Wait...Loss is hard.

I don't exactly know where to start. All I know is that I have to say this because it has been burning inside me for some time now.

For context, I am morbidly obese. It certainly isn't something I am proud of and, up until recently, I had quietly withdrawn from the world into the comfort of my home in the Hills. Everything is familiar here. There is a sense of ease that comes from knowing the streets, the shops and the people around me. I don't feel watched here. I don't feel judged. Home became my safe place and, looking back now, I think it became something else as well. It became somewhere I could quietly disappear.

But life has a funny way of disrupting the stories we tell ourselves.

A few months ago I started a new job. Suddenly I found myself catching public transport every day, surrounded by unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. I had been gently, almost without realising it, living a smaller and smaller life. Now my circumstances were pushing me back into the world whether I was ready or not.

Every morning I squeeze into the Metro with hundreds of other commuters. Like everyone else, I look for an empty seat. The seats are incredibly narrow, even by skinny people standards. Every day I notice the little things. The sigh. Someone shifting slightly away. The sideways glance that tells me they're calculating how much room I take up. I've become accustomed to those moments.

But this afternoon I got more than a sigh.

As I went to sit in the only available seat between two passengers, the young woman beside it looked at me and said, "You're not seriously going to try to squeeze in here?"

I nodded.

She huffed before adding, loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear, "You know, you could try losing some weight. Ugh."

Oddly enough, I wasn't offended.

What could I do? Argue? Explain the last twenty years of my life in a thirty-second train ride? So I sat down.

The irony is that only moments earlier I had been quietly congratulating myself. When I first started this new job, the commute almost broke me. I could barely walk from the station. My legs hurt, my ankles swelled and everything ached. But over the past few weeks something had changed. I realised I had a stride again. I was walking further, walking faster and feeling stronger.  Not so fast, Amy!

The woman on the train couldn't possibly have known any of that. She only saw my body. She didn't see the progress. She didn't see the effort. She didn't see me.

When she got off the train, the passenger on my other side quietly turned to me and said, "I'm so sorry you had to go through that."

And that's when I cried.  Not while I was being humiliated.  Afterwards.  I think I cried because, in that moment, someone acknowledged that what had happened wasn't okay. For a brief second I wasn't just an inconvenience taking up too much room. I was a human being who had been hurt.

The incident happened less than two hours ago and I'm still crying as I write this.

I don't think I'm crying because of what happened on the train.

I think I'm crying because, for the first time, I'm beginning to understand why I built the armour in the first place.

Dear people who have never lived in a body like mine,

I'm not writing this because I expect strangers on trains to suddenly become kinder, although I wish they would. I'm writing it because today forced me to confront something I think I've been misunderstanding about myself for years. And if I'm only just beginning to understand it at 47 years old, perhaps there are other people carrying armour they don't yet recognise either. 

I didn't get here overnight.  This wasn't a matter of waking up one morning and discovering I'd put on three kilos and better cut back on ice-cream.  As I look back over my life, I can trace a path. Not one I consciously chose, but one that quietly unfolded over decades.

As a child I was constantly told how beautiful I was. That might sound like a lovely thing to hear, but my childhood wasn't safe. Then, as a young teenager, I experienced a further incident. Looking back now, I wonder whether somewhere inside me I quietly concluded that beauty wasn't safe. Being noticed wasn't safe. Attracting attention wasn't safe.

I don't remember consciously deciding that I wanted to disappear.  I don't think anyone does.  But I do think that, over time, I built armour.  If I wasn't attractive, perhaps I wouldn't attract predators.  It sounds irrational when I write it down. But frightened children rarely make rational decisions. They make decisions that help them survive.

If I stayed home, perhaps I couldn't be hurt.  If I made my world smaller, perhaps it would become safer.  Looking back, I think hibernation became part of the armour too. Home wasn't just comfortable. It was predictable. Safe. Nothing unexpected happened there. No strangers. No crowded trains. No one looking at me.

The armour didn't just change my body. It quietly changed the way I lived. Once hiding became safer than living, everything else seemed to follow.

The more I hid, the less I moved. The less I moved, the more weight I gained. The more discouraged I became, the more I withdrew. Depression fed the hiding. The hiding fed the weight. The weight reinforced the armour. Before I knew it, years had passed.

The tragedy is that the very armour that once protected me slowly became the thing that imprisoned me.

Please don't misunderstand me.

I don't like being this big. I haven't for a very long time. I miss moving freely. I miss feeling healthy. I miss walking into a room without wondering whether people are looking at me. I miss fitting comfortably into chairs, train seats and aeroplane seats. I miss participating in life without my size being the first thing I think about.

For years I thought the answer was simply to lose weight. I've dieted. I've lost weight. I've put it back on again. Every single time I blamed myself. I thought I lacked discipline. I thought I simply didn't want it enough.

But there is something I've never admitted out loud because, quite honestly, it frightens me.
The last time I lost a significant amount of weight, putting it back on almost felt... purposeful.  Even writing those words makes me uncomfortable.  Why would anyone work so hard to lose weight only to regain it?  I don't think I understood it then.  I'm not even sure I fully understand it now.  But I wonder whether I wasn't putting the weight back on.  I wonder whether I was putting the armour back on.

That thought has changed everything for me.  Because if my weight became my armour, then asking myself to simply lose it is like asking a soldier to walk into battle without protection.

No wonder I've struggled.  I wasn't trying to lose weight.  I was trying to let go of the very thing that had convinced me I was safe.  For years I've been asking myself the wrong question.  I've been asking, "How do I lose the armour?"  Now I think the real question is, "How do I become the sort of person who no longer needs it?"  Those are two very different journeys.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting the armour. I think it served a purpose. I think a frightened little girl built it because she genuinely believed it would keep us safe.  And perhaps it did, for a while.

But I'm not that little girl anymore.  I'm a grown woman now, and I don't want to live the rest of my life in survival mode.  I want to learn how to lay the armour down.

Not because someone tells me I should.

Not because society expects me to.

But because I want to know what it feels like to live in a world where I no longer need it.

Sincerely,

Amy xo