A Taste of Self-love

For most of my early and mid-20s I was often either in really good shape or really bad shape. I would fluctuate often between extreme discipline and extreme decadence.

In 2013 however I’d begun working out at the college gym with my friend Nabil while we studied music together.

Having a gym buddy for the first time since my teens definitely helped, and soon I got in the greatest shape of my life at a lean 180 lbs of muscle.

Around that time I also began seeing a girl in Seattle, or Everett to be precise. I got significantly healthier throughout the course of our romantic entanglement.

I’d joke about my yoyoing weight and fitness saying “If they love me for me, then I’ll make more of an effort in the relationship to reward them. Me making an effort is weirdly a reward for a lack of shallowness.”

But here I was in my deepest love, and the iron pumping in my heart matched the iron pumped as an expression of it… a material reward for what became an immaterial love.

I used to walk around at around 205 when I wasn’t in shape. How I long for the days where 205 was considered bad shape. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

She told me she loved me for the first time on my 25th birthday after we’d been seeing each other a few months.

Then she didn’t.

From running into my arms at Tahoma Airport as I caught her, twirled her and kissed her… who knew that the sweetest kisses were laced with poison. That the sweetest words were laced with lies?

Just a few weeks before her own birthday she’d started seeing another dude… I say dude not to be hip or to speak casually, but because one cannot honestly call such a monster a man.

Yet when her daughter asked me if I was happy… I said yes. Not because I wasn’t hurt, because I was… but because the love her family and friends showed me was immeasurable. I was made to feel at home even while my heart became a warzone.

After I went home she disappeared with him for 16 days… and her family turned to me to try and find her.

I did, but I lost my confidence, I lost her, and I lost my 180 lb frame.

The rest of 2014 was a blur, and in 2015 I became a chef. Overeating became a ritual in a cult of self-hatred I want no part of.

If I wasn’t loved at my best, then why bother?

2017 saw a whole other take on emotional discord… I lost my grandad, dementia being the finishing blow that did what cancer never could – took my grandfather, friend, and greatest role model from this world. Shortly after a former neighbour lost their mind, and I lost my best friend in the process as they became a bulldozer which demolished the life I’d known with reckless abandon. I moved in with my parents for a few months in order to process this combination of losses. However, overeating was encouraged by my stepdad who’d often do the same.

Can scars ever heal if they’re perpetually ripped open as you feast on your own wounds like carrion?

The answer is yes, but self-kindness and self-acceptance is key.

More recently, I signed up for a weight loss program that builds solidarity, kinship, and accountability through exercise – football specifically, and also through keeping a food diary equal to half a point which absolutely makes the difference when games are tight. These days I use my hands to stop shots on goal and am training my tongue and my mind not to take shots at myself.