This summer, I gained weight again. It was inevitable: I had come off the high of running the London Marathon in April and was unable to regain my footing as everything seemed to stagnate. I could feel it creeping in, those habits you have when you're an eater, the habits that you hide from everyone and which make them even more shameful. I ran a half marathon in June, which mitigated things for a bit, but running alone never leads to me losing weight because of how much I want to eat when I run. I plodded around the course in Leamington Spa, or so it felt, but thinking back on it, I was not nearly as heavy as I was two months later, the trip to Japan giving me just the right mixture of anxiety and excitement and depression and restriction. The food is always an attempt to feel okay, to feel as though I'm taken care of, that I have enough of whatever it is I'm lacking: love, or peace, or happiness, all things I've not been able to find externally in places I was told they would be, in marriage or God. In the pachinko machine of anxious attachment coping mechanisms, I’ve always fallen on eating. I might not be able to find love, I say in a line I've practised carefully over the years, but I can find a cookie.
This year's making weight was much easier than it has been in the past, namely because I am now running to and from work, four miles each way. I could have done this while I worked at Newman, but then it required going out of my way to find the extra miles. Now, those miles are just there naturally to be run, and every morning I leave as the girls are waking up and am into the city in just over thirty-five minutes. I did, of course, track my eating over the eighty-two days it took me to drop the weight, but with the help of a variety of different strategies and placebos I've discovered over the years to get to this weight, I've seemingly learned to trick myself into making it easier. The specific methods are not worth mentioning, because they're the sort of dieting tips that only match my own idiosyncratic relationship with my body and the world around me. Suffice to say, I can lie to myself effectively enough to drop 100 grams a day.
The loss of eight or nine kilograms in the autumn has become such a common experience in my life that I can basically tell you to the day when I'll be at my goal weight once I start. This time I had predicted I would hit my goal just one day later than I did. I know what little things are okay to slip on and which ones I must take seriously. I know what counts and what doesn't, when my body has plateaued and when I have broken through, even without having to step on a scale. The ease at which this loss happened, and how normal it felt made me hopeful that I would eventually discover how to avoid the spiral in the first place. It's not an abiding hope, I'm sure I will be ten kilograms heavier in six months’ time, but maybe I can manage some self-awareness when the process starts, maybe I can start to understand myself better. This sounds like the sort of thing the TikTok therapists want me to say, particularly the new one, an English man in his fifties, telling me that the menopause (with the determiner in British English) is your opportunity as a man to really become a man, to really know yourself. Sure, I want to say back to him, I agree, but I'm still a child, not a man. Does it matter that I'm still a child?
At three on Saturday morning, I woke up as I have been every night since we came back from Japan, startled by some dream that upsets me, but which I can't ever remember. My mother-in-law appears many times, smiling and peaceful as I try to speak to her, to say I'm sorry. I felt my way down the stairs and pulled off my clothes and got on the scale, the same routine as I have for years of losing weight, although this time, I didn't do it every day as I'd found that daily weigh-ins led to mania. Just once a week is enough for me: I lose something every week and I don't have the anxiety created by unexpected upticks. I guessed the scale would read seventy-six even, maybe less, and it was less, and I had the feeling I knew I would have: the melancholy of having achieved something that only mattered to me, as if it only would really count if someone else praised me.
I pulled on my running gear and headed out into the early morning darkness, indulging in a run that I could finish before everyone woke so as to not burden my family with it, like the men you read about in the New York Times. Those men have wives who suffer endlessly I'm told, men for whom running has become an escape from the work at home they need to be told to do. I'm not that man, I want to footnote any comment I make about running: I take care of things at home, I cook and clean, and attend to the emotions of my children and partner when I can. I do what needs to be done, I vacuum and tidy up, and shop without a list from my wife, though I ask her before I go if she needs anything, careful to say that I will get what is normally needed and I'm only asking if there's something special she needs that I wouldn't normally know about. I buy gifts for family members, and remember dates, and, I tell the TikTok man with the menopausal wife who wants me to work on myself, I am trying. This is me trying.
My faith feels like a cage I was held in, but in which I was fed and in which I was afraid of the world outside of the cage. And now, that cage is open, and I'm free to leave, and there is no longer any food given to me, but I have chosen to stay here and starve, like I'm still afraid of what might happen if I leave, of the world apart from this one that abides in me like Jesus in my heart, like a malignant cancer that is spreading slowly enough that I keep saying I can deal with it another day. What is the metaphor that breaks me free from it: I'm told to go back to marriage, the love of Christ for the church as bride, and I am physically repulsed by it. I want to throw a punch, I want to scream that this doesn't work, that it has never worked, that I can't hear again that the solution is the cage. I can't leave, but that shouldn't be understood as anything more than my own cowardice, my fear that if I do what I want I will lose something I can't get back. An impromptu walk with a daughter who confides in you. A kiss rare enough to last days. A run unencumbered with guilt. Another day where you have held things together and done, in whatever limited way you can, your best.