It’s always good to have goals. I have some; I have upcoming events that I’d like to be back down to my low weight (or beyond) for, as well as be fit for. Having things like that which keep me thinking in positive ways while I work toward getting recent gains off seems to help my mental attitude. After all, I’d rather be looking down the road rather than staring in the rearview mirror; I’ve been there, already.

I know the past has lessons for me that I need to pay attention to so I don’t repeat them, so some glances in the rearview mirror to orient myself are totally appropriate. What’s wrong is when I fail or don’t make the effort to recognize the walls I’ve built myself.

Recently, I had to do some mental work on why I stopped short — by 2/10 pound — of achieving the major goal of losing 200 pounds. I gave myself time to examine this and came to the conclusion that I had sabotaged myself. With what isn’t nearly as important as the recognition that there’s a huge difference between setting achievable and positive goals and setting ones that work against you. At one time, from quite a distance, I saw the promises I gave myself as good. But I also likely never saw those promises as achievable.

It’s an easy matter to promise yourself something you firmly believe is outside of your abilities. At 371 pounds, even though I had previously lost 140 pounds in my life, I really didn’t believe for a second that I’d ever be where I am at this moment. Setting goals back then wasn’t necessarily a bad thing — some of those goals moved me forward, after all. Perhaps, looking back, setting goals that were just daydreams at the time were good from the standpoint that eventually, I’d have to dig into why I set them in the first place.

And here I am with a shovel; or maybe a sledgehammer is more appropriate. Me at 371 pounds just never imagined Me where I am, right now, facing the realities of those dreams. Even though I stood in my own way until I realized what I was doing, I look at this as a good thing. It’s part of the process that is helping me to understand myself. Now, I realize I was setting myself up for failure and promising myself things that worked against my mental health instead of contributing to wellness. I had to find some peace and discard those long-held self-promises because they ended up making me feel inadequate and unworthy rather than being great rewards for a job well done.

I knew, for months, that I was holding myself back from achieving that simple .2 pounds; it might as well have been a brick wall. But I also recognized that I needed silence — the elimination of mental noise — to do the necessary work. That didn’t happen during the holiday season; it couldn’t happen because I couldn’t find peace enough with far too much on my plate. I needed to get my own house in order and pull off the layers in order to see, and then work on, what was at the heart of my self-invoked barriers.

This is a constant work in progress. The more I learn about myself, the closer I come to allowing myself to achieve the things that are important to me. I can’t say with 100% certainty that I’ve completely removed my wall, but I know I’ve tumbled at least some of the bricks, and my job going forward is to keep chipping away at the walls I’ve built.

Bad days don’t tend to tell you in advance when they’re going to happen; they just drop in your lap, unexpected, and you either swing at the curveball or watch it float by for a strike.

This week, I dealt with a curveball. Without going into detail about the situation, I had to make difficult decisions on behalf of a very dear family member, but here’s the spoiler alert: everything is okay.

It’s not the particular situation, anyway, that’s the issue — it’s that whole curveball thing, because inevitably, they come along, and while it’s difficult to plan for every situation out there, being strong enough to keep your eye on the ball and take a swing at it instead of letting it put you in the hole, is a result of working to become strong. Even when you don’t know they’re coming, pulling yourself together enough to take a swing and connect is far better than letting a situation freeze you from fear.

Being strong in this case meant not just physically or mentally, but emotionally, which I think is a byproduct of doing the hard mental work. This is one of the biggest reasons I advocate against taking shortcuts with diet plans; there’s an enormous amount of challenging headwork that has to take place in order to grow enough to understand ourselves. The biggest deception we can commit is to take the easy route and lie to ourselves. Doing the hard work helps me in everything else I do; I can stay levelheaded in the face of the unexpected.

