I'm fine where I am. I'm healthy, I feel good physically, I wear "normal-sized" clothes now. It's enough.
What I am becoming is a wrinkly bag of bones. That I am not ok with.
I had the DS to become healthy. That is accomplished. It was never about looks or appearance.
Fat I could handle, wrinkles I cannot. I mean...even my wrists are wrinkled. This wrinkly thing has progressed quickly in the last few weeks. One day is was just barely, the next *bam* mega-wrinkled.
I don't like it.
You know what else I don't like? More surgeries. I'll need a hernia repair, and we'll see how that goes, but otherwise? I'm done with surgery unless my life is on the line. My pain tolerance is low and I never get enough pain medicine. Plus....as a redhead, I need more anesthesia and it takes longer to work its way out of my system.
My face has aged 50 years. I looked better at about 220 lbs.
Now don't get me wrong; I'm not going to intentionally sabotage myself. I am going to continue to eat healthily and appropriately (for my body's plumbing), but I really do not want to lose any more weight. I'm fine, right here, maybe plus 20 pounds. I may not have a say in this.
I do not like what I see in the mirror. I look skeletal and very unhealthy as well as unhappy. I also feel vulnerable, physically.
I'm sick of all the male attention I'm getting. It frightens me. I trust no one in public. I don't feel I can defend myself. This is a new feeling for me. I always defended others. Now I feel weak.
Congratulations, you are now truly a DS post op. Gone (so to speak) are the carb crazed focuses and now it's onto the next phase which I found much much harder. Why? Because pre-wls we all dieted and so the cravings and the frustrations and fears were not new issues.
ReplyDeleteThese are all brand new issues and they are hard as hell because they are just SO SO foreign.
Stick with the counseling. It's brutally important now.
The skin - it will actually improve slightly over time. Not much but it will. And like most of us, you will begin to worship Sara Blakely and begin saving your pennies to give to her on a regular basis. The more you exercise and tone, the better off you'll be, yes even your face.
Your weight number - you're not done. Don't fight it and don't argue it. You're going to drop some ore and then drop some more again. Trust your body, it knows where it needs and wants to be.
If I can offer you one piece of advice it's this - do not trust eyes, yours or others. Not right now. You look unhappy because you ARE unhappy. You don't look skeletal, you look good. Your face ain't full of skin from what I can see BUT I also know what I see ain't what you see.
You were unhappy at your old weight and you're unhappy at your new weight. You're going to learn just how much we tried to blame our unhappiness on our weight...and omg it's such a bitter bitch of a pill to swallow to learn it isn't.
You're going through the process of learning how to accept success. Own it, baby.
As for vulnerability, I hear you. At my very lowest (and trust me, you come up from your lowest), I was once blown over standing on a curb waiting for a bus and a guy jumped down and picked me up. It was such an incredibly gallant gesture to swoop down and scoop me up but I was terrified. At the time.
Now I'd give anything to fit into that dress again ;)
First, thank you for that lengthy, thoughtful comment. It's given me lots to think about. I've been busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest between my elderly mother, her four-year-old cat becoming ill and dying (and the grief, so much grief. We both loved him so.), my FIL needing an emergency trach last week after getting pneumonia on his slippery slide to death via ALS. It's been a lot.
ReplyDeleteWhen I'm at home, with my kitties and my things, and the appropriate foods, I'm very happy. I am, however, and have been since my teen years, an anxious and depressed person. Medication has helped a lot with both, but during times of stress (see above), it magnifies. And of course, the myriad other stressors that I don't discuss in public.
As an obese person, I was dying by inches, and I knew it. I know I wouldn't have lived another ten years without surgery. My new body is weird, feels unfamiliar, looks strange, but from the inside feels fucking fantastic. It's scary how good I feel, and the things I can do now. You know what I mean.
I felt a hip bone last night I hadn't felt in 40 years and my first thought was, "tumor!" Scary and exhilarating.
I asked my therapist if he thought I looked skeletal and he said no, definitely not. Alternately, I now see people who I always thought were "normal sized," like a TV commentator who annoys me, who tonight I realized is rather overweight. Huh. My perception is adjusting both inward and outward. It is new and foreign and weird. But not necessarily bad, just different.
I guess this old dog can still learn new tricks. Good to know. Life is so strange...
Thanks for stopping by.
SJ