Day One of becoming my own Batman

 Be your own Batman

31 December 2020

I have decided to begin the new year by becoming my very own Batman. No I am not going to be a brutal vigilante but I am going to perfect myself this year.

Batman used his pain and grief to become a Superhero or Anti Hero as some might probably say. The truth is he is a superhero without superpowers.

It is easy for Superman to be a hero, he is given superhuman strength, laser eyes, the ability to fly all because he is not a human. An alien given these powers by our beautiful golden sunshine. Any mutant human can be a superhero or supervillain simply because their genes are a little different to us regular folk. Captain America’s superpowers come from a concoction of chemicals and even the Hulk is the product of an experiment gone wrong.  If the comics are to be believed then only Batman suffered through years of hardship and training at the hand of Ra’s al Ghul. Bruce Wayne was trained and mentored by Henri Ducard and subsequently defied the organisation when he realised that their goal was to destroy Gotham. Even though Gotham City was a cesspool of crime and violence, Bruce could not bring himself to destroy a whole city just because some of the people were criminals.

It’s not my objective this year to become an actual Batman, but to harness the singular mindedness that is needed to reach some sort of perfection.

In the year of the Covid Pandemic, I turned fifty years old. I am morbidly obese, suffer from diabetes and have stopped doing any exercise at all, my ovaries have gone and on top of medicines for diabetes and high blood pressure, I also take HRT, I have cronic back ache and am awaiting the results of an MRI. I am not at my heaviest weight but pretty close. I know that getting Covid could kill me (my daughter also loves to remind me of this fact).

There is so much I wish to perfect and I know exactly how to do it but I am a serial quitter. I have never failed at anything because I have never actually seen things through to the end. I am even prepared (and unafraid) to die. However I do feel sorry for the people who have to lug my heavy fatty corpse to the mortuary. Again quitting rather than reaching a single goal.

Although if getting your teenage daughter to hate you is a goal then I have succeeded. My daughter and her friends all agree that I am an emotionally abusive mother. Yes, I have emotionally abused my daughter, I do not deny this, I can’t when the affects of the abuse are thrown back into my face. Yes I have sworn at my child, yes I have threatened her with bodily harm and in the depths of a temper I have probably said things no one should ever say to anyone, let alone your own child. For this I will always be ashamed.

I have just realised that the way I react to situations often makes the situation worse. So once again I must begin to be more mindful of how I perceive the situation. In other words I am going to have to stop, breathe and respond in a more positive way. My insecurities make it hard for me to not react in a negative way. I know this, I used to practice this. Years and years of insecurity and taking things too personally have caused me to build invisible walls and not think about how I was reacting and how that reaction could have made the situation worse. Reacting time and time again in the negative has also caused me to develop very many bad habits.

I guess the biggest wall I have placed around me is perhaps the least invisible. It's about twenty five kilograms of fat (for those not using the metric system of weights and measures that’s about three and a half stone). I was always a big girl, I just never realised why. For years I had buried much of my childhood. Repressed memories I think they are called. The sexual molestation by a much loved uncle caused me to slink away from those who loved me. I took refuge in food. Food was my constant companion, it was comforting and safe. As much as my mother and father tried to get me to lose weight, I have learned now that they were enablers, it was easier just to give in and give me the chocolates and sweets I wanted than put up with a tantrum. 

So where do I go from here? What’s the plan? What needs to be addressed first?

The body or the soul?

As today is the 31st of December 2020, I will have to see how I feel tomorrow. Oh that’s another tool I use, procrastination, I hope to be able break that habit as well.