Losing a Buck Twenty Five is a weekly column that will document Cinderella Undercover’s quest to lose 125 lbs. You may also keep track of her progress at www.weightitout.com
by: Cinderella Undercover
It was February 10th, 2009—a seemingly ordinary day in the daily grind of my corporate America life: waking at 5:30am; hitting the snooze until 5:45am; stumbling sleepy-eyed into the shower; throwing together the semblance of an “ensemble”; feeding my cats; hastily dashing out the door by 6:30am with wet hair and without breakfast; sitting—nay cursing–in traffic for an hour; arriving a few minutes past my 7:30am start time; and narrowly escaping the wrath of my boss for it.
On that particular Tuesday, I ducked into my cubicle, unnoticed, save by my cubicle neighbor who loudly trumpeted my arrival over the ambient din of fax machines, printers, phones, keyboards, and the daily, general outbursts of malaise vociferated by my officemates.
“Happy birthday!” she exclaimed. “Thanks,” I casually retorted. The greeting stirred those around to chime in too: “Happy Birthday!strong>” But it wasn’t my birthday. My birthday—my 29th birthday–was yet a day away. And although it felt like it was still decades away, the birthday greetings continued all day and into the night.
The younger greeters marveled at the age—noting that it was the last of my carefree twenties; and the older ones reminisced about how wonderful their thirties were, and that I was on the verge of something phenomenal. It didn’t sound so phenomenal to me. It sounded so cliché.
It was a cliché. It is a cliché, and I wondered: “Am I a cliché?!” I hate the word cliché. I hate using the word cliché, but if the shoe fits…so I still I pondered: “What did happen to my twenties?” “Did I have anything to show from the past twenty nine years,” I wondered. I reminisced. I smiled. I laughed. I cried.
I was a day away from completing twenty nine years of existence on this planet with little besides sanity to show for it—sanity, which is highly questionable at best. Then it hit me—the full gravity of turning twenty nine—and the fear of hitting thirty–hit me square in the face.
I am indeed a cliché–an underpaid, overworked, overstressed, and overweight corporate peon with the proverbial crossroads staring me in the face!
I realized that I closed my eyes to blink about ten years ago, only to open them to find that those ten years had disappeared like a plate of cupcakes in front of a fat kid, and I was that fat kid. Well, I am that fat kid–both figuratively and literally.
The realization that I had become a cliché irked me. Using the word cliché irked me (as it does now). So did being fat. It irked more than the cliché my life had become; it irked me more than it ever had in my almost-twenty nine years—twenty four of which I was fat.
Now, I could bitch and moan about heredity of obesity, or my weird digestion disorder, or my physical maladies which perpetuate my fatness, but none of it seemed to matter, because none of the excuses would make me less fat—not skinny, mind you—just less fat.
Not being able to fathom ending up a clichéd, cautionary tale, I made a choice—no New Year’s resolution—it was just another day in the grand design, and I had decided I would not spend my thirties as a fat person. So, in keeping with my cliché- life theme, and embracing the “I have to change/do/be/gain/lose something by thirty” routine, I hired a personal trainer, whom I was to meet that very evening before I was officially a year away from thirty.
To be continued…
