Musing

So those of you who have read my blogs for awhile know that I used to be over 300 pounds. I was also pretty vastly unattractive for 90% of my pubescent years. I was the chubby girl with terrible hair (thanks, many poodle-y perms!) from, oh, fifth grade to probably freshman year in high school. And I was still chunky then, I just happened to make a friend who convinced me to ditch the perms and wear semi-cute clothes. High school mostly remained a sea of feeling shitty about myself, though. I'm not complaining about this, readers. I don't think anyone has a fantastic high school experience. Hell, one of the people I thought had the time of her life in high school has since mentioned that she hated herself then and felt pretty uncomfortable.

Anyways, I gained a lot of weight in high school, and then even more after that. Part of it was legitimate medical reasons - I was on a lot of steroids for asthma for a long time and I pretty much ate everything in sight - but the majority of it was eating a bunch of awful food - made easier by the fact that I pretty much always ate fast food, since I was broke and that's where I worked.

I made noises for years about wanting to lose weight and such, but I never really did anything about it. I'd eat healthy for four seconds or work out sporadically and then be annoyed when, magically, weight didn't roll right off of me. Because that's totally reasonable to think, yeah?

I'd pretty much resigned myself to being the fat girl forever. It's very strange to not be any more.

Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't go back to 300+ pounds for anything, and I enjoy being a healthy size. But it's still really surreal. When I look at pictures of myself, I get confused sometimes because I appear thinner in them than I see myself as. If I gain back anything over 5 pounds, I freak out a little bit. When I go clothes shopping, I have a hard time shopping the right size. Sometimes, I feel like an imposter in those sections. Like the other people looking there are wondering why I'm in that section, as I am clearly too large for it.

It's kind of a mind fuck.

People calling me hot is strange, too. I mean, quite frankly, I decided forever ago that I was attractive and then just acted the part. If other people didn't think so, well, fuck them. I was sexy as hell and they could get over it. My self esteem is not an issue. I'm just not used to so many people agreeing with it. Sometimes I find myself slightly irked by it, like, "Hey, I'm pretty sure you knew me before, and I was JUST AS COOL THEN. Really, the excess poundage made that impossible for you to see? What the hell?"

When I'm more practical, I realize that people can't really help what they are or are not attracted to, and I should really stop seeing that as a personal offense, since it's obviously not.

I don't really know how to end this blog. It's really just kind of a stream of consciousness at this point. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESSES DON'T HAVE PAT ENDINGS, Y'ALL.