My Bad Hand: Being a Brain

Natural Ability Isn't Always Good

I was the kid for whom school came easy. Everything that I learned took very little if any effort, and when my natural talent for absorbing and applying information became apparent there were of course all the usual tests and it resulted in those terms being thrown about. Gifted. Genius. Brilliant. Words that sound like huge compliments, but would plague me for much of my life. When I learned something quickly, like math concepts or principles of science I was praised instantly for being "so very smart". 

What bullshit. My parents and teachers no doubt meant well, but what they didn't know was that they were teaching me to equate results with a state of being I had no control over. I was good at school, not because I worked hard or devoted myself to it, but because that shit came easy for me. I learned early that if something isn't easy the first time, there's not going to be a lot of excitement around attempting it. My first and only attempt at team sports involved a lot of being told that sports just weren't for me because they weren't instantly easy for me. For every failure there, I was encouraged to just keep doing what I was good at. Trying anything new was out of the question. My fate was decided, and I was going to be a brain. 

Always Learning

Learning Not To Try

Expressing interest in anything outside academics is something that I learned not to do. Through a combination of that and being every bit the target of bullies that a four-eyed geek who can't even get a base hit at kick ball is, I learned to stop trying. And so it went throughout my childhood. If it wasn't about getting an academic scholarship, don't bother. Forget art classes, music, sports of any kind. Just stick with the math and science.And don't fuck it up. Because if you fail, all it means is you're not actually smart. That brought its own problems. Kids who get told that their academic success is due to being smart are way more reluctant to try doing something new unless they're already certain they can succeed at it. I wasn't any different. I sure as shit wasn't going to do something that might disprove everyone's insistence that I was a genius. 

Creating Bravery From Fear

I still battle that demon every day, but at least now I know that I have a demon to battle. It took me a very long time to recognize that fucker as an entity of its own. And it rides my ass like a conjoined twin I can't separate. There came a point late in the middle of winter of 2016 that some people I knew from work who were aware of my gym going had been telling me that it's fun to run. I had never had fun running in my entire life. Running was one of those things I wasn't good at, and therefore didn't try to do. I'd failed the mile run every year in high school PE, and I sure as fuck did not want to start running as a 37 year-old fatass. I was going to be terrible, so I wasn't going to try. There's the demon. Screaming in my ear. You're not good at running. You should stick to what you are good at. Be a brain. Write more code. That son of a bitch was still there. 

But so was something else. I had, months before, created a voice in me that would yell back at the demon. And so I relented, with my coworkers promising me that if I ran just one 5K and still hated running, they would never bother me again. I downloaded a Couch to 5K app, and I signed up for a 5K. The biggest 5K in Pittsburgh, which is always run the day before the Pittsburgh Marathon. I didn't tell a soul. I was too afraid I would fail. I still weighed over 200 pounds and I had never run a mile in my life, let alone 3.1 miles. But I started running anyway. I had no proper running shoes and at first I struggled to run for 1 minute at a time. I was convinced that I would fail, but at least I would fail silently and no one who knew me would ever know about it. 

On April 30th, 2016 it was race day. I pinned my bib onto clothes I have come to learn are a terrible choice for sweating into - a 100% cotton shirt, and some loose fitting sweat pants. My shoes had holes in the toes. I weighed in at 201 pounds, but I hauled my ass out there and ran. I was nearly last, and nervous the entire time about the sweep bus picking me up for being too slow; I'd heard all the horror stories about that humiliating possibility. But the demon didn't win that day. I didn't fail. I finished a 5K. It was the first time I had tried something I wasn't automatically good at, risked failure, and carried on anyway despite my fears. Bravery is not being unafraid. Anyone can do something they're not afraid of, that shit's easy. Bravery is doing something that scares you. So of course at the finish line, when another runner asked me "What now?" I replied "I'm going to run a half marathon!"

You never forget your first time

Of course the first stop from there was to get properly fitted for some running shoes and retire my old friends, but the following year I was back. And I ran that half marathon.

My Bad Hand - David Goggins Challenge

"What kind of bullshit did you deal with growing up?"

The dirty laundry I don't want to air

 I started out life in a coal patch in rural Pennsylvania as a scrawny, nerdy tomboy in a blue collar rural environment that didn't know what to do with me and parents who didn't either. Vision so bad that for the first two and a half years of my life, I could tell day from night but nothing else, and in a family where excess money wasn't one of our burdens I got my first pair of glasses before my third birthday. They were Coke-bottle thick. I wasn't even in kindergarten when I learned what bullies were. The neighborhood kids taught me that being the four-eyed weirdo was not the thing to be. I resisted every effort made to put me in dresses and teach me to be a normal girl, and that didn't really win me any friends either. The summer after kindergarten, I was put in Pony League baseball. Not because I was good at throwing or catching or hitting a ball. I couldn't do any of those things. I was the ninth kid in town the right age for there to be a team. I was shoved into left field with a hand-me-down glove, and everybody knew I was a guaranteed strike out. I played one season, and other than getting my ass kicked by the boys on the team for constantly fucking up, I saw no action at all. From then on, baseball and softball were nightmare inducing. A guaranteed recipe for being made fun of and kicked around. I stuck to riding my bicycle.