I’m not here to beat my own drum. I’m here to say that investing the time and effort it took to heal myself, which is an ongoing and never-ending process, served me well when I faced a challenging decision that my family member trusted me to make more than twenty years ago. I doubted my decision, and I felt horrible and guilty, but I trusted my instincts and made sure she got the care she needed and deserved. I think, in the long run, what happened will be helpful for both of us; it was just an unexpected hiccup in the process.

The surprising part to me is that once the whole event was over, I realized I hadn’t simply fallen apart. I still haven’t — and I won’t. I didn’t give in to emotions and decide I needed to medicate myself with food; in fact, eating my feelings, something I would have justified doing not awfully long ago in stressful circumstances, never even occurred to me as an option. I wasn’t devastated or a hot mess; I was able to keep myself focused and ready to do what needed to be done.

Although I’d prefer such circumstances never happen, I’m learning that I’m stronger than I realized. Each step toward physical health has also been a bolster to my mental well-being.

I’ve struggled a lot, lately, and came to the realization (yet again!) that something in my brain has been holding me back from achieving my goals. I ate much more freely during the holiday season than I should have, and I knew exactly what I was doing, but allowed it. I’ve been thinking about this, and still have some figuring out to do.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The current book is about a group of women who, like me, have been morbidly obese, lost a bunch of weight, regained it and have had to battle with it all over again. Although I haven’t necessarily identified with any one story, it stands out to me where I would have been had I not made the decision to start again. Going on seven years later, where would I be, today? Right this moment?

Mind you, in September of 2013, I weighed in at 371 pounds. I am 5 feet 2 inches tall. The recommended normal weight range for my height tops out at 136 pounds, although I don’t necessarily give that range a lot of credence. (My doctor recently mentioned a different, higher number.)

I don’t often play what-if. More than anything else, I am beyond thankful for having made that simple decision to start one more time, and I would like to think that I would have found some way to give myself that huge gift in some other way. Unfortunately, I firmly believe that had I not made the decision back then, the decision would have been made for me. What would it have taken? A heart attack? Full-blown diabetes? Submission to the depression that often accompanies morbid obesity, leaving me without hope? Complete disability?

How far was I, at 371 pounds, from not being able to function at all, becoming completely dependent on others? Had I continued in the same fashion, would have I just ballooned bigger, succumbed to any number of health-related issues, possibly bedridden, unable to enjoy even the simple things like playing with my grandson?

Or would I even be alive today?

My world was ugly, then. I am the first to admit that living my life at 371 pounds was brutal. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I feared for my life, back then, hoping beyond hope that I wouldn’t die before I could lift myself up and lose enough weight to improve my health. Even just thinking about it, now, raises my anxiety level. While I’ve spent a fair amount of time reminding myself of where I’ve been, I haven’t really imagined what would have happened to me if I hadn’t risked another start.

As I read about one story in particular, it hit home that I could have ended up like one of the women in the book — over 400 pounds, on disability, unable to work, unable to understand what I was doing to my body; or rather, choosing not to understand. Because I have been amazingly good at lying to myself over the years, and that’s how I ended up at my top weight, as well as dozens of other previously top weights over the decades.

Admittedly, part of it was not really understanding my own physiology. When I did make various efforts, I often didn’t dig deeper than whatever diet I was on suggested. I read a lot of self-help stuff over the years, and whether or not the authors hit on what my solution was, my takeaway from those wasn’t necessarily the absorption of the right information. Remember one diet guru and her pile of naked potatoes, spouting off about how you could eat those all day? Or another author, who partially blamed obesity on lacking brown fat in our bodies? Oh, the recipes I followed that were promised to help — and didn’t.

I gave up at a lot of points, just figuring that I was destined to be fat. I wanted to believe that as long as I was healthy, being fat was okay. I lied to myself about what I was really doing to my body. And while I have no problems with those who espouse fat acceptance, I damaged myself by allowing that in my world; lumbering about in pain was not fat acceptance. It was the denial of what I was doing to my body and the real price I was paying.

