What Lies Beneath?

What Lies Beneath?

What lies beneath a person’s surface is usually a mystery; often as much to the person themselves as it is to others.  I have spent most of my life afraid to explore beneath my own surface.  Self-doubt, oversensitivity, moodiness, unmanly emotional mush and other things were barriers that I didn’t have the courage to face and overcome.  Instead, I comforted myself with mass quantities of unhealthy food and self-pity.  Depression became a frequent and all too familiar part of my inner life for 20 years.  My waistline ballooned, I started to have blood pressure problems, I rarely felt happy and I seemed to become less and less relevant in my own life.

About year and half ago I decided that I first had to learn to take care of myself physically, followed by finding a path to greater self-acceptance.  I chose the weight loss surgery route to control portions and to make it almost impossible to turn back to my old existence.  In less than a year, I adopted a much healthier lifestyle, had surgery and lost the vast majority of my excess weight.  I continue to take care of myself physically via exercise and a healthy diet.  Most days I feel none of the old need to eat for comfort, even during times of severe stress in my life.

I have been working on self-acceptance, too, but facing my own self-doubts and mysterious inner workings, while daunting, has not been nearly as hard or gut-wrenching as seeing the consequences of being more open about my emotions and needs.  In trying to be clear and unambiguous about those things, I have managed, at times, to hurt, confuse, disappoint and anger people that I care about.  I refuse to go back to my old, emotionally stunted existence, yet this new and selfish approach I have recently adopted isn’t working either.  I must find some balance that allows me to remain physically and emotionally healthy, but not at the expense of my wife, my family, or my friends.  So, what lies beneath for me, quite obviously, is a man still in search of what it means to be himself in a thinner body

RP