Making Weight
In which I lose weight, again.
In October of last year, as it does every autumn, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, it became clear to me that I had gained weight. The last trip around followed a cycle that began when we left for Japan in the summer of 2023 and ended sometime in the spring of 2024, when I was trying to get to racing weight ahead of the Manchester Marathon. I did hit the weight I wanted, before promptly gaining almost all of it back over the summer, the same series of triggers and stresses leading to something deep inside, convincing me that cereal eaten by the handful in the middle of the night would fill whatever void that was gaping and yawning inside of me, a true madness of modern life.
When I lost weight the first time, famously when I first met Yoko and was disassembling the structural fatness of my life, it was easier because I didn’t know yet that it was hard. The struggles were all new, there was no history of failure to stop me from trying again, to stop me from getting up quickly when I fell and thinking, I will avoid this in the future, I have learned my lesson. When you fall in your forties, you remember all the times you have fallen before, the long history of falling and you see at the same time a future of falling. You think instead, I have fallen before and I will fall again, but that doesn’t have any bearing on my need now, in this moment to get up and try again. I can say this to myself, but it takes more time now. Give me a moment, I’ll get there.
The retreat to food is something I have documented well in my life, from my childhood when everything good or bad was met with treats, pop from the gas station, some good memory of my father happy and everyone else happy by extension. Food could be central to that, eating out, eating at McDonald’s in nineties, when they used to give you plastic collectable cups, before climate change and all the poison of Jesus had metastasised in me. When everything was free and easy.
Now, it’s thirty years later and I am my father. My kids are also looking for the happiness in their father, saying things like, Dad’s in a good mood, you can tell him now, when they have something to tell me that they are afraid to tell me. It’s hard to describe the feeling of abject failure you feel when you realise you have been unable to escape the gravitational pull of your genes, that you have become the same person as your parents, when someone you love says you frighten them. How can I separate myself from a genetic depressive aura that makes the women in my life recoil, that makes everyone afraid, that makes me stand in front of a class of students and beg them to say something, anything, for some evidence that someone can see me in a way I recognise, as another person in this world with them.
Instead I feel like I am Dad for everyone, Dad the man who can fix anything, Dad the man who will scold you for spending too much on fast food. Dad with the furrowed brow, Dad who is only interested when it’s about him. Dad whose love is contingent, Dad who is angry because he is always afraid. Dad who can reset the modem, can make electronic things work, who can find the exclamation mark on the keyboard. Dad who has made dinner and done the washing up, but done it wrong. Dad whose hands and beard are dirty, who farts, who has come home with the shopping. Everyone is acting cautiously around Dad, Dad who could be angry, we don’t know, we haven’t seen him since he’s been home from work. Dad who is lumbering around and scowling, and Dad hasn’t responded to that text yet. Dad who was just a child that grew up. Dad who will try again, Dad who as a lecturer responds to module evaluations by filling out grids with columns: ‘what you said’ and ‘what I did’ to indicate that he’s heard and responded to any concerns. I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable. When I was your age, I wasn’t allowed to be uncomfortable.
When I was able to stop eating in October, to flip the switch, I was determined to not make the same mistakes, to spiral up and then down and then up again, and here I am again, down but for how long, one can only guess. I did better this time to recognise the feelings, to sit with my unhappiness and not respond to it with food. I wasn’t perfect, I still was up at three in the morning, eating and then studiously putting the numbers in the app like the record of my failure would save me. It can’t, of course, and this ending is always just the beginning, another blog post in the future, fired off without proper editing, full of typos. In the meanwhile, Dad will try to stand — Dad will listen, I promise. I will try to listen.