Make no mistake: being morbidly obese and fearing for your life is not an easy path. Nor is fearing change or committing to trying again. We have so much judgment surrounding obesity; we accuse the obese of a lot of things, so when those of us who are obese want to start again, we flog ourselves with the accusations society makes: we are fat because we’re lazy, addicted to food, sitting around and binge-eating, we’re a burden on health care, we’re disgusting, we infringe on the space of others. I knew, without a doubt, that even if people didn’t say so, their eyes when they fell on me screamed it.

And I have also made those same judgments about the obese when I have been in the throes of fitness; I finally shut up about it when I regained 140 pounds. Who am I to judge what someone else’s journey is?

Giving myself a life to look forward to has not been easy. It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Yes, there are times where my brain starts in with a pity party; enjoy this for a little bit, it’s not fair that I shouldn’t be able to enjoy what others do. I’ve earned it, haven’t I? And it’s clear moments like now, where I have to remind myself that there’s no fairness or earning bad behavior involved. I can either choose to work toward my health — or I can choose the path I was once on.

So here I am, swallowing my pride and making sure I make the right choices; not the emotional ones. Not the easy ones — although now, contemplating where I might have been, my life is much easier than it was seven years ago. Even as much as I have to talk to myself to get out and get my exercise for the day, or push myself to make the right food choices at the right time, the burdens I invoked on myself back then made life extremely difficult; not just in function and movement, but in the haze of depression. I didn’t want to think about what might happen; I lived in the moment, and if my stomach was full and I wasn’t in pain at that very moment, I told myself that I was okay. But I spent just as much time, if not more, hearing my own heartbeat pound in my ears while laying awake in the dark hours of the night, knowing I had to change if I wanted to survive, but scared of trying to figure out how I could move forward.

Every attempt before had been a failure. I finally accepted that even if I tried again and failed, it surpassed doing nothing at all, because that was a failure of a different type. In retrospect, while the journey to health has been long and hard, staying morbidly obese was much longer and harder. Figuring all this out has not been easy, especially since I had to accept that no one was going to do the science of learning what my body needs for me, but robbing myself of life and knowing it had dire effects on my body and mind. Freeing myself of those burdens has been the best thing I could ever do for myself.

I told someone just this morning that small things add up to big things. That’s as true today as it was the first time I made the small choice to not eat something that I knew wasn’t on my eating program. Or the next. Or the literally millions of times I’ve since made small choices about what to eat, when to move, how to face the next challenge. Those decisions are there as long as we draw breath.

Back then, I had to swallow my pride in order to move on and do what needed to be done, no matter how difficult it might be. And now — in fact, any time my head isn’t fully in the right place to do battle — I have to swallow it all over again and do what needs to be done.

I plan to finish what I start, now, but if I hadn’t started in the first place, the finish line would be impossible.

Here we are — the beginning of another new year, and my social media feed is full of diet ads.

I’m that person that either laughs at the diet ads or reports them as offensive. 😉 Seriously, though — there are a lot of reasons why people end up on these programs time and time again — and fail just as many times. In my own opinion, these programs are designed in ways that will inevitably lead to failure; if they had the definitive answers, they’d be out of business. And friends, I think most of us know that the diet industry will never go out of business.

In amongst the noise, here’s a little advice from me, and it’s bound to contradict a lot of these programs. And mind you, I have to take my own advice; I’ve used the holidays as a reason to stray and I need to get my own house in order, but the good news is that I’m fully able to recover from hip-expanding choices, and that’s a major part of my own growth. So, without further ado… things I’ve found that work for me, and maybe they’ll help someone else find a little success.

1. Committing to change can be in stages. You don’t have to jump in and go 100% in on a program immediately — especially if you’ve found that doing so makes you resentful and deprived. If you’ve got a lot of weight to lose and know you need to change, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor if you understand your own nature. If you know you’ll fall off a plan because it’s so overwhelming to change a lot at once, don’t. Ease yourself into your plan in stages; you’ll find yourself growing stronger with each small success and you’ll be much more likely to stick with a plan.
   
