This weekend, I’m heading to the ultimate throwback. Yes, people, I’m going to Band Camp.

Okay, not really band camp; more precisely, horn camp. I’m driving out to New Mexico with one of my dearest friends from forever — and a newer friend — and we’ll spend a weekend making music, learning, and probably laughing a lot, while playing the instrument we all love: French horn. It’s a rural, rustic setting, and a camp where young musicians as well as us more fermented folk (sort of like fine wine!) will learn from clinicians and then have a final concert in a very unique setting. I haven’t been there before, but my friend has.

To say I’m excited is an understatement, although I have a little apprehension about the drive out. (By the time you read this, we’ll likely already be in New Mexico and on our way to our final destination, or already there.) I am also nervous and excited about the experience.

The one and only time I ever got the chance to attend band camp was when I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school. I was young, cocky, and talented. I got a scholarship to go. I had a blast while I was there, but I was raw material, too. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was wildly devoted to playing, but not necessarily to learning.

This coming experience is nearly the exact opposite. I absolutely know what I don’t know. I am open to whatever learning I can glean at my age. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been a hotshot player; I got knocked down a few pegs when I moved to Arkansas and thrown in with people who were better than I was. I had rise to the challenges and take my lumps. And really, that sort of thing, taken in the right light, makes people better musicians. And better humans, too.

It’s about teamwork, much like team sports teach. Especially in horn sections, blending sound and listening to pitch is especially important. Knowing what sort of sound to produce — dark, rich, and full as opposed to brassy, for instance — is key. It’s a practice in cooperation and respect for your fellow players, even when warming up; the grounded players will do proper warmups while the hotshots play solos that aren’t currently part of the repertoire. (I know. I did this as a young player.) Because really, there’s a time to stand out, and a time to make your contribution to a team effort as best you can.

In many ways, my weight loss journey has been similar. My first bravado effort, I was very much the cocky hotshot who lost 140 pounds… and then got knocked down a few notches when I regained all my weight and more. Going through that process and learning some humility about weight loss has been… instrumental. 😉 Regardless of what I hope to accomplish, paying attention so I can improve is a much preferred experience to deluding myself into thinking I already know everything I need to know. If the focus is to improve, ego needs to get out of the way.

You would think that health journeys are a solo effort, but they’re really not. I have taken this journey with countless people along with me. I’ve benefited from the perspective and learning of others, and hopefully, returned the favor and encouraged others along the way. When we learn from each other, all of us benefit.

We proudly bought our first personal computer in 1990. We thought we got quite the deal, too; we drove all the way to a Sam’s Club and spent just over $1000 on a desktop computer with Windows 3.1 (… I think), DOS, and a 20 MB hard drive with something like 16K memory. We brought it home and discovered that they’d accidentally given us the other choice in desktop computers: one with a 40 MB hard drive! I remember calling the store and they told me it was their ($700!) mistake, so congrats!

Mind you, that might have been our first computer, but I’d worked with computers, before. I started back in late high school in an Explorer Post (BSA) that centered on computers; they were the size of rooms, back then, and we got to program a Snoopy calender in Fortran. WOOHOO!! And after that, I was the point person for computer stuff in an office I worked at for a couple of years. So, naturally, I thought I was an expert.

Which is why we took it home and I immediately reformatted the hard drive… without realizing it had already been done. Yes, I recovered from that failure, and that was just the beginning of a long line of failing with computers. I learned a lot by screwing up. And thank goodness for that, since I’ve been working with computers in one way or another since then, most of that time online. (Hello, modem installation back in December of 1990! Turn off call waiting so it doesn’t boot you offline!)

I’ve had plenty of other failures, too. You name it, I’ve failed at it. And mind you, I dearly want to be good at everything I undertake. That’s my nature; I want to excel, and I have had to fight the tendency to want to give up when I fail. If I can’t be good at it, I don’t necessarily want to do it. I was a perfectionist early on, and I have struggled with that my entire life.

