It was right at dinnertime; hubby was warming up the grill for burgers when we both heard a ruckus at the front door like something had hit it. Fighting the instant dog alarm, hubby opened the door — to nothing. A service truck was parked in front of the neighbor’s house, and the driver yelled to him, “a deer hit your door”, just as a fawn scrambled around the corner of the house and took off into our backyard.

He ran through the house and alerted me to keep the dog inside; we both shot out the back door as the fawn ran to a corner of our backyard and flung itself against the chain link fence. (Our yard isn’t completely fenced, so it was easy for the fawn to get in.) He tangled himself in a corner, struggling hard to push through the weak fence there, bleating. I tried to calm him down, but it didn’t work; he stilled when I touched him, but I couldn’t get him to back out of the fence, and he already had a minor injury on his face. I backed off and he frantically pushed against the fence, freeing himself, just to run across the yard and throw himself into the other corner against the fence.

This time, I didn’t come right up to him, but as soon as he stood away from the fence by a couple of feet, bewildered, I approached — and he finally turned in the right direction and bolted out of the yard and down the road, likely back to the woods a block away. Hopefully, he got to a place of safety and his mother found him.

That baby didn’t know or understand what a chain link fence is; he could see through it, so his frightened brain figured it was the right way to flee. We’ve seen it happen, before, with young fawns; their mothers leave them by homes, perhaps thinking them a safe place, and then something happens to flush the fawn from its hiding place. When he’s older, he’ll leap fences as if they don’t exist, but he’ll be smarter and more capable.

If only humans were the same way.

I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my life, I’ve seen what I wanted but couldn’t figure out how to get there, just bashing myself against a figurative fence until I just gave up. Sometimes, those fences were there because I was definitely going the wrong way, and sometimes, I’m the one who built the fence in the first place. That’s been especially true from the first moment, as a young teenager, I wanted to lose weight.

I don’t remember, now, why I thought I needed to lose weight, except that my father was prone to making cracks about my weight throughout my childhood and into young adulthood. I had no idea how to go about losing weight, and it’s not like I had the available resources to learn — so I just stopped eating food and only drank Tab, that vile early 70’s idea of a diet soda. I remember my mother taking me to the doctor, fearful; once the doc talked to me, he realized what I’d done, and they both told me it wasn’t healthy.

Throughout my teen years, it seemed my mother and I were constantly trying some diet together. I also went on diets with friends as I became an adult; some of them safe, many not safe at all, some flat out disgusting. From tuna diets to Weight Watchers to pill popping, none of them really worked. I was just addressing a symptom of what was wrong with me, not the main issue.

For me, any diet was just another fence I’ve thrown myself against, trying to get somewhere and not understanding why it wasn’t happening for me. As I crossed from overweight to obese and finally morbidly obese, what started out as a simple chain link fence became more like a brick wall. Knowing how badly I no longer wanted to be fat was both physically and emotionally painful. I have shed many tears, with a heavy heart, longing for the idea of being something different than I was — whether I had 20 pounds to lose, or later, 200. The more I tried, the more my goals seemed more strongly fenced away from me.

At some point, the idea of just dropping a few pounds became something much darker; that desire to be different than what I was, the inability to accept myself as good enough, became that fence I couldn’t jump. The more I believed something must be inherently wrong with me, the higher and stronger the fence became. I let my excuses reinforce the fence; no longer was it a simple few pounds to lose, but the fight against genetics, chemical imbalances, and once I finally admitted it, my own poisoned thinking.

It’s taken a long time to realize that if I built that fence myself, I could certainly take it down. I had to teach myself how to do that. I had to be willing to change; not into something different than what I am, but to peel away what doesn’t serve me so I can be more of who I am, already. When I started that process, not only did I realize I could jump the fence with less effort, but that the fence wasn’t nearly as intimidating as I had created it to be.

That fawn will learn to leap a fence in just a few months. It’s taken me decades, but changing my mind from constantly dieting to convince myself (and others) that I’m worthy of becoming someone that’s somehow better because I weigh less, to adapting my brain so I know that I’m fine just the way I am, has dropped that fence out of my way. Not only that, but I realized I didn’t have to choose to jump a fence at all if the path was wide open in a different direction.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” – Maya Angelou