Although I’ve barely had a moment to breathe over the past month, I’ve had a few seconds of pure clarity about how ridiculous I was back in high school and college, in particular about my weight. 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my high school boyfriend and I have been writing sporadically.  It’s been oddly cathartic, although there wasn’t any bad blood between us (or, not much).  He’s happily married and busy trying to help his mom grow her business back in Traverse City.  We are both very different people than we were, and that isn’t surprising considering we started dating in 1988.  That would be 18 YEARS AGO.  Gasp.  I’m old.  But I digress.  Apparently he had lost most, if not all, photographs and mementos from his growing up years, and asked me if I had any left.  I had unfortunately burned 98% of my high school and college photographs in a manic attempt to pretend like those years never happened, so all that was left of him was one tattered picture on the deck of Tricia Holmes’ deck right before prom.  Val is standing next to me, post-makeup-ruination after bursting into tears at my house prior to the photograph because her vintage velvet dress had ripped right on the butt.  My mom sewed her back up and we continued on to dinner.  What’s really ironic about the picture is that Val’s “date” (I believe he later came out of the closet) was the son of a man who bought my dad’s business 4 years later in TC, and consequently ran it into the ground before paying him off.  I think that might have been Family Company Sale #2 of 3.  Third time was the charm, apparently.  That’s the dark side of business ownership (so is the mysterious vanishing $5000), but that’s another blog post entirely.  Anyway, it’s just weird how small Traverse City was, and how everyone was intertwined with everyone else.  And it’s no wonder I have a panic attack every time I think about going back there.

  You can just barely make out the lake behind us, but that does make me very nostalgic.  I don’t miss much about Michigan, but I sure as hell miss, and sometimes physically ache, for all that water and space, and the smell of it all. 

So I dug around through a lot of piles of stuff, included about 2,000 pages of journal notes looking for some things to send.  I used to shove photos or letters or notes into my journal when I didn’t know where else to put it.  Going back through those pages and pages of mental puking made me alternate between laughter and tears.  Some of it’s really, really funny.  The situations I put myself in, the people I spent my time with, the places I lived, the fights, the romance . . . it’s all just so . . . .DRAMATIC.  And so unnecessary.

The parts that made me feel like crying were the literally hundreds of pages spent obsessing over my body, and later, obsessing over my eating disorder, and still later, obsessing over all the therapy and work it was taking to get me over it all.  There is a clear and definitive line between being just a teenager and a teenager with the beginnings of a serious problem.  Because I was such a fanatical writer back then, I recorded it all, and there is an actual entry that shows me moving from worrying about my weight to losing my mind over it.  Snap.  Somewhere in the 18 hours between entries, I lost my grip on what was really important.  I can place the blame on Keith, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair.  He was a big part of it, but he never refused to feed me or stuck his finger down my throat.

When Tricia’s mom snapped the prom picture, I remember clearly feeling like I was Fudgie the Whale.  I might have weighed 98 pounds.  Maybe.  That’s how messed up I was.  Even before I burned all my pictures, there weren’t that many, because I didn’t allow myself to be photographed unless forced.  As I poked through old photo albums, I saw one of myself in college that I had forgotten about, and one of myself in Charlotte that Susan snapped, right after her first baby was born.  In all of those time periods, I was fat in my head.  Now I look at them and I can’t believe that I was ever that pretty, or that thin.  Most ironically, in 10 years, I may look at that recent and unfortunate picture my dad snapped of my ass as I leaned over to put Arden into the Moon Bounce, and grieve for the days when my ass was THAT SMALL. 

My point to myself is that I wasted so much time - not just hours, but years, starving, barfing, running, lifting weights, climbing rocks, hiking frantically, starving, barfing, worrying, obsessing, justifying, overeating, not giving a shit, hating myself for not giving a shsit, and starting all over again.  I can’t get those days back and that just bums me out.  I can’t get the years back and I certainly can’t get that ass back, either.  Someone I know who shall remain nameless recently (and very bitterly) commented that I have no right to worry about my weight, because compared to her, I “had no issues”.  That’s probably true, but that also really illustrates how non-eating-disordered people just do not get what it’s all about at all This same person who said this to me - while she’s not skinny -  is in my eyes attractive.  I have a lot of friends with non-model bodies, but instead of focusing on their flaws, I see how beautiful they are.  Jennifer has a 500 watt smile and gorgeous hair.  Sara has fantastic eyes and great lips.  Giselle always makes me want to know where she buys her clothes.  Susan makes me wish I had her eyelashes and hands.  I don’t judge other people, and I don’t compare myself to them, either.  It’s all about what I THINK I should look like, not what I am compared to others. 

That comment really pissed me off, because it negated my feelings.  Maybe she was right to say that to me.  However, I wasn’t going around saying “Woe is me, I’m a huge heifer. ”  Instead, I was griping about my dad taking pictures of me when I wasn’t “ready”.  Like that unfortunate butt shot.  I just wish that I could find the natural beauty in myself as easily as I do with others.  It’s something I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life.  For now, I go back to Philip’s (my prom date) hilarious comment when he saw the prom picture after so many years.  He said, “I remember my cummerbund kept falling down and your dad told me not to worry about it because in a few years, my gut would be holding it up.  He was right.”