My inspiration

Once as a child when I had performed some geeky feat like winning the county spelling bee, I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter who asked me that question every child dreads hearing: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

My mother, who was present at the time, probably expected me to say something normal like "a nurse" or "a teacher," and she would have smiled even if I'd admitted the truth and said I wanted to be a writer. Instead, when the reporter asked what I wanted to be, I said, "An inspiration."

My mother was appalled, but at the time I didn't understand why. "Inspiration" isn't one of those vocations open to the granddaughter of a tobacco farmer, and no matter how carefully you comb the classified ads, you're not going to find a lot of companies desperately seeking Inspirations. Maybe my mother foresaw a future of compromise and broken dreams.

These days, though, I understand even better why my bizarre response made my mother uncomfortable, because I find it very uncomfortable to be told over and over again, sometimes by people I barely know, that I am an inspiration--and not at all the sort of inspiration I dreamed of being as a child. I was thinking of writing some amazingly wonderful book that would inspire awe at my insight and creativity and inspire readers to take bold steps to make the world a better place. Little did I know that all I had to do to become an inspiration was to lose 100 pounds.

Now the people who keep telling me I'm their inspiration always want to know the same thing: how did I do it? And their interest is not purely academic: they want me to reveal the secret, tell them the name of the magic pill that will melt all their fat away without effort. The problem is that I don't know the secret, and the things I can tell them aren't terribly inspiring.

For instance, the plain and simple truth is that if you want to lose 100 pounds, the first thing you have to do is gain 100 pounds. This is actually the easy part (two words: Taco Bell), but there's nothing the least bit inspiring about it (and if you don't believe me, pay a visit to Wal-Mart on a Friday night).

Losing all that flab is more difficult, and people who want a quick and easy way to burn off unwanted weight aren't going to like what I tell them: Eat right and exercise. Turn off the television and plant a big garden. Stop drinking pop, even diet pop. Losing 100 pounds took me two years of pretty much constant effort, and I can't ever go back to the kind of lifestyle I led before or all that weight will come back.

Not very inspiring, is it? Maybe that's what my mother understood: being an inspiration is not a vocation you can actually seek, and if you stumble into it, it's just not as exciting as you might have expected.