Wins: cleaned my living room and kitchen, dusted, listened to music, ate on plan, my new plant and flower acquisitions are still alive, finally washed that sleeping bag that had been sitting beside the laundry for over a week, so many wins. Don’t be jealous. Especially about that sleeping bag thing. Great days come to all of us.
Here are some memories from my childhood around food and weight loss and then I’ll say something else. I thought my thighs were always huge- just enormo since I was 8 probably. There were moments in my youth and young life when I was thin and I desperately just wanted to be thinner. I remember refusing to eat my lunch on vacation once because I felt so terrible about myself and my dad begging me to eat half my sandwich. We were in the camper, I was eleven or twelve. I was an exchange student in high school to Paraguay and I was just a bigger taller nordic woman compared to most women in that region and I went to Brazil to go visit a family friend and needed a sweater and had to shop at a mens store because nothing fit in womens sizing and it was right around that time that I just quit shopping. Going to buy anything was just an exercise in humiliation and torture. And again, I was not obese, but in South America people just call people “Gorda” (fat) who are bigger than normal and so since strangers were confirming what I had already heard from home, I was like, well there ya go. That’s my identity even in the Southern Hemisphere.
I got back home, joined the swim team again, dropped the weight pretty easy and the one time the head coach ever talked to me was to complement me on slimming down. So I was like, “Well that must be how you get approval and get to live in the world or something.” Who knows? I was 16. I was trying to figure out the world.
Which is to say. I was a kid. I was trying to figure out the world with the information I was given. Now, as an adult, I know there was information I was given that simply wasn’t absorbed and I can’t tell you why. I know my parents loved me and thought I looked fine. I remember my mom trying to say all the little old ladies at church said I was beautiful to get me to stop crying, but at fifteen, I wanted boys my age to think I was pretty and I didn’t give the sweet ladies at church any credit. I don’t know why.
So this stuff I’m writing? It’s about letting you in on a story that is, in some ways true, and in some ways, total fiction. I gave it power, and I know I was just trying to be someone worth a damn. For some reason (you guys know the reasons- fashion magazines, popular kids, Tiger Beat, MTV), I picked up on food pressure, appearance, pant size, and wanting attention as markers for my own permission to exist. I know full-well there were other markers going on. Even now, there are markers in my beautiful amazing, fantastical life I overlook and discount.
Losing 5.5 pounds by August 1st is a flag in the sand. I’m writing some of this stuff because I’ve never said it out loud or written it down. I gotta burn all of it in a refiner’s fire. I gotta finally be nice to that girl from Mission Viejo so she can go eat a cookie and go shopping with her mom without making it an international situation.