My Biggest (heh) Failure

Lately I’ve been reading The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman, and while my verdict as to whether or not I’d recommend it as a whole is still pending, I was reflecting on one of the core principles - embracing failure - and its relevance to my life.

Without a doubt, the biggest failure of my life is my inability to losing weight and keep it off. And let’s be clear: despite some important changes in how I view weight and my own body, it is a failure, if only because it’s something I tried - and failed - to do. As I read through the chapter on failure with this specific example sitting in my mind, I ran headfirst into the sentence that made me realize I had to write this post:

Failure is a relief. At last you can say what you think.

Or, as American Zen Buddhist Natalie Goldberg put it:

To see and feel things as they really are, ‘we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self. Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose.’

I believe I am a happier person now, at my larger size, than I was before the pandemic, when I was at my smallest size and, in some part, that is because I failed. And now, I can say what I think, because I have nothing to lose.

I think it’s ridiculous that we watch people who, regardless of their habits, never gain weight, but assume the opposite can’t be true. I think it’s ridiculous that I ran or cycled or hiked every day for several years and went to bed hungry every night - transforming my entire life in a desperate attempt to chase what some people just naturally have. And, finally, I think it’s ridiculous that society encourages both of these things, and so much more, in no small part because there’s always money to be gained in convincing us to hate ourselves, and that the only way to free myself from that cycle of self-loathing was to fail at the one thing that mattered to me the most.

Gaining weight, at first, caused me to spiral. Most days, even with many hours of therapy and self-reflection, and a multitude of strategies under my belt, I still feel as though I’m balancing precariously above that same void. On the best days, the ledge I’m balancing on feels so wide I cannot see either side, and on the worst days, I fail, and I fall, and I spiral. But the days where I fall are fewer in number than they were a year ago, or two years ago.

Every time I pull myself out of the bottom of that spiral, the person who emerges is a little bit happier than the person who fell. I understand myself, my mind, and my body, a bit better. I feel more empathy towards others who face many of the same struggles I do. Each failure is an opportunity to sharpen the blades I use to keep depression and anxiety and self-loathing at bay.

Early on, I was not even sure how to define myself if I was no longer the formerly-fat-kid-turned-incredibly-amateur-athlete. That singular goal was my entire personality. That loss of definition was terrifying, but I am instead starting to recognize it as liberating. Freed from the need to define myself by a goal that I am likely doomed to fail, I can now define myself on my owns terms. I still exercise, no longer to burn off calories, but to keep my body and mind healthier. My self-definition is still a work in progress, and it’s a work that may never be completed, but at least it’s my definition, on my terms, rather than becoming what I assume the world wants me to be.

I do not know, and will never know, if I needed to fail in such a drastic way to discover the strategies that, bit by bit, make me a happier person. All I can do is recognize the facts: I did fail, and I am happier, at least in part because of my response to that failure. There is little value in pondering alternate paths to this destination, because those paths do not exist, at least not in this timeline.

Even after all of that, does a part of me still want to lose weight? Most days, absolutely. And maybe I will! Maybe tomorrow, I’ll be struck by the New Year’s Resolution Bug and download a calorie counting app and go for a run and come home and smugly believe I’m “back on track”, whatever that means. However, what I can recognize now is that that wouldn’t be a success, despite much of society’s insistence on viewing it as such - it would just be another flavor of failure.

Early on in the process, my therapist asked me if I was happier when I was smaller. Even then, the answer was no. I was tracking everything that went into my body, corrupting my relationship with food. I was weighing myself every day, and if the number was higher than I wanted, I knew it was going to be a bad mental health day. I was exercising more than almost anyone else I knew, and going to bed hungry, just to tread water, in what I now recognize as a rather obvious sign that perhaps my body was simply never meant to be that smaller size.

Returning to my old habits would be a failure to accept what I’ve learned about the world and about myself over the last couple of years. It would be a failure to accept the happiness I’ve already discovered, in favor of chasing the same goal that got me here in the first place. It would be a failure to accept the person I am now, today, in favor of some hypothetical “better” or “happier” version of myself.

While I’m coming to understand that accepting failure should be a natural part of life, and that we have to push our current limits if we ever want to grow beyond them - just ask any weightlifter - this is not a particular flavor of failure that I’m interested in revisiting any time soon.