Real-World Fitness Milestones

I suspect that some people are tired of hearing about this, but you probably remember that I was very sick with debilitating fatigue for about two years. Even when I began to recover, I felt that I had lost so much of my baseline fitness and wellness that I would never be the same again--I thought I was permanently diminished.

About a year ago, doing a lot of walking at the FGC Summer Gathering, I realized that I had improved enough that I had a baseline of fitness to work with--that I could walk enough to do it regularly, with the goal of being able to do it more, go farther, go faster.

So I joined the Y and I started working out, lifting weights and walking on the treadmill.

I loved my workouts, and I could see, in the gym, how I was improving. My weights crept up little by little, the time I spent on the treadmill increased, my walking pace got faster, I adjusted the incline so that the imaginary hills I was climbing got just a little bit steeper.

But what I really loved was the moments in real life when I realized how much stronger and more fit I was:

The day I caught myself trotting up a flight of stairs, instead of sighing at the bottom, holding onto the handrail, and going up a slow and determined one step at a time.

The day I took some kids to the Renaissance Festival and we criss-crossed the grounds over and over in a very inefficient pattern, and I didn't even think about it, and at the end of the day realized I had never had to sit down to rest.

The day I got all the way up to the third floor at Tiny Tornado's preschool and realized I'd forgotten the snack for the class in my car. I ran down to the parking lot, got the snack, zipped back up to the third floor, and was on my way back to the car again before I realized that I had done that without thinking, when only a few months earlier it would have seemed insurmountable.

The day Raider and I were moving a dresser, and as we picked it up, he said, "Should we take the drawers out first?" I said, "No, it's not very heavy," and he laughed and said, "It's not very heavy for you."

And right now: I have done heavy yard work on four of the last five days. Yesterday I was out there for five hours, moving mulch, climbing up and down the ladder, running the power washer.

I was a little stiff last night.

A little stiff.

That's all.

This morning I feel fine. I expect that I'll head out there today to try to get the last of the mulch where it's supposed to go, and then I plan to power-wash the driveway. (Because I love that power-washer. After I finish the driveway, I'll be standing out there, looking around, thinking, "What else can I blast with a powerful spray of pressurized water?")

Soon enough I'll get used to this and stop having to talk about it all the time. But I may still talk about it more than often than is quite proper, because our cultural narrative says you're not supposed to be able to be fat, fit, healthy, and strong at the same time, and I am. So even when this stops being a ressurection story, a new-lease-on-life story, I think it is still worth telling.

My hero and role model, Ragen Chastain, would say that no one is obligated to meet anyone else's notions of health, or beauty. But, with her, I think it is important to remind people, as often as possible, that it is possible to be fat, fit, and healthy all at the same time; that, as she says, the only thing a person's size tells you is how big they are, not what they eat, how much they eat, whether they have diabetes (or will get diabetes), and not how far they walk in a day.

The summer gathering is coming up again, the first week of July. Perhaps that anniversary would be a good time to retire the "I felt so bad, but now I feel so good" story. It's old news now.

But I will still have a story to tell.

The Awakening: A Coming Out Story in Pictures

Last night at our homeschool group's curriculum sharing night/7-hour chatfest, a friend I hadn't seen in awhile said, "Su, you look fabulous!"

And I thought, "Yes, I do."

This morning I had the idea of doing a blog post about how sometimes I look at old pictures of myself, and I am lovely, but when I think about what I thought about myself at the time, it breaks my heart. I was going to put up a picture like this one of me at 22:

And I was going to say: Look at this attractive young woman. She is packing up to leave the land after her first Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and this unposed shot was taken by a friend. She is smiling out of the frame at her lover at the time (whom you may know as my friend Farina Endfen from some recent blog posts). She looks happy, relaxed, fit, and lovely. She has a charming, easy smile and, apparently, dimples, although this photo is too low-quality for you to be able to see them.

However, this is what she thinks of herself: she thinks that she is grossly fat. She thinks that certain unfortunate features of her physical appearance--her eyebrows, her nose, her high forehead, and her facial hair, to name only a few--mean that she is not, and never will be, pretty. Although she has never had any trouble finding either romantic or sexual partners, she is convinced that each person who expresses an interest in her in this way has been so charmed by her intelligence, her wit, and her bubbly personality that it has overcome their, what? Revulsion is too strong a word...so is distaste. Ah, let us say, their indifference to her physical appearance. It has never occurred to her that someone might be attracted to her because of her physical appearance, or that those who enjoy her bubbliness and wit and intelligence might also sometimes just enjoy looking at her.

