Someone Else's Pants

I maintained again this week, in case I forgot to mention it. (I think the 20 pounds I had wanted to lose by Christmas are not going anywhere, because I have 7 weeks in which to lose 11 pounds, and at the rate I've been losing recently, I don't think that's at all probable. At best, with the average loss of 1.3 pounds per week, I might be able to shed another 9 pounds by Christmas, but my rate of return has been slowing down enormously.)

I'm not entirely sure why, because, once again, I've stopped journaling consistently. Which is to say, I know why I didn't lose. Because I stopped journaling. But, I don't know what it is I ate or did that might have caused me to not lose. Or something like that. Pardon me, I'm horrifically undercoherent today.

Sometimes I think I'm trying to do too much with too little resources. I clean house (which sometimes consists of wanting to murder both my husband and my child, who cannot seem to do anything other than leave their socks in some strange location!). I write NaNoWriMo. (And while I wrote yesterday, I ended up scrapping all of it because it was crap beyond the pale of normally acceptable crap, which is why I'm doing NaNoWriMo unofficially... so I can throw out crap writing and not worry so much about keeping up.) I write and read blogs. I write and read Twitter (and honestly, I think I'm following more people than I can reasonably keep up with. I want tabs for Twitter, so I can divide people into groups; my friends, political, writing, sci-fi/fantasy, weight loss, and mommies.) I'm planning an outline for a dietbook lifestyle change memoir. I fix all household meals. I pre-pack lunches for my husband. I game. I write emails for another game (which I am sadly behind on, so if you're in that game, don't feel the need to nag me, please. I know I'm behind. Believe me.)

Slowly, very slowly, I'm coming to an acceptance of what it is I've done this year.

I have lost almost 60 pounds.

I have dropped from a size 24 to a size 12.

Which brings me to the pants I'm wearing today. Don't ask me to explain it, but it's been sort of weird that I can't really seem to wrap my head around what size pants I'm in. I got a 12 from Target about a month ago... They were a leeetle bit tight, but I bought them anyway. And then I got another pair from Kmart, which were a leeetle bit tighter, too (I think Target and K-mart run at slightly different size margains). Slowly, I'm kind of accepting the fact that clothing that actually fits is... a bit clingy. What I percieve as being too-tight is actually a correct fit. And yet, despite the fact that I've been pulling these two pairs of pants on every day for the last few weeks...

Let me back up to Monday. We saw Leslie at the meeting, same as usual. She had for me a small gift of two pairs of pants she'd bought last year at Old Navy. Mind you, I've never, ever shopped at Old Navy. When the chain first came to my attention, the advertisements for it completely and totally revolted me. By the time I'd gotten past that (or, at least, haven't seen an ad for them in a long, long time) I'd heard that they changed their profile so that if you were an overweight lady, you could only buy their clothing online. Because, you know, god forbid they actually have fat people in their stores, what is the world coming to that fat people think they can just walk into the store like they were normal citizens with full rights to act and be treated accordingly. No shit, sherlock, this particular move offended the crap out of me.

Anyway, she gave me these two pairs of pants, both marked as size 12.

I was convinced they wouldn't fit.

I held them up, looked at the waist, thanked her for her kindness... but knew they weren't going to fit. Couldn't. Possibly.

I haven't worn a 12 since my sophomore year of college. That was 1992, for those of you doing the math. (Yes, I'm 36 years old, On the backside of thirty, short side of time / Back on the bottom, with no will to climb... sorry, I do get a little depressed from time to time about my age recently. Hah! And I remember when I was so worried at 26 that I was running out of time to get a family and have children... I clearly remember that conversation... I also remember my friend laughing at me about it. I guess he was right, since I have husband and child now and everything's pretty much peachy... but still. I feel old. I was talking to a girl at a party last week, making a joke about a song that came out in 1984 and said "What were you, about 4 then?" And she looked at me oddly and said "No, I was just born in 1984." OLD. OLD. OLD.)

Thomas and I came home from the meeting and I shucked my jeans to try on the pants. Many jokes were made by Thomas on my finally getting into Leslie's pants, until I finally told him to fuck off kindly be quiet.

They fit.

Fine.

My general math goes this way: ~60 pounds = (24 - 12) 6 pants sizes (speaking of which, does anyone have any freaking clue why sizes go 6, 8, 10, 12? And further, why there's a shop in the mall called 5-7-9? What is this random number generation system and how did it apply to women's clothing? And further, why is M sometimes classed as size 6 - 10 and sometimes as 8 - 12?) with anther 36 pounds to go, which should equal about another 3 sizes, taking me from a 12 to an 8.

An 8?

I'm experiencing a strange and slippery sort of... loss of self. And not just in the physical weight that I'm shedding. But both more and less and feeling of losing my place in the world.

I have a friend - haven't seen him in a while, but we'd great each other with smiles and hugs if we happened to meet again - who used to hide behind his long hair and his head-banger music as a reason why people didn't like him. Which I always thought was strange, because I can't remember ever really caring what sort of music people liked, as long as say, they didn't force me to listen to something revolting bagpipe music, it wasn't important.

Eventually I came to understand that he was using this as a shield. That when people didn't like him (and some people didn't. I mean, really. No one has universal popularity) he could say to himself "Oh, they're just close-minded, and they don't think men should have long hair, and they've heard all sorts of bad things about people who like heavy metal music, and so it's not really me that they don't like, it's these perceptions of what people should be, the round hole/square peg problems."

Have I been using being a fat-girl in the same way? Have I been hiding behind my fat, and saying to myself when people didn't like me, or when service was bad at a shop, that it wasn't me that was the problem, it was this bias against fat people? Because you know, prejudice against gays is on its way out of fashion, but hatred against fat people is, for the most part, still universally acceptable behavior, and as human beings, we feel some deep seated need to feel superior to others, generally in the manner of making those others feel as bad as possible. (Allow me to take a minute here to refer you to a truly wonderful post by Carla of MizFit and say very loudly There's Enough Room For Everybody!)

I don't really know. Perhaps not, to some degree. Most people who know me will agree that I say I do not suffer from the delusion that no one likes me. (I do not, and have not ever, gone out to the garden to eat worms!) I generally know that I have lots of friends, and while I do think some of them are quite derranged, I do not usually question their judgement. They like me, ergo, I must be likeable.

And yet... I find myself constantly looking in the mirror. Is this me? What will I be in six more months? Who am I? Where do I fit in? Do I still belong with the 'fat girls', or can I stay in that circle of friends, without offending or pissing anyone off? Could I join a group of thin girls, or would I feel that I didn't really qualify to be there?

I went to a costume party last weekend. Pretended to be someone else for a few hours.

It wasn't that hard.

I'm wearing someone else's pants today. And god only knows what I'm pretending to be.

I used to make fun of my friend who went to South Dakota for a 'discovery of self.' Of course, if you were to lose youself, I always said, chances are good that SD is a good place to start looking. I mean, there aren't that many people there, after all, so if you run into someone out there, there's a better chance of it being you than, say, if you ran into someone here, in Chesapeake.

And yet, I suddenly have more sympathy for him than once I did. Because I'm losing that sense of self, and I don't have any idea where to find it.

How does one redefine ones self, when suddenly, everything is different.

And then I think, am I really that superficial that I think my weight matters that much? Am I not still who I was?

So, you know... I'm out looking for my Self. If you should happen to see me before I get back, could you kindly hold on to me until I get here?