Back On The Shelf

When I was asked when I was five years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said with full confidence that I wanted to be a robot.

It didn't take long for that to become wanting to be an astronaut, I think maybe because I realised when I was about six that robots get built and people get born and I was in the latter section of society. I don't remember being that upset about the revelation. I mean, today - if I was fully of the belief that in several years I would be contained in the chassis of an immortal machine, then told today that it wasn't going to happen, I'd be livid.

Other, more feasible dreams followed.

Being wealthy and happy after an indeterminate period of time, because all you had to do was live that long. Being a rock star. Being a professional writer. Being a rock star again. Being a writer again. That kind of calibre of aspiration, running at that kind of level of want or need. It was joined with a variety of other dreams, like travelling the entire world, living in California (I was young enough that I couldn't really differentiate different bits of an albeit huge state), owning a Lamborghini, owning a private jet.

I can tell you the approximate moment in my life when depression really started to kick in, and that was when I was thirteen years old, because my dreams and aspirations started to change.

Now, a lot of folks - the kind of folks who like to use terms like "never did me any harm" or "back in my day" or "that's just the way it is suck it up" - would point out that this is just part of growing up. You put your childish dreams away, and you start having adult ones. Right?

Well, my dreams and aspirations started to include getting through a school day without being verbally abused or physically assaulted.

Dreams of getting out of school and having a job, and maybe owning a record store, and having a flat that was near the shops. Of living near a railway line so I could hear the trains rattling through the night. Of being able to open my windows and hear the world existing outside them, without having to be out in it. Things became a lot more prosaic.

Around about 15, when I had to put down the groundwork for the rest of my educational life, I had dreams that I'd be successful. That I'd have an office in a legal firm, and a bowl on my desk which I would fill with cherry tomatoes, and eat throughout the day. ...I mean, I had no idea what a career in law actually entailed but I had to pick something, and the panic attack I had during the careers meeting didn't help much. Those dreams included waking up and wanting to do the things that I had to do that day, which was steadily becoming more and more unlikely - but the vague dreams of travel, of seeing things that interested me, of seeing the bands I loved, still remained.

Funny how things change.

When you're a teenager you never conceive of having a medical condition that could literally stop you doing things you want to do. Physical OR mental. It happens to other people you know, but you never really consider what it means, let alone what it is like to have it happen to you. That is, in fairness, partly because of society's habit to assume that every illness or condition can be prevented as long as you do the right thing. If you ever need evidence of that, ask people with chronic health conditions the advice they have been given by people without those conditions. (I have some stories, I tell you.)

So life happens to you - life in the boundary of the world as it stands today, here and now. Life in the expanding gulf between rich and poor, wherein all the things that you were promised as a child of the seventies, eighties or nineties becomes the purview of a thinner and thinner slice of society.

It can feel like calcification. Like a million doors that were previously open are closing one at a time, even if now and then a new one opens.

That's why it's important to grab onto the ones that are left, where you can.

It is easy to spend one's life staring at the aspirations on the shelf that we can't reach for any more. I understand that. The mentality of it - how hard it can be to reach for the new thing, when the old things we wanted so badly are unreachable. We have to find the things to reach for that we can grasp. We need to find our victories where we can, rather than pine for win conditions that no longer exist. It's the only way we can keep going. And if those win conditions are as simple as having a day end wherein you actually look forward to waking up tomorrow, then draw your plans and march your troops.

Everyone needs something to strive for.

I don't think there is some overarching point to this ramble. It's something that has been occupying my thoughts recently, after I was asked what I wanted to be when I was a kid, and I had the most incredible wave of nostalgia wash over me as I remembered the one thing I really, really wanted to be was a robot.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Three-Letter Word

(Content warning: what follows will be a frank monologue that talks about body issues, weight, self image, self esteem, depression, anxiety, bullying, trauma and suicide. If you really don't want to read any of that, no judgement whatsoever. I understand. Feel free to check out one of my other blogs which are less heavy. This one is about Blade Runner. If you're into that sort of thing.)

Hi folks. My name is John, and I'm fat.

Here's a picture of me at Nine Worlds this year.

Yes, I am the one on the left, har har har. (This person cosplaying Ellen Ripley was really cool. Very friendly. Many thanks to her!)

I am fat. I use that word to describe myself, not to take the piss out of myself, not to disarm people who weaponise it against me, but because it is true. I am overweight. Obese, is the term. The BMI chart - if anyone even thinks that is a thing any more - doesn't go up far enough to account for my height or my weight, but I probably sit in the red bit.

