Trust Your Heaviness

This is what the things can teach us:  to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.          ~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

I leap - heaviness

grabs my back.  My sole defense?

My strong beating wings.

Trust your heaviness.  That is hard for me to do.  My entire life I have felt heaviness. As a child, even before I started school, I knew I was heavy.  Well, fat, was the word that was used.  I was confused as to why girls were compared negatively to other girls who weighed less than they did, while boys were lauded for being heavy.  For boys, heavy equaled strength and growth and presence.  For girls, at least for me, heavy equaled fat.  My heaviness seemed only related to my body, while boys' heaviness related to positive traits as well.

I tried early to manipulate how I spoke to others about my heaviness.  As a ten-year old, saying aloud that I weighed sixty-three pounds felt so much lighter than the real sixty-seven pounds the PE teacher whispered to me as I  stepped off the scale.  And so my personal relationship with body dysmorphia began.

My dysmorphia did not just involve my body.  I also had the sense that I was not a very good person. My adults were constantly pointing out my shortcomings and telling me how I affected them.  I felt I was this fatty lump of disappointment to many.  

Looking back, literally - looking at pictures of myself as a child - I was not fat.  I was not thin.  If we were measured in percentiles back then as children are now, I would have been in the 50th - 60th percentile for weight and height.  I was that way as a teen, a young adult, even a young middle age adult.  Looking back in pictures, I was fine.  Just fine.  But that is not how I felt or saw myself during those time.

There was no real scale to measure my emotional heaviness.  The only measurement on my emotional scale was that I was fine.  And funny.  To distract myself from my real emotions I provided comic relief whenever possible, making myself a joke. Underneath, I was sad, and mad, and scared.  Until, as an adult, I discovered falling.  Falling saved me.  Less dramatically stated, falling helped me see choices.

I have identified that there are three choices when beginning to fall. The first choice is what I tend to do most often - quickly, reach out and grab onto what ever I am falling from.  I grab on to that relationship, that job, booze, eating, spending money - whatever ledge I was sitting on before the fall.  It will probably hold me until the next storm pushes me off the edge.

The second choice when falling is to, well, fall.  To crash to the ground.  I have been fortunate that my crashes have not been fatal.  Some people I know crashed and that was the end.  

The third choice is, of course, to fly.  As Rilke says even birds have to trust, for as they launch, their heaviness will bring them down until they flap their wings, catch the updrafts - and fly.  It's not easy. There are random moments of gliding, but flying requires near-constant beating of the wings, navigating tall buildings and mountains, and finding safe shelter in the storms.  

May all your falls end in flight.  Okay, realistically - may many of your falls end in flight.  May the rest end safely with you in a better nest.