Page 54 of The Ground Beneath Our Feet
“I don’t want to tell you.”
His eyes flashed with exasperation. “We talked about this. Tell me what’s up. I won’t judge.”
“I still don’t want to tell you,” I said, and went in my room and threw myself on my bed. Then, with bravery I didn’t know I had, I said into the mattress, “I just don’t like my body still, okay? Leave me alone.”
“I like your body just fine.”
“I know. But I don’t.”
He sat down next to me on the bed, wincing from bending his knee. “Can I tell you a story?”
I didn’t really want to hear it, but I let him talk.
“In school, I was the fat kid. I couldn’t run the mile. The worst time of year was the presidential fitness test time. I couldn’t do those sit ups. It sucked.”
Mikey used to be fat? He was so fit now, with a rock-hard body. He had like six percent body fat.
Seeing the disbelieving look on my face, he said, “It’s true. I’ll show you embarrassing family photos. Because I was fat, my mom started me in karate. I hated it. I couldn’t do any of it, and I didn’t want to be there.
“Then I saw the Olympics that summer on television, and I loved watching the gymnasts. I wanted to fly, baby. Fly like I weighed nothing.”
I understood that statement far too well.
“So I started gymnastics, and of course I couldn’t do any of it at first. I wanted to quit.” I could tell where this story was going.
“And then Yoda told you to try not, do or do not?”
He reached over and touched my arm, looking me in the eyes. “No. I quit.”
That didn’t make sense. “Really?”
“Yeah. My reaction when things got tough was to escape. I just wanted to leave, to not try anymore. But then I went back. Again and again, I went back. I talked myself into it. Because I really wanted to do it.
“And so I did. And see, that’s the secret. You have to really want to do it, so badly that things like sleeping and eating get in the way.”
That was the thing.
Food worked. As an addict, I knew this. It kept me focused on having to lose weight instead of my real problems, which were unbearable. It was much more bearable to deal with my weight—and to always lose that battle, because then I didn’t have to think about my abusive dad or my old, absentee boyfriend.
I had a project: Me. I was always under improvement. I always needed to get better, to be better, to do better. I could obsess about diet plans, weight loss apps, and the best exercise. I’d get somewhere for a little while, then fail. Then repeat.
And focusing on obsessively improving myself was a distraction from my real problem: that my parents didn’t give me the love I needed.
I didn’t really want to get healthy because my food loved me. It never hit me or yelled at me. It didn’t ignore me. It was always there.
Why would I want to give up the one thing that always made me feel better? The one thing that never disappointed me.
But hearing from Mikey that he used to be like me?
Well, that made me feel better. He changed. Maybe I could, too.
Maybe I just needed to go and get the pictures taken and look at what I looked like, right now. As is. This body. Not someone else’s. But the way I looked right now. The way my body was. Without criticizing it—just allowing myself to be.
“So what brought this on?”
“A stupid idea I had.”
“Stupider than parkour?”