2. If you want to wait until you’re “ready”, you’ll never be ready. I used to reject the idea of “fake it until you make it”, but I’m now in my 7th year of living with the happy decisions I made when I faked it until I made it. In the long run, I found I was more ready than I realized.
3. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Break your goals down into small chunks. If you have 210 pounds to lose, set your goals for small, achievable goals. Marathon runners don’t start training by running the entire distance, and you don’t have to, either. When I started my journey, I likely would have quit if I had continually seen the entire goal; I would have considered it too daunting. I knew that, so I worked on 50 pounds at a time.
4. Pick a bunch of ways to gauge success. The diet industry tends toward measuring success with pounds and inches, but those don’t have to be the only ways. Maybe you didn’t lose a single pound or inch, but you’re able to walk for longer distances. Maybe your clothes fit better, regardless of what the scale says. Maybe your A1C went down. Don’t tie yourself to someone else’s idea of success; find your own markers.
5. Reject the lies you tell yourself. I have a long history of justifying weight gains, and I had to recognize that I needed to stop being inflexible and be completely honest with myself. When I hit roadblocks in my plan, I have to figure out why I allowed myself to become sidetracked.
6. Do the heavy lifting yourself. And by this, I mean — learn what’s necessary to be successful. Understand the hows and whys of your body and how it reacts to various input, whether it’s food, exercise, sleep, stress, or any other environmental factor. Often, the diet industry promotes a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t work for everyone; if something doesn’t work for you, figure out what does, and don’t give up being a scientist on your own behalf.
7. Be willing to change. My biggest failures in past efforts were my own unwillingness to adapt as I progressed. What works once may not work in the same way again; we all get older and our bodies change. What worked when I had 210 pounds to lose does not work as well now that I have much less to lose. It pays to occasionally shift and see if the methods used are the best for your own situation; being inflexible leads to failure.
8. It’s okay to fail once in a while. Just don’t live there. Our own muscles grow stronger by tearing in small bits and rebuilding. If you fail, recognize what’s behind it, get up, brush yourself off, and forgive yourself. Move forward and learn. It’s NOT okay to repeatedly fail and not make the effort to understand why it happened.
9. Be transparent. Find what method of accountability works best for you; there’s no need to be alone in your efforts, and the more support you find, however it works for you, is the best. Yes, it’s scary as hell to recruit your support, because it means you’re closing an easy way out, but believe me — it helps.
10. Make sure what you’re doing is something you can live with for the rest of your life; choosing a better way isn’t meant to be punishment or torture. It’s meant to improve your life, and if you feel like you’re constantly punishing yourself, you either need to change your plan or change your mind about why you feel that way.

These are just some of the lessons I’ve had to learn over recent years. If you’re looking to start yet another effort, chin up: you can be successful, but you have to dig in and do the work necessary to make it happen. I promise you, though, that it’s worth the effort.

This past week, my daughter and her husband and infant son were in for a visit. It’s the holidays, and while there’s still New Year’s looming in front of us (and all of the year-in-review that entails), we celebrated simply.

One of the things we found ourselves doing, especially with a 1 year old in the house, was looking for ways to run him out of energy. We made several trips to the nearby playground and he got to swing in a swing seat designed for parents to swing with their babies, and loved going down the short slide (and back up it, rather than the steps).

Personally, I couldn’t really remember the last time I was on a playground, other than when my daughter was a child. And, of course, when I was a kid. I swear the equipment we had when I was little was designed to keep the doctor’s offices in business and it’s probably a good thing most of that stuff no longer exists, except in memory.

Except, of course, for swings. Swing sets are an ageless part of playgrounds, even if you can’t rock the legs up off the ground and darned near spin yourself around the top support. Not that I ever did that. Or jump off at the highest point. Certainly not me. 😉

Okay… maybe. On occasion.

