Living me Softly

I realized today, that as I was traipsing down the office hallway for the 72nd time, I was making this odd sigh/motorboat sound with my lips. And I thought to myself, "what the hell are you doing?" And I really had no answer.

I watched a movie this weekend with a fat, red-headed woman, who portrayed an overbearing and slightly psychotic mess of a boss to the movie's main character. She wore a lot of polka dots, ate jelly donuts, and carried on office banter in a shrill, earsplitting tone. The movie actually opened with an office celebration of her birthday party, and her little beady eyes glistened as she cut herself a Texas-sized piece of cake.

Really? Seriously? Is this material still funny and cool and trendy? Is the overbearing, overeating, overweighted, shrew of a woman still a necessary cinematic staple? Are we really still buying the mentality of the fat person's agony? Hiding sugary snacks, over-compensating for a bullied adolescence, wearing tentlike fabrics to hide abdominal fat? Really? I was annoyed before the plot was ever introduced.

Fat acceptance is something I struggle with, mostly because I can't seem to accept myself. At any size. It's been almost six months since I've had a bulimic episode, and I can't say that I feel any sense of accomplishment for it. I guess I just thought that if I stopped all of that behavior, I would just start losing weight. I thought the 'next step' would be so natural, that I wouldn't even realize it was happening.

What I seem to forget everytime is that this is not going to be an easy fix. In the past, when I wanted to lose weight, I would stop eating for days, weeks, or even months at a time. In the past, I could drop weight by starving myself and then having one big binge and purge session to work out my hunger. But my reality today is that those things have stopped working for me, emotionally and physically. Forcing my body to react to my actions just doesn't fulfill me any more.

That said, I have realized the only thing I can do at this point is be gentle with myself. Restricting, obsessing, forcing, overhauling; all these do is send me into a crash that takes me longer and longer to retreat from each time it happens. I want serenity. I want peace. I want to know that I am ok no matter what the tag on my pants says. And even as I read those words, I still can't quite convince myself that it's true.