Time Does It Even Matter? (Chapter 6 if you please)

As of this writing I am 17,019 days old.

For the vast majority of them I have attempted to live a life of avoidance and denial about what I thought was cool and how I chose to deal with my problems. Even though I was raised in a very loving home, I think that sometimes we were almost sheltered to much from daily conflicts/problems and how to go about solving them.  

My parents rarely argued or disagreed in front of my brother and I.  It was only after my mother passed away and I read her diaries that I realized they were no different than anyone else.  They were awesome parents who sacrificed a lot to give my brother and I a happy life.  My mother passed away when I was just shy of my 26th birthday and up until that point I just thought my parents were these two people whose lives were bonded together by the power of love, unicorns, and rainbows. Turns out I was right about the love part. Sure we saw small disagreements but we never heard or saw anything that resembled screaming, hitting or general disrespect of each other. It was only after reading my mothers diaries that I was made aware of just how close to divorce they were. They were very close, at least my mother was. She had an exit strategy and socked away some extra money to make it happen. The problem with the marriage was not money, it was not love, it was not having nice things, it was time.

My father had one favorite hobby, work. He was a Plumber and a damn good one. He was selfless in his commitment to utilize his skills to craft what he thought was a better life for his family. Leg braces, orthopedic shoes, braces on teeth, plus the rest of the household bills cost real money and my father was driven to get ahead. In the wake of this, he almost forgot what was even more important than that. Time spent with family. Where there is no time clock and the payoff was fulfillment.  

I tell you all this not to lay blame on my parents for the way I chose to deal with my problems but to show that sometimes the real work is just plain time spent working on yourself and your relationships. We just rarely stop to realize it until someone or something conks us over the head with it.

As I have mentioned before, food was the one common denominator that turned off power tools and put away shovels and provided comfort for your problems and the work that was perceived as an issue.

I have many many photos of myself from as far back as early childhood with my hand in a bag of Doritos (best served with ketchup and/or french onion dip or for a long time both mixed together) or sitting around a table with a two-liter bottle of Coke and a pizza or beers or Jim Beam and Coke or a bag of hershey kisses. I was convinced that anytime I felt anxious or awkward (which was most of the time, I was NEVER like the other kids) that the answers to my problems could be found in the bottom of that Doritos bag or Coke bottle or whatever it was. Feeling full from junk food was certainly better than dealing with the real feelings. This behavior is a self fulfilling prophecy, the more you eat the more anxiety and feelings of inadequacy you harbor which is still compounded by the fact that you still never really dealt with any of the original problems that caused the behavior in the first place. 

The other thing that manifests itself during this cycle is that you believe that your life would be perfect if you were just skinny or at the very least average weight.  This is as big as a mindfuck gets. I really believed that the weight itself was what was holding me back from a life fulfilled.

In 1997 I had a tightness in my left calf. I was 24 and probably somewhere around 380-400 lbs.  I was completely self absorbed. Sure to most that knew me at the time I was fun loving Mike, Big Mike, of course. Under the surface I did not care about anyone or anything and did not think one millisecond into the future.  I know that that during this period I hurt a lot of people that tried to form relationships with me.(If you are reading this and consider yourself one of those people I am humbled, grateful, and very sorry.)  I was a monster. I did not care if I lived or died, and for the love of god, if I was going to be in this much pain, so were you. Your feelings couldn't possibly count, oh and by the way if you showed them you weren't courageous, you were weak and going to be chastised for it. Did I mention monster? That's another chapter...(see I still have avoidance)

The tightness in my calf came and went over a week or so. Then one morning I woke up and I had the same tightness except this time my left leg was red and swollen. A trip to the doctor, (like he knew anything) and subsequent ultrasound revealed a blood clot and an infection to go with it. At age 24 I was about to spend my first night (5) in the hospital.

