Body v. Mind

I've been feeling a little off today and the irritant of it has been a festering burr under my skin.  All right, the red-eye flight across the country and the subsequent twelve hours in the airport before getting on another cross country flight back didn't exactly help.  It's more than that though.

I have been living with this sense of disconnect for a while now and today I suddenly identified it.  My mind and my body, or rather what my body can do, seem to have fallen out of sync.  Let's call it a misalignment of expectations. 

I remember feeling like that before...  As a teenager I gained a lot of weight and while I'm sure it was traumatic on my body, it did a complete number on my head.  Up to that point I have always been too thin and I never gave a single thought to what I ate.  Size and weight were just not on the list of things I worried about.  Then, in a space of a single year I had ballooned to twice my weight and I can think of few other experiences in my life that were as traumatic as that.  Logically I realize that it didn't happen overnight, but that's what it felt like.  I went to bed as a skinny twelve year old and woke up the next morning as a depressed and grossly overweight thirteen year old.

The mental damage of that transformation took more than a decade and a half to repair.  The adage "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" may be true and I may appreciate it now, however, at the time I would have gladly chosen to die rather than battle on.

That sense of a disconnect between what I expect my body to do and look like and the reality is what I'm experiencing today.  There are things I expect my body to be able to do and tolerate.  Things that I don't want to have to think about, let alone be confronted with incontrovertible evidence that it just ain't happening.

Have I mentioned that I'm neither accepting of nor gracious in defeat?

Let's see what I can do to get things straightened out again.  After all, who doesn't love a challenge on the eve of a new year?