Nine years ago

Facebook told me yesterday that I had four posts needing review.  I clicked the profile review tab and lost my breath.

I talk openly about my weight loss and I've posted my fat pictures here before.  Most of my friends have known me at all my weights over the years.  When I was at my heaviest, both times, I had no concept of what I looked like until I saw a picture of myself.  I always felt the same inside as I do now and presented the same self to the world.  Furthermore, I've always seen the same thing when I look in the mirror over all this time, and yes, that is as disturbing to me as it may be to you.  I understand that I look much different now in an intellectual way, but I remain just as surprised when I see current pictures of myself as when I see the pictures from years ago.

Is this a bad thing?  I'm not sure.  I've always been the same.  I'm just me.  I just wish my perception wasn't so skewed.  If I could have one magic power, I think it might be to see what others see when they look at me.

So anyway, when I think back to that time, what I imagine are the three fat pictures I have, two of which you saw here.  Those are my only three concepts of "fat Amanda."  When I saw the pictures below, taken as I sang at a friend's wedding nine years ago yesterday, I felt like someone had slugged me in the chest.

I tend to not think I've lost touch with the past, but damn if that lady in the picture isn't me.  Oh, how different my life was then.  Jim and I had moved into our first place seven months prior,  and I was six months into my first full-time EMS job.  I was in the final semester of my two-year degree and starting paramedic school in a few weeks.  Just a day or two before this, I got engaged.  I remember how disappointed I was that I couldn't wear my ring; it still needed to be sized.  And it was this engagement, that horrible number on the scale, and pictures like these, that made me want to change my life.

I want to weep for that girl in the pictures, for where she was at and what she was struggling though.  For the things she thought she knew but didn't about both the future she was embarking on and the resources within herself that she hadn't yet discovered.  Sometimes I don't know which girl I recognize less, the girl above, or this girl last weekend:

 

It's so disorienting, not only to view these dramatically different images but to realize how my way of existence with food and fitness, once such a diligent and concerted effort, almost no longer seem like work but rather just the manner of my life.  It feels as if it's always been this way, which is maybe why these pictures shocked me so deeply.

I'm going to go approve them now.  Refusing to look at the past doesn't change it.  Only when all the parts of ourselves are given their space to be can we heal and move forward.  Standing naked in front of my mirror last night, I examined my skin for a moment thinking, "You know, I could keep you."  Just like I refused to let my plastic surgeon completely remove my scar back in 2000, my "badge of courage" as the CRNA so aptly put it, maybe I could keep this skin as a badge of strength and determination.

I could use the reminder - daily - of how far I've come.