My brain is still fat

I've been over 200 pounds for most of my adult life and I really thought I was never going to lose weight - though I was desperate to do so. Being fat has occupied more of my waking thoughts than just about anything else in my life for the last 10 or so years. I used to walk into a room and immediately "size up" everyone there to see if I was the biggest. I used to wonder what it was like to not always be thinking about being a big girl and how badly I wanted to be thinner - not even thin, just not fat.

I wasn't always fat. In fact, I was downright skinny back in the day. The fact that I gained weight after those formative high school years led to an interesting dichotomy in my body dysmorphia, one where I would feel so fat and ashamed of myself sometimes and other times like I wasn't overweight at all. The latter definitely contributed to me not losing weight before now. I mean, why not have that 3rd slice of cake? I'm not that fat, right?

While losing weight has been a very positive journey for me, my brain still hasn't caught up. For instance, I have no idea what size I am anymore. I don't mean this just in terms of clothing, just in general. There are days when I feel just as fat as my biggest day and sometimes just walking by a full-length mirror can be a jarring experience. I no longer walk into a room and determine who the biggest person is. I don't feel panicked wondering if the the armrests of a chair are going to dig into my sides. There are just all of these things that, after a DECADE of anxious thoughts, just don't exist anymore.

The unfortunate part about the my brain is that all of these anxious thoughts have just been replaced by new anxious thoughts. When people ask how much weight I've lost and I tell them 50 pounds, they are always astonished and for a moment, I'm damn proud of myself. Unfortunately, on the heels of that pride sits disbelief; it feels like I'm telling a lie because even I don't believe it. It's as if, behind it all, I still feel like I will fail or one day I will just wake up and those 50 pounds will be right back on my ass.

As of today, I still have another 50 pounds I would like to lose and it's just as daunting as the first 50. Some days it feels like I'm just hitting the reset button. I still feel fat, just a new version. I still get as upset about the areas of my body I hate and how they look when I've tried on something too small in the dressing room and how I feel like I will never get to where I want to be with myself. I honestly had no idea that teaching my brain to lose weight would be as hard as teaching my body, but I'm learning.

"Failure pile in a sadness bowl"

One of my favorite comedians is Patton Oswalt and he does a bit where he talks about an entree from KFC and dubs it a "failure pile in a sadness bowl". I feel like that is a pretty good summary of my practices for most of this week, culminating in a giant heap of suck last night.

Now before anyone starts feeling like I need a pep talk, I promise you I don't. Having a crap practice (or several) just makes me want to try harder. I don't know if everyone feels like this, in fact I hope no one does, but I feel like I am constantly running from failure. The thought of not succeeding at something important to me gives me intense anxiety, sometimes to the point of waking up in a panic.

I don't know when this anxiety and self pressure started, but I've felt it for a long time. Growing up I was the youngest of 5 kids and the only child from my mom and dad's marriage. All of my brothers and sisters are much older than me so for the most part I grew up an only child.

I was a smart kid and I suppose that set high expectations as I grew up. No one in my family really knew how to support me in academics or athletics because none of them had done it themselves, but they wanted me to succeed at everything. My whole life has been figuring things out on my own and it's been tough at times, but I wouldn't have had it any other way. Having never had anything come easy, I never expect anything to come easy. Unfortunately that also leads to the mentality that when it does, I am always waiting for someone to pull the rug out, hence the constant running from failure.

So what does all this have to do with derby? Well, sometimes a "failure pile in a sadness bowl" is good for us. Too often I think we tend to rest on their laurels and never really try to get any better. Sometimes we need these moments of failure to remind us that if we love what we're doing, we have to get up and do it better. In roller derby you are literally picking yourself up off the floor time and time again, mentally you just have to keep doing the same thing. Don't dwell on the fall, thrive on the recovery.

Derbyversary, Part I

I have probably thought of topics for a thousand blog posts in the last couple days, but have not had one second to sit down and actually write any of them. It's now 9pm on Sunday night and I am completely exhausted. Between baking a cake, practice, a bout, helping with our Derby 101 class, another practice and a team cookout, I feel like I have run the derby marathon. Four more days of derby start tomorrow, then a 2 day break followed by 7 days straight up to our league championships. Whew...

