Personal

Looking Back, Personal

Two Milestones

The numbness in my arms was the first indication something was wrong.

Throughout my life I'd find myself sleeping on my stomach, arms tucked under my body for warmth – something I no doubt learned in the Canadian winters when I was too lazy to get another blanket – but when I began to awake without being able to feel my upper limbs, I became concerned. After a few months of hoping it would go away, I finally resigned myself to seeing a doctor and got the news: my blood pressure was high and I was severely overweight.

Since I was a child I've battled with my weight. Always on the heavier side, I fluctuated between highs and lows, but I had never let it get overly bad. In fact, I thought I was doing quite well. When I had first moved back to Victoria after film school, I was the slimmest that I could recall. However, that was 5 years previous, and in the interim I had slowly piled on the pounds to finally reaching nearly 300 lbs.

In hindsight, I knew I was getting bigger. My purposefully loose clothes had gotten decidedly less loose, and I had all but stopped looking in reflective surfaces – I actively avoided the full length mirror in my room. Until the tingling started, I never let myself acknowledge the problem, and now I had to.