Your Heart's Desire

YOUR HEART’S DESIRE

What is your heart’s desire? Be honest now, with yourself if not with me. If your heart’s greatest desire today isn’t weight loss, that’s OK. There are lots of things in our lives that are just as important, or even more important, than weight loss. After a lifetime of dieting and weight problems, my mother’s dying wish had nothing to do with her weight. Her greatest wish was that her grown children (both in our 50’s) would stop fighting with each other. Maybe your heart’s desire is that your partner will love you more (or better). That’s OK too, as long as you understand that weight loss probably isn’t going to achieve that. Maybe your heart’s desire is to become a neurosurgeon, and you somehow believe that weight loss will make your studies easier or faster, or it will ensure your acceptance to medical school (but think twice about that last one).

What if you don’t know your heart’s desire, but you hope that weight loss will help you find it? That’s entirely possible, but it may not be revealed to you in a sudden, blinding flash. You may have to go groping around in the dark for a while before you find it.

JUST WANNA BE THIN?

Is your heart’s desire simply to be thin? Are you sure of that?

Before I ask you a question, I first try to answer it myself, and it’s not easy for me to answer this particular question. For much of my life, it’s been fairly easy to talk about what I don’t want. I don’t want to be fat, I don’t want to listen to another doctor lecture me about my high cholesterol, I don’t want freak-show breasts, and so on and so forth.

When I decided to have WLS, I focused on the desire that burned most brightly in my dark life: weight loss. Intellectually I knew that things in my life other than my weight would change as a result of the surgery. My surgeon and nutritionist made it clear that I must change my eating and exercise behavior. I didn’t especially want to change those things – who doesn’t want to effortlessly lose 5 pounds a week while sitting on their butt eating potato chips and cookies? – but I nodded obediently and gave myself a stern self-improvement lecture for perhaps the 200th time in my life. I thought that weight loss was the most precious prize I could ever win. Everything else paled in comparison to it. Weight loss has indeed been a precious prize, but it has turned out to be the ruby instead of the diamond in my crown.

We tend to believe that weight loss will cure all our problems. While it will indeed solve some problems (especially health-related), it also introduces us to some brand-new ones. Like my friend Joni, who after getting her heart’s desire (a baby), was astounded to realize that caring for that baby was going to be her 24-hour-a-day job at least until he turned 18, we discover that maintaining weight loss is a lifetime job. It may not require all 1440 minutes of our attention every day, but it’s still there and it’s still work. On the whole, I’m OK with that. I’ve come to realize what a precious gift my body is after decades of despising it, so I’m willing to give it the attention and nutrition, the relaxation and pleasure, the exercise and rest that it needs to in order to carry me onward.

I discovered something else after achieving my heart’s desire. As soon as it was in my eager hands, I started looking around for another heart’s desire. Identifying that and figuring out how to get it has taken me longer than I expected, and I’ve changed my mind a few times along the way. I usually make decisions quickly, preferring to make a bad decision over no decision. What do I want now? Do I really need something else, or am I a compulsive seeker of experience and sensation? Am I still trying to fill the bottomless hole that I used to stuff with food? Or do I already possess my heart’s desire – such as a personal relationship with God – and just don’t recognize it?

Sometimes I wonder if naming my heart’s desire is so hard because I wrongly persist in thinking of it as a thing – something as tangible and solid as a book or a chair or a car. Perhaps I should look instead for a place or even a state of being.

OK, OK, don’t go to sleep quite yet. I’ll stop my philosophical meandering and tell you my secret heart’s desire.

I want to live.

After decades of self-punishment, frequent despair, and several attempts at total self-destruction, I want to live. And I want to live well, in a way that celebrates life. No more hanging back, no more wasting time. No more time spent counting the minutes until mealtime, or how many cookies are left in the Keebler package. I’ve got to stop fearfully dismissing new things because “I’ve never done that before,” or because “I don’t know how to do that.”

SO HOW DO YOU RECOGNIZE IT?

How do you recognize your heart’s desire? How do you envision and name it? Are you living your life like a shopper who doesn’t know what she/he is looking for, who says, “I’ll know it when I see it.” I know that feeling, but I wonder if a gut “that’s it” reaction always sends us in the right direction or helps us make the best decisions. No big deal when choosing a color of nail polish, but is it safe when choosing a career, a partner, or a medical treatment? While my analytical skills are overdeveloped, I also know that my built-in danger detector tends to sound the alarm when I’m facing something unfamiliar or unknown. With the alarm blaring in my ears, I back away or even beat a retreat from whatever adventure or challenge I’ve glimpsed.

About 10 years ago I spent a long weekend in Honolulu when on my home from an overseas business trip. While there, I stood at the edge of a cliff and watched other visitors snorkeling in incredibly clear water, only inches from coral, shells, and undersea life so vivid I could see it easily from my distant perch. I was filled with envy. I knew that in a tourist town it would be easy to find a way to join a snorkeling expedition, but my inner alarm sounded, and it scared me off by blaring, “You can’t do that. You don’t have a bathing suit. You’re too fat to find a bathing suit to buy, never mind wear it in public. You’re afraid of the water. You’re a lousy swimmer.”

So some of the questions I try to ask myself now when contemplating something new include:

1. Is this opportunity likely to arise again?

2. What’s the worst thing that could happen if I do it?

3. What’s the worst thing that could happen if I don’t do it?

4. Does the cost or risk outweigh the potential benefit?

BITTERSWEET

And that brings me to my final (for now, anyway) point. As I wrote in Bandwagon, saying goodbye to the excess pounds and problems can be bittersweet. We lose some beloved companions (such as our edible comforts) and discover new things about ourselves, not all of them lovable.

For example, I discovered that I am a far more selfish person than I ever would have admitted when I was obese. When I was supporting my food addiction, I believed I was the only one affected by it, but I was wrong. It saddens me now that I gave my relationship with food more time and energy than my relationships with my friends and family. I can’t go back and change that, much as I might like to. All I can do is give those people (including me) the love and attention they deserve as I go forward.