I was going to go on to say that one of the many reasons that this, right now, is the best time of my life is that I feel very good in my body, and I look good in my body, and I know it. (Do I have any pictures? No. The only person who takes pictures of me is the Tiny Tornado, and they are usually pictures of my butt. But maybe I can get David to take some this weekend.)

I was thinking of doing a series of these: here I am at 16. Adorable! Yet self-hating. Again at 23. Again at 30. And so on. Until the thrilling conclusion: Here I am at 46, happier in my body than I have ever been before. Even though I am also, without a doubt, actually fat and not just imagining that I am. Who'd have predicted that?

The first box of photos I found covered only the years from my high school graduation at age 17 through my First Grad School Foray, which ended 6 years later. And as I flipped through these albums, I saw a different story being told: "My Gay Boyfriends: Seriously, How Could We Not Have Known, Just Look at These Photos."

But that's not the only story, and it's not the one I'm telling today. This is the one I'm telling today:

Until I was 20, in almost every picture taken of me, I am crossing my arms. Whether I am on a sailboat in San Diego Harbor with my dad's cousin Barbara or coming down the dunes with my cousins or getting my picture taken with Grandma Irene before we leave for the airport, my arms are crossed over my stomach:

If I can't cross my arms, I fold up on myself and look away from the camera:

In those last two shots, I am 17 and on a bike trip with my cousin Marion, who is 57. She's on the glider there with me, in the red tank top, looking completely at ease and gazing cheerfully and directly into the camera. The young woman on the glider drinking a Dr. Pepper is an amazing physical specimen. She can ride her bike 60 miles in a day, set up camp, and then hop back on to go exploring, riding another 10 or 20 miles before bed. Her bulging thighs and calves are like granite. But she believes herself to be basically an unfit and sedentary person, because she is so often harassed for the time she spends sitting around reading, and because she does not play any sports or do anything "athletic." She does her best to hide when the camera comes out, because even though she is in the middle of pedaling her bike over 700 miles across the state of Michigan and then up the western shore to the UP, she is ashamed of her body.

This is only a sampling of the pictures like this I could show you. But then, one day, something changes:

[Side note: In this picture, you can see my son the Lego Savant, who won't be born for another 16 years, squinting into the camera with me.]

Let me tell you the story of this picture:

I am 19. I am transferring to the University of Michigan, and they have assigned me a roommate. I get a letter that tells me that my roommate's name is, well, let's call her Muffy Lou. At this time in my life, I am hanging out with punk rockers a lot, though you can tell from this picture that I am not, myself, actually a punk rocker. I am not happy at the thought of rooming with a preppy. And Muffy Lou sounds like the ultimate preppy name.

A couple of days later, I get a phone call from someone who identifies herself as Louie and says she is my roommate for the fall. I say, "I'm confused, my letter said Muffy Lou." "Oh, yeah," she says, "that's my name but nobody actually calls me that. I think we should meet."

So we do. That picture is of us meeting. She's not home when I arrive at her house, and her mom shows me to the rec room in the basement. After a couple of minutes, I hear the door open and that woman in the picture comes down the stairs. Blonde hair, plaid skirt, oxford shirt, sweater on a chain: Muffy Lou. The preppy personified.

Then she whips off the wig.

In this picture, I think that I am not just squinting into the sun but perhaps also not as OK with this practical joke as I am pretending to be. You can see that Louie does not have my problem with body image--Look at how she stands, hands on hips! Look at that smile! Look at that direct gaze! She is tough, good-humored, smart, playful, self-confident, outgoing. She has a little bow-legged swagger and boundless physical energy. After this picture is taken, she will change into regular clothes and then barbecue seafood for me on the beach.

It is August. By the time I turn 20, on October 13, we will be lovers.

This is the last picture of me with my arms crossed over my stomach. After I come out, my pictures start looking like this:

And this:

And this:

And, for heaven's sake, this:

[My cat Susie Sienkiewicz, may she rest in peace, chewed a bite out of that one.]

