Lets talk about how I got here. No, we’re not going to talk about “privilege,” because we all (should) know that privilege has been thrown around so much that it no longer carries any meaning, and as such doesn’t add anything to conversations. I’m going to tell you about I got from the beginning of freshman year to the present day.
It all started on one sunny day in early September of 2012. I got to Choate as tubby six-foot-tall pile of awkward. The small middle school I went to previously (and I mean small: fifty people for a K-8 school) had passed fairly uneventfully, and the transition from this tiny school to Choate was a shock, to say the least. I went from a microcosm of a six-person eighth grade class to a eight hundred student school. As such, I developed a very tight-knit group of friends in Mem House over the course of the year.
Sophomore year was when things started going downhill. The group of friends I had in Mem drifted apart. It was hard to make new friends, and eventually I gave up trying. My grades tanked, my social life had tumbleweed blowing through it. I gained 40 extra pounds of gravitational field in that time as well, which not only made people want to talk even less, it made me hate the way I looked. I’d wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see that achievement of loneliness hanging over my belt. Then I’d put on mask of humor to try to hide the emptiness inside and get through the day, and end up back in bed at the end of the day ready to do it all over again.
So that sucked. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel though. In the summer of last year, I clocked in at my highest weight ever, 257 pounds. That’s almost as heavy as an average baby killer whale. I motivated myself to do something about it. I started going to the gym, and more importantly I stopped treating my face like a garbage disposal. It’s been slow going, but eventually I lost almost 30 pounds. I’m still a social wreck, but at least I’m a slightly less round social wreck.
What’s interesting about the whole ordeal is how alone I felt during it. I never, ever, felt like there was someone who I could talk to. There’s a giant stigma against men speaking their feelings as it shows “weakness,” and that stigma has caused incalculable harm to millions of men who otherwise would have been able to seek help. Even Choate’s own body positivity club was women-only until last year, and to this day almost all of its meetings are women-only.
Just some food for thought.
It is interesting that you took a personal approach to the blog post. I like how you brought up the stigma around men expressing their feelings, and how you challenged it. Sorry you've had such a rough time!
ReplyDeleteI chose to read this post because when I sent my blog link to some friends, two replied with praise for this post. The chronology and stages of being work well together, and this post opens my eyes to something I wasn't necessarily thinking about, but now I see how important it is.This post addresses something that plenty of other people are thinking or going through, but it's intertwined with the courage to put it into words.
ReplyDeleteIt take a lot of guts to put such a personal post on the blog, and I applaud you for it. It has opened my eyes and continues to remind me that body image is not an issue for only women. I like how personal you made this post through content and conversational tone - it makes it all the more powerful.
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