setbacks

I knew it before I got on the scale – I felt it in my clothes, and in my body, and I had been avoiding stepping up for exactly that reason – I was not interested in the concrete evidence. It's the same reason that sometimes, it takes me right up to the due date to pay a bill – I know what's in my checking account, to the penny, but sometimes, I just don't want to look at that balance, and watch myself deduct from that balance, because the numbers, they're not the prettiest numbers you're ever going to see. Working in academia, it doesn't pay the Big Dollars. Eating Snickers, though – it makes for the big ass.

And I knew that, and so the number I saw, when I jumped up there, naked, first thing in the morning, was not entirely a surprise, but it still wasn't, as you can imagine, pleasant. It was actually deeply, deeply unpleasant. So was kicking the scale with a bare foot. Because ow.

Ow all around, really.

But it's finally real. All this diet planning, exercise thinking about, grocery shopping stuff was playacting, because I really didn't know what kind of shape I was in, and I really hadn't realized how bad it had gotten. It wasn't real, that sense that I have to buckle down.

I'm buckling down, now. I hope this is the last time I get to say that. I hope that future setbacks – because there's always a future setback – will be temporary, minor, easily recoverable from. I hope that I don't ever have to see that number, ever again.

This entry was posted by anne, on Monday, May 09, 2005. You can leave your response.