I sat down on one of the swings during one of the trips and then decided I’d take it for a swing. (Because that’s what you do when sitting on a swing, after all!) I didn’t worry about whether the seat would support me; I just started swinging, feeling weightless, rocking back and forth through the unseasonably warm air. It was a sweet return to a childhood joy, like carnival rides and coasting on a bike on a summer’s day. One of those things you try to convince yourself you’re too old to do, rather than face the actuality that doing it is a risk when morbidly obese — if you’re even allowed at all.

These little surprises just never seem to end; I am still finding things I didn’t know I could do, and while simply swinging on a playground swing set is far from complicated, it’s more about what I allow myself to do. There’s a lot of self-punishment and denial that comes as part and parcel of the mental weight loss process; those things we tell ourselves we shouldn’t do, not because of self-discipline, but because we somehow don’t deserve those small joys. There’s nothing wrong with sitting on a swing; it’s the idea that my weight should prohibit such things. And while my body is no longer one that will break a chair or cause real harm to something like playground equipment, my brain hasn’t always accepted that my physical situation has changed. At double my weight, I had no business doing such a thing; it might have harmed the swing as well as me.

As I look forward to the next year in my newly changed body, I hope to challenge myself more in small and big ways, tackling some of the things I’ve been hesitant to do. Why not take a swing at it?

I’ve been on a cleaning jag, lately, partly because of the holidays and partly because I tend to throw things in boxes with the intention of going through them, later, and never do. “Later” finally arrived and I’ve been working on thinning things out.

A few days ago, I went through the bookcase in a spare bedroom. Some are books I will always keep; others were gifts but aren’t my reading taste, so I set some aside for donating. One I came across was a paperback that I know I bought, but I’m not sure I ever actually sat down and read it.

The book is Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self by Frances Kuffel, an author who lost a great deal of weight and recounts the experiences she had before, during, and after loss. I’m still in the early chapters of the book, so I don’t know everything she went through just yet, but the simple phrase passing for thin has stuck with me.

I’m far from thin; I have a bit to go and quite honestly, even at my lowest weight, I was never thin in the classic definition of the term. In my mind, thin includes a slight build, and thanks to a fairly large bone structure, that’s never been me. I’ve always had wide hips and thick legs, even as a child. That’s my body’s tendency.

That aside, I understand the term. When I lost a lot of weight in my 40’s, I think I passed for thin in that I never felt like my weight loss was legitimate; I felt like an imposter in my own body. An actor playing a role that wasn’t at all like me. It never felt permanent or complete, really; in my mind, “passing for” something means you’re not really that thing. I never managed to get past that mindset, and in many ways, my inability to cope with my own issues with weight loss — as well as fear of how differently people saw me — undid all the hard work I had done.

I had the weird and sudden realization the other day while I was out driving somewhere; I was just sitting at a stoplight and it hit me — this is my life, now. While I am well aware I will always have to be diligent and realistic with myself, the changes I’ve made feel permanent. I don’t feel like I’m pretending to be something I’m not. While I continue to push forward with my efforts to be healthy, there’s no sense that it’s precarious and will slip out of my grasp.

I also don’t feel the need to make excuses or tell people that I’ve been morbidly obese. I meet people all the time, especially the course of volunteer work, that have no idea what my journey has been — and it doesn’t matter. While I certainly will never hide it if someone asks me, I no longer feel as if it defines me in the ways it once did. And very much unlike those days when I lost 140 pounds fast enough that I was able to surprise people that didn’t recognize me, I now choose not to be defined by weight loss, either.

It’s living life by a different standard: it used to be that people didn’t expect much of me because I was incapable of doing much, especially physically. Now, the expectations are far different and I like the challenges they present. There’s no looking back now!

I am not much of a tv watcher. I’ll watch Outlander (when it’s on), the news, tornado warnings (when they’re on… which seems like every other week here in Arkansas), and Survivor.

