Action Over Time

Personal Ownership Principle #1:  Action Over Time

If it’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for…

Any significant goal we have will require significant time to achieve.  That’s if we can achieve it at all. With significant time will come both adversity and opportunity.  The key is to keep fighting through adversity to reach potential opportunities.

Notice I write, ‘if we can achieve’ and ‘potential opportunities’.  I can not predict the future.  If you implement everything I write about into your life, I cannot guarantee you success.  As a matter of fact, the more significant and meaningful the change you want to make, I can guarantee you adversity, pain, and disappointment.  What I am suggesting here is the appropriate posture towards challenges and a persistence in acting towards the goals we deem meaningful.  Said simply, if it’s still worth it to you, keep fighting.

Family Trauma

I started eating excessively when I was around 4-5 years old.  Sweets were my main vice (still are to a large extent).  I believe this was a response to both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of my sister, who was 9 years older.  Something that I don’t write about in detail in the book are the types of things my sister would do to me.  I have a distinct memory of her hog tying me with my hands and feet tied together behind my back.  I was gagged with some pieces of clothing.  I was then placed in a closet on my belly.  I can still remember being in the dark and the light shining in the closet from under the door.  The sexual things are still hard for me to describe at this point.  I’m saving more vivid descriptions of all of it for a future book that will center on how stress and traumatic events have impacted my body and how I’ve overcome these issues.  Currently, I’m dealing with night terrors that I believe originate from this time.  I don’t know how often these things happened.  As I said in the last post, the memories are faint and scattered.  I asked my sister how often these things happened and she wouldn’t tell me.  I still suspect that she killed herself in part over guilt from our relationship.  I think I struggle to write in more detail about these things because my sister was a child when these things happened.  She was a young teenager.  My mother was a financially and emotionally struggling single mother.  I don’t want my sister’s memory or my mother’s efforts as a parent to be judged because I believe that they both loved me, but life is hard.  Particularly where there is a history of abuse and fathers who are absent.

My mother’s father (my grandfather) was abusive to her mother (my grandmother).  My mother was escaping a violent romantic relationship when she met my sister’s father.  Then, my sister’s father was abusive and violent.  He would ultimately spend time in prison for drug trafficking.  He was also using cocaine regularly.  Who knows how much chaos my mother endured.  Who knows how much chaos my sister endured.  Eventually, my mother escaped my sister’s father.  Later she would meet my father who wasn’t abusive but was absent.  Struggling single mom with two kids, working multiple jobs, recovering from abuse, and fathers both absent. Hard.

My mother was intensely stressed out and that often meant taking out that stress on my sister and I in the form of verbal tirades and belt whippings for minor infractions.  Back then, my sister and I never knew what version of my mother would walk through the door after getting off of work.  I use this reference to myself in the book but it was like a female version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  My sister and I spent lots of time alone.  We were what was known back then as Latch Key Kids.  I suspect that all these stressors combined with things that my mother and I probably don’t know about, led to my sister’s abusive tendencies towards me.   

In spite of all this I never doubted that they both loved me.  I had a sense that life was just a struggle for us.  My sister committed suicide when I was in the military.  My mother and I have talked extensively about our history as a family.  Again, I communicate these things not to put my family on trial but to convey the difficulty of my home life from an early age.  I ate to self soothe.  Obviously, being so young, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.  As I entered the public school system I got heavier and the bullying began.  I often describe my childhood as being bullied at home and bullied at school.

School: Insults and Embarrassment

In 1992  my mother and I moved from Houston, TX to Birmingham, AL.  At this point my sister had left the house when she was 16 years old to live with her boyfriend at the time.  Her and my mother’s relationship would be tenuous until she took her own life.  At that time I was entering my 5th grade year in elementary school.  I was 10 years old.  It was in Birmingham where the bullying at school seemed to intensify.  I found myself always cautious to do my best to not upset anyone, at home or at school.  I felt constant anxiety and fear, especially at school.  I hated feeling that way.  

Around this time a series of embarrassments at school began to clarify things for me.  One particular incident really drove home the fact that I had to do something to change my situation.  There was a boy scout Troop attached to my elementary school in Birmingham.  I joined because I always wanted to try outdoor activities.  One weekend a cookout was organized for the new scouts.  My mother dropped me off.  As I walked towards the cookout, a scout leader pointed me to a picnic table to prepare my own food.  As I walked up, a little kid, no more than 5 years old, said to me, “You’re fat! You don’t need any food!”  His mother promptly and nervously apologized to me and grabbed him as she scurried away.  It was such a simple thing but it hurt so bad.  I can’t even remember what we did that day.  I remember feeling like I was floating for the rest of the day.  I wasn’t in the moment, my mind just kept replaying this 5 year old calling me fat.  

Here it was, this kid’s mother heard what he said and probably scolded him for it.  For so long I had hoped for the day when the adults would hear and see how other kids treated me.  I thought they would be able to do something about it.  She saw it, heard it, apologized for it.  Clearly, she was embarrassed.  But I was left to deal with the hurt and shame.  It was around this time when I began to have a regular thought, “Travis, Ain’t nobody comin’ to save you!”  I reasoned that adults couldn’t be with me 24/7 and even if they were, this incident clearly showed me that the pain of embarrassment and shame from the ridicule was mine to bear no matter what.  I had to take control.  I had to take action.

