Determined To Succeed

Day three.

I don’t quite know how to describe what fear feels like but I will do my best. I am standing in front of a mirror and can finally see the person I have become and, for the first time in my life, not knowing who I am but knowing I have to find myself again on a path I’ve never traveled before.

There are many other ways to describe fear but that’s the one that is most prominent right now. I said to you all the other day it really feels silly to talk about weight loss, too, in all of this but they can and do go hand in hand. Like when I am really fighting the urge to grab an ice-cream, or a Coke. I have always been an emotional eater and since I am truly admitting to myself how messed up I can be AND not running away from it I also have to admit that. I have been fighting the urges to eat and drink those bad things.

I can tell you all there is an old Bill and a Bill who wants to be a new Bill. I have lived so long with the old Bill that it’s immensely foreign to be looking at a stripped down and bare Bill, one that is trying to be a new Bill for the first time in his life and not wanting to fuck it up. That is fear. And it’s also a fear to do something I have never done before – tell the complete and honest truth. That contains fear. It is an unknown land and I am walking in it for the very first time.

When you’re afraid your heart beats harder and faster, your breaths get shallow, your adrenaline pumps and you become hyper-aware of sensory things – things you hear, your mouth going dry, etc. That is how I am living these days, but I do so very much want to be that new Bill. That also means suppressing the urge to run away and to hide and, yes, to hide with food. I just have to keep reminding myself that the empty pit in my stomach these days comes from fear and having to finally face life and reality not from actual hunger.

I mentioned yesterday how stupid I felt even bringing movie lines into my blogs these past couple of days but there is a movie quote that is very appropriate. It’s from the 1982 Ridley Scott movie “Blade Runner.” In that film Harrison Ford cowers in a corner on a rooftop after having been pulled from its ledge by Rutger Hauer’s character, an android who simply wants to not die (androids live only four years in their world). Ford doesn’t understand why a person, who just tried to kill him, would save him from falling to certain death and is given a lesson in living in fear.

“Quite a thing to live in fear. Isn’t it?” Hauer says to Ford before dying. Ford then gives voice-over about how he thinks, in the last moments of his life, Hauer realized the gifts of life and how that made him value life in the end.

Fear can make you do that, too.

I have told lies upon lies upon more lies in my life and have always lived in fear. Fear of being found out. Fear of people laughing at me, ridiculing me, realizing I was not who I said I was and, most of all, fear of not being liked by everyone. Believe me when I say there are so many people out there in this world, me included, who claimed and claim they don’t care what people think, but they delude others and themselves with that lie. But I admit it now. I did care what people thought, from as far back as when I was a kid, and that is when my path of lying started, leading me to this very point in time. This crossroad. This empty path in front of me that is scary because it contains the one thing I have never done in my life – tell the truth.

Don’t ever be afraid to admit you want to be liked. We all do. There is no shame in that. Fuck, that’s a human thing to feel. We all want to be the perfect one, the one who people look at and have them say “that person has it all together.” But if you don’t admit that to anyone or only tell it half-way like I used to then you will one day suffer the same catastrophic failures I’ve suffered.

Whether or not your situations deal with food or not I can now tell you from recent experiences that lying gets you nowhere and leaves you bankrupt and empty. It makes you live in fear, constant and inescapable fear. I am trying very hard to be that new Bill, but that comes with a new fear, too, and I am scared. I don’t ever want to be old Bill again (and yes, that does include the 400 pounds that also came with that baggage). I want to be new Bill, but it will take time and work and moving in a direction called truth. And I will get there. That road may be scary and dark and uncharted but it is my new path and truth, honest-to-goodness truth, is the light that will lead the way.