Defining Moment

Word Association.       I say ____________________ and you say ______________________. 

• More
• Less
• Hungry
• Full
• Weighty
• Light

These are all powerful concepts, and depending on the interpreter, can evoke different, even opposite responses. They can be good things, bad things, things you wish you had or felt, or things you'd wish would leave you alone and forget where you live.  Like it or not, these are concepts we deal with on a daily basis.  But is it a matter of better or worse?  Is More really better?  Is Less truly worse?

Words, it seems, are flexible.  People, often, are not.

We define ourselves in concrete terms.  We use numbers for our age, our weight, our salary and our grade point average.  We use GPS coordinates to identify where we are all the time: where we live, where we eat, where we work.  We use mascots for sports teams, colors for school pride, and corporate symbols for all that we eat, drink and drive.  We define ourselves politically and religiously.  We wave flags and wear lapel pins and advocate for causes important to us.  If there's one thing we know, it's all the minutiae of data that make up the sum of our individual whole.

And that's all fine and good, until...

It's fine and good until we take all that data and apply it to everybody else.  Now there are sides.  Now there are absolutes.  If Option A is good, then Option B must be less-good, which, as we all know, is bad.  The sliding scale feels more like an anvil of judgment, and words once so flexible are now tools used to rule on the value and worth of everything and everybody.  It's brutal.  Or, it can be, if we let it.

And that's the key.  If we let it.

Over the last several months one of the things I've been doing is taking stock of some of the things that I have let define me and rewriting the script. The driving, concrete (boring) bit of data is that after five months there are 40 less pounds of me, or about 17%.  To answer questions quickly: Yes, I'm proud of myself.  I worked damn hard.  What did I do?  Unglamorous answer:  ate less, moved more, counted nothing, aware of everything. Where did I go?  Privacy of my own home.  Family supportive, cats alternately annoyed and amused.  Do I have more to lose?  Yes.  How much?  No idea.  Ultimate goal?  To continue to feel better, and get stronger and healthier.

So, there's less of me, and that is a very good thing.  It wasn't a vanity decision, it wasn't a doctor yelling at me decision (which would be entirely justified), it wasn't an upcoming reunion or anniversary or social engagement where I felt the need to impress people.  It was frankly, a sudden, middle of nowhere decision that I had just had enough of the way I was.  And while you could rightly use many words to describe me, the one that was the most harmful and destructive was apathetic.  I had let apathy define me, and I knew, or realized, or maybe just remembered that's simply not who I was.  I decided I wasn't going to let my sedentary job kill me, so I run the stairs and the library stacks every day.  I decided that I wasn't going to allow my too-busy life to be an excuse, so I go at it at home four days a week.  Religiously.  No excuses.  No missing.  Period. Ever.  I knew that buried under the apathy was an extremely strong and strong-willed woman.  I wasn't going to be afraid of numbers, or data, or words that defined me.  I stared them down, I jumped, I ran, I sweated, I swore (a lot), I made zero excuses and reminded myself every day that I who was was my choice and nobody else's.

So today, I'm so much more, partly because I'm so much less.  My life is full but now I feel so much lighter and more hopeful.  I would describe myself as weighty because I am strong and determined.  And as for hungry?  Absolutely I'm hungry.  But it has nothing to do with food.  I'm hungry to do and be the person I choose to be on my own terms. And I hope to never forget that being hungry is part of who I am, because the opposite of hunger is apathy.  And I intend to never let that word define me again.