“Its so much easier to sculpt a mask than go without one…”

The best part of writing about the mental struggle and insecurities that come with being fat are the conversations that have come out of this. Well, the best part is that I get to treat this like “an evening at the Improv”… like I have a microphone and get to shout every thought at you. But the second best part, are the conversations that have been started through the process. I don’t know if all people do this, or if it’s something that only happens to the insecure, but sometimes a simple phrase will stay with me for months. Usually it’s a negative phrase. Something that someone says without thinking… or even says without intent. For some reason their words will catch you just right and sink deep inside you. When this happens to me, I will define, and redefine every word, and try to nail down the true meaning of the sentence. The funny thing is, I will spend months breaking down the statement that the deliverer of the sentence forgot saying within 2 minutes of saying it.

I believe so much of my insecurity and struggle can be boiled down to creating relationships and ordeals from innocuous statements. I can’t tell you how many times I must have applied more value to someone’s statement, than the person did who said it. This type of thing rarely happens in a positive way. At least for me. This past week, I got to experience a rare instance of this happening. A statement was sent to me, that I have been dissecting and dwelling on, that gave me a great deal of perspective.

“Its so much easier to sculpt a mask than go without one…”…

To give this statement context… I had an Instagram chat with one of those cloying over achievers (this statement will be revealed to be a shitty judgement soon… just wait, I come off as an asshole soon). If we did a plot point graph, she would be as far away from me as possible. Polar opposites. She is in amazing shape, and energetic, and beautiful and deep… and I am… hmmm… I guess I can best be described as Eyore, from Winnie the Pooh, after he eats thanksgiving dinner. For instance, if a building was on fire, she would scale a wall, dive through a window with a double front flip, and come out holding four people and two cats. I on the other hand, would lay in the lawn, look at the fire, and mutter “oh bother” as I rub my bloated tummy. However, during our conversation, I realized our plights are identical. She revealed to me that she lived her whole life as the tiny one… the weak one… someone who “couldn’t lift a suitcase if it was full”. She talked about how that made her feel. How insecure and helpless that can feel. How one day she just decided to take control, and change the aspect of her life that she didn’t care for. Her description of her struggles, and insecurities are exactly the same as mine. She felt undervalued at times. She felt that sometimes she was defined by physical traits that she didn’t care for. It made me feel so shallow and arrogant to think that because she is pretty, and in amazing shape, that somehow she didn't earn her current condition. How shitty of me to talk about hating feeling judged by my physical condition, and then turning around and judging this woman. That’s when she wrote about feeling like “Its so much easier to sculpt a mask than go without one…”… I spent a few days thinking about how true this statement is. How real change is hard. Pretending to be ok with your demons is so much easier. But is it? Is it "easier".. .

When I started this post by talking about how I dissect messages, I wasn’t fucking around.  After dwelling on this phrase for a few days, I eventually got stuck on the word “easier”… “easy”… I guess the meaning of her statement, lays in your definition of the word “easy”…

Is it “easier” to pretend to change, than to actually change? Is it “easier” to pretend we are ok with ourselves, instead of doing the work required to improve? Is it “easier” to cohabitate with our demons, than to overcome them? Absolutely not… Maybe the action of ignoring the problem is easier in the moment.. but god damn it, living with a sense of failure is hard. Living with a prolonged sense of self marginalization. Living with an inferiority complex. These things are not “easy”. While the actual act of self-improvement is hard, nothing is harder than living your entire life feeling you aren’t good enough to overcome your faults. Nothing is harder than the feeling that comes with nurturing your own self-loathing. Easy, and hard, are given value by each and every person according to their own perspective. These words have a nebulous definition. 

This simple statement that this woman made, a woman I don’t really know, had more depth than she could have known or intended. Like I said, its rare that his type of unintended impact comes in a positive form. But this one has definitely stuck with me. I want giving up on myself to be “hard”. I want the idea of feeling marginalized to myself to be “hard”. I want the feeling of not maximizing my own potential to feel "harder"… I want feeling good about myself to be "easy"… I want the feeling of pretending to be ok with my demons to be "hard"… I want the feeling of celebrating the small victories that come on the road to success to be "easy".

During my conversation with this woman, I was watching some videos that she had posted to her instagram. In one video, i kid you not, she was doing pull ups on gymnastic rings while holding a medicine ball straight out in front of her between her feet… bent 90 degrees at the waist. It was almost like a Dr Seuss scenario… she was banging her tumtumpler and tooting her zoozooler while balancing a dish with a fish on the mop on top while she hops.  After muttering “go fuck yourself, this is dumb” under my breath.. mostly because I can’t do a single thing she was doing in her video, things she was doing all at once. I realized what a piece of shit I can be. This woman just opened up to me about how hard this journey was. She opened up about the importance she placed on finding how capable she was to do things she had always felt inferior about not being able to do. And my instinct was to shit on what she was doing. Why? Because she is better me? I guess that’s a statement of fact, and not a question. “I shit on her accomplishment because she is better than me”… what a prick. I hate that this was my instinct. ß I want that feeling to be the hardest thing of all.

At the end of the conversation this woman and I decided my motto needs to be “Work hard, get to do rad shit”