Confession time: when I started both my weight loss and personal healing journeys, I did so with a severely flawed premise, that this process would somehow transform me into who I might have been. I spent so much time thinking about the impacts of trauma, my childhood, and the various impacts of my weight, so it felt pretty natural to think about “what might have been,” and then to even imagine having the chance to become that person, to unearth my buried secret self, to free all my imprisoned potential, to have a few transformative healing moments and then emerge from the wreckage of my twisted self as a fully formed version of who I was originally meant to be.
But that person is lost forever. She’s dead and gone. Fantasizing about “who I might have been” serves no practical purpose.
I think I actually believed that I could have the perfect body (or at least a pretty good one) just by losing weight. So I’m no longer considered overweight, but even if I went down to the socially sanctioned “ideal” of 120 pounds, I’d still have extra skin, stretch marks, and disproportionately large upper arms.
(I’m not kidding. Size small shirts fit comfortably everywhere else, but my upper arms still look like they did fifty pounds ago. Seriously, getting dressed is like stuffing sausage casings. I’ve even tried lifting weights, to try to tone my arms, but now it’s like, “Oh, look! Now I can flex the sausage casings!”
Sexy.)
I’ve changed some aspects of my body, but it can never be what it would have been if I had never been overweight.
And who I am can never be who I might have been. It does me no good to imagine this beautiful butterfly woman; I can never be her. I am not trapped in a cocoon, waiting to emerge from my past and become her. She can never exist. In geek terms, her timeline was pruned decades ago.
She is gone.
And I think it’s ok to mourn her, to grieve for what might have been, but dwelling on it, exploring who I think I might have been, only serves to make me both sad and angry, heartbroken and bitter, found and lost.
I suppose it’s a good thing that I started with this belief, because if I had known that nearly two years on I would still be fighting with my weight and food every single damn day and in some ways feeling even more internally broken and having more relationship challenges than the day I started (yes, there was a specific day), I doubt I would have made it past the first two weeks.
Delusion is a powerful motivator.
So I mourn my beautiful butterfly woman and try to release her into the void. Here and now will have to be enough for me.
This is all that I am; there is nothing more.