Ever since I hit puberty I have been this shape.

Like, you can look at kid pictures of me and I've got pudgy little cheeks. You can look at teenager pictures of me and I am, yes, fat. I am fat, have always been fat, and will remain fat until such a time as I actually decompose or am otherwise reduced by being dead.

As you can imagine, this has led to my certain life experiences. I lucked out in many other areas of my life - I recognise that I have the privileges of being white-passing, straight-passing, cis, and coming from an only slightly poor household. This thing, though - this thing is something that can affect just about everyone.

Being generally treated like shit by half of the people I ever met was a strong motivator toward changing something. So I tried.

This is where a lot of people are going to roll their eyes and close this window, but stick it out, because this is the literal truth.

None of it worked.

I can understand your skepticism, trust me, because for all my life I was surrounded by people telling me I was wrong, and I was lying, and I was doing something wrong. To the point wherein I actually started doubting myself. Doubting whether or not I remembered how things went, properly.

It goes like this: I try to lose weight by just reducing my calories and doing more exercise. Two months pass. I put on a few ounces. I reduce the calories more, do more exercise. Doesn't work, again - this time I put on four pounds, which is absurd. My mother and father are confused at this, because mum's the one making my meals, and there's only so much snack food you can buy on £2 a week pocket money. So they assume I am sneaking food elsewhere, I promise them I'm not, I get the "Alright then" with the roll of the eyes which basically tells me they don't believe me at all.

So then, I am put into the care of the health services. Referred to a dietitian. I am issued a rather strict eating plan. Everything not on the plan gets lobbed out of the house and my pocket money goes away so I can't spend it on food. For six months I am on the first plan, and my weight actually - this time - doesn't change at all. It remains constant. I AM miserable, but - you know. Constant. The dietitian, who predicted the loss of three stone in those six months, throws up her hands and declares that I am either not doing enough exercise (har fucking har) or I am cheating on the plan. Except this time my mum is on my side here - because I haven't been.

We see another dietitian. This one swears by the cups-of-rice diet. Like all your food is measured in cups of rice. The idea of which actually made me burst into tears when I was in the back of the car on the way home. Nothing but rice, forever. But hey - at least I wouldn't be fat any more. Right?

I lost a pound in the first week.

I put on three in the second.

I had monthly weigh-ins. I was meant to be referred for six months but after the third the lady didn't want me to go any more, because I was half a stone heavier,and her heavy hints of "something else going on" pretty much told me she thought I had cheated on this diet, too.

Which I hadn't.

My food had basically been plain rice, for three months. It killed me. It absolutely killed me. I like food, that is no surprise to anyone. I like food, and here I am, eating basically plain rice. I got sauce sometimes, that was a luxury. Carrots, too. I love carrots. Maybe I love them because they were the only interesting thing I got to eat in that period of my life.

It was during this three months that I was written out of doing PE classes at school, anything high-impact like running or basketball, because my knee joints were already deteriorating. But you don't get Arthritis when you're young, so it can't have been that. That was because I was fat, too.

Now, there will be a lot of people shaking their head at me. "John," they will say, a knowing smile on their lips, an understanding hand on my shoulder. "You don't need to justify yourself. Everyone tries and fails to diet. Everyone does. You just need to try again, and you need to stick to it."

I mean, right, I fully agree.

The idea of not sticking to it was alien to me. I was highly motivated to make this work, and that was why I never cheated - because I was tired of being beaten up for it. Literally being physically assaulted for being fat. I was tired of being called names constantly, of always being self-conscious of myself, of always flattening myself against corridor walls and taking seats that people couldn't move behind me. People made my life an absolute hell. As a child, many times, I considered doing something very drastic about it. I must have been broken. There must have been something wrong with me. Didn't you just eat less and then the fat went away? Didn't you just jog and do the exercise bike and play the stupid football and eat the boring stuff and then it went away?

Except it never, ever fucking did.

It flies in the face of common wisdom, I know. But then a lot of actual facts in terms of weight loss don't actually marry up with common wisdom - here's a Time article on the topic. What it comes down to is that nobody loses weight the same way, and some people can lose it easily, and some people find it difficult to put any on, and some people find it nigh on impossible to actually lose it.

You will find it difficult to get any hits on actual science for this on Google, obviously, because dieting is an industry and a lifestyle - and it is one that is primarily fed by insecurity. Nobody in that industry wants one of the first ten results on Google to be "Actually Maybe You Are Already An Okay Weight, Just Eat More Veggies".

