Hindsight

I find myself wishing recently that I could withdraw or rewrite some of my Grandfather's eulogy.

In the eulogy I wrote, I talked about him being a man's man who loved his family deeply and who held the women in his life in the highest esteem.

And that's all very true, and I certainly felt that way at the time I wrote it.  The man was 150% all about his family.  Through and through - he provided for them, taught them, raised them, had fun with them.  Gave them things his parents weren't able to give them.  And he saved.  My God was he a saver.  But he also had problems that I was blind too - sort of.

1) when it came to loving everyone equally, I'm not so sure he did that.
2) when it came to mental health, I believe he often suffered with what we now understand to be mental illnesses of depression and at times anxiety, but he would have fought you to the death to be labelled as such.
3) he thought the best way to make you strive for more or better was to help you see the worst possible options as a means of driving you to be better than that.  Let me explain, because these are truly the reasons that I wish I could re-write it now.

I've spent many years trying to figure out "how I got to be the way I was."  There were lots of great things he taught me.  For example, he taught me to save at least 10% of my salary from day one.  I did, and it's saved me more than once in a crunch, and I have a real shot at retiring by the age of 55 and living pretty modestly and comfortably throughout retirement despite any of the set backs I've had.  He also taught me that the day I stop learning would be the day I died.  I am surrounded by people who I am often envious of, because they just go about their lives without seeking the meaning of everything, but I am plagued by this innate need to peel back layers, understand, learn from my mistakes and others, while others just simply move from one mistake to the next,  No worry, no dread.  Just meh - and on they go on their merry way.  I learn which is wonderful.  But it also means I've got anxiety at times that can be very debilitating.

But I also beat myself up in insane ways over my weight.  I brood over every piece of food - the good and the bad.  I've done diet after diet and exercise after exercise.  I've done weight loss surgery, plastic surgery, taken pills, and done everything short of actually take myself out of the equation entirely...and even that, well, I'd be lying if I didn't say I hadn't actually tried dismally at that once even.

And when I've thought back trying to pin point who in my family had actually reinforced that I was physically beautiful, or otherwise even Just fine the way I was, I could pinpoint exactly who said what and when.  Because clearly my self esteem or lack thereof had to have come from something I was hearing or seeing regularly enough to warrant it becoming a self fulfilling prophecy.  I can look at a photo of me as a teen, and while maybe I did mature early, I was smoking hot and slim and normal and nothing near what I envisioned myself to be back then.  I am certainly bigger than I ever imagined being possible now.  And the only voices that I remember hearing that countered those other voices were my mom's and a cousin's husband.  I can tell you exactly when each reinforced the good in me, because it was so infrequently heard, and so precipitated likely by a frenzied experience of hearing how horrifyingly fat and worthless I was, that they needed to be loud enough to be heard.

The voices who made me feel worthless, and horrifyingly fat and destined for a life of vomit inducing profiles, hiding from the world or putting myself on display at the circus?  My grandfather's.  My brother's.  In some ways my mother too who tried simultaneously to use similar tactics to my grandfather's and only countered the arguments when I would hit a breaking point, and who I believe tried desperately to overcome those feelings herself.

It makes me wish that the counter voices, the voices who reassured me of my worth and my beauty were louder, more frequent and more relevant than all the other voices.  It makes me wish I'd seen my mother stand up to my grandfather on my behalf, in front of me to stop him dead in his tracks.  It makes me wish our baby boomers didn't respect their elders to such a degree that they'd at least call them out on their bullshit.

And so when I find myself struggling with the decision about whether to reinforce my daughter's beauty or her brains, I try my damnedest to reinforce both at the same time.  At 5 she has already told me how un-pretty she feels.  And this is despite me trying desperately to model body positive behaviour for her even when it's not natural for me to do so.  And I wish I could find the right words, that would be the loudest of them all, that would tell her not to listen to other stupid and jealous people.  Words that would scream from the highest monuments, that other people's jealousy means absolutely nothing and that I've never seen anyone so beautiful as she is.

She stops the world, quiets a room, commands attention in every single way.  And it's her beauty inside and out that does that.  How do I make her believe that...?  How do I believe that for myself now that all the damage is done?

it's a new dawn, It's a new day, it's a new life

So birthday festivities are over and being forty is still no big deal.  Everyone who came this weekend knew about my surgery and was asking how I was feeling - I think they were all surprised to see me as chipper and energetic and lively as I was.  If I've said it once, I've said it 30 times now.  I feel better today, than I did this time last year.

When you make the decision to pursue weight loss surgery, the notion that it would be an easy out or an easy decision, is as ludicrous as red rain.  NO ONE approaches this quickly and without serious reservations.  It's not natural to admit defeat.  It's also not economically sound.  Any investment in one's self is a good one, but when diet alone is the end goal, it's not like people just have $16K just lying around.  And I think when other people look in at this, they expect to see desperation, deathly pale skin and sallow faces.  They expect to see someone near their ends, rather than someone on the mend.  That's probably because fat people never complain about being fat.

They complain about skinny people being idiots.  They complain about skinny people not understanding, and companies not being smart enough to accommodate their clients.  They complain things may not fit right, or that the world is not made for them, and they'll tell you straight up that fat is not a choice.  And they're 100% right.  Well, except for the idiot part.  But, no one understands the life of a fat person, til they are one.  It's a little like being black or gay I imagine.  Until you are what you're supposed to empathize with, well, then the empathy is wasted.

As I was putting this article together, I honestly googled these words "image fat people", and what resulted were pages and pages worth of links to sites where people are bullied and pasted up as jokes.  There is not a serious fat photo out there?  They are all "hilariously funny photos" of people who are easy targets and blatantly pointed out as jokes.  It makes me feel sad and appalled.  And for that very reason, there will be absolutely no photos in this post.

