Well, I woke up in a cloud of melancholy today. And it’s my weekend, to boot. I don’t want to be in a bad mood on my weekend! So, hopfully I can just throw all the moodiness here, get it out of my system and proceed to 48 hours of good times.
I’ve got an Internet friend whose about five years older than me. She’s just finishing up a fellowship, and her parents have come down for a little ceremony thing the school is doing. She’s glad to have them there, but right now, they’re mostly being irritating, which I can completely understand. Weirdly, I was thinking about her when I woke up and realized never in a million years would my parents ever be able to travel half-way across the country to see me finish a fellowship (journalism fellowship — essentially, you spend a school year taking classes for the hell of it and hopefully go back to your job de-stressed and with new ideas. Not exactly a f0r-credit, get a degree sort of thing).
Setting aside my occasional annoyance that I’ve lived where I live for three years and have been home to visit family four times and plan two more this year and they’ve never been to see me once (setting it aside because they still can’t afford it), it made me think about my first year of college. It was 2001, I was 18, and my grandma drove up with me. It was only 2 hours from home, and my parents eventually showed up, but Grandma was the one who helped me carry stuff up to my room and went to the parents’ orientation meeting and was just there for me in a way they weren’t, and she was always the one in the family that I felt closest to — like we had the most in common. I swear, I got my sense of responsibility from her.
But Grandma died about 3.5 years ago. Now, I’ve never been one of those people who are all “I wake up every day and miss her!” I don’t think about her every day. The days I do are usually fodder for happy memories not balls of sorrow and misery, but today I’m just feeling really sad about it.
So, that’s Thing One. Thing Two stems from the knowledge that, in not quite three weeks, I’ll be getting on a plane and flying back to my hometown for the wedding of a friend I’ve had since middle school (technically earlier, but there was the entire stretch of grade school where we were at separate schools and didn’t see each other). I’m happy for her, and I know the day is about her and not me, but I wish I wasn’t go there and seeing her for the first time in years while being so huge.
I’ve put on about 40 pounds since I last saw her, and I wasn’t thin to begin with. As a side note, when I came to WordPress, one of the featured posts was “the only thing we need to lose is our obsession with thinness”, and while I agree that there are people for whom the only Pretty is Skinny/Thin and they will do all manner of horrible things to their body to achieve it, and that is a very bad thing, for me, the notion that I was never thin is synonymous with the reality that I was always overweight. And not by a little bit, either. I was around 180-190 in high school, floated between 200-220 in college and am now 240 on a 5’2″ frame.
I have no desire to be stick-thin. Absolutely none. I just don’t want to be carrying 100 extra pounds of fat on my person. At 140, I would still be overweight a smidge by BMI standards, but I’m fine with that. Hell, I’d probably be fine at 150 or 160. But 240 and 5’2″ is not “a little heavy” or “knows how to have a good time, society’s standards of beauty be damned.” 240 at 5’2″ is laziness. It’s whacked priorities. It’s “what the hell do you do?”
It’s embarrassing, and I don’t generally feel shame easily.
And, as if the idea of being the person who just keeps getting fatter weren’t enough to make me feel weird, there’s my personal life. I have no boyfriend, I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’m a 27-year-old virgin and 90 percent of the time, I”m 100 percent fine with that. I love being responsible only for myself and what I want to do. I don’t want to have to think about other people or what they want to do. I don’t want to share my space or my time or my stuff. (Yes, I realize this is all incredibly selfish.)
But the other 10 percent of the time? I think it would be nice to have a companion. Somebody who GOT me, you know? Somebody who made me not mind sharing my space, time and stuff. And then I see so many of the other people I knew in high school on Facebook, and they’ve got kids and are a family and they just seem so much farther along in LIFE than I am. And I’ve got to say, there’s nothing that bothers me more than feeling like I’m being left behind. Now, generally, that applies to *actually* being left behind as taller, more athletic people who comprise a group I’m supposed to be part of speed off without realizing they’ve left me huffing and puffing and in pain half a block back (*cough*2007 Internship*cough*), but apparently it applies to life stuff, too.
Either way, it’s a confusing and gloomy time.
Slow and Steady 
April 20, 2010 at 12:06 pm |
I am so sorry if my post (the one on the front page) made you feel down. Being thin is not a prerequisite for love or sex or love and sex or companionship. Just check out the Museum of Fat Love if you want photographic proof.
April 20, 2010 at 12:38 pm |
Oh, not at all. My mood was cooking long before your post. 🙂 In fact, when I mentioned your post I was just trying to make the comment that being unhappy with my current size doesn’t mean I have some crazy desire to be a tiny little bird-like thing. I would just like to be of a size where I can buy clothes I like and have them fit, where I can easily fit in an airplane or school desk, and where I don’t feel defined by my size when it comes to first-impressions. Plus there’s the whole ‘would like to not sound like I ran a marathon after climbing a flight of steps,’ thing but that’s a little more fitness than size-related. Which isn’t to say size doesn’t play a factor — it all might be easier if I didn’t have so much fat weighing me down — but I do, to an extent, subscribe to the Healthy at Any Size concept.