The notion of someone being a size and being okay with that size is an alien one. If you find it very, very hard to lose weight, that is your body pushing back. If you enter starvation mode and stop burning calories the moment you cut out your daily snacks, then that weight is probably not going anywhere. Nobody cares about though, because just wanting it bad enough and not drinking Coca-Cola any more worked for their uncle Derek, who put on eight stone when he quit his job, but now he's managed to lose seven, so literally anyone can lose weight, right?

Medical fat-phobia is such a common thing, too. Relatively recently, I talked to a doctor about joint pain. He didn't even blink, just suggested that if I lost weight it would help. After an awkward silence, I explained to him that I meant my knuckles. He cleared his throat, looked at my medical records, found the word Rheumatoid, and told me he couldn't do anything. Well, glad we sorted that one out.

For a long time I hated the word fat, because it was a knife that was stuck in my back constantly.

It carried a lot of hostility in it, and a lot of my own hang-ups. It carried the hatred and derision of my peers (and hell, just normal people who didn't even know me), and it carried the feeling of failure of constantly trying without any success. It also carried the constant accusations of being a liar. A treble-whammy of shit.

...if people weren't actually shit to me, though, I don't think I would have thought twice about it.

While I was fat, it didn't stop me doing things. It didn't stop me riding a bike or playing football - though I wasn't very good at the latter, I still did it, and did it every single school day and most Saturdays. I would walk a lot of places. I was still capable of every physical task in front of me, aside from winning any running races. Even if I hated doing it, I could still do cross-country races. We played cricket, and rugby, and (against my doctor's advice) basketball. While I was told my knees were in serious trouble, I kind of ignored that, because they didn't hurt unless I jumped around on them or dropped down on them - though when I got to fifteen they started crunching whenever I bent them. They still do.

It's as I got on in life, and I paid less attention to people that don't matter, and I found my confidence and my capabilities in the outside world, that I started using the word fat again.

Yes, at first, it was to disarm people that would use it against me as a weapon - but then I started to think, why should it be a weapon? We're not in school any more. Is fat really a bad thing? Is fat really a thing I shouldn't be? Is it a thing that you should scold me for being, in the street? Is it worse than being a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a thug?

The fact is, no. It isn't a thing that is inherently bad in and of itself.

Some people will throw up their hands at this, tell you how bad it is for you to be overweight, so on. If any of them had a similar childhood to me, or anyone that knew me, then I understand why.

Anyone remember the Two Minutes Hate from Nineteen Eighty-Four?

That one.

I will never use the word Fat to describe someone else unless they have told me I can or should. Just because that's my word now, doesn't mean it is theirs, and that's because the word still carries the same trauma, the same pain that it carried for me. And it carries that pain and trauma because we got to be the target of the two minutes hate.

I've talked before about insecurity, and how it drives people to turn on others. When Person A decides they need to lose weight because that will fix the hole they have inside, they go out and do so, but they find that Person B is apparently happy without having to do the same. I mean, I've also - in that same mini-series - done a blog about how high school never ends, which is also relevant, so...

So this word. This three-letter word. Fat.

We don't hate it because it is what we are.

We hate it because of how it was used on us. We hate it because people told us it was the reason why they treated us badly. We hate it because out parents and other people told us it was a bad thing to be and constantly, constantly pushed us to not be that thing any more. We're told from an early age that fat is mutually exclusive to beautiful or attractive or handsome, which leads to me being told, when I use the word to describe myself, to sometimes be told: "No you're not, you're lovely!" Which usually results in a snarky comment along the lines of: I didn't say I wasn't, did I stutter? But in these people's heads, fat is a definite negative. It precludes everything else.

You can probably replicate the same effect with any other word, with a concerted effort. If any school-age brunette was beaten up for being a brunette, and the word Brunette was spat at them from across the room as a term of abuse and hatred, and their parents constantly told them that, actually, it would just be a little easier for them if they just bleached their hair...

It's got so little to do with our own weight, and so much more to do with other people. With the fact that this was how other people were raised, how they get their kicks, how they make themselves feel better. Sure, they might be powerless in a sea of confusion in a world they don't understand and surrounded by people they have no empathetic connection with, incapable of illustrating their thoughts and hopes and dreams, and feeling like they will never achieve the things they aren't even sure they actually want to achieve...

...but at least they're not fat.

