onceafatgirl

I’ll think I was cute in ten years

The hardest part of this blog is that there are only so many things to say and only so many ways to say the same thing when it’s such a specific topic. Sugar addiction and the associated eating and body image disorders. I struggle, often, to find something to say that I don’t think is repetitive. I have even considered retiring this blog. But then I remember that I don’t write this blog to be read. I write it to say the truth I need to hear. For me. With the additional hope that it can help another addict.

So with that in mind, I have learned to honor that they won’t all be great posts. I try to remember that making great great art is contingent on one’s willingness to make bad art. So I just keep writing them. I keep committing to the practice. 

Recently I noticed someone reading through the archives of this blog. (Hi person! Thanks for reading!) I certainly don’t remember all of my posts. (It’s 52 a year for over 10 years.) So I went through and read the ones my new reader was reading , and I was happily surprised to find that I thought they were good. Interesting. Thought provoking. Funny! (I’m a lot less funny in this blog than I have been in years past. Part of it may be that I am comfortable enough in the writing that I spend less time trying to impress my readers. I feel like I should work on that.)

Certainly I noticed that there were sometimes points that I failed to make coherently. Plenty of punctuation and grammar errors. (I should probably have an editor. I mean I probably won’t, but I probably should.) But in general, I am proud of this body of work. It’s good work. Some of it is even great. 

In having my eating under control, I don’t have to have doubts about that pride. I don’t have to be falsely humble. I don’t have to ask you if you think it’s good work. I absolutely hope you do! I hope you love it and find it helpful! But I don’t need to know. I don’t need to ask. It’s really none of my business. And I don’t make it my concern.

You know that thing that happens, where someone takes a picture of you, and you think you look terrible at the time, but then you look at it years later and you realize that you looked good, you looked like yourself, not at all the weird troll you thought you looked like 5 minutes after the photo was taken? That is what it has felt like to look back at my words for the past decade. Oh! I was clever. I was wise. 

But it is also really special see the sparks of a change in thinking that would affect the trajectory of my life. All before I knew I was doing those things, thinking those thoughts, changing those patterns. All a record of the process of me becoming the most authentic person I can be. 

And I suppose it reminded me that I feel like I am in the middle of a change now that I don’t fully grasp. That it will only be in retrospect that I will understand what is going on right now with my body and my work life and my health. So perhaps in another ten years, I will look back at this period of time, and see the whole picture. And realize how cute I really was.