It's not that all my body image issues are magically resolved. I doubt they ever will be, not completely. I would be a much better person than I actually am to live as a fat woman in our culture and have no issues at all with how I look and how much I weigh. But you can see that something happens. And it's not just sex--I'd had sex before, with men. Some of whom turned out to not actually be gay, even. It's something else. Something complicated about finally understanding why, for all those years growing up, I felt I didn't fit in but didn't know why; and about Lou liking to look at me and me figuring that out after awhile (why else do I have all these pictures of myself?); and about love; and about it just being very exciting to be a young lesbian in the late 80s.

p.s. In case you are wondering what Lou looks like under that wig, here we are a couple of years later:

We're Facebook friends now. She looks exactly like that but 100 times better--one of those women who starts out cute and just gets better with age. I am happy about every good thing in her life, because she was one of the good things in mine.

(Also, these pictures look crappy because I don't own a scanner, so I just took pictures of them with my camera. I hope they're good enough to make my point.)

TV Needs More People Like Hurley

David and I have just started watching Lost, from the beginning, on DVD from the library. I like it fine. But what I like best about it is Hurley, the fat guy. Why?

Because Hurley is a smart guy. He is not portrayed as a glutton--in fact, when another character assumes he has been hoarding food and comes to him to ask for some, Hurley takes him down a peg with a kind of tired dignity that shows he's dealt with this kind of bs before and he's just not gonna get worked up about it anymore. When there's work to be done (digging somebody out of a collapsed cave, hauling heavy shit around) Hurley gets in there and does it.

He's portrayed as a decent guy who treats others well. He's the one who figures out that the stranded people need something more to bring them together than the endless round of survival and try-to-get-rescued activities.

The show treats Hurley respectfully even when others don't--when another character calls him "Lardo," it's just his selected insult for Hurley; he has a different one for anybody else who crosses his path.

Hurley is a fat guy who never once says anything denigrating about himself; when he tells Charlie he's taken in a notch on his belt, it's a statement of fact, not a "one good thing about being stranded on an island and not being able to get Ben & Jerry's, ha ha" joke of the kind we hear all too often from women with, say, a stomach bug.

I've heard Hurley called the show's comic relief. And he is. But unlike most fat characters on TV, he's not the comic relief because the show is making fun of him, or he is making fun of himself. He's the comic relief because he has a sense of humor.

This shouldn't be revolutionary. There are plenty of fat people in the world who are healthy and hard-working; who like themselves despite all the messages they get telling them they shouldn't; who have brains and compassion and decent relationships. But they don't show up on TV or in the movies. On TV, they show up on The Biggest Loser, or on NCIS as a woman whose flirtation with a main character can't be anything but a joke, or on name-your-medical-drama as patients who are psychotic or eating themselves to death.

I am happy to add Lost to my very short list of movies and TV shows with positive portrayals of fat people (even if the show otherwise makes no effort to show the diversity of body size and shapes that 40 people randomly put together on a plane would exhibit). We're maybe nine episodes in, and so far Hurley and the show's treatment of him is the highlight for me. It is so refreshing to see a member of my tribe being treated like a human being on TV.

Quick Pissed-Off Rant

I was just chatting with David about my breast reduction surgery, and realized that twice in the last two years a doctor has told me I couldn't have a certain treatment because I was fat, I have pushed and had the treatment, and the result has been a complete or dramatic reduction in pain: first knee surgery that completely eliminated my knee pain, which my (now former) doctor didn't want to refer me for because of my weight--although the surgeon, when I spoke to him about it, felt confident the surgery would be efficacious for me, and it was. And then my breast reduction, which the surgeon initially told me he wouldn't do unless I lost 70 pounds first, and which has almost eliminated a 15-year headache. How many people are suffering because they believe doctors who tell them treatment won't be effective for them, or that they don't deserve it? I'm lucky I'm a pushy bitch.

And you know what? If I had listened to my doctor and not insisted on being referred to a surgeon for my knee (after months of ineffective physical therapy), I'd still be in a lot of pain, my mobility would be increasingly restricted, and they'd say it was because I'm fat.

/end rant