The digital scale in my bathroom has a decimal point. It measures to the nearest tenth of a pound. It’s unhelpful. It’s not how people work. Or at least it’s not how I work. And I’m people. A tenth of a pound is barely even water weight. You can’t gain or lose a tenth of a pound in any meaningful way. You can only happen to be a tenth of a pound lighter or heavier than you were the day before. It’s too small of a sample size. Not enough to be indicative of trend. If I were more naive, I would wonder why such a precise feature was even included in a tool designed to weigh human bodies. 

I’m trying to lose weight again, if you couldn’t tell. I’ve tried this before, to varying degrees of success. I’m not weighing myself often. Last time I looked I came in at 280.x pounds. 2.x pounds down from before the holidays. A nice surprise. This kind of thing takes a lot of self-convincing and overthinking. Beyond faith and drive to do it. I have to convince myself of good reason as well. My thesis for weight-loss needs to be ethically and philosophically sound. I know. I rolled my eyes too.

It just can’t be for the wrong reason. In many ways my body as it exists feels like a righteous rebellion. A rejection of expectations laid before me. But it’s a lie. Rebellion requires joy to be sustainable or truthful, I think. I often need to convince myself that the lack of joy I feel in the mirror is real. Valid, and not a moral failing. It doesn’t mean that I am lying to myself about love. It doesn’t mean that I am lying to myself about the way I feel towards people. 

I am not required to have such thorough consistency. Grace is not singular and I can apply it contextually. It looks differently when applied to myself than when I apply it to others. It looks like accountability. Reminder that identity is not branded. The self I stand behind is more profound than that which is so vainly reflected back at my eagerly lying eyes.

I am afraid. I am afraid that in however many months or years that the feeling in the mirror will not be gone. That the issue is more than skin-deep and that the mole will continue to reappear and reappear no matter how deeply I dig or how much of myself I remove. So sometimes I convince myself to do nothing. Fear is paralyzing in that way, and fueled by that decimal point, which is originally, implicitly, sold as some extra convenience or feature. 

When I step on the scale I need further convincing. That extra and objectively unnecessary digit gives me such pause. The dot before it staring up at me like the pupil of some judgmental eye. It reminds me that I am choosing to participate in a predatory industry willing to capitalize on such seemingly banal observation and incrementalism. Obsessive compulsion disguised, marketed, and sold as hope. I feel I am trading one profit-producing habit for another. That in my attempt to escape or even critique the powers which drove me to the scale I am instead reinforcing and affirming them. That my rejection of one pillar remains an endorsement of the structure.

So I don’t look at the decimal point. It was placed there by cynical profiteers and I will not abide by it. There is no convincing myself out of this point. To move past it requires that I get out of my own head. Stop theorizing. Build my own structure. Write my own rules. Weigh myself once a month. Strictly to track trend. Render the decimal point obsolete. And so simply. Without force. The grip of the decimal point is unnatural. In this way I have the advantage. Here is where true hope lies. I remove its power passively. By refusing the structure it sits atop. This structure which insists upon incremental “progress” and on observation. Micromanagement. Surveillance. Documentation. Verification. Distrust. Hatred. 

My structure must be tangible. It has to be measurable. Real. But not convoluted. Human. My senses will lie to me as my body changes. I have always seen myself as fat. In high school I played football and practiced with the offensive linemen because I thought I was huge. I was 5’8” and barely pushing 170 pounds. I was thrown like a ragdoll every day and I marveled at the sheer strength of those I perceived to be my peers; to be able to send a giant like me through the air with such ease. And so I think it was self-fulfilling prophecy. It was a negative perception of self. I couldn’t help it. A loss of hope I think from a pretty early age. I think the marketing got me early. Before I could articulate the way I felt or had the tools to be vulnerable with people I knew. I was sixteen. It is hard to have hope when the structure of the decimal feels like it is embedded in your bones. But the purpose of this structure is to sell you your own tail disguised as a false hope. To transform you into an isolated ouroboros, mistaking your isolation for individual righteousness. A true hope we can get so easily from each other. 

This dysmorphia will not go away and I must prepare for the way it will adapt and manifest as I lose weight. Trust the scale but lend it no emotional leverage. I’d like to be able to run again. I remember what it was like to bound and feel the wind glance off of my cheek as I cut through the air. Use the scale, but find my joy in that liberation. That reclamation. 

I’m an optimist. I believe people are generally good. It’s my experience. One I understand I am privileged to have. Nonetheless, I believe in the goodness of individuals and communities. I believe that goodness is stronger than the structure of the decimal which seeks to take advantage of it. I believe in the individual’s ability to measure beyond the decimal point and seek something greater. Use the tools which we may feel damned to so we can dismantle but not take measure. Then let go of them when the work is finished and trust the joy found in the resulting freedom as adequate measure of our success.