I was told I really dodged a bullet and let this be a wake up call. Mr. Drouard you need to lose weight. In a moment of clarity, I decided I would lose weight. This would be my second attempt, the first roller coaster diet ride was when I was a senior in high school. I knew just what to eat even if I hated it and my mother had been diagnosed a diabetic a few years previous so I just started eating what she was eating.  I was on a blood thinner and could not drink so partying was sort of off limits. I started exercising like mad, bought a bike and dropped close to 100 lbs over the next 8-10 months. Although, I was lighter on the scale, my new found relationship with gravity did nothing to squelch my feelings of inadequacy and the anxiousness I felt around crowds and people. I hated myself even as a thinner version of myself. How could I be at a healthy weight and yet still have all these problems? What a mindfuck!  I was still a monster.  I wasn't drunk and full of rage/angst anymore I was just full of rage/angst. Frustration that manifested itself through treatment of the symptom not the disease.

Over the next couple of years the weight came back, and I felt like a bigger failure than ever. My mother passed away and the hurt I felt over that just added fuel to the fire. Shortly thereafter another blood clot and hospital stay and weight loss and weight gain and leg infection and weight loss and weight gain and leg infection and...I'm not kidding.

Then there was the moment the proverbial fog cleared, the realization that really got me thinking that I was doing things very wrong.

It was a family reunion in Illinois, I'm guessing the summer of 2008 maybe 2009. I had been laid off from permanent employ since 2007.  I was in the midst of one of my weight loss cycles and I rode with my brother to Illinois for a weekend of fun and frolic. Being that I was only 34 or 35 years old at the time and single because no one should have had to put up with my miserable ass, I decided to camp out on the living room floor. You can do things like this when you hate yourself.

The great thing about these reunions is that my cousins are very gracious hosts and allowed my brother and his kids, myself and a few other cousins to stay at their house.  This put their young kids out of their beds in order to make room for the guests. Except me, I was the camp counselor on the living room floor with the other 4-5, 7-10 year olds. Now I like kids. I love kids actually and normally being around them is never a problem. But here I was at age 34 or 35 still sitting at the kids table! If there was ever a metaphor for my life up until that point this was it.  The irony was wicked thick.

Adult couples, some very close in age to myself were upstairs, tucked away, part of something very different than what I had going on. I couldn't even fathom it until then.

That moment on that living room floor really stuck with me. I was not sure what to do with that moment or how to turn the bus around but it really was a driving force to try to unfuck myself.

It was the fall of that same year that I saw an ad in the local paper that a professor at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) was running a weight loss study and looking for individuals willing to participate.  This was a long term program that initially lasted sixteen weeks and then check on your progress every three months for a year after that.  Best part was after the sixteen weeks you got $500! BOOYAH afterall I was still laid off.

This program consisted of attending lectures and answering questions about your self esteem and the bias you felt was on obese people. During the second 8 weeks you met with a counselor for therapy sessions.  There was also nutritional information and weigh in every week.

Now I was in this to lose weight and for the money so I knew I was going to have to go to these therapy sessions. I was terrified of telling someone my true feelings. Plus I knew nothing about therapy except the stereotypes. I was pretty sure that I was going to be declared insane.

Like a lot of situations in my life, I could not have been more wrong.  Turns out therapy is not a witch hunt to deem one clinically insane.  Turns out my problems are a lot like countless other peoples. Turns out eight weeks of therapy was not going to undo all of this.

Turns out, what it did was allow me to forge an avenue and relationship that would literally save my life 2-3 years later.

After the initial program, I returned to work and the weight returned as well. It was late 2010 and I was becoming increasingly worried about myself.  I said it, I was worried about myself. For whatever reason as the weight came back on this time I started to feel worse and worse about my self. I started to become a homebody and noticed a pattern of behavior where I was isolating myself from friends and family and becoming more depressed. By the fall of 2011 I reached back out to the professor that ran the weight loss program at BGSU and asked him if he could recommend a therapist. For the next almost two years I attended therapy twice a month. It was the single greatest thing I have ever done for myself. It was very grueling, but gave me the tools to notice and deal with some of my issues.

Time

It took me thirty-eight years give or take to fuck myself up. I would have liked to think that there is some pill or some program that makes it all go away and makes me the model citizen in my mind. That just does not exist. It takes time, and is excruciatingly slow. After 18 months I can see the real progress I am making and if you look at the larger picture it is therapy that allowed me the experience to meet a fantastic woman and get married. It as allowed me to accept my shortcomings and know that I can work to make the changes I want/need to and exercise my demons. It just takes time...

Miked

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