The skin on my thighs feels tight as I climb into the tub. Bending my knees makes my calves feel as though they’ve split open at the stretch points. I’ve put on weight. 

Weight. That’s a funny concept at the moment—only funny because if I don’t find humor, I might cry or break down or worse, be mean and self-deprecating. 

As I lower myself into the steaming water, heavy with emotions that keep bubbling from the seemingly endless well within me, I pause and think, I need to get a handle on this. I need to let go and allow space for my own health to show up. I’ve got to act. But first, this bath. 

The Epsom salt does what Epsom salt does, and I melt into the bubbles and sloshing water. There’s nothing wrong with where I am, but I can’t stop from wondering how many others feel crushed by their body’s weight when all their bodies want is to be seen and their hearts heard. 

The weight isn’t really fat. It’s not. At least not in the way it exists as I float in the tub. It’s compounding choices to eat instead of addressing an issue. It’s avoiding a news conference during a pandemic, so the next worst thing doesn’t have to be real. It’s the desire to feel safe when nothing else appears to be working out. It’s seeking carnal comfort over and over until it stops being comfortable. 

Some people wear their cares when things get tough. I happen to be one of those people. Since twenty, I have been on every diet there is, and at thirty-eight I realize it’s not always a calories-in calories-out game. It’s often a softening of the way I hold myself in proximity to health. It’s succumbing to the trials and tribulations around me. It’s eating a cookie every time I get up to let the dog out at night because I feel sad about a death or a birth or not honoring my word to myself. It compounds and builds and then I bob in the bathtub wondering how the world got so heavy it hangs off my bones. 

I once had a friend who would do weight loss challenges with me. When one of us failed, we would have to pay the other person $100. It seemed like a healthy competition at the time, but now I just want to hug both of those women. I was once paid for her eating chicken wings. The weight of that is worse than fat to me. It’s worse than calorie counting and worse than buying a size up. It reeks of shame.

This go-around, I have no shame about where my body is. As I slosh my pretend mermaid tail, I consider the weight of why and how I got here. A family trauma, a surgery, a pandemic, the death of my dad, the death of two close family members, participating in the pandemic by catching it twice. I consider that these are all easily made excuses. These are all reasons which can be refuted. And yet, there they are in all the bits and bites taken to numb the pain of reality now stuffed under my tightly stretched skin. There they are. The weight of why: 

Why me. Why you. Why us. Why now. Why later. Why not. 

A sense of pride rolls over me and my face flushes. A growing light of gratitude for a body willing to put up with my existential crisis propaganda over and over swells in my chest. 

Tough love isn’t what my body needs. It doesn’t need a personal trainer or a nutritionist. It doesn’t need therapy or supplements. What my body and soul need at this moment, what so many others need as we carry this burden, is to release the weight of why. The need to build a ball of meaning in our guts. To eat meaning and wear it. The release of all that might have been and the acceptance of right now. If that is possible, then also forgiveness for holding onto the why and the weight and the desire to stay in one place long enough to catch our bearings. That, too. And gratitude sprinkled with deep compassion for brave souls who cloak their bodies in soft armor to face the day, hidden and sad. 

Not every pound is why, but most of mine are. When I release the burden of expectation and worry for the future, the inches of why come off. 

Again, why becomes curiosity. Why loses its weight.