The Decision:  Lose Weight or Die Trying

I decided to start working out.  On Christmas Day of 1992 I got a Joe Weider Weight Set and I began working out that day.  I had a simple strategy: Work as hard as you can, for as long as you can, as often as you can.  I made a promise to myself, “I’ll figure out how to lose this weight or I’ll die trying!”

From this point began a 7 year process of trying and failing to lose weight.  I got stronger but I struggled to change my diet.  I worked extremely hard, especially during the summer months when school was out.  I didn’t have friends but I didn’t mind being alone in the summer because no one was insulting me or embarrassing me.  I would spend 2-3 hours a day lifting weights and then I would aim at the hottest part of the day to go outside and do hill workouts.  I would wear a sauna suit the whole time.

While the workouts and the attempts to change my diet were difficult, the hardest part of the journey was being at school and being called ugly, fat, slow, and stupid while knowing how much effort I was putting in to improve myself.  It was incredibly demoralizing at times and in my lowest moments I often wondered what the point of all this effort was.  With time I learned to embrace the pain my peers inflicted with their words and use it to motivate myself to keep going.  I developed a stubborn persistence.

Eventually, it was January 2000 and I was 305 lbs.  It was at this point that I was finally able to change my diet in some significant ways.  I stopped drinking soda.  I stopped eating fast food, fried food, and sweets.  I allowed myself one meal a week to break these rules.  In the eight months before heading to college at the University of Houston, I lost 80 pounds.  This is still the most cathartic experience I have ever had in my life.  After trying so hard for so long and feeling like I would never be more than the things that my classmates had always described me as (slow, fat, weak, ugly), I finally moved that rock.  I remember thinking that if I could bottle up the feelings I had and give them away for free, I would.

What was the Secret?

For years people have asked me what the secret to weight loss is.  I used to say, perseverance.  That’s what I had done.  In spite of a lack of knowledge, zero physically fit role models, and constant bullying and belittling by peers, I kept trying.  However, with time I began to realize something critically important.  In that final semester of high school I was ahead academically so I only had to be in school for half a day and those last classes were super easy.  I had already been accepted to college and my peers were focused on their next step in life.  All this meant I wasn’t getting bullied at school anymore.  Originally, it was intense stress that had caused me to eat so much.  At that point in my life I would say I was always stressed out.  I just didn’t know it.  I hadn’t conceptualized feeling a different way.  Suddenly, the stress disappeared and I had the mental capacity to change my eating habits.  I didn’t need to self medicate with food during this time period before heading off to college.

Back then, I didn’t know anything about stress or emotional eating.  Unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t just battling exercise and eating habits, I was battling demons.  I kept fighting with the tools I had and I just fell into an ideal situation where the environment synergized with my efforts.  What I spend so much time thinking about today is, “What if I let all the pain and failure cause me to give up?”  Most people wouldn’t have kept going after year 1.  Let alone 4, 5, and 6.  Especially, being surrounded by people telling you you will never change, people belittling you constantly, having no fit role models to ask for help, and watching your body weight go up year over year.  But I made a promise to myself because this was worth fighting for, even if I never got there it was important for me to know that I didn’t let difficult circumstances break my spirit.  Yes, as a 10-17 year old kid, this is how I thought.  Adversity is an incredible teacher if you pay attention and keep going.

Lots of people want to lose weight, get out of debt, or any number of goals.  But when they hit obstacles they stop.  I just never stopped.  That posture kept me on the task longer.  The longer you stick with something the more likely you are to hit opportunities.  Even when you don’t recognize them.  

What’s most important in this principle is learning a posture towards adversity and a posture towards meaningful goals.  The main outcome of this process is that I became confident in my ability to do hard things. Even without achieving the goal, the knowledge that we have the ability to press forward and take action with a broken heart under intense adversity is immensely valuable.  This will be important for the next 2 principles. For now, understand, this isn’t a guarantee of success but, If it’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for… This is not a ‘how to’.  It’s a choice.  Is it worth it or not?  If it is, find a way to keep going.

Is it Heartbreak or Character Development?

Everyone will experience heartbreak in life.  Being abused, being embarrassed by classmates constantly, being belittled, being left out of sports or other activities, being lonely, being heartbroken is a feeling I became familiar with very early on in life.  It makes you feel like, ‘What’s the point of anything?!’ or ‘What’s the point of trying to do anything?!’  Our emotions can cause such disengagement if we let them.  

However, the right story can override those emotions.  I think through movies I got it in my head that ordinary people must endure adversity in order to become a greater version of themselves.  A version that can achieve some extraordinary thing.  Like I say in my TEDx Talk, I decided that the pain I was enduring would be useful at some point in the future.  It would make me stronger and better able to endure difficulty at some future point.  But it wasn’t enough to sit and take the abuse.  I had to keep fighting for what I wanted in the midst of the abuse.  That was the key.  If you are going to suffer anyway, suffer in the direction you desire to go in.  Keep fighting for what’s important to you.  My health and, more importantly, my sense of self worth were important to me so I was not going to let anything break my spirit.  Win or lose, I was going to fight!  Said in another way, this principle says that adversity does not determine our actions, our goals determine our actions.

In the next post we’ll talk about how we know if our goals are worth fighting for.  

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