TheBanyanTree: Identity Crisis

[Maria Gibson]

I was looking through photos of days gone by, nay, pounds gone by, to 
show someone else who had lost a lot of weight and I was amazed that I 
could not recall the physical feeling of how it was to be nearly three 
hundred pounds.  I can easily bring to the surface the emotional side of 
it but I feel detached from how it felt to walk around day after day 
with the extra weight.  I just never even imagined that was something 
I'd achieve and although it's a good thing, it does in truth make me 
feel displaced.  This new me is very new.  I've been roughly this size 
for about a year and previous to that I still felt plus sized and 
overweight even though I had already been losing weight for a lot of 
years.  Since I was diagnosed with diabetes in the summer of 1999 I have 
struggled and succeeded.  I think it's always important to note that 
even though I succeeded, I struggled.  Inside and out.  And still do.

I think part of it is that I look older.  Six and a half years is a 
significant piece of life for a forty-something, a seventh of it 
according to my calculator.  That's a big chunk of time that was going 
to be evident on my physical appearance in any case but when you throw 
in a hundred pound loss you end up with a tiny chicken waddle (sure to 
grow) under my chin not to mention the bod which has loose skin, 
wrinkles and baubles of indiscriminate description.  And although my 
face is still ok, I don't look exactly *old* yet, my body is probably 
closer to what may be expected of a woman twenty years older than I am.  
I put on the hooker jeans and the cute top but when they come off, wow, 
the picture changes dramatically.  All of that adds up to not being able 
to reconcile the physical person I see in the pictures to the physical 
person I see in the mirror.  Time will only exacerbate that effect.  I 
don't recognize me in the pictures anymore and it's a little scary, 
almost like what it might feel like to wake up with amnesia and have to 
rebuild your life with the limited memories that began when the old ones 
were lost.  It's weird.

The larger part of it is how I feel.  I feel like a totally different 
person in so many ways.  Even though I can quickly recall the emotional 
side of being very heavy, it isn't something I live with every day 
anymore.  I don't feel slender or fit but I don't feel obese.  I guess 
this is the feeling of an average woman who wants to lose twenty pounds 
but just hasn't gotten to it yet.  I'm not quite satisfied nor am I 
wholly miserable.  That is a fait accompli in and of itself.  I no 
longer get nervous or anxious about dressing in a way which might show 
my body and emphasize its smallerness.  I don't worry about being the 
fattest person in the room and I don't obsess thinking everyone wonders 
how I got so fat.  I think a good way to describe it is, I've stopped 
feeling new, new.  I'm becoming more comfortable with the way I look 
which makes me a lot more comfortable with the way I feel about it.  It 
seems, however, that it may take a little more time to come to grips and 
feel as if I *belong* in this body which is a whole different twist.  I 
don't belong back there in obeseville but I still feel like a stranger 
here in normalville.  My post amnesia memories are still limited and all 
I have to fall back on to identify with the here and now.  I've become a 
squatter in ambivilanceville.

This was going to happen anyway, I think, as a matter of course for 
life.  We all will be different from six some years ago if we continue 
to grow as a person.  As life marches on we move on and do different 
things and live different experiences.  It will be interesting to see 
how I feel in another six years but what I really wonder about is a year 
from now.  I wonder if I'll be a little more comfortable with what I see 
which will take me even further from where I was.  I'll move further and 
further from there and have to learn to be more and more comfortable 
with where I go.  That's the goal, anyway, right? 

In the life of a forty-something, one year is so little.  Even when it 
is everything you wanted.


Maria