In fact, while examining why I haven’t conquered my weight and health issues until late in life, I had to come to the difficult realization that not only had I failed at every single previous attempt over the course of my lifetime, but I also had not embraced efforts to work on my health issues because of fear of failure. I’d failed at even the most previous notable effort of losing 140 pounds; while I had lost the weight, I hadn’t fixed what I needed to fix, and it took me a long time to come to terms with failing myself in that regard.

The great thing about failure is that it gives me the opportunity to learn lessons if I will only be open to that learning. I wouldn’t have become as proficient with tech if I hadn’t learned from my failures. As a musician, it’s up to me to practice through failure until I achieve what I want.

Putting weight loss and health issues into perspective is much the same. The difference, for me, is that while I now consider weight loss to be a side effect of getting healthy, it’s also a very noticeable aspect to others. At 371 pounds after having lost 140 pounds and then regaining all of that plus more, I often felt humiliated seeing people who knew I had failed at my efforts. When you’re consistently the largest person in any room, and then you lose any noticeable amount of weight, it draws attention and well-meaning comments as well as praise.

It’s one thing to fail in private. It’s quite another to fail out loud, where everyone knows exactly what you’ve done. On top of that, our culture has an inherent character assessment tied to weight; obese people are often seen as lazy, stupid, gluttonous, unworthy. If only they’d stop shoving food in their faces! It’s just so easy — calories in, calories out!

Friends, if it were that easy, the weight loss industry wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry. In fact, it’s an industry that thrives because we fail. When I realized that simple fact, I also realized that any long-term success had to be built on discovering for myself what works for me. Which meant building on previous failures.

I am where I am right now because I have been open to learning from failures. As the song says — I win some, I learn some. I’ve had to take my ego out of it and not worry about societal pressures, and simplify my view to analyze whether a change I implement is working. It’s definitely a scientific approach, but it’s much the same approach I have taken over the years to excel at tech as well as becoming a better musician. In those worlds, if something doesn’t work, you change it until it does. This has also become my approach to bettering my health.

While I have spent innumerable moments regretting that I didn’t allow myself to learn about such things much earlier in my life, I now see failure as simply a step in the process rather than an indictment of my character. Making that change has been crucial to continued success, and I’m no longer fearful of failure.

At the stroke of midnight, Cinderella scurried down the vast palace steps, losing half her footwear and dressing like a Walmart shopper again. Honestly, that shouldn’t happen to anyone, but the girl couldn’t control it. And had I been her, I would have ditched that prince, anyway; she dances with him, they fall in love, and he can’t even figure out what she looks like without making her try on a shoe? Perhaps he should have seen a princely optometrist?

And to the fairy godmother who thought glass slippers were a sensible footwear choice — seriously?

Still. Cindy had a couple of good things going for her. For one thing, even though she was stuck with the sucky jobs in her house, she had happy forest animals willing to pitch in on the work. And until that danged shoe came off, she was leading a charmed life.

So am I, minus the animals with killer cleaning skills and, obviously, glass on my feet. When I have to do a lot of cleaning, my dog is positively useless.

Bonus: I didn’t lose any footwear, but the stroke of midnight hasn’t tolled, yet, for me.

I wait for it. Every morning when I wake up, I’m totally conscious of when I’ve failed, previously, and made the decision to give in to my baser needs. Every single day is a reality check, and the reminder that I’m not an imposter in this body. My situation is quite real; I’ve lost over 204 pounds. And while Cindy may have deserved the wave of a wand and a trip to the royal ball, my weight loss has been far from magical. It’s been the result of years of hard work, dedication, and a willingness to be a scientist on my own behalf so I can be fully aware of how my own body works.

Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I still don’t trust the reflection. I know that somewhere in me, there’s the potential of my brain giving up the fight. I’ve done it, before, despite massive efforts, though not as vested as this one. But I’d be a fool to believe I’ve banished that thinking completely; like pulling weeds from a garden, I know that the seeds of doubt can gain traction if I’m not diligent. I can’t just consider things done, yet.

I also know that despite keeping my weight down for years, I still have medical issues I wish to resolve. Medications I would like to no longer have to take. I am still insulin resistant regardless of what the scale says, and that factor alone can account for easy weight gain when I’m not willing to push hard. I want to do everything in my power to control and heal these issues, and until I reach a point where I am confident they are fully within my control, I continue to push forward. No magic wand will solve that for me; I have to continue to do the hard work required or risk letting those weeds invade, again.

