Last night The Boy (my 17 year old son) started complaining that I had said that he wasn’t allowed to eat the food on the top shelf of the fridge. He was also very puzzled about why I had brought a pair of trainers. I flippantly said to him the first time he asked (last week) that I was “dancing the tango in them”. He then assumed I had a man in my life and was going to dancing lessons. I have not owned a pair of trainers in many years. I hate wearing shoes and working in construction I spend my working day in steel toe capped boots and then as soon as I get home I am bare footed. Or if I go out I wear my old boots or flip-flops, depending on the weather.
So last night I made him swear he would support and encourage me and not take the piss if I told him what I was up to. After much sniggering, joking and making daft comments and guesses at as to what it was he finally agreed. He sat on the work top in the kitchen and listened, while I prepared my tea, to what I wanted to achieve and how I was planning on going about it. He sat and listened to me and seemed to understand what I was talking about. I told him how I was doing the walking every day and that I am going to an exercise class on Thursdays. I showed him what was actually on the top shelf and that a lot of it he didn’t like anyway, (low fat soft cheese, low fat yoghurts with bits in). He took pleasure in telling me that I wouldn’t be able to eat the brie I have on the other shelf in the fridge. I sobbed quietly as I remembered tucking into it with crackers and pickled onions over the Christmas period.
I said perhaps on the weekends he could come for a walk with me, and we could talk and just enjoy spending time together, he said that we could. He also agreed that next summer he would teach me to kitesurf. I am hoping he will have sorted himself out by then, have a job and we will be able to afford to go abroad and he could teach me somewhere warm and sandy.
Since the conversation I have been having a think. Perhaps my ”private battle” hasn’t been made so “public” after all. Yes I am writing about it on here. But who reads it? People I don’t know (admittedly more people than I thought would have so far), and no one comments on it (apart from a couple of lovelies who have on twitter). I only post about it on Twitter, where the majority of my followers I don’t really know. There are a few I do, and they are on my Twitter list because I consider them real friends and I don’t mind them seeing the real me.
The Facebook me is very much a toned down, ‘have to behave myself because I have family on it,’ account. It also has people on there from when I was at school. People who even though they weren’t the ones bullying me, we weren’t really friends at school, just more a case of we knew each other and remember each other. Why am I more concerned about what these people think more than anyone else? Have I got more to lose? Do they have anymore of a hold over my life than anyone else?
Perhaps I am just not really ready to be that public about it. Perhaps I’m not ready for those who know me, to know Me. I would love to tell my family what I am doing, but I keep holding myself back. I know my Mum and Dad would love to know I am doing something positive, but I also know that perhaps I might let them down again. I can’t guarantee that I am going to achieve what I want to, I can’t guarantee that I am not going to end up back as I was at the start. Don’t get me wrong, I want to achieve it, I want to change and I want to be able to do things I have prevented myself from doing, but there is always that element of can I really do it this time?
I hope so, I want to, I will do..
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