The Message in The Music…

When I move physically it can sometimes invoke quite an emotional response. Anything from “holy shit did you just see what I did there?” to “Why the hell is this sucking the very soul out of my body?”. I’ve experienced every emotion you can think of from pure elation to pure anger.

It’s something I look forward too.

I allow those emotions to flow no matter where I’m at (the gym, outside, running a race). Many times a particular song will play and the message that I’m receiving as my heart is beating fast, the sweat is falling off my face and my muscles are begging me to slow down…

One of those songs is Pink’s newest song “Try”.

While the message for the masses is about the ending of a relationship with another person and moving on despite the pain that is felt the words go much deeper for me. It’s about ending the relationship with self of old and moving on…

When you look in the mirror and find a morbidly obese person looking back at you, begging for any kind of change to happen to get out of the darkness that has become your life, you feel like a failure first and foremost…I can’t begin to tell you how many times I stood naked in front of whatever mirror was in my bathroom and wondered “how in the world did I get here?“. I looked at my thighs that touched from top to bottom and contemplated when I would need to buy another pair of pants because the thighs in my other pants were rubbing thin. I wondered if I would sweat profusely under my skirt because unbeknownst to the rest of the world I was wearing cut off long johns underneath to prevent chaffing in the middle of a heat wave. I would look at my belly hanging over, pinching the flap and wonder if I had enough diaper cream to rub between the skin of my pubic area and the underneath of my belly because it was raw from the sweat that would collect.

But even with all the anger and frustration of looking at my body…

I was so very afraid to try and change the way I was living.

“Where there is desire
There is gonna be a flame
Where there is a flame
Someone’s bound to get burned
But just because it burns
Doesn’t mean you’re gonna die
You’ve gotta get up and try, try, try
Gotta get up and try, try, try
You gotta get up and try, try, try”

I had the desire. I saw it in my eyes as I looked at my body that I allowed to grow into morbid obesity. The begging to move. The stirring of “maybe I could”. As I began to make even the smallest of changes they felt earth shattering; life shifting. It was painful. Emotionally and physically. I didn’t shoot out the proverbial gate like a race horse and take off on this journey. I cried. I resisted.  I thought about giving up and returning to a life of emptiness. Almost on a daily basis. It was frustrating counting calories and stopping when I had reached the end of my allotted calories and despite not being hungry wanting to shove anything within reach into my piehole.  Having to learn new behaviors. Understanding that a serving wasn’t what I could fit into a bowl but that there was actual measurements to follow. It was down right humbling when I began to add movement to my weight loss and cried because a 3 minute run felt like it was going to kill me while at the same time one of the most exuberant moments of my life.

In was in the physical movement I began to understand about my emotions. My fear of change. My fear of going beyond what I know to be comfortable and blindly moving toward  something I desired more than anything I’ve every wanted in my whole life. Every day I questioned myself and the deep rooted belief that I wasn’t worth saving.

“Ever worried that it might be ruined
And does it make you wanna cry?
When you’re out there doing what you’re doing
Are you just getting by?
Tell me are you just getting by, by, by”

As the days (weeks and months) passed, I waited for the ball to drop. I waited for myself to give up. To throw in the towel and go back to what I knew to be true; that the deep rooted belief that I wasn’t worth saving would knock me down and I would never get back up again…

but each time I knocked myself down…

I got get back up.

I burned myself countless times.

But I didn’t don’t die.

I push my body something fierce some days. Maybe it’s about proving a point. To show the world (or anyone that cares to listen) that you can indeed change everything you know to be true about who you see in the mirror. Maybe it’s about proving to the Self of Old that even if it took 40 years to unlock the potential that is the Self of New, the deep rooted belief that I wasn’t worth saving was and continues to be a lie.

Most of the time it’s because I’m trying to evoke emotions as the music tells me what I know to be true:

You just got to get up

and try.