1985 - The scrawny tomboy with glasses

The coal patch is quicksand

My father was a steelworker and my mother was a part-time teacher when I was a kid. They weren't well off and I was abundantly aware of how often I heard "We can't afford it." about absolutely everything. Since it was decided at age five that sports weren't for me because I didn't have natural talent, I heard a string of "No, we can't afford it." about pretty much everything I wanted to do. Musical instruments, dance classes, even karate at the rec center were not in the budget. Growing up in a small town that came with all the rigid conformity that accompanies a place where less than a thousand people live, I was shoved into exactly one activity and it was one that was thought to be proper for a girl: Girl Scouts. Enrolled as a Brownie at six years old, I thought it would be like Boy Scouts. Camping and hiking in the woods and learning to build snares and make fires. It was nothing of the sort. Once again, I was forced into a dress. There I would find myself watching the clock through activities like make overs and sewing decorative pillows. I went to camp exactly once and to my great horror we were simply put into a dormitory building and kept indoors doing more fucking arts and crafts. I wanted the hell out of that coal patch, which was the one thing my parents were in complete agreement about. They didn't want me stuck there my whole life trying to be the housewife of a coal miner. Since I was shit at sports, and not a musical prodigy, the one way out was to dig in and be a good nerd. And I was. 

Nerds don't go to the prom

I had exactly two friends in high school and I haven't seen either one of them in 26 years, not since the day we all graduated and went our own ways in life. I don't know where they are; I've never looked them up. We were outcasts together and our friendship seemed to mostly be based on just not wanting to get bullied too much at lunch. School work was the one thing that came easily to me, so I excelled at it without any real effort. Being a nerd still wasn't cool, so I spent a great deal of my middle school and high school years getting into fights. That kind of shit will kill your motivation to leave the house. I read books, I ate a lot of snacks, and I started developing habits that plague me to this day. Sit around eating. Like it was my job. I never went to the prom, homecoming, school dances. I didn't date. I read books and ate food. By 16 I was obese. My answer to everything was food.

1994 - Already on my way to morbid obesity

 

How far down the hole goes

In some measures, I was a success story. I got an academic scholarship to pay about half of my tuition at my first choice university, and I went. And like a lot of freshmen, when I got there and moved into my dorm room I discovered a few things that led what otherwise would've been a success story to be more of a slow roll into a self-dug grave. I found parties, bars that didn't ask for ID, and the cafeteria. Wholly unprepared for the amount of work involved in a university level education, I didn't do any. My grades reflected the fact that I spent all my time drinking and eating. My BMI went up. My GPA went down. I lost my scholarship so I took out bigger loans because I had to get the degree. I did, eventually, squeak by with it. Along the way, I got an explanation for why I had always been such a weirdo. It's not just that I was a tomboy or a nerd. "On the spectrum" is how the refer to it now. Then it was Asperger's Syndrome. It explained a lot of the behavior that made me tick, and even more of why I've never found it easy to make friends or handle social situations. But food and alcohol don't care, and alcohol makes everyone popular in college. I drank all night, I slept during the day, I cut classes routinely and showed up for exams. I relied on my brain's uncanny ability to make sense out of anything in a hurry - at least sense enough to pass the exams - and I maintained an acceptable average in enough of my classes to get a degree.

 

Having just barely graduated, I spent the next five years working in a shitty job at a shitty little company that paid me only enough to make the payments on my student loans and my shitty little economy car. I had taken up smoking, so all my addictions were related to putting something in my mouth. Food, alcohol, cigarettes. I did no physical activity. I hated everything involved with going outside. I worked, I slept, I ate, I drank, I smoked. Five years of my life disappeared. I got a better job but by then was morbidly obese. In the vein of always indulging my desire for more food and more beer, I took a full-time travel position and made the most of my per diems. Food addiction wasn't anything that even entered my mind. I liked to eat, so I did a lot of it. I still like to eat. There's a constant battle raging in me between my appetite for more food and my knowledge that it will kill me. I lived a repetitive life where even in the chaos of constant travel, I maintained my routines. I once ate dinner at the same gastropub every day for a year straight. I was so predictable, I had a usual at three airport bars. And then in January of 2015 it came to a screeching halt. My employer did a massive layoff, and I found myself suddenly getting a new job I didn't want to get. I looked at myself in the mirror and it looked like the picture below. No angles, no filters, no hiding the truth. Somewhere north of 300 pounds - where the scale stopped - at 37 years old and that was the day I knew that if I didn't get the fuck over the food addiction, the aversion to all things sport related, and my inability to go the hell outside I would die that way. The day was coming that the last words I heard on earth were going to be "Get the extra-wide stretcher." 

And on Monday, 2 February 2015 I woke up on Day Zero of the rest of my life. 

2015 - Day zero