Settling Into My New Self

It's tough. You'd think it wouldn't be. I've now had passing commentary "eat eat!" "stop being so aneroxic!". I know this is coming from people who love and care about me, but the simple fact is that we are all competitive deep down. I can't help but wonder if this is the type of sabotage that they tell you about. Or maybe they are worried about me.

Well, let me put those worries to rest and then I'll go on with the post. Since I've finally come to the realization that it's about some emptiness or internal struggle (probably my mother) and that it's not about the food, I still eat. Just not in the quantity or with the voracity or rapidity, etc.

But, anyway back to the title. My new self. It's wierd. If I'm having a good self esteem day, you can't tear me away from a mirror. But, on a normal day, I'm still the fat kid. I still feel like the fat kid.

Obviously, I had to know on some level that losing the weight was not going to be the end all to my problems. Yes it definitely helped with my health and self confidence, but we haven't even begun to delve into the cave to work through my stuff. Oy, stuff. Mostly mother stuff.

I had an interesting thought today. I always have to know why. Why I do things. Why I feel the way I do about certain things. Like I have a little director in my brain saying, "What was your motivation?" Oy. Anyway, I can only go back as far as my own life. And I have done that. I can trace my weight issues all the way back to essentially birth, but not before that. "How could I have weight issues before I was even born?" you may ask. Well, since we are shouldering my mom with a huge amount of the responsibility for various reasons, there must have been something, an infinite series of things, really over generations (if we are going to get crazy about it), there must be a series of things that happened in her life to affect her to affect me in the way that she did and so on and on and on. We do not have the type of relationship where we could have this conversation; nor, in my opinion, would she have the ability to answer the question. My mom isn't and probably never was the type to ask why; never the one to question in certain situations.

So, my ipiffiny for the day is that the change within myself that needs to happen is that I need to learn to give it all up. To give up the blame. To stop asking why and how and when and who. To stop theorizing. I'm feeling very anxious and uncomfortable at the moment. The old me would probably be eating right now to numb these feelings and the interim me would be figuring out what my mom did to cause them; but, the NEW me needs to just go with it.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that in my journey to simply lose weight, I would figure out precisely how I got that way in the first place, would figure out a way to blame my mother for it and finally come to realize that I will continue to torture myself for the rest of my life unless I can let go of this, what seems to be, obsession. All I set out to do was get rid of fat and have a lower number when I got on a scale.

Losing all of this physical weight has left room for all of this emotional weight to emerge. I now have these emotions and feelings and am dulling them with prescription anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications. I think they're helping.

I guess I really am a staunch pessimist. Here I am, having accomplished something so few people can even imagine attempting to begin doing and I am having emotional breakdowns because I'm remembering that it upset me that my mom didn't hug me enough as a child. So, you can see, it's not about the food.