People want to make sure that chronic illness can't happen to them. It's why they offer such insipid solutions if it ever comes out that you suffer from one. They are just the things they cling to as reasons why it can't happen to them. It's the same with being fat - they don't like the notion of having to suffer from how society treats you, so they make themselves feel better with the thought of "Well, if you didn't like it, you could just lose it really easily".

Insecurity made manifest. And the easiest and quickest way people find to deal with it is to dump it on someone else.

Well I'm not letting that happen to me, any more.

I'm fat. I've always been fat. It's the shape I am, it's a shape I tried not to be and failed at. In the failing, and in other people's treatment of me even while I was failing, my mental health got very seriously snarled up. At least part of the reason behind my attempt to kill myself was tied to it,and to the clinical depression and generalised anxiety which was probably fed by it.

Except I wasn't depressed or anxious or suicidal because I was fat, if I am at all honest.

I was depressed, anxious and suicidal because every other fucker that I knew decided to punish me for being fat.

And I'm not taking that bullshit. Not against me, and not against anyone else I know.

This three letter word is my shape, and fuck you if you don't like it.

Warmer Weather

So the cold and the moisture really doesn't do me any favours. It hurts, physically. I always know if it will rain or has rained when I first wake up, because my knees and elbows hurt.

Then we get to a time of year when the sun starts coming out.

In part, one of the reasons this makes me happy is because it means stuff is happening. Events start occurring that draw people together. Walk The Wight is today; a lot of folks get stuck into that, and I don't doubt the feeling of camaraderie that must come from making the entire distance together. This island is its best self when the sun shines on it. It's just all better.

Another reason: even basic tasks become pleasant. Going to the shops in the rain is misery, and in the cold it's a chore - my joints are stiff and walking is just shit. When it's warm, though? When it's sunny, with a faint breeze? I will happily take my time, mooch along the street with the hot sun beating down on me, leaning against lamp posts and soaking up rays as I get some fresh air.

The biggest benefit to me is that it hurts a lot less to do anything.

Sure, I sweat - and I'm a big guy, so I sweat a lot. Nobody likes to see the fat man sweat. But I catch rays, and just standing still and letting the sun soak me seems to make shit hurt less. I don't even know how or why.

Maybe it's just because, when I was in school, the hot weather promised holidays. Not travel - time off school. I hated school, for the most part, so any time I wasn't there was just beautiful. Positive association, perhaps.

All I need do is look out a window and see that sunshine, and I feel better.

Heading home from work when it's still baking hot. 8pm and it's still warm and bright - that's my favourite time. That's the best time. The working day is well over, it's just segueing over to late evening, and still it's the weather to be out and about.

It's songs like Cruisin' by Smokey Robinson that capture this. The long and lazy summer days that just slide by, when everything is hot and glorious, and the entire world feels like one huge holiday.

So if you see me smiling more from now until about September, this is why.

Just a short one, this time. Just to check in.

Legs Twelve

Remember this blog right here, wherein I talked about the pair of ulcers I had on my legs?

Time for an update - and it's good news.

Sheldon (the painful, annoying blemish on my inner right ankle) has been closed and healed for a long while. The leg still bears the scar - it was a savage wound after all. Now, though, the primary discomfort that leg causes me is through the arthritis in the joints.

Lefty, though; Lefty, who I have had since almost 2010 - Lefty has been a constant source of piss-off and pain. Draining. Ugly. Requiring constant wrapping and pressure.

Up until earlier this week.

Lefty isn't an ulcer, now. He's not a wound. Now, he is considered a Previous Wound Site.

This means that, in a couple weeks, my left leg won't need to be bandaged up to the knee; it will have removable compression, the kind that comes off whenever I like.

It is a very, very odd feeling to think that something that has affected me for so long will soon be technically over. It will feel alien, I know, to lay in bed and not feel the sheets cling to compression bandaging. To be able to reach down and touch the back of my calf, without feeling elastic and cotton in the way.

The day I am told that I no longer need that compression, I may just break down in tears.

I can't even tell you how much better this will make my life.

It's all thanks to the NHS. Without them I would be in serious and severe debt or worse - just ignoring the problem until it goes away. I've seen what happens if you ignore a venous ulcer. It spreads. Then you get sepsis and they take off your leg.

I can't thank the medical staff who have treated me enough. First at Garfield Surgery, now sadly closed - then at Tower House Surgery. The many doctors and even more nurses that have helped me not only with Lefty and Sheldon, but also with the various and sundry other conditions I suffer from.

Onwards and upwards, right?

I'll post a picture sooner or later.