So, it was a huge non-scale victory for me this weekend, to tell people I was doing great, to show off my scars and to reassure the world that 40 felt awesome.  Especially as compared to how 39 felt.  Can you imagine that?

And the best gift I received was having my closest friends and family here to share it with me.  No part of this event in my life was about the tangible.  It was fully and completely about living it.  And for that reason, there's nary a photo of the party either.  Because this weekend's lesson to me was, you can be in pictures or you can live the moment.  I had too much fun living this weekend, and to run up the stairs to dig out the camera and ask someone to take the photos for me would have meant another lost moment.

And that means...I just succeeded in my mission.  My purpose in having this surgery was not about watching a number on the scale.  While that's a big measure, it's not my success indicator.  I want the chance to see my child grow up and have kids of her own.  I want the chance to live life to the max and enjoy all this stuff I worked so hard to get.  This weekend marked the very first step of that very awesome journey...It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life...and I'm stoked!

DENIED

Have been thinking a lot lately about why I need validation, and what ties that has to both my own mental health issues, as well as how it may be connected to my weight issues.

It's no surprise that very often depression and anxiety and obesity are intrinsically co-dependent.

Fat people are rejected.  Every hour of every day, by someone or several people.  And in many ways, fat people have been so rejected for so long, that it's now the somethings that do the rejecting on someone else's behalf.  You see, rejecting fat people has become so passe that society has built ways upon which the fat people can continue to be rejected without having to exert so much effort.  Lazy ass skinny people!

Airplane seats get smaller and smaller - and smaller still.  Movie theatre seats got bigger.  Serving sizes got ginormous as if the corporations who supply them are saying - "holy crap you eat so freaking much we're going to throw the trough at you and hope it's enough".  And the disdain in gym commercials, print media and advertising got even thicker.  It's such a cobbled web of impunity, that now fat people reject themselves before anyone else can have the opportunity.

You want to talk about taking bullying to a whole new level of awful...this is how it starts.  This is where fat people become so unbelievably unhappy, that they remove themselves from social situations.  They create the backdrop to their own depression and isolation.  They take themselves out of life, before other people get the chance to hurt them, and before their obesity has the chance to catch up.

Shortly before my medical leave in 2008 for depression and anxiety, I went on a business trip to Singapore.  Did you know that in regions of the world where people are stereotyped for being petite, they have made airplane seats and therefore seat belts that much smaller?  That's right, while we would complain about the shrinking seat sizes in North America, it's nothing compared to the seat sizes in Asia.  That was the first and only time I was faced with a mortifying reality of having to request a seat belt extender or face being de-boarded.  And I was shocked, appalled at myself, and in real severe pain because the arm rests were digging into my hips like daggers on a relentless mission to remind me of what a reject I was.  Suddenly, in a world full of people of all shapes, colours and sizes, I was made to feel like Godzilla on a war path.  I attracted stares anyway with my 5'8" plus size stature.  NOW - I also had the ridicule and shame of adding that seat belt extender and spent the rest of my several hours in coach wanting to die.  And I spent a week swollen from the humidity of tropical Singapore with black bruises in each of my hips from the entire coach airplane experience to remind me what a reject I was.  Thanking God I didn't have to suffer the added humiliation of being charged for more than a single seat too.

The pressures of rejection are so pervasive that I've spent the last two years thinking about how everything I do related to meals and food, is an example to my child, and worrying that if I eat the way she should, she'll worry she'll be fat.  And if I go to the extremes of eating differently, she'll worry that she'll get fat and have to do that too.  I am terrified that my child will be known at school as the one with the morbidly obese mom.  I'm terrified that no matter how perfect she is, she'll be ostracized and rejected because of my weight.  And I'm terrified that taking the steps I need to take to make sure that won't happen will scar her just as badly.  

And there are many a night when I go to sleep tearful because while my child eats healthy at nearly every single meal, she also gets a treat every single day.  And the thought of a day where she doesn't get a treat causes her distress.  My daughter is thin and beautiful and perfect in every way.  There's no reason why she can't or shouldn't be able to have a treat every day - but what is the right answer when you're a parent?

When work pressures were at an all time high in the spring of 2008, and my body continued to reject the idea of being pregnant, and as I continued to withdraw and I struggled with even maintaining a morbidly obese weight, depression and anxiety took over and therapies and medical cocktails began.  In my work with the psychologist, we figured out that my feelings of inadequacy were a major trigger.  They were a huge factor in how I viewed myself - and as slow as this may seem, but I'm just realizing now, how my failure to lose weight and the constant rejection surrounding my weight has been connected to all of that.  I always knew it was PART of the bigger problem...I just didn't know how the puzzle piece fit.  It wasn't just how I felt I was a failure.  It was how the world at large was rejecting me all along, and telling me I was a failure.  If those things that we do in our lives to mitigate and cope with those feelings of failure are also breaking down (work, etc), what's left?

So, as I'm diving head first into my pre-op diet and am already starving every 2 hours...dreaming of a diet that includes cheese and bacon...well, for that matter any taste at all...I'm trying desperately to remind myself that doing this is brave, difficult and by every possible definition, setting myself up for success.  I'm trying very hard to remember that this is not a mark of failure, but a promise/commitment to myself and a strategy for doing this for the very last time.

In my lifetime, I've never imagined a day when I would know that I was a healthy weight, and that I would never have to fight the battle with weight again.  Today, I feel like that's a remote possibility.  And I'm not sure how to process the emotions of it.  But I'm glad that's where I am.