Wine & Cheese

Weight: 310.2
C25K Wk 1 Day 2

Sounds good, huh?

Wine and cheese. Merlot and Brie.

But then you get to the party and find that they are serving Mad Dog and generic spray cheese. Not the good Kraft stuff, but the like Clover Valley kind.

Lots of things sound better or look better on paper than they are in real life. On paper the Cabbage Soup diet seems great. Hey, I love cabbage soup, and you can eat all of it that you want? Oh, YES!

But then you find out that you can really only eat cabbage soup and bananas and you are like, "What the crap am I supposed to LIVE off of???" I mean, yeah, you may lose a lot of weight but that's because you are STARVING!

Even relationships can be like this, mine was. They say that when you are in a content relationship that you will often gain weight, something about being happy and comfortable. I suppose that can be true. But for me it wasn't. It may have started that way but soon it became eating because I was depressed and miserable. On paper and in public we tried to make our relationship look as functional as possible even when I was thinking of extreme measures to get out of it. I made pretend like things were rosy.

But they had gotten bad. I had curfews, I had to check in. It was bad. My school work really suffered and eventually I had to drop out. I was devastated. When that happened I certainly wasn't allowed to be at home alone so I would have to come to his house and stay and do his chores. I was miserable, I was more than miserable. I had given up hope on just about anything and everything. Friends that I had had my whole life and some of my best friends I lost touch with I had to let go because they were men or because he didn't like them. I lost touch with my family, I lost touch with God, I lost touch with everything and everyone that I cared about.

We went on a vacation (against my better judgment). It was miserable. I slept on the floor of the hotel because I didn't want to be near him. One the way home I got that feeling in the pit of my stomach, that tugging at my soul that I hadn't felt since the day that I went forward in church and was saved. I had  to do something, to say something or I would bust. So I did.

I asked how long we were going to go on like this. I was miserable and I was pretty sure that he was too. It didn't go over well, I expected that. The trip ended with him leaving the 9mm that we traveled with in my passenger seat and telling me that "I may as well kill myself because I would never get away from him".

I had lived this lie for like 6 years. This lie that looked so great on paper but beyond the paper it was Hell. Pure Hell.

Why do we advertise wine and cheese when we know that we will be serving Mad Dog and generic spray cheese? Why do we feel like we have to offer ourselves up as some flawless entity when we know that we are anything but?

This fuels our unhappiness with ourselves and with life because we have no one that we feel that we can show our true selves to. It's hard, it's really hard, but we have to stop feeling this way. Now I'm not saying to just open up to everyone, you can't do that, and you shouldn't. You should pick the people that you trust very carefully. But you can find someone that you can trust to show your true self to, even if at first it's just God or whatever deity (if any) you believe in. Don't be afraid to be Mad Dog and not Merlot.

Amy Grant has a song out called "Better than a Halleluiah". It says that even in our misery and our sorrow we can cry out to God because sometimes us crying to him for help is more of a joy for Him to hear than a Halleluiah. You can be the Mad Dog and still be loved and accepted.

Acceptance of ourselves will eventually make us happier people who want to be happier people. So the better that you can feel about you, the better you will want to feel about you, get it? Once you start making decisions that better your health or your well being, you will want to make more and it will snowball for you.

So whether is aged wine or gas station malt liquor make the best of it and enjoy it for what it is. The food may be crap, but you are among friends and you are alive and that is something to celebrate no matter what is going on in your life. There is someone who would take your place in an instant.

Raise your Solo Cup friends.....