Can you hear the music ?

I felt it like a soft chime, “Start skipping rope, alas, there’s still a chance you’ll grow taller”. There was no malice or judgment behind my mom’s sweet, comforting voice, no no, it was quite the contrary, all I ever saw in that innocent person’s eyes was love and concern for me, and I had heard a thousand similar phrases from her before, But somehow this time was different.

This time, I noticed a singular flash amongst millions from my neurons, and my brain played a chime, or now that I recall, it was more bittersweet, It sounded like hope, wonder, and the exhilaration of a breakthrough, with a subtle tone that reminded all the underlying menace and melancholy I had to dare across to be able to trace that little flash of thought - that maybe my mom was wrong. Her and seemingly everybody else missed that I was perfectly good enough and capable at the height he naturally grew to be, at the weight he could manage to be in.

Yes I was fat, 32% fat to be precise, and 5’ 8” tall. But neither my mom, nor any other soul in my life had taken a moment to say that its absolutely fine, that it was decent enough, that my height wasn’t something I was in absolute control of, or that I have it in me to work and lose the fat - Not a single person amongst the thousands I crossed paths with had told the little kid in me that I was good enough.

It never even crossed my mind that I wasn’t confident enough with myself, for someone who presumed the other way. I guess subconciously I always knew but I had never realised why that was so, not until I realised that my need for external validation arose far far earlier when I was all but a boy in the midst of a broken childhood. An absent, unloving father and a poorly fated mother could only do so much in the name of inspiring me to be myself, and certain ‘friends’ were catalytic enough to cement it in.

I wasn’t always fat ..it arose from the only time I got to listen to my mom and speak to her freely without my sister stealing her away for yet another convo or her running of to do chores - when she fed me while telling me stories (F*ck that dopamine hit), I used to ask one more mouthful just so I could sit there with her and the rest was history. I had a fair share of bodyshaming up until my college life, and I still vividly remember moments , even ones from a decade ago, of the people I was surrounded by, people I was being myself with, ever so easily throw a comment at me or giggle at something within themselves (shitty enough that I’m tearing up as I write this).

Churn that life out a few years, add in more relationship dramas, failures, heartbreaks, betrayals and fuck ton of loneliness, and you end up where I’m at. “Not this time” I told myself with a smirk creeping up on me as I realised what had always been the issue, nodding and throwing my mom’s words to the air, Not this time.

I now realise that my mom had merely been exposed to ways and thoughts just like my own but she never had the luxury of realisation and emotional fluency that I had built now, to realise this toxic pattern.

All those nights I laid drowning in my own tears, in anxiety, in doubt, in confusion, in misery, panic attacks after panic attacks, all of those drawing down to one single question - “Why am I never enough”, and now its funny enough to piss me off that it was never me, all that doubtful, self sabbotaging thoughts were never even f*cking mine to begin with.

It was of all those poor souls I came across, it was them being molded to make fun of or find fault in people like me rather than showing trust and appreciation. Its in the little things, yelling at your kids or infront of them, making someone feel the worst just so becasue they didn’t meet your absurd expectations, or not having the nerve to be curious about a person’s capabilities.

“You’re too fat”, “you’re not tall enough” , “you’re boring”, “you’re never gonna make it” - It cost them zero effort to shill out all these yet no one found it in their hearts to take a gamble for me, to be kind, to say “you got this”. And I now understand that its not malice that drove innocent, kind people like my mom to be that way, nor was it truth that based the claims and absurdities of all the unreasonably rude people outside my family, It was merely their opinions over a person whom they knew little about but thought they had EVERYTHING figured out, they found it easy to take a bet against a stranger rather than gamble in my favour, It had taken me Twenty Two years of life to reach a mental state of resilience, for confidence to bud out, to have clarity over situations just like these - to grow, And its okay.