reading in the shower

2-18-18 Sunday 2:12pm @ home @ desk

before I forget

@ reading shampoo bottle label in the shower

Just before hopping in a post-yoga shower today, I paused in the midst of trying to decide whether to listen to music or a podcast and wondered why I felt the need to have anything at all playing.

I do this check-in regularly around shower media selection: is there some reason I want to be distracted from presence right now? It’s not a rhetorical question; sometimes the way I most want to be present is to scrub my body while fullheartedly attempting falsettos substantially too ambitious for my vocal range.

But other times, I notice that there is a shrinking away from presence, a desire for a break from being. Sometimes I’ll pause and abort an ironically avoidant impulse to play an episode of Tara Brach.

Today, especially because I was fresh from yoga and feeling great body and mind, it was an easy choice. I showered listening to - get this - only the sound of the shower and the gusts of wind periodically rattling my upstairs neighbor’s bathroom window in its frame.

And then, a few minutes in, I caught myself momentarily confused, staring at what I thought was a sentence written in French on the label of my conditioner bottle but was actually a sentence written in Spanish. What To Do (“Que Hacer”).

I was bemused at noticing this lapse of presence. I brought my attention all the way back into my body, and to the mindful performance of the task at hand. I was aware of the sensations in my hand and of my hand on my ribcage as I rubbed and rinsed off the soap. I practiced sending gratitude through my hand and into each part of my body as I touched it, thanking them for supporting me in my yoga practice, thanking them for the good sensations with which they were now overflowing, thanking them for being healthy and not injured or full of pain.

When I reached my stomach, ever the body part with which it’s the most challenging for me to be nonjudgmentally present with, I noticed the feeling of tightening toward judgment, recalling the stomachs I’d envied during the yoga class. Especially the stomach of a middle aged, heavily built man who’d been practicing directly opposite me and who had removed his shirt just a few minutes into class, leaving me the only remaining shirted male.

His belly was larger than mine, and not one of those purely-muscle bellies that still bulge, just a normal belly. But his stomach looked fine. It was tan and round and the skin was taut around it. I immediately identified it as the stomach of a man who’d never been significantly fatter than he was today. It reminded me of Collin Farrel’s belly in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The body and belly of a father of two children. Arms and legs and torso thick with muscles developed decades prior, their bulk now maintained by mowing the lawn and supporting the weight of an entire family depending on you.

I envied the appearance of his stomach and I envied his comfort exposing it to the room. My own stomach, I noticed last night, reminds me of my mom’s stomach, of Boogie2988’s stomach, in that the belly button is surrounded by origamilike creases of loose hanging skin, rather than a smooth, relatavistic cone of taught skin sloping uniformly in. My belly button is a maw hanging open, as if in gaping hunger. This is bitterly fitting and I despise it.

Last night as I looked at it in the mirror I wondered if I’d ever have skin removal surgery. I considered; I might be able to afford it in a year or two, and I might have lost enough weight, or maybe I already have. But then I’d be paying for this surgery in order to feel comfortable with my shirt off as a 30+ year old? Would it be better to use this as a place to practice acceptance and gratitude for my body rather than seeking out an expensive surgery and painful recovery in order to forcibly reject this part of me?

In the shower today, as I washed my stomach, I sent it gratitude. For being as small as it is, and accepting this profoundly diminished size and stature with dignity and grace. Of course I wish plank position didn’t make it hang from my body as if fleeing, stretching out so many graceless inches toward the floor. But it doesn’t complain about being a twentieth of its former size. It doesn’t complain about all the negative feelings I send its way on a daily basis, or about how I stare at it with loathing as I turn this way and that in the mirror, trying to decide if the way its bulge interacts with the drape of this t-shirt is acceptable.

In this moment, I practice seeing my stomach as a reminder of my accomplishment, my transformation. It is the most visible sign that my transformation is not complete in the way I wish it was, but that same fact, that it’s the only lingering piece of me that isn’t completely acceptable to me, is something worth celebrating. I think back to how it felt to be living under a mountain of fat which separated me from the world and caused me to become alienated from my body as the only way of coping with the awful reality of existing in this world as an obese person.

I think back to how impossibly daunting this journey looked from the beginning, when I’d do back of the napkin calculations involving unrealistically optimistic calorie deficits (say -300 a day for someone who did their best to avoid ever feeling the painful emptiness of hunger) that showed that I’ll only need to endure this painful feeling of 1) I’m on a diet because I’m fat and I’m facing that truth 2) I didn’t have enough to eat today, and I mourn this feeling of not enough, every single day for 5 or 10 years!

I marvel at the fact that my body underwent that transformation as gracefully as it has, that I’m on the other side a well built, attractive 27 year old who appears fairly healthy, maybe a little thick around the middle, but nowhere near enough that anyone would classify me as fat in their head. Fit and attractive enough for Markin to remind me that I am the blood boy, and assert that I’m basically already a Disney prince. Success could’ve been so much less absurdly kind to me and still have represented an enormous, profound, life-changing, unlikely miracle.

I slosh my belly around with love, which is not usually the emotion behind that motion.

That was a longer digression on my stomach than I’d planned. I guess that was maybe the larger thing to say, but the next thing is why it occurred to me to write about this: I remembered how I’d read and reread the shampoo bottle labels in the shower as a kid. I never quite understood why, and I’ve never thought about it seriously, even when I saw a meme about reading labels in the shower on Instagram. Looking back on that behavior from this moment, it was obvious that I was avoiding presence in the shower. Maybe more acutely because being present in the shower meant confronting my body and all the feelings I had about my body, but also not an uncharacteristic behavior. I did a quick survey of other behaviors I might have used to avoid presence when I was a kid, and came up with uh basically every behavior. Reading while eating. Video games. Reading in the car. Reading on the toilet. Reading while walking (gym) or hiking (Manitou Island). Rubik’s cube or origami or pencil-fiddling in class. Furtive David Letterman on a 3-inch black and white portable television when I was supposed to be sleeping.

One avoidant childhood. I thought about music, wondering whether that had been avoidant. I decided it was one of the few examples of healthy self-elimination, more transcendant than avoidant. Flow state.

But overall I was saddened that I’d been fleeing from presence so desperately at such a young age. Maybe from the time I stopped showering with my father or brother. I don’t know what time that was.

But again, the happier take, I’m so happy to be so much more frequently and comfortably present now. I’m so proud of myself for finding the ability to come to peace with the moment and with life and relax the struggle against what is, soon enough to let it bear fruit in my life for decades and decades to come.