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 It certainly isn't something I am proud of and, up until recently, I had quietly withdrawn from the world into the comfort of my home in the Hills.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

He stoops to conquer

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The following is taken from 'The Problem of Pain' by CS Lewis:

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We "have all we want" is a terrible saying when "all" does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere "God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there's nowhere for Him to put it." Or as a friend of mine said "we regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it."

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call "our own life" remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make "our own life" less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God's providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. 

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people - on capable, hard- working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty, little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? It does not matter that I know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were personally responsible for all the sufferings I try to explain – just as, to this day, everyone talks as if St. Augustine wanted unbaptised infants to go to Hell. But it matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth. Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them. I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. 

If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble highminded readers of scripture. It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it "unmindful of His glory's diminution". 

Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask. If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall. The dangers of apparent self sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success. Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self righteous, are in that danger.