Allowing myself to lose control amounts to hearing that bell start to toll and acting as if it’s nothing. I have to remain diligent and constantly listen; and in my case, at least, I can reverse time when one or two bells toll without having to flee, lose perfectly good footwear (no glass in my house, though), and relying on a prince with bad eyesight to get me back to my own personal fairytale. It’s me who creates my reality, not the wave of a wand; and now, I totally understand that the work I’ve put in also keeps me on course. I’m not about to throw away the years of intense mental and physical work I’ve done, and if my efforts had been easy and miraculous, I probably would have caved a long time ago. Being vested in the outcome makes a difference.

I’m responsible for that fairytale and as long as I keep on my own path, the stroke of midnight will remain far in the future. And while those glass slippers are gorgeous, I’ll stick with my running shoes.

For those keeping up with it, I’m at a new low weight! I have now lost a total of 206.6 pounds, and no one in the world is more surprised about that than me.

My super ambitious goal at the outset was to lose 200 pounds. It was a grand goal, but I seriously didn’t think I’d actually lose 200 pounds. I had zero faith in myself to do that, but I knew from previous experience that I could totally lose 50, so I set mini goals. Looking at a goal of losing 200 pounds was just too daunting and I knew it would wheedle its way into my brain and work against me.

I had smaller goals within each of those 50 pound segments, not all weight related. I know my body changes slowly, so I tried my best not to set time limits and frustrate myself.

There’s also the theory that overwhelming someone with goals that are too far out there tends to discourage compliance. For instance, grounding a 7 year old child for a month, whether that discipline is deserved or not, may work against both you and the child; if they can’t see a reasonable way to work off what they did in a time frame they understand, they have little incentive to improve and may just act out more. My mind works much the same way; I knew from the beginning that it would take me a long time to lose, and if I set goals that were too far in the future, I would likely give up. I’d done it before, time and time again.

When I reached that 200 pound loss mark, I decided I’d try for 210. Our health insurance has made the occasional rumble about adding a surcharge for those with a BMI over 30, so I decided I’d get to that point, next; with 210 pounds lost, I’ll just be overweight. My goal is health-related; there are a couple of medications I’d like to either eliminate or adjust to lower dosages, so that’s what I’m after, now. For the first time in darned near 40 years, I’m fine with where my weight is; my goal changed to health some time ago.

So now that I’m within reach of that 210 pound goal and on the verge of another reassessment, it strikes me that a lot has changed in my world — and not just my body.

For one thing, as I said above, it’s been a heck of a long time since I’ve been okay with my weight; maybe even longer than I suggested, since I dealt with pressure from my father to conform to an impossible physical standard when I was just the barest bit overweight. We carry those scars with us for a long time, and they’re not easy to fight with logic when they’re firmly entrenched in our brains.

For another, my brain has almost caught up with my body, for once. I occasionally find myself fighting those imprints, but not nearly as often as I once did. I don’t look up weight limits on things designed to hold my body anymore. I don’t constantly assess whether I can pass between two chairs in a crowded room. I’m not concerned with whether I can bend over enough to tie my shoes. I’m not hyper aware of people glancing at me; before, I used to automatically think someone was looking at me because of my weight. Now, I don’t care why they’re looking at me; that’s their problem, not mine. I don’t spend a ton of time having to consider things like how long it’ll take me to walk to my own mailbox; not when I can easily get out first thing in the morning and walk four miles.

And while we all have the occasional day when we feel small or particularly large, those days when I feel ponderous are rare. When I lay in bed at night and assess my own body, I’m constantly pleased and surprised at the small amount of room I occupy, these days. While I’m still obese (for a little while longer), I feel small just about every day, now.

Those types of eternal calculations used to take up far too much of my brain. I’m free from those, now. I have the ability to commit those brain cells to things I enjoy, or to meet the demands of each day, instead of allowing those overwhelming calculations to hold me back. Instead, as I near maintenance — you know, just the rest of my life — the small changes and adjustments are what keep me moving forward.

Maybe I’m finally getting it right.