kethrai's Diaryland Diary
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Congratulations! You've lost a toddler!
Thanks, Juliekins, for that title...
I feel really funny writing about the weight I've lost this year.
I've always had something of an adversarial relationship with my body, and my looks.
When my sister and I would dress up for Halloween, as little kids Brown Belt Girl always did really neat stuff-- a mushroom one year, I remember--whereas I always chose something "pretty". I had a dress-up box of all kinds of fantastic old 50's prom dresses that I beat into rags, playing dress-up (give me credit though--I may have been playing at being a princess, but she was a kick ass and take names kinda girl, who wore pretty dresses whilst smiting the enemy.) While my mother managed to keep me grounded enough that I never aspired to be some tiny model type--and both parents managed to make me proud of my height--somehow, pretty was something you put on with a dress-up dress, not something that I actually was.
I was a klutz with bad skin throughout high school, and then throughout college the boyfriend at the time in addition to his other control-freak tendencies tended to dictate what I wore and very much disapproved of anything that actually fit me--I suspect his motivations were split; he was preserving whatever charms I might have possessed for him alone, and keeping my self-esteem low enough that I was controllable. All in all, I actually remember the first tailored dress I ever owned, and I was 22. And even by then, the boyfriend was making comments regarding my weight. I'm nearly six feet tall, folks--there's no way on earth I'm ever going to be 120 pounds, short of sawing off a leg. Or both of them. But his worldview did not allow that a woman who was already 170 pounds plus was healthy and at a good weight for her tall and ridiculously curvy frame.
Twenty-four and -five were pretty good years for me and my body image, all things taken together. By then I had started performing, so the klutzy was at least somewhat under control, and in the spirit of whatthehell I bought clothing that the boyfriend (now shed) would never have approved of--leather halter tops and tight-fitting jeans and cut my hair and remade myself. I got at least some approval of my physical self from some of the folks at the venues at which I was performing, and felt ok about my weight and my face. The next relationship I got into would be different, I told myself--you get me how I stand. Deal.
It wasn't. I'm happy to say that this time the not-so-subtle "have you considered joining a gym?" comments got directly challenged, rather than quietly cried over, and he was gone within three months. Then I started dating the Darling Husband to-be, who likes women, period--all women--and my weight ceased to be an issue, except for me.
Over the next several years, I slowly gained weight. It was not anything dramatic at any one point in time--on the rate of about five pounds a year--but instead of coming off, like it previously had, thanks to the depo-provera shot that I now used for birth control, it never did. It stuck. And some of my tight jeans got given away, and I changed some ot the style of my other clothing, and while I can't say that I ever got as agonized over being a physical wreck the way I did in high school (but then, nobody agonizes over anything the way they do in high school) I really wasn't all that happy with the weight that was sticking to me. I didn't panic, I didn't diet, I wrote snarky fat chick manifestoes and figured this was just something that happened when you stopped pushing thirty and started pulling it instead.
I even had some pictures taken that showed my dimpled knees, in November of 2002:
In January of last year, 2003, I went off the depo shot for the first time in seven years. Depo-Provera had actually been pretty good to me--the side effects had been cumulative, over time, very slow oncoming, and it was the winter depression that finally made me think again about it. I knew, intellectually, that it took more or less six months for the Depo to clear out of your system, having read the pamphlets in the doctor's office--to me, it didn't mean much because it's not like I was going off it to get pregnant--I was merely switching birth control methods. I was more or less resigned to my weight at that time--225 pounds--although I had vague plans of trying to walk some of it off that summer.
So it was completely unexpected when sometime in May or June, a couple of pounds dropped off me, although the reason why immediately made sense to me. The Depo was finally clearing out.
(This is the part where I start to feel guilty about this weight loss. I know lots and lots and lots of people who struggle horribly to maintain their weight, or loose weight, and I was not doing anything, really, at all.)
