hating myself for being worthless applied to everything and it was an answer for everything: my parent’s and friend’s rejection, every failure, being a disappointment, being fat and ugly, being molested even. I thought that only people who have worth are protected and spared such horrors and that “safety” was well worth hating myself for. I was miserable, but I was safe.

Miserable, but safe.

These three little words seem to have defined my life up until this point. For most of my life, the need for safety outweighed the need for happiness. For the last couple of years at least, I’ve been approaching that tipping point – the point where the misery is just too much of a burden, a shackle, rather than a life line. In other words, the need for happiness becoming more important than the need to find safety in self-harm.

As I have been working on self-acceptance, seeing my past for what it was and seeing myself for who I am, I feel “growing pains” of an emotional kind. It’s scary giving up the “safety” of self-hatred. It’s terrifying accepting myself for who I am – a flawed, imperfect man who just wants to be a good man. It’s terrifying because just being me means I may not be “right” before God; it means I was probably all wrong about how I interpreted my parents treatment of me; it means I can’t control whether or not people like/accept me/approve of me. Giving up control, whether real or imagined, is terrifying. It means opening myself up to the possibility that I’m not safe, or that I may not be safe… that I’m going to be wrong, imperfect, etc.

As I was working through the twisted “logic” of hating myself in order to “be right,” I had a moment of innocent realization. “I just don’t want to hurt myself anymore.” And for a moment, I felt the sweetness of self-compassion.

I often see and hear messages of the need for self-love and self-compassion and I have believed that those concepts were great advice… for others. I never felt like that advice applied to me – again, because I thought hating myself was the only way to be “right.” But for a moment, I did feel self-compassion and that moment taught me a few things. 

First, I only know what self-love looks like because I have known what self-hatred looks like. For the first time in my life, I now have something to contrast with self-hatred. (This idea explains the title of this blog post.) And this is NOT a minor point – the contrast is necessary. Maybe – for me personally – I needed to hate myself in order to know what loving myself should look like. Indeed, as Lehi, a Book of Mormon prophet taught, “There must needs be opposition in all things.” Life happens in the opposition; growth overcoming entropy; faith in the furnace of affliction; 

Second – and please know that I am NOT in any way shape or form advocating self-hatred as a path to self-love – what I have learned is that there is great power in gratitude for where I have been because it was all a part of the journey that got me to where I am now. I could continue to lament the years I spent in self-hatred, to regret all of the things I didn’t do, or missed out on, but what good would that do me now? None. Instead, I can look back and say, it happened. And it led me on a path to finding self-love – no, more than that, to seeing the NEED for self-love and self-compassion. I truly believe that my poor health, being overweight, being sick, etc., is all somehow tied to years of hating myself and wanting to hurt myself.

In all of this reflection I have “climbed a mountain” of understanding and while I appreciate the view, I am, once again, at a precipice. I can back down this mountain the way I came and ease into the safety of self-loathing once again. Or I can jump into the unknown of self-love.

I choose to jump.

Why? Because I believe that there are arms to catch me; the arms of unconditional love. Love without condition. Think about that. Pure love – love with no strings attached, no conditions, no expectations. Just a love freely offered that says: I love you for who you are – all of you; I accept you for who you are – flaws and strengths, imperfections and gifts, all of it, ALL of you!

I didn’t know it, but all my life I’ve been looking for someone to love me in a way that would allow me to escape my prison of self-hatred. Someone who could just hold me, for no other reason than to be close to me; someone who could be affectionate with me; someone who could truly see all of me – the good AND the bad – and somehow love me just as much for having both – unconditionally.

Somehow, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think I’ll find that from another human being, until I can do that for myself. Maybe it was good to hate myself for a time, but the best thing I can do now is to learn to love myself, unconditionally.