You would just about have to be living in a cave to not know the premise of Survivor, even if you’ve never watched it, but just in case you’re a cave dweller, let me explain briefly. From IMDb: “A reality show where a group of contestants are stranded in a remote location with little more than the clothes on their back. The lone survivor of this contest takes home a million dollars.”

It’s a social game, complicated by having to survive the elements outdoors with a limited amount of available food. They’re given rice; in some seasons, dried beans. If they can scavenge food, as well as catch fish, they obviously are more valuable to their tribes, as well as other skills like fire making, the ability to build shelter, and shimmy up coconut palm trees to lop off food. Throw in looking for immunity idols like it’s an adult Easter Egg hunt, charming and outsmarting other contestants, and being convincing liars, and you’ve basically got high school all over again.

During the game, there are occasional food rewards where contestants that feel confident that they won’t be voted out can step out of a competition and enjoy foods many consider pretty average: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fried chicken, pizza. Other challenges in prior years pushed contestants to eat absolutely disgusting local “cuisine”, including bugs and rotten eggs.

Fans of Survivor can also visit CBS online and view episodes of Ponderosa, where contestants who have been voted out and are also on the jury go to cool their jets while waiting for the game to end. The jury is usually the last half of the contestants with each one voted off about every third day, and the last three contestants that survive in the game until Day 39 have to sway the jury members to vote for them and win a million bucks.

Ponderosa episodes show the contestants as they leave the game and travel to an island resort, where they spend the rest of the time with others who have been voted off. After being deprived of a bed, decent shelter, being subjected to the elements, barely eating, and having to strategize and decide who to trust, each person is weighed, checked out by a doctor, and they’re handed candy and a food menu while being transported to the resort. While it’s not a 5-star resort, they do get a private room, air conditioning, and the chance to thoroughly enjoy personal hygiene and brushing their teeth. That includes being able to relax a little bit and drop distrust.

I finally sat down and watched the Ponderosa episodes the other night, and one of the interesting parts for me is when they are weighed — and their reintroduction to food. In this current season, there are a couple of people who have lost over twenty pounds (in roughly 30 days). Some choose to eat sparingly, knowing they’ll likely get sick after not eating anything of substance for weeks. Others order everything on the menu and eat until they’re in pain.

While my interest in the show is curiosity about the social game, I admit that I find myself absolutely understanding how some of these folks feel, longing for and sinking their teeth into real food, again, after a long period of barely eating anything. No, I certainly haven’t gone through what they have! But I have committed myself to stretches of time where I limited my food intake greatly in order to resolve a weight loss plateau or for some other reason. I admit that there are times where just looking at food pics on Facebook makes me want to eat my computer screen.

These folks also willingly admit that they’ll rapidly gain what they lost if they spend their time at Ponderosa doing nothing but eating, and the same is true for me; this is a time of year when people tend to justify overindulging, but those actions aren’t without consequences. Since I’ve done my fair share of food vacations over recent months, I’ve been reassessing my plans and tightening them up, despite the lure of holiday treats.

You see, I have my own Survivor-like life episodes, and until now, my seasons haven’t lasted for long and I’ve left the “game” in favor of eating everything in sight and regaining everything I’ve lost.

Until now; here I am, in my own Season 7 (on my 7th year of this journey) and finding myself pushing hard to get to an endgame of sorts. I don’t have to justify what I do to anyone but me, but I’m also my most difficult jury. The reward isn’t a million dollars, but I can’t put a price on how much of my life I’ve earned back. I am a survivor.

I remember the day it came; it was in a huge box, being delivered by FedEx, but I couldn’t be home, so I left instructions for the delivery person to leave it in my garage. I wanted nothing more than to get home and open it.

That was the day that rekindled my childhood love affair with music; the day I became next in the chain of love for an instrument older than I am — the horn I now play.