It was a hot enough summer that I really couldn't face food all that often--and I found it was much easier, post-Depo, to stop eating when I was full. I didn't own a scale, anymore, but out of morbid fascination I started hopping on and off the freight scale at work, and my weight was steadily dropping. By September, I think, I was seeing the underside of 200 pounds again, something I had never expected to see. I don't want to give the impression of having totally parked my ass--I was getting workouts of sorts on the weekends, working faire, and walking some with Ghostly Tours, but an exercise program it really wasn't.
It continued throughout the fall. By then I was starting to get complimented on the weight loss at work, something that really rather weirded me out--I mean, I hardly reside in my body three-quarters of the time, so to get approval for it seemed...strange. Not that it wasn't nice to hear, and I know my co-workers were being sweet, but it just...felt bizarre.
By this January, my weight seemed to have settled into a configuration it seems to want to stay in. And I now weigh just about 180 pounds.
The approval has felt terribly wierd. I've gotten complimented by lots of folks--the most treasured of those was a dear man at my work, who stutters terribly, and very, very carefully told me that he wasn't sexually harassing or anything (and with his extreme stutter, this took about four minutes to get out) but finished up with "You look fantastic!" There have been folks at faire and mundanes who seem to approve, and I've had to go shopping to find pants that fit (irony of ironies, I had tossed everything that didn't fit me, last spring--figuring I would never fit into it ever again, so why bother?) and my god, this feels really weird to write about...
I really, really didn't ever expect anything like this, see? Getting to play fairy princess was a matter of the dress-up box, and to actually get my weight--and my looks--approved of in regular life feels beyond bizarre. I was talking with a friend via IM the other day about this, and said "It is why I love playing dress-up in outrageous clothing,though, because it throws my view of myself enough off-kilter that I can see pretty in the mirror."
Who knows, maybe I'm just used to being invisible. But I'm not quite sure what to do with the approval I've gotten, or how to handle it particularly gracefully. I'm a little more used to getting approval for what I do rather than how I look. It wasn't anything I ever had to worry about as an Official Fat Chick. And while I may be enjoying some sort of renaissance-of-me at 34--the way I did at 25--I'm even more aware now than I was then that in then end, what I weigh matters less than who I am or what I do. At twenty-five, I had my teenage rebellion ten years too late--got my ears pierced three more times, got my bellybutton pierced, and bought a leather motorcycle jacket. At 34, I'm dressing in snug long-sleeved t-shirts and hiphuggers, and wondering at times what the hell I'm doing. I don't know quite what to make of this--if anything, I think I'm less inclined to trust the actions of others toward me than ever before--because I wonder what they're reacting TO.
I wonder uneasily how much I should enjoy shopping for clothes in smaller sizes, and ones that are snugfitting in a way I would not have considered a year ago. I didn't do anything all that special to "earn" this weight loss--it feels strange to "own" it. In some ways, it makes me want to retreat further into my head and live less in my body than ever before.
So my friend Juliekins wrote to me a few weeks ago and said that she noticed the difference in pictures posted on ThreeWayAction, and read the first entry for this year, and hey, "congratulations! You've lost a toddler!" which made me laugh and feel considerably less weirded out, (thank you, dear!) and her uncomplicated congratulations made me feel lighter than I had in a while.
Whether the freight scale at work agrees with me or not.
This feels terribly odd and vain and peculiar to write about. Dear NSR's, please understand that there's no indictment here of my previous weight--or my current one--and that feeling beautiful is a thing entirely unrelated to size, face, or figure. Spider Robinson once said "Any configuration of features can support beauty--go chase pretty, and see where that gets you." And I think now, what I'm slowly realizing is that I'm heartily ashamed of myself that I needed to shed 45 pounds before I could start to believe someone when they told me I looked good. I know better. The most profoundly beautiful women I know are beautiful because their beauty has nothing to do with shape or size or anything that you can lay a tape measure on or even anything you can photograph, at all.
I knew that pretty could be achieved, but beauty is actually a work in progress. And it starts not with a loss of pounds, but an acquisition of joy; that even if I do eventually lose more weight--painlessly as I have so far, or not--it is only a tool, not an end--and that working on actual beauty requires that I erect the scaffolding and haul out the drop cloths inside first. And play dress-up, whenever I can.
A year and two months later:
7:09 a.m. - 2004-03-06
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