Occupying Space
For most of my adult life, I’ve had what I can only describe as a low-budget, self-funded version of body dysmorphia. Nothing formally diagnosed, I did not have a therapist nodding at me from across the room while I unpacked my relationship with mirrors, just the persistent feeling that the version of myself staring back at me was never quite right.
I was a scrawny kid, I looked like a zipper, and being small came with consequences. People leave marks on you when they sense vulnerability, especially if you grow up gay in places where softness is treated like an invitation. I learned pretty early that larger men occupied space differently. Bigger men were left alone. Bigger men didn’t get shoulder checked in malls by men compensating for some emotional manufacturing defect. Bigger men didn’t have comments hurled at them from passing cars by people who looked like they considered Oakleys formalwear.
So I got bigger. At least I tried.
Over the years I built myself into something that felt harder to approach. Muscle, weight, tattoos, shaved head. It was armour more than aesthetics. A kind of security system. Inflate yourself enough and eventually the world becomes a little more cautious around you. And if I’m being honest, it worked remarkably well. People generally don’t bother the heavily tattooed bald guy built like a retired nightclub bouncer unless they have absolutely nothing left to lose.
The gym became one of the few places where I felt genuinely good. I loved the discipline of it, the ritual, the structure. I liked putting on muscles and watching my body become more solid and capable. But there’s a strange psychological trap hidden inside using size as protection because there is never really a point where I would arrive. There’s always another ten pounds, another inch to gain on my chest, another layer between me and the fear that somebody could hurt me again.
By February of 2025, I was creeping close to 250 pound and I ended up in the hospital convinced I was having a heart attack. Thankfully it turned out to be a compressed disc in my back radiating pain around my chest and down my arms, which is apparently the spine’s version of practical comedy. Still, it scared me enough that I finally paid attention.
Within a couple of weeks, I shifted hard into weight loss. Not reckless, not self-destructive, but disciplined and sustained. I kept working out, kept focusing on muscle retention, kept doing all the sensible things people pretend are simple once they’ve already survived them. Somewhere during all of that, something unexpected happened.
For the first time in probably twenty-five years, what I see in the mirror and what I see in my head are finally in alignment.
That feeling is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived with the opposite. For years, there was always a disconnect between the person I thought I needed to be and the person standing in front of me. I either felt too small, too soft, too exposed, or too large and uncomfortable in my own skin. The math never balanced properly. Now, somehow, it does.
I’m below 200 pounds for the first time in decades and instead of panicking that I’ve become vulnerable again, I find myself looking in the mirror without immediately negotiating with what I see. I don’t look perfect and I don’t suddenly resemble a Marvel character carved out of marble under dramatic studio lighting. I just finally look like the person I’ve been trying to become, instead of somebody constructed entirely around survival and fear.
However, fear hasn’t entirely disappeared. I still catch flashes of that old wiring telling me smaller means target. I suspect parts of that instinct stay with you forever once they’ve settled into the walls of a nervous system.
There’s something beautiful about realizing this late in life that safety may have had less to do with becoming physically intimidating and more to do with finally feeling comfortable occupying my own skin without needing to disguise myself inside it.
