359 pounds.
About 3 months after the end of a two and a half year relationship, I decided to get a job as a "sandwich artist" at Subway. It was the start of the spring semester of my freshman year in college and I knew hardly anybody. When my girlfriend and I moved to town, we were still so wrapped up in each other that I never took the time to meet new people and when our relationship went south I found myself in a very lonely position and dealing with pretty serious depression that I had been using my relationship to mask. A few weeks after I started at Subway, a young woman and fellow college student started there and she brought so much light back into my life. She was smart, funny, hilarious, and had this smile that actually brightened the moods of the people around her. I remember she drove this total piece of shit car that she spray painted yellow and then painted these huge multicolored flowers all of it. She was always laughing and saw the humor and the beauty in everything around her. As we began to see each other more and more, we became inseparable. It was such an incredible feeling because as I had began to gain weight from all the recreational drinking, I could tell by the way she looked at me that she still saw the beauty that I possessed inside.
At the end of the academic year, I moved north to a different school and she moved south to cook at a Girl Scout camp, but for the 4th of July she and a friend drove up to where I was going to school and my best friend and I took them to the carnival and the fireworks. So we got back to my apartment where my rainbow-colored sunflower told me that once the summer was over she was taking a job as a chef on a cruise ship so that night was going to be our last night together, or even in communication, for quite some time. So as the morning hours started to roll around, the young lady and I retired to my bedroom and we began to cuddle, which was actually the first physical contact we ever had. As we were drifting off to sleep in each other's arms, bottles clanging and drunken cursing alarmed us awake. I got up to see what was going on where I found my best friend on the balcony, drunk and in tears. We sat and talked and it turns out that he had tried to make a move on the friend and had been denied. I should have patted him on the shoulder and said better luck next time, but instead I sat down cracked open a beer and started discussing the pitfalls and hardships of being single in an attempt to get him out of his funk. After a few hours of talking, his mood started to lift as the sun started coming up over the horizon. So at a point of physical and emotional exhaustion, I headed back to the bedroom only to discover that her alarm was going to go off in four minutes! I climbed back into bed, woke her up, looked her directly in the eyes and we kissed. I apologized for wasting the night helping my friend and I asked her to remember me for that kiss and not as the hapless mess that I was becoming. At that point, the alarm went off, she and her friend got up, I walked them to her car, we kissed again, and then she drove off never to be seen again. Later as the single life raged on, I came to regret and regret missing every second with the cruise ship, rainbow-sunflower girl.
When I started in my quest towards 215 pounds, my therapist started talking about how important it was to take time for myself and suggested that I get a massage or two. The massages would be good for a 500 pound man who was exercising and it would be therapeutic for my soul. In beginning the process of finding a massage therapist and learning of all the different types of massage I came across a healing technique known as reiki. From what I understand, reiki is a type of massage that deals with getting your energy balances in order and the therapist actually channels the "bad energy" out of places of pain and discomfort and into their own bodies. Furthermore, this practice can't be performed by just anybody off the street because the therapist needs to have the ability of pushing that channeled bad energy out of their own bodies and back into the universe or else the therapist will then suffer their client's pain and discomfort. I thought the idea of this technique was totally preposterous, but now I'm singing a little different tune. Though I believe it to be scientifically unlikely, I really don't think it matters. What does matter is if the client and therapist come to a meeting of the minds. If the patient believes it will work and the therapist believes they are helping, then both parties will experience mutual benefit.
I mention this because I think I have been an unlicensed reiki therapist since I was 7 or 8 years old helping my mother deal with the trials and tribulations of a single, 40-year-old college student raising a child on child support and pell grants. In college, I had a fraternity brother that used to mockingly call me "mother goose" because I was always the one that would seek out those who were in emotional distress and help them get to the bottom of their problems. Though they, and I many times, were too drunk to remember the situation or what exactly was said it would always end it with, "you are a man above men and WE will get through this." The problem was that not only was I not educated in reiki, but I had no education in any sort of therapy, so their fears, pain, and problems became my fears, pain, and problems. And though that pain is what eventually drug me beneath the surface of the water and all the way to the bottom, it was only a welcomed distraction from the huge knife in my belly, or my own personal hell of pain, sadness, despair, and darkness. At that point, as I lay weighted down at the bottom with a knife in my belly, there were very few "clients" that came to see how I was doing. It got to the point that I enjoyed living at the bottom because it meant that there was nobody that needed my magical hands anymore.
I guess I bring this up because earlier this evening I was looking on facebook at pictures of that same friend's wedding. It was so great to see him so very happy and that those sad, sad nights on my balcony with the Bud Lights had finally become a distant memory. As I continued through the pictures I noticed other familiar faces and thought of all the emotional battles that we had fought together, and then I started to feel sad that I missed out on such a joyous celebration. I started thinking of all of the people that I grew up with and struggled though my early 20's with and I realized that probably 95% of them are now married and of those 95% five of them invited me to their wedding. I'm happy to say that of those five, I managed to make four of them, but god do I feel like such a damned fool! To this day I remember every single one of the heart-to-heart conversations with my friends and brothers, but it seems that it didn't mean enough to anybody else to get my name on a guest list. Now this probably makes me sound angry and bitter, but truthfully the only person I hold responsible for any of this is me. My motto used to be that "every beer is an adventure," but in retrospect if it isn't an adventure then its at least a story, and trust me I have a million stories to tell and a bottle cap collection as evidence. But based on distribution of invitations the only person that gives a damn about all these stories, from all those beers, is the fool that is telling them. I guess this kills me so much is because without all those stories, without all those tough times that I thought I was helping my friends through, then all I have to show for the past 13 years of my life is humiliation, embarrassment, and shame for all of the opportunities that I've squandered. After looking through those albums I feel like a crack pot and a first class fool to say the least.
I remember an episode of Family Guy where they did a Dawson's Creek spoof and the theme song went, "high school; because this stuff really matters…" During any given time in college I was carrying at least one of seven people, emotionally and financially, and today only one of them ever contacts me. When my queen and I started dating, she used to complain that she just wished she could understand why her ex-husband was the way he was. She just wanted to understand him, and I would tell her that the fact that you don't understand him is a joy because it means that you aren't as crazy as he is and to understand him means you have give up your own sanity. I spent so much of my early 20's living in other peoples' dysfunction because I was just too scared to make the effort to take advantage of the opportunities I had right in front of me.
I grew up on the story of the man who was walking the beach and came across a little boy throwing sea turtles back into the ocean. The man said to the boy, "Look down the beach at all of those sea turtles that will die if they aren't returned to the sea in the next few minutes. You can't possibly think you can make a difference." The little boy smiled, picked up another turtle, and flung it into the ocean and replied, "I made a difference to that one right there." It would be great to know there was at least one time that I made a difference in the last 13 years, but that isn't going to magically change the mistakes that I have made or make the road ahead any less cumbersome. It's true, I am bitter, but I want to make clear that it is intended at nobody other than me. For each and every one of those characters from those million stories, I want nothing but the best for each and every one of them. My psychiatrist recently prescribed xanex and for some reason I've been reluctant to take them as if I'm afraid of being happy, but I see now that happiness will always be a fool's errand as long as I sit here depressed wishing it to come closer. So tonight I think I will take a pill to help swallow down that sadness and shame so that tomorrow I can rise rested and refreshed and ready to do something to be proud of, because pride is the greatest drug of all!
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