At first, it was a real challenge to even make a single note; it had been well over 30 years since I last played a horn, not long after I left college, and the one I owned, then, was not a joy at all. It was never a good fit, and all musicians know that the relationship with a musical instrument goes far beyond the ability to simply play it. Think of it more like a kinship; there’s a synergy that happens when the right instrument comes along, and that never quite happened with my old horn. I lost the desire to play it when I dropped out of college, and it became an expensive paperweight. Eventually, I sold it; putting groceries on the table and being able to pay rent were bigger priorities.

So when this new-to-me horn arrived, I was cautious. I wanted to play, but would I find that inexplicable spark, again? Or would it become just another thing I do for a while, and then try to ignore that neglected horn case sitting in the corner of a room? Those early days of playing were rough, and if I laid off for any length of time, I had to start over from scratch, or nearly so. Reading music, again, was also a challenge; music is a language you can lose, just like high school French class.

The process was much like starting a weight loss journey, and I honestly didn’t know at the time whether the journey would be more like a trip to Walmart — or a world tour. Beginning anything big, again, is a matter of fits and starts; and as an adult, I knew I’d have to set aside my ego and understand that this wasn’t something I was going to be good at any time in the near future… or ever.

My weight loss journey has been very similar to my experience jumping back into music; at first, it was a challenge. I failed, and often. I still fail miserably at both, on occasion, like anything else I do. I still have to pick myself up, brush myself off, give myself a firm reality check, and decide if the occasional stumble is worth continuing the journey. Too many times over the course of my life, the stumbles have stopped me.

There are continual tipping points in both journeys; will I quit and never look back, waiting for someone to ask me, “hey, what happened to __?” At which point, I admit defeat and awkwardly change the subject. The truth is that such tipping points come every single day; is this the day I stop worrying about what I put in my mouth? Not step on the scale? Not practice?

Every day — every single day — I have to recommit myself to every single thing I want to succeed at and do well, because those things we do well always come at a price we must be willing to pay. Nothing comes easy at first. Everything I find easy, now, was difficult at some point, and I made it past those early failures. That’s what is necessary to move forward in anything that matters.

The musical reward, for me, comes this Saturday; I’ll step onto a stage with around sixty other musicians that doubtless make the same daily commitment I do, in varying degrees of ability, and make music. Making music is the reward, and I’ll forget everything else once the first downbeat starts. It’s the process, not the performance, at least for me.

The bigger reward in literally thousands of daily re-commitments to improving my health is in being able to enjoy the outcome of the effort; it’s an ongoing process that continues to improve the more I practice. It’s in every breathing moment, whether it’s hiking in the woods, going about my day easily, or the pleasure of music.

Fair warning… this post is just a tiny bit TMI. But push yourself forward, friends, because I’ve discovered something else my brain isn’t good at, yet.

This past week, we made a quick trip to visit my mother-in-law; just an overnight visit to take care of some things. Hubby made a hotel reservation and surprised me with a room that had a hot tub in it. WOOHOO!!! I have generally avoided tubs except for very rare occasions; when I was much heavier and my knees hated me, bathtubs were a nightmare. Hot tubs are roomier, thank goodness.

We’ve stayed at this particular hotel, before; it has an outdoor hot tub that’s simply fun to be in when the weather turns cold, but it’s currently out of order. Our plan had been to spend time swimming and then head to the room and enjoy an adult beverage in the hot tub, which we did.

Mind you, outdoor and larger hot tubs have steps into them, so they really haven’t been an issue for me, but the type in the hotel room meant stepping over the edge, as well as the ability to push up without sliding across the tub. I managed to get up and out of the tub several times with no issues… until hubby let me sit in the tub, alone, with a bath bomb.

I’ve never used a bath bomb, before; I don’t use the tub at home, only the shower. But I picked one up at a specialty shop when we were at a historic hotel a couple weeks ago, in anticipation of using it, there, but circumstances just didn’t work out that way. So I saved it for this trip and threw it in. And guess what? When you turn on the jets in a hotel hot tub, you get bubbles! I got a bubble bath!

