Part 3: The Peace Treaty

September 2012:

I found myself a widow at forty years old. When something this unexpected happens—leaving a gaping void in the daily existence you once knew—there is no standard playbook for moving forward. My previous ten years had been a focus on raising three children, completing my education, and establishing a career path that could provide stability for my often unstable situation. With my husband gone, and as the primary parent for three young souls, I had to get real with myself. Real fast.

Similar to when I left my first marriage, I didn’t have the motivation to do it for myself; I did it for my children. Now, facing my own mortality after the sudden death of my second husband, I feared I was going to die. My weight was crushing me.

I will never forget that first attempt to “get healthier.” I drove to the local paved path running parallel to the ocean. It was a perfect day—the kind that leaves you with no excuses. I stepped out of the car, headed up the gentle slope to the crest of the trail, and was immediately out of breath.

If you’ve read my previous dispatches, you’ll recall my German maternal lineage takes great pride in being “Good Stock.” Likewise, I grew up embracing the phrase “strong like ox.” For years, I hid behind that strength; I told myself that as long as I could perform heavy labor, the weight didn’t matter. But that morning, the oxen spirit was nowhere to be found. I was panting, sweating, and failing before I had even begun.

How could this be?

Instead of honoring my body’s limitations, I charged ahead—angry, resentful, and desperate. I pounded my feet into the pavement, willing my joints to just fucking do it. Two hundred feet later, I hit the first bench. I sat, caught my breath, and felt the sting of tears.

Nope. No time for that. Get up.

I pushed myself further down the trail to the next bench. My right hip was screaming, pain radiating along my lower back and down into my leg. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was having my first of many sciatic flares and could barely move. I put my right foot up on the bench seat, settling into a soft lunge, silently begging my body to cooperate. Sheer panic settled in: I don’t think I can get back to the car.

Just the idea of having to call 911 for medical support to get me off a walking trail sent me into a full spiral that I can still feel the effects of as I type this. It was at that moment I came to terms with the fact that I was in real trouble.

Grieving at 300 pounds was a physical war. I was finally trying to do the work my therapist had sparked back in 2000, but the math was against me. The progress I made felt like inches; the relapses were measured in meters. In an ideal world, this chapter of my story would be wrapped up with a pretty bow by 2014. But no, the reality is that I did not make peace with my body until 2022—ten years after that fateful day on the beach trail.

Ten years of making strides measured in feet, only to backslide in miles. The scale ruled over me like a warlord, a constant reminder of the failure I believed myself to be. I spent a decade in a self-loathing, manic cycle: counting calories, fat grams, protein, micros, and macros. I chased every trend and fell for every fad. It was a war zone, and I lost more battles than I care to count.

Then came the dawn of my 50th orbit around the sun: January 2022.

By then, the landscape of my life had shifted. My youngest was a senior in high school. We had survived two years of a global pandemic, and my core beliefs about—well, just about everything—had been dismantled. I had been “truly” single for nearly five years. No flirting, no “sexty” texts, no curated online profiles. It was just me, myself, and I.

For many, the pandemic was a period of pure terror. For me, it was a forced solitude. It slowed my frantic pace—the ‘oxen force’ I used to charge through life—and finally allowed me to be vulnerable. I couldn’t fix the world’s chaos, and I couldn’t run from myself anymore.

To be blunt: I accepted that I hated myself. More to the point, I hated my body. I despised the very vessel that carried the essence of my soul. If consuming food was my drug of choice, the self-loathing was my pimp—keeping me trapped in a cycle of shame that I couldn’t see a way out of. I was rough, unkind, and ungrateful for everything my body had carried me through, and it showed. I was finally ready to surrender.

More importantly, I was finally willing to ask for help.

With the love and support of my family, I sought out weight loss surgery. I started the process in January of 2022, and seven months later, I had a procedure that saved my life. More importantly, I returned to therapy. The insights and “a-ha” moments from those sessions are blog posts for another day; suffice it to say, without doing the therapeutic work, the numbers on the scale would still be ruling over me. Now, I mark success by the inches. In all aspects of my life.

I’m still treading the water, still finding joy in those inches. But the full story—the depths, the meters, the grief, and the grit—is all being poured into Swimming in the Gray. My hope is that my voice and my journey might serve as a tether for anyone else tired of fighting the current alone

You can follow the journey and read the chapters as they unfold on my socials. Jump in. The water is deep, but you don’t have to swim it alone.