Decisions

Seven years ago on this day, I sat shaking, sweating, and dry-heaving in my parents bedroom with a decision to make:

Would I leave LA and move home with my parents to lose weight and inch my way out of the closet, or would I stay in LA (Burbank, oy!) and remain so fat that I couldn't breathe at night, wondering if I'd be alive each morning.

It had been that bad.  I would gorge at night on ice cream, and weeze all night long, convinced I'd have a heart attack in my sleep, like my grandparents before me.   It sounds like an easy choice now, but still, I lay in the corner of my mom's baby clothes collection that December 30, 2002 and throwing up into a paper bag, terrified and confused about what to do.  I was 24, and felt so old, so at a crossroads, with a pit of flames, and snakes, and darkness on either side of the road.  If I'd been a religious person, it might have scared me into suicide.

These baby clothes I was laying on, my mother had started buying them five years ago and hoarded them all over the house awaiting the day I'd bring home the right girl and start a family, but I knew that was never going to happen.  Downstairs I heard my dad drinking the last of a full gallon of Chocolate milk.  He'd started drinking it at 8 AM.  He and I were so much alike that way.  It had been what bonded us.  The night before, we went to Jack in the Box together and each got two Jumbo Jacks.  In the car, he told me about playing the accordion as a kid.  I never knew he did that.

I had $15,000 in student loans to pay off and couldn't afford to just quit my job and move home unemployed.  Besides, my brother had already done that in his twenties, and it was because he was an addict.  I was no addict.  I threw up again.  I sat there and thought about what I had going for me in this very average existence:

1) a job

2) some sense of normalcy in my family of oddities

3) The predictability of what tomorrow would bring.

That predictability was more overeating, sure--but it had always been that way.  It's how I was. It's how we were as a family. 

I looked up at a picture of myself in my cap and gown on the wall.  I remembered how going to college was such a big deal back then.  No one in my family had ever finished college, much less moved away to college.  It almost killed my mother.  I watched her cry at my dorm and have a fit about leaving me across the country.  I spent the first semester so scared of not knowing anyone that I would take hour long showers just to avoid talking to my roommate, but I stayed.  And I finished.  And when it was all said and done, my parents were so proud that they hung my graduation picture, stretched to poster size, into a beautiful gold frame on their wall, in two different places.  I stayed.  I fought.  I kept moving forward.

As the year closes now, seven years later, I think of how hard it's all been and how rewarding going against the grain and up the mountain has been. And recently, I've been challenged with more life-altering changes, and I can only use my previous life as precedent for how I'll proceed.

And for you, the reader, the overweight, or the closeted, or the education-seeker or the heart-broken--as you wonder if what you want to do with your life is worth the risk, I'll offer this advice: Think of how you've conquered before.  Think of your triumphs leading up to today, and allow that version of yourself to be your hero in 2010.  

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Oh, and if that doesn't work, be the corny fag that I am and watch this video shot at my Alma Matter, Belmont University.