I told you a fraction of my story on my about me page, but if I really want to be transparent and show my truest self it is important to talk about all of the things that have gotten me to this point in my life.
Might as well start from the very beginning… For the first six weeks of my life I was literally starving to death. Not because my mom didn’t feed me or anything, it was due to a blockage in my stomach that wouldn’t let food go through my body so everything that I ate was later vomited out. After many trips to the hospital, several formula changes and a lot of my mom yelling at doctors they finally found the problem and I had a life saving surgery. The doctors told my mom, had they not found it I would have died.
Now, I don’t know if that did anything to the chemistry in my body or what damage was done, but the doctors told my mom that I may have weight problem (boy was that an understatement of a lifetime). So, I did end up having a weight problem I was a chunky baby and an even chunkier toddler. Even so I was active, happy and just a little bit fat. I did love to eat and as I am writing this I am actually realizing that even at a young age I used to sneak into the kitchen and eat stuff out of the fridge. Maybe there is something to that, maybe I will explore that later.
Fast forward a bit, six years old, my mom and dad divorced, after a brief period my father left the state and I did not see or hear from him for fourteen years. Yes, of course this had an emotional impact and left some pretty deep scars that would take me years to work out, and break free of. My mom found a new man and he treated me like a son so even though it was painful I still had a male figure in my life. The biggest change in my life came when I was ten years old. While horse playing with my sister I made a stupid decision to run after her in the house, slipped on the floor, and low and behold I ended up with a broken hip. Of course it couldn’t be a simple break it had to be the beginning of a living hell I would have to endure.
I spent years in and out of the hospital, on crutches or in a wheel chair, no ability to exercise, struggling through school and trying to get through my life as a teenage boy. The aftermath was CRAZY! By the time I graduated highschool I had ballooned to four hundred pounds. At that age my weight caused me some problems but like I said in my about me I have always tried to enjoy life regardless. My life from seventeen to twenty-eight was fairly uneventful. As far as the weight goes it slowly but surely increased. I gained friends, went out to eat and never really worried about what it was doing to my body. The way I saw it, they were eating trash and they were all skinny. I was eating the same things as them, yet I was increasing my waistline as I increased my popularity. In my mind I wasn’t doing anything that everyone else wasn’t doing and why should I suffer because of the hand I was dealt in life.
Throughout all that I managed to find God and some really great friends. I grew up a lot and I developed into a man who I was proud of. I was never happy with how I looked but I was happy with who I had become as a man. It was smooth sailing for a while, well a little less choppy any way.
The next turn of events happened when I was twenty-six. I was playing around with a friend, took a wrong step and bam there I was on the floor with a broken femur. I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital and then physical rehab for four months. I was back to being stricken to a wheelchair and on came the weight faster than ever. Before I knew it I was pushing six hundred pounds and starting to really struggle. You know it wasn’t all bad that year. That happened to be the year that I met the love of my life. We were married two and a half years later and are still very happy today. Unfortunately, my wife struggles with her weight as well. Although we did several things over the next couple years to try to drop the pounds, two people who struggle end up having twice as much temptation and opportunity to screw up.
My wife and I have battled the buldge together. We have had our ups and downs; mostly on the scale. We would start a diet, work out together; basically go all out on a regimen to lose weight and before we knew it one of us would screw up. Unfortunately, instead of us doing what we should have done and pick each other up, we kinda just used it as an excuse to fall back into our old habits. Now I am kinda going off on a tangent, through every struggle we have had my wife has been the best part of my life and I am going to leave it at that.
Well that pretty much brings us to today, and it couldn’t come to soon because my fingers are starting to tingle. I am a seven hundred and eighty-three pound man, starting on what may very will be his last chance to get it right. I truly feel like if I don’t get it right this time, I may not live through another year. So this time I am going to do something that I have never done, I am going to let people into the reflection I see everyday. I am not going to put on a happy face. I am not going to lie to myself , my wife, my friends or my family any more! I am afraid of rejection. I am afraid of failure. But most of all I am afraid I will never get to see the reconstruction of my reflection come to fruition.
Join my construction crew and come with me on my journey to see how it turns out.
Untill next time,
T.J.
Redefining Reflections 