My Battle With Me

Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

Nido Qubein

My typical day starts about 3:00 am each morning. I have this routine where I wake up and I turn on the TV and just lay in the bed while listening, praying, and thinking. Generally, this process lasts about an hour or so and then, about 4ish, I am up and off to my workout in my home gym or periodically with my buddy somewhere. I refer to these four hours or so as my “me time.” It’s the time in which I selfishly devote towards working on me. Since starting Collectively Me, it has also become my time to really think about what I want to share. It is kind of funny because I literally can run through topic after topic and content after content in my head. My mind can go so fast that I often forget most of what I was thinking and talking to myself about.

One particular morning, I woke up really focused on a talk about a deep personal challenge that I have, one that I believe would be a total shock to most everyone around me and really hard to believe. This challenge is difficult to comprehend because it is so outside the general perspective of how I believe many see me.

I think, if you asked most everyone around me to name a few characteristics about me you would hear that I am a very confident person and that I am completely comfortable in my own skin. I would tell you that is a true statement but it isn’t entirely correct. I don’t like myself and I honestly never have. The effort to “like myself” is something that I have to work at in order to achieve. I have expressed in prior writings that have been blessed with the gift to just move on. I have a way of not showing you what you want to see. Today, I was told that I have a really good poker face. Maybe that’s a better description.

I will tell you this, I am not comfortable in my own skin. It is a fact of my life that I struggle with daily. I have a very deep conflict with the way I look and how I feel about myself. I don’t like the color of my own skin. I think I am too dark. I can’t tell you how many tubes of Ambi I went through growing up thinking it would make my skin lighter. I don’t like my body shape. My thighs and butt are all too large. I have an extreme fear of becoming overweight. Listen, I get why Michael Jackson went to the extremes that he went through. Unfortunately, this is the reality of many people. During the summer months, my battle with my skin tone becomes extremely more difficult.

As you know by now, I absolutely love playing golf. Well, you can’t play golf without being in the sun, and during the summer, the West Texas sun is brutal. I am so concern about becoming darker that I run for shade after every shot. I stand behind other golfers trying to steal their shade. I try to make my own shade by squatting and trying to protect my most visible parts. I sometimes park my golf cart in positions to create shade and then I try to position my body for most shade. This is a serious issue.

You may ask what has caused me to suffer with this issue. I can’t tell you exactly but what I can tell you is, this started when I was a very young child. I had step brothers who lived with us for a while. Both had lighter skin then I, better hair than I; looked better than I. You get my point. Not to mention they, nor others, were not bashful about letting me know. I am not blaming them. It wasn’t an attack to destroy me I promise you that. If you did anything to me and I called Broncho, one of my step brothers, there would be hell to pay.

I was born with this really challenging body type. My thighs are near the size of my waste and I have my fair share of booty. For some of you, booty is what we call butt or buttocks! This overabundance of thighs and buttocks makes it very challenging to purchase pants. I am very sensitive about this issue. The friend that I mentioned with whom I work out, when we are working out together and the trainer has us do any type of squats, my friend always jokes to them that I don’t have as far to go down as he does because of my butt. This is my guy! But he has no clue that every time he says something like that how much it bothers me. By the way my best friend in the world who is deceased, and I will write about him one day, nicknamed me “Booty” way back in high school. Suffice it to say, I have been rolling with this problem forever.

One of the best things to ever happen to me for my own self-confidence happened in The Buckle many years ago. I had always shopped there because I had found a loose-fitting style of jeans that I would buy and they became my brand. A young college basketball player by the name of Chris came to help me one day. She asked me what I was in there for and I told her I needed a pair of these particular jeans. She looked at me and said, “I am sorry but I won’t sale those to you”. I explained to her my “issue” and she said very quickly “whatever!” She proceeded to tell me which pants she wanted me to wear. She basically told me I was an idiot and I have been wearing form fitting jeans ever since. Thank you, Chris!

I have three big fears in life and one of them is the fear of becoming overweight. My home gym includes a Peloton bike and Peloton treadmill. Someone needs to get me an endorsement with them! In 2020, I logged nearly 15,000 minutes just with Peloton. That doesn’t include the time I spent on other workouts. I would guess that in total, it’s in excess of 25,000 minutes of working out.

As I am writing this, I have literally started doing something new, simply because I didn’t like the way I looked. Prior to reading this, some of those who know me probably thought I felt good about myself and maybe thought I spend a great deal of time looking at myself in mirrors. Well, I do spend a great deal of time looking in the mirrors but it’s only because I don’t feel good about myself.

My home has a total of six mirrors. The few people that have come into my new home have made the statement that I don’t have very many mirrors. One friend of mine is an interior decorator and owns a furniture store. When I am purchasing items from her, she always tries to get me to purchase mirrors. When she has come to the house, she always points out great places for mirrors.

Listen, I don’t like mirrors. NO, NO, NO! I will not purchase nor put any more mirrors in my home. Every day when I get dressed, I go by six mirrors trying to get every angle of myself because I don’t like anyone of them. I don’t need more mirrors around to check myself or I would never get out the house.

I am single and live totally alone and you will never find me walking around my house without a shirt on. Not doing it! And if I happen to find myself without a shirt, I absolutely avoid looking into those six mirrors. When I swim in my pool! A shirt is within two footsteps. I don’t like the way I look! To make matters worse, when I moved into a new office some time ago, guess what I found… a bathroom in my office and a stupid mirror in the bathroom. It’s exhausting!

I hope that you have stuck in this far because what follows is really the important part of this writing. First, don’t feel sorry for me. That is the absolute worst thing to do and it would really make me mad. I don’t write for anyone, and I mean for anyone to be sympathetic for me. I get me! I understand me! As Terrell Owens says, “I love me some me.” Outside of my home I am a bad brother and a formidable foe. I have been extremely successful in spite of my battles within.

I write for those who battle the very issues I too share and for some reason, they have not figured it out. I want you to know that you’re in control of the chapters and the narrative in your book. We all have struggles and I mean all of us. This includes the however many billions of people there are in the world. Overcoming our struggles doesn’t mean they go away. We adapt, adjust, modify, and accept. God gave all of us the ability to be happy in spite of our circumstances. Listen, this is real for me. These are real struggles. I battle with me. I don’t battle with you because you will never bring me down, at least you will never know you did. I will always have dark skin, a big butt and big thighs with side handles.

I understand that God created me this way. There is only one special person in this world named Chris Cole with this DNA. I am special. I know this. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle. It means that the struggle doesn’t get to own me. I don’t live based on your expectation or standards of me. My expectations and standards for myself are extremely higher than yours will ever be.

Final Point…I don’t care how you come to grip with the gift that God gave you. Just do it! The drive and grit to overcome exist within you. I am not expressing something I heard, I am sharing something with you that I know.