Hey there my friends! Most of you know that I've been off the technology reservation for a while as I had a rather emergent removal of my gall bladder that included a 4 day stay in the hospital. I will say, overall it was not an awful experience, with the exception of the pain between the surgery and the endoscopy needed to remove a wayward gall stone that was stuck. I have to emphasize that NURSES ARE THE GLUE THAT HOLD THE HOSPITAL WORLD TOGETHER! I have much respect for the physicians who did the surgery and other procedures, but as far as the day to day comfort, pillow fluffing, pain medication dispensing and general bolstering of my spirits when I was on day 2 1/2 of nothing my mouth water included; it was the nurses who insured my sanity as well as the coverage of my derriere when I started walking around the ward post surgery. Save one nurse who had a verbal confrontation with my very worried 80 year old dad, ALL of the nurses were wonderful, humorous and deeply concerned with my physical and emotional comfort. I'm sure you've all seen the bumper stickers that say, "If you love your freedom, thank a VET." I have a new one to produce, "If you love your health, thank a nurse." I have so much gratitude for how they made my first ever hospital stay as painless as possible.
Now that I'm home and getting back to my usual life, I thought it was about time to do another post. And because I've pretty much caught people up on the back history of my growing up as a morbidly obese youngster, teenager, young adult, and now not-so young adult; I'm now embarking on writing about the CURRENT journey. I've lost a lot of weight, more than once. What I'm constantly amazed by is how different the experiences have been each time. Twelve years ago, when I originally came into recovery I lost 189lbs in about two years and at the time my brain was not moving as fast as the scale was going down. There's a slogan in recovery, "Came for the vanity, stayed for the sanity". And the first time I lost a great deal of weight, it was about what I was going to look like, and how fabulous my life would be when I got "there". And as anyone who has embarked on a significant life change of any kind knows, RARELY if EVER, does "there" meet the expectations we place upon it in our heads. And I had also bought into the misconception that I couldn't really be happy UNTIL I got. So while I was putting forth a great deal of effort to change very ingrained behaviors, I thought that I had to almost literally suffer through the process. If I wasn't struggling in angst and borderline martyrdom, I wasn't working hard enough toward the goal. I grew up with a mom who literally said out loud to herself, but also to other's around her, "I'll be happy when I'm thin." That comment presupposes that if one is currently not thin, they are not happy. And I believed that concept to be true for a very long time.
As I've said before, one of the great experiences of becoming part of Twelve Step recovery was finding an entire community of people who were happy WHILE working towards attain a healthy body weight for them. And so while I saw these people who were happy, and I was certainly making great progress towards a more authentic level of happiness in my own life, I was so happy purely because I'd found such a loving and accepting community of people who so intimately understood the pain of being a compulsive overeating. As it says in the Twelve Step literature, identification with others often is the most powerful component of the recovery process. It certainly was in my experience.
Fast forward a decade, and I've had lot's of success and recovery, along with taking my own will back which resulted in gaining back all the weight I'd lost. When I came back into the recovery rooms in July 2011, I'd also started seeing a great therapist who was rather adamant regarding the idea that I could be happy NOW. I was over 400lbs, having to use a wheelchair because I need both my knees replaced, living with my parents because I'd lost my job and on permanent disability, living what I believed to be a VERY small life. I was encouraged to consider the concept that the whole point of recovery wasn't just to put down the substance that was simultaneously irresistible and destructive, but to find things that are enjoyable and interesting to me. And for someone who has spent a great deal of my life consumed with the idea of losing weight and how great life will be WHEN I got there, I intellectually have a very hard time buying into the concept of being happy in the moment. I say that in the present tense because after a year of being focused on physical/emotional/spiritual recovery, I feel like I'm still struggling with this idea. I am once again aware that my intelligence certainly can be a hinderance in my recovery.
So in the past year, as I was very focused on my goal, I became acutely aware of how lopsided my thinking was when it came to my weight. If someone I haven't talked to in a while asks me how I'm doing, my instinctive response was to go into a detailed discussion of how much weight I've lost,, (because that makes me a better person right?) and how I'm progressing towards my goal of being able to get my knees replaced. And like so many things I've experienced in my life, when the universe wants to provide you with a lesson, you will keep getting that lesson, OVER AND OVER until you've sufficiently absorbed the intended message. My therapist suggested that I undertake a hobby or activity that was group oriented that would help me to break out of the isolation that had become a crutch and a curse in my every day life. After some thinking and no small amount of resistance I joined a choir at a church that I felt a lovely family-spirited connection to. It has turned out to be a great experience and an opportunity to sing, which I've enjoyed in the past, as well as be in a place where I can naturally spread my spiritual wings.
I'm more aware than ever that I have arrived at a place where I use my size and my weight as the defining characteristic when I think of myself in the world. It's always been a negative connotation because I was so overweight, and the easiest reason to feel like I was "less than". I am also aware that I need to be willing to let go of the old thinking that says I am primarily defined by how I look, rather than who I am as a person. My intelligence, humor, compassion, ability to be a good friend, daughter and sister SHOULD account for so much more than the weight on the scale or the size written on the tag in the back of my pants. And yet it frequently doesn't. I have also recently become aware that it's not solely society's fault that I buy into thinking like that. I am a big fan of personal responsibility, on lots of levels. And if I am going to be a fan of that concept, it certainly should apply to me. And while society's view of overweight people isn't exactly helpful, as I believe that Compulsive Overeating is an eating disorder just like anorexia or bulimia, but not treated that way by society and the medical community, that's NOT a good enough reason for me to remain stuck in thinking that no longer serves me today. The same goes for fashion magazines, reality television and other forms of severely superficial mainstream media. Now that I'm aware of the overwhelming prevalence that thinking has in my day to day life, I have a choice about how much energy I give to it, and how much work I do towards deconstructing those thought patterns. THANK GOD for my support system; meetings, sponsor, program friends, therapist, support group members, and lots of good friends who remind me that I am lovable just as I am, today. It gives me the willingness to stay diligent on the path of truly learning to find joy in living in my body and my life TODAY. It will be the only way that I will be able to reach my goals, whether those goals have to do with my weight or my life in general.
It continues to be a very interesting journey. Thanks for coming along.
