Final Word: Facing the inevitable me

I think my body has given up on me. This is not to say my body has given out on me, as in major system failure leading to incapacitation. There's plenty of time for that sort of thing in the future. Rather, my body, exercising a mind of its own (which isn't my mind), has given up all hope and decided to call it a day.

My body has run up the white flag of surrender and declared that it is what it is and that's just the way it is, and what's the point of fighting the inevitable?

It now becomes apparent to me that my body realised, well before I did, that the writing is on the wall for this writer and that all my attempts to become that lean, mean, awesomely sculpted machine that exists in my head will, inevitably, prove futile so why bother? My body has, effectively, mothballed itself and gone into survival/hibernation mode.

I should have seen this coming ages ago, when no matter how sensibly I ate or how little I imbibed or how much I exercised and generally lived sensibly, that the numbers staring up at me from the bathroom scales were always pretty much the same.

For a long time I secretly harboured the belief that the scales were broken but I know now that this was my strong wishful thinking instinct going toe-to-toe with reality. Reality, of course, will beat wishful thinking hands down every time.

And so it came to pass, as I started to notice that no matter what I did to curb the inevitable, that things that used to fit now no longer fitted in the ways they used to, that the creakiness and the clunkiness of the act of getting out of bed every morning was more creaky and more clunky. That, in short, I was getting more and more middle-aged and the spread was spreading. For a long time I denied this, because denial is good, denial means you can live happily for long periods of time. Unfortunately denial is not real, and reality will always win in the long run.

I am what I am and this isn't ever going to fundamentally change. The face that looks back at me from the mirror is what it is and it's not going to improve with time, so I need to man-up and deal with things on that level. This is not ideal, but it's what I've got to work with and that is the fact of the matter. Bugger.

I suppose if I was truly obsessed (as opposed to casually obsessed) about body image, I'd be seriously considering surgery as an option where all else has failed. I could never do this - partly through cowardice but mainly because the idea of having surgery voluntarily strikes me as just nuts. Also what exactly would I ask the surgeon to do? Where would I get him/her to begin? Can they lipo-suck out all those yummy long lunches that have accumulated over the years? Are they able to re-sculpt my one giant ab, caused by years of sitting at a keyboard writing, into a series of many abs? If they are to literally chisel my features into something more chiselled, have they got a chisel big enough for the job?

This is not to say I'm going to give up things like exercise or watching what I eat and not drinking to excess. Just because I have acknowledged inevitability, doesn't mean I'm going to throw myself head-first into her arms. That would be stupid and, ultimately, ill-fated. Yes, it might be fun for a while, but I have people around me to think of and, quite frankly, I'd rather like to hang with them for as long as possible.

No, this is simply the recognition that I've had some kind of (very) minor epiphany and I need to adjust my expectations and my behaviour accordingly. I don't know yet how this epiphany will actually impact on my day-to-day behaviour, as I'm still trying to determine how the new (but increasingly older) me will react in any given situation. I'm picking this won't differ much from how the old me used to react but I can't be sure of anything anymore - which is something of a problem when it comes to deciding things like courses of action.

So I guess I'm stuck with doing what I think most of us do in these kind of situations, which is to carry on and make the best of things.
Unless, of course, the new me and my body decide to hibernate for the winter. Which isn't actually a bad idea, come to think of it; I only hope my body concurs.