No Cure for the Swimsuit Blues

It occurs to me now that I jumped on my own personal bandwagon a season too late. Back in DC I had athletic classes I could attend (I remember now actually passing up a T'ai chi class due to my Master's thesis), friends to work out with, free access to a gym -- and weather that was barely brushing 80 at its finest. Now, as I struggle to find ways to exercise by myself in triple-digit temperatures... I realize that my timing was probably a bit off.

After all, summer is the dreaded swimsuit season. And if I'd just started a season earlier, I might not dread putting it on quite so much. But there's nothing for it now. Day four of the new regime, and the summer barbeque is tomorrow. Complete with the traditional donning of the dreaded swimsuit.

Oddly, with this on the horizon, I kicked it up a notch today. Almost as if I expected it to actually make me drop twenty pounds before tomorrow. It's amusing to see that the things that I never let bother me before (i.e. how I looked in a bathing suit) are now so horrifying now that being this size has become a temporary condition rather than a permanent fate. Before, I got past it. I had to, because it was just one of those things. And if I didn't deal, I'd never do anything I wanted to do. But now I almost want to hold myself back.

A lifetime of being overweight and now I develop terror at the thought of swimming in public? Did my synapses just not fire all these years or something?

Talking to a friend about this, she said that it made sense to be stressed when the status quo was changing. And when I stopped to think, the situation reminded me of nothing so much as a little kid drawing a picture for their parents, yelling "don't look, Mommy, don't look! I'm not done yet!" Though I hope to be a little better-drawn than anything rendered in Crayola, it does feel a little like that. I secretly want to hide away and not show anyone until I consider myself "ready" to be seen.

But if that was the proper course, I would not be seeing my sister, who's been on this track for nearly a year and has dropped 55 lbs so far. (So proud of you.) And I probably wouldn't be able to keep trying. After all, I'm doing this for me. For my health, for my confidence. But the people around me give me extra incentive. If I never had to worry about being embarrassed around people I cared about, why would I feel inconvenienced enough to make a change?

I wouldn't.

I'd have a perfectly good excuse to sit on my ass.

So in other words, ladies, quit it. Don't be like that. (Or, a la Riggs in Lethal Weapon 4: "Don't be a don't-be, Rog. Be a do-be.") Ahem. Point is, we're never going to get the juice to get off our asses and make that change if we don't get out there and see why we need to. If we hide away and pray no one will notice, no one will. And neither will we. And we miss out on a whole lot of living in the process.

So this summer, let us don the swimsuit with pride and shake our groove-thangs with the best of them (though perhaps not at the same time.) Let them stare, let them look. Let them admire our courage for it. (After all, even if you're a size 2, very few women actually like their bodies.) And if they judge? So what? That only means that we have more confidence for it. That we have enough self-respect to live our lives instead of hiding.

It all comes down to one thing, mushy and clichéd as it might sound. Without the confidence and self-respect to live our lives to their fullest potential... that perfect body is worth absolutely nothing.