This month marks my one year "derbyversary" and before I put on skates and aspired to a roller girl, my life was totally different. Generally my evenings consisted of cooking dinner, eating dinner, watching tv, and going to bed. More often or not, a bottle (or two of wine) was involved. Weekends were typically full of drinks too.

It wasn't like we were going out and partying, but it added up just the same. A typical Saturday started with beers while we did yard work, then maybe go out for lunch and a drink there too. On the way home, grab a bottle of wine and drink that while we made dinner. I don't think any of us felt like we needed to drink, it was more like something that came from lack of having anything better to do.

Between the pregnancy, miscarriage, and the drinking, I put on about 10 (more) pounds and was basically a lazy slug. When I finally decided to do this derby thing, part of the reason was that I wanted to get in shape. Apparently the thought never occurred to me that I should be in better shape to play derby.

When I first started skating with my Meat class, I didn't have a ton of trouble keeping up in the endurance department (I mean we were all newbs), but I was definitely slow. As a former high school athlete (read: half-assed attempts at random sports without much enthusiasm), I gave myself a little too much credit for having done sporty things in my adolescence.

The first endurance practice that I ever attended with my league was probably one of the worst, yet important days of my derby career to date. It was an outdoors practice in late summer and we were going to skate 12 miles around a point. From the start I knew things were going to be bad. I was trying really hard and yet a giant gap was forming in front of me in the pace line. In no time, other skaters were going around me, including other meaties who I had seen quit in long drills or endless pace lines when I had kept going. At one point I remember someone passing me and patting me on the shoulder. I know she meant well, but the look on her face was clearly one of pity.

It turned out that the problem that day was the rock hard starter wheels that had come on my skates; they made pavement a miserable, torturous experience. After a very kind vet skater loaned me some hybrid wheels, I went back and skated that point with ease. I felt a little vindicated, but nothing could change how that day made me feel. Mostly because it made me realize how other people must see me and forced me to look at myself the same way.

That endurance practice was a wake-up call and I vowed to make changes. At first I just started by trying harder. I tried to never have to stop in a drill and I practiced as much as I could. A lot of times I would seek out other skaters with skills I envied and take mental notes, trying out what I saw until I was able to start doing it myself.

I guess I did something right because when it came time for drafts, I was lucky enough to get drafted by the undefeated league champions. Frankly, I didn't know what they saw in me, but I was just ecstatic to skate with them... and that was when I found out that I hadn't even gotten to the real work.

Do all the things better

Last night I was determined to have a good practice with my team. I wanted to be fast (or slow if need be), aware, solid, and all those other adjectives that equate to awesome in derby. I typically define a good practice as having one or two moments that make me mentally high five myself while looking around to make sure someone else saw all that awesome! Ok, and it probably wasn't even that awesome, but it might just be that it's the first time I nailed a stop or a juke. I love these moments because it feels like progress, like things are clicking!

Occasionally and despite my high hopes, a practice can go from promising to demoralizing in one fell swoop. For me it usually starts with some kind of muscle cramp that my body just won't shut up about. All I can think of is how much it hurts. Then, in the first drill maybe I can't accomplish any of the objectives. At this point, I'm getting really frustrated and thinking about quitting for the night. I usually trudge on, but my brain is just a huge chorus of negative and by then, I'm screwed. This is basically what happened last night.

I would do anything to kill that little negative voice in my head that tells me not to bother counter blocking because I'm going to get hit out anyway or the one that says I will never get lead jammer because I am a chunky slow girl or that no one sees me as an asset on the track. I'm slowly learning to tell that voice to STFU, but its a sloooooow process and I still lose more days than I win.

Tonight is day 2 of many upcoming pre-championship practices, and another chance for me to have some 'aw, shit' moments, so here's to shutting off the I can'ts and listening to more I wills.

My mental theme for this practice comes from the almighty Yoda, "Do or do not. There is no try."

Wish me luck!