Adipose As Armor

A few people know that I've been a bit frustrated with the fact that I've not lost any weight in the last year.  I'm still basically the same size, although I'm able to do more physically, so it feels so puzzling and frustrating.

Throughout it all, my Roxanne has just calmly repeated, when your body is ready to let go of the extra fat, it will.  Just keep doing what you're doing and try to improve the nutrition!  (I mean, for honesty's sake, I never overeat in terms of calories, but quite a few of those calories come from cookies!)

In keeping with this honesty thing, I admit I feel safer when there is a buffer between me and the world.  Extra fat is really serving as a kind of armor, helping me avoid attention, be a bit numb to my surroundings... and when I am being painfully honest, keeping men at bay.  I am quite talented in choosing men for relationships where there can be no long-term survival -either we are badly matched, or life circumstances are insurmountable, or they are jerks.  It was an unconscious sort of fear for quite a while and really difficult to admit I was doing that, however unintentionally.

So Friday night I was contemplating some stuff from earlier in the day, and having experienced some frustration with my imperfect body, started going through my meditation of thanking God for my strong, resilient body He gifted me, and thanking my body for everything it allows me to do.  I held up to God my frustration with not losing any more weight, and then it struck me.

I had not lost any weight this past year because I didn't want to.  Most of this past year I have felt off-balance and frankly, unsafe in a number of ways.

This revelation hit me like a wall:  I am perfectly safe.  The stuff from so long ago that sat in the back of my head whispered, "Oh yeah, you've had a nice run, but at any moment, things will fall apart, and then it is all pain and violence and fear.  Without constant vigilance and having your defenses up all the time, your past IS your future!" That all seemingly dissipated.  I'm not sure when that happened, maybe just a couple days ago.

I laid there on the bed in wonderment.  I mean, I really AM safe.  Nothing is going to hurt me.  There was so much plain relief in that revelation I actually cried a bit.  I could see in my mind's eye how much my body had been struggling this past year, torn between wanting to live up to my dreams and being weighed down by my fear.  I could actually see this extra fat as armor I simply wasn't letting go of.

My body did its job.  It made me feel safer.

In perfect peace, I said, "It's okay, I'm safe now, I can let you go" and this peacefulness came over me, and I finally understood, in calm acceptance, that that old fear was really gone, and my body doesn't have to bridge that gap anymore, between reality and fear.

So, I am very interested to see what this next year brings, with a calm sense of rightness about it all.