I felt a bit like a kid again. Yes, I’ve had the occasional bath at hotels in recent years; I just like their tubs better than I like my own. But a bubble bath? Ooooh, y’all, I was in bubble heaven! And the bath bomb made my skin nice and soft.

And made the floor and walls of the hot tub nice and slick. Oops.

This meant I needed to get out of the tub differently than I had been because I had no traction at all. I’d have to —HORRORS — get on one knee and then up. My youngest knee is days away from being a year old, and while I’ve gone down on a knee one time to plug something in under a table, I just have avoided doing this. Everything in me screamed DO NOT DO THAT, STUPID.

Hubby had to help me out, but I did get on one knee and no one had to call emergency services to hoist my naked butt out of there. Thank goodness.

I was mortified and sort of ticked off at myself at the time, but have managed to laugh about it, since. I know that my brain has spent most of my life giving me signals on what it sees as my current state; that’s part of self-preservation, but it hasn’t fully adjusted, yet, to replacing original equipment with new and improved bionic knees — and a body that’s more capable of handling them.

Last weekend was my annual writer’s and horn player’s retreat with my dear friend Beth. We always spend it at a local state park cabin, but this year, we changed cabins so my dog could come along. It was a great change; more room, a fireplace, and puppy snuggles all around.

I’ve made a point to write about previous visits because the cabin we used to reserve has a series of steps going down to it. The very first year we did this, it was just a summer escape. Friends came to visit Beth and invited me to go along for lunch — but I couldn’t go, because my right knee had locked. I spent far too much time, after they left, trying to get my knee to cooperate; I won’t go into the ugly details.

It occurred to me on this most recent trip that I used to spend a lot of time just figuring out the best way to get around. When I had endless stairs to deal with, I had to plan my trips, including the emotional tax of working myself up to making the trip — up or down. It took strategy; how much could I carry? How long should I wait between trips? Had I thought enough to distribute weight properly? Had I done everything possible to make transporting items easier?

Throw into this mix that we always meet with our horns, and unless a horn has a detached bell, the case is just plain awkward to carry. I remember as a kid, walking with my horn to and from school, I walked with a certain gait and rhythm built around that horn case smacking the side of my leg with each stride. Now I have a gig bag with straps, and it’s a bit easier, but still off-balance and awkward. If something were to happen to my instrument while carrying it, I would be absolutely heartbroken.

Even thinking about this stuff, now, years afterward, spikes my anxiety. I spent so much time and energy just figuring out simple things that I didn’t have nearly as much time for restoration, which is one of the points of these trips. Yes, we write; yes, we play duets; yes, we gab half the night away, but there’s also time to watch the fog drift across the lake and listen to the crackle of a fire.

Each step I take that brings me closer to full health is also a step away from the days when so much of my energy was expended on things that depleted me instead of restoring me. I waited until recently to share a story for the first time with my husband and my friends; the story of how I woke up, one morning, stuck in bed because my knee had locked during the night, and the things I needed were are the opposite end of the (small!) house. It took me well over an hour to make my way to the next bedroom over, unfold my travel wheelchair, and scoot down the hallway to grab my brace and cane. An hour — not just because my knee was locked in a position that prevented me putting any weight on it, but because I was so morbidly obese that doing something as simple as hopping was completely out of the question.

Although — honestly — I’m not so sure I’d hop down the hallway now, but I no longer have a reason for such things. And that’s the point in this; the time and the emotional and physical tolls I paid for so many years, simply just getting through each day, are now gone. I get around like a normal person, and when these issues took a big bite out of any restorative time I might have designed for myself, before, I now get the full benefit of not having to worry about it.

It means my time I design for the purpose of restoration is spent on exactly that. I get to recharge my batteries without constant depletion. Now I get to happily enjoy the view without worrying what the view will cost me.