Something Is Still Off

Standing in the mirror, I could see the veins coming in under my skin. Striations across my chest. The softness gone. I had done something only a small percentage of men do, and I knew it.

The moment didn’t last.

What followed wasn’t satisfaction. It was fear. Fear I’d lose the edge. Fear I’d backslide into whoever I was before. And that fear, quietly, became the thing I was living from.

So I doubled down. Weighed every gram. Tracked every step, every heartbeat. Wore a CGM when I was already ripped, just to know. What I called discipline was really surveillance. I was the kid riding his bicycle as hard as he could, convinced he was training, training wheels still on.

Meals I used to enjoy with my wife became something I managed. I sat across from her tense, eating worried I’d still be hungry when I finished, wondering what I’d want next. I was in the best shape of my life. I was no fun to be around.

And underneath all that control, the buried man was still there. After our wedding there was cake. Two of them. We’d invited seven people and five ate cake. I bought way too much and I knew it, and I still couldn’t stop eating. I’d sneak extra bites thinking someone was watching, judging, counting. All of it made up. The thinking made me frantic. I couldn’t even taste it.

That’s the thing Maxwell Maltz noticed. He was a plastic surgeon who fixed faces. Scars, disfigurements, things men had carried their whole lives. He’d finish the surgery, the man would look in the mirror, and still see the old face. The broken one. The one he’d been carrying before the operation.

I understood that the first time I read it. I knew exactly what that was.

I still saw the fat kid. I had the body and I still saw him. Which meant the problem was never the body. It was the image I’d been running on long before I ever walked into a gym. Built in an environment where it wasn’t safe to trust myself, where I had to ask permission, where the cost of being wrong felt very high.

Discipline won’t fix that. Neither will the gym, the tracking, hormone replacements, an app. You arrive at the destination and the image is still there, waiting.

What I actually want is simpler than any of that. I want to be in the room when something lands for another man. That moment when he looks over at you and you can see it hit him. The view opening up. I want to help men find that.

And I want to trust myself enough to live from what’s actually true, instead of managing the distance between who I am and who I’m afraid I might still be.