Diss Con 2 - 24

Blood this morning was 6.2.

The day has been as we thought it would be - hard work in separate rooms, but work towards a common goal, the shifting of our rooms into a new form, the clearing of rooms of garbage brought from London mainly because to go through it was too hard and took too much of time we did not have. We moved the kithcen round, taking bits into the living room.

Then we separated, d to the kitchen, the larder and the living room, me mainly to my office. We paused breifly for a Nando's dinner - protein, mainly - and then went back to it till late at night. More of the same is likely to characterise tomorrow. I've done nothing in terms of actual exercise today, but lots in terms of activity, and so I don't propose to worry about a calorific balance.

One of the things I came across in going through my office was a bunch of pictures. Pictures from years back, the last time I did a proper Disappearing. I've often wondered, recently, when it was that I did this last - the pictures were from 1988. I was 16, going on 17, with so much life and hope and opportunity ahead of me. 24 years later, I look back and cannot help but wonder...
How did I go from there, from youth and hope and Disappearing, to twice the man, most literally - from 10 stone up to 20 and beyond?

Simply, I remember being that young and slender man, full of hope to turn myself into a thing...a social being, a member of the normal world, from which I felt my fat had kept me for my formative years. And yet, while slim, it made no great difference to my world. It made me normal in so many ways, but the damage had already been done - damage to my mind, essentially, that wouldn't let me BE a normal, slim and hopeful man, trained as I was to be a fat fuck, to carry all the weight of that state, all the insecurity of it, that wouldn't let me ever be happy and hopeful of what the slimmer me could be, or could achieve.

And so I began the tread to double my size, over the course of 23 long years.

And are my reasons for wanting to do this now any better than they were back then? Are they different? Different, yes, but better? That I cannot say - my urge to live, live better and be bright in the second half of life seems no better or worse than the desperation to be "normal" that I felt as a teenaged boy. Can I then, now, promise myself or you that all of this is worth the doing? That I won't tread all the way back up to blubber-covered illness and despair. I keep telling myself there must be a way, a sensible way, to normalise my brain, to stop it flinging itself from one extreme to the other.

But the truth is I don't know that such a way exists - not for me. Which means my lifelong future is a series of ups and downs, a roller-coaster of Disappearing and Gain, of waxing and waning like a moon...

I want to know, on some level, whether I am broken in the brain, because I see no merit in a median path. No pleasure in the straight or narrow, but only in the wild excess or the strict and burning path of losing weight.

Answers on a postcard, anyone...?