I’ve lived my entire life in fear. It’s mastered me since I was six years old, and from then until my current age of 41, I have let it destroy me. It’s not only fear but weakness and pain, all controlled by fear, and it has led to the saddest, loneliest existence you could possibly imagine.
It has caused me to hide away all these years, afraid to grow, experience, or be vulnerable with people. Afraid to have personal relationships. Now, it has even led to the destruction of my personal health to the point where I could never fully recover.
I share all of this not to seek pity but as a starting point on a quest to live the time I have left in this world in a way different from the first 41 years of my life. This is a statement that I intend to test: is actual change possible for someone like me? Weakness is all I have ever known, felt, and exhibited in my life.
The Years of Neglect
Mental Health
Since I was 9, I can remember the beginnings of a severe anxiety condition that kept me from experiencing normal activities other kids enjoyed. Severe, to the point of not going outside or avoiding people. I was always the person with only one friend, and that one person would mean everything to me until, somehow, I destroyed that friendship. That’s when I learned about depression and how sad a person could truly become. The spiraling, even at such a young age, and the lifetime that followed.
The control mental health struggles have had on me has been life-defining and destructive. It has led me to withdraw completely from the world. To what extent? I have left my house only three times in the last two years. It’s not that I can’t interact with people; in fact, I find conversation comes easily. However, I can’t accept myself, and I don’t think others should accept me either, given what I’ve allowed myself to become. I am ashamed—and I feel I should be—because what has become of me was always in my control if I had been stronger.
Physical Health
I began self-medicating with food when I was 6. It became a nasty cycle, along with a physically limiting degenerative disease. It has led to a lifetime of being unable to participate in life due to pain and the physical limitation of being overweight. Extremely overweight—think My 600-lb Life. I’ve never weighed that much, but that doesn’t mean my size hasn’t kept me from leading any semblance of a normal life. I have never been able to participate.
It makes me so sad to think about all the years I’ve desperately wished I could participate in activities and experiences with others—friends, family—just to be accepted as normal and not as a disgusting waste of a human being by society, by friends, coworkers, or family. What a lonely life it’s been, to feel completely unaccepted by every person I’ve ever met. First impressions hurt so badly. People who have never experienced this can never understand how much it hurts and how much I avoid them.
I am sorry that my existence offends you. Let me hide myself away until I die from chronic self-abuse through overeating and lack of exercise. I don’t want to die having lived the last years of my life this way—completely alone and controlled by my fear of what the world thinks of me, what I think of myself. I want better for myself with the time I have left.
Financial Health
Financially, I’ve simply never been independent. I’ve been too weak and unfocused, caught up in distracting myself from my very existence to care for myself financially, in the same ways I have never cared for myself physically. This has destroyed my future and left me ruined, forcing anyone in my life to constantly pick up the pieces. Oh, what a terrible human being I am that I’ve used those best people I know so often, instead of taking responsibility and fixing my own life. I have taken liberties with so many kind souls instead of facing reality.
If I am to live any semblance of a better life going forward, I must focus on my physical well-being. But I also need to fix my financial health, or I will be consumed by my lack of success and a wasted life of not focusing on building a financial base. Most people my age are reaching a place of financial comfort while I am literally living paycheck to paycheck, unable to pay all my bills.
The Consequences I Now Face
As I write this, taking stock of reality, I sought guidance from ChatGPT on how best to share this. ChatGPT insisted that I be compassionate with myself. I think it’s better if I take a true and brutal account of where I am so that I can measure progress going forward. I do believe that self-love will be the most important habit I need to cultivate in order to make the monumental changes I want. But for now, I’m starting with cold honesty.
My lifestyle of overeating obscene amounts of food, drug abuse, smoking, and drinking for the first 41 years of my life has destroyed my body. I weigh 450 pounds. I am unable to walk more than a few steps a day, using my walker to get to my wheelchair, where I sit for the rest of my day. Using the bathroom is an awful experience that most physically able people couldn’t understand, and it shames me every day. How have I let myself get to this point? Again, this is an existence that was completely within my control.
I go nowhere, contribute nothing to society, have very few personal relationships, and my days consist of worrying about how I’m going to find the money to stuff my face with as many calories as possible, all while being exhausted from my self-abuse, medical conditions, and medications that leave me tired to my bones.
My Medical Conditions?
All permanent and destructive: congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, hypertension, prediabetes, and Blount’s disease. These diseases, mismanaged by me, have destroyed my body to the point where I’m afraid any quality of life might not even be possible. This thought, mixed with depression, makes the quest to get better feel almost monumental most of the time. It’s hard to even think, “Why bother?”
The answer is: because, for once in my life, I want to live.
I have missed out on so many things I wish I had done: traveling, building relationships, going to concerts and sporting events without being judged and treated differently by everyone. Can I just exist in public without being hated for being me?
I am so sad for all I have given up for fear—the life I have destroyed through inaction and destructive thoughts and behaviors. I have a lifetime of days full of regret and the feeling of loss.
The Wake-Up Call
I don’t know why now. People talk about one singular event that made them decide to change. I’ve had a lifetime of them. Every rock bottom was a wake-up call that I turned my back on, only to find an even deeper rock bottom. Down further and further I’ve gone, always until I reached this point. I only hope that maybe this is truly rock bottom, and I can start working my way back.
I am under no illusion that I can undo what’s been done. The damage is too great, too permanent. But I am a reasonable person when it comes to my limitations. However, there’s better…and I choose to fight for better than this existence. Fighting, after a lifetime of giving up, is everything to me right now.
What I’m Fighting For Now
So, I can’t walk, can’t breathe, my heart is giving up on me, I have no money, I’m addicted to food and sugary drinks, I’m underemployed, and I have nothing that I’ve been successful at in this lifetime. Haha! Hell of a starting point.
So, I start here. To lose weight, to increase my mobility, to improve my living conditions, and to improve my financial situation.
I am creating this blog site to share my journey on how I intend to improve my life in every way. I hope it will keep me focused and on track, and also allow me to connect with others. I think I need to connect, to seek outside help. I also think I need this to give me purpose outside of myself.
I won’t be sharing this post with anyone. It’s my first post. I doubt many people will ever read it, but if you do, you know exactly how I feel at this moment, at 4:05 AM. Down, beaten, destroyed. But there’s the slightest glimmer of light, of hope, that I can, for the first time in a very long time, have a day better than the last.
If you read this and can connect with it, please let me know.
A Promise to Myself
I won’t let fear own what’s left of my life anymore. I won’t continue with the self-hate and destruction. I will choose to let love in, to love myself in all of my darkest places, and to seek to improve every day, no matter how slowly and no matter how limited the ceiling on my improvements might be. Even if all I have is one more year, I want to live it better, and in as open a way as possible.
This is not a comeback story. This is the beginning of a life worth living. I’m not giving up. Not now. Not when I’ve finally decided to live.
