Content Warning: This post discusses weight, eating disorders, childhood trauma, and marriage. Please skip this post if any of those issues would harm your day. <3
On Saturday I will have been married for 17 years.
SEVENTEEN.
I left my parents’ home when I was 17. I have officially been in a relationship with the same person for over half my life (we started dating when I was 18 and he was 19).
We are celebrating this momentous occasion by getting the tires on my minivan replaced and cleaning the garage. This has less to do with being married for 17 years and more to do with the fact that we are less than a month away from moving 3000 miles to South Carolina in June.
We’ve been married 17 years and we’ve crossed the country more times than I can count. We’ve lived in nine different states and moved more than that. Really, somewhere around move #6 I gave up counting. It’s a thing we do.
We pack. We move. We haul everything across the country. We curse the fact that none of the curtains we have fit any of the new windows. We buy new curtains. We pack. We move. … it’s a cycle.
This time I’m doing something I haven’t done in 17 years… I’m leaving some of my old clothes behind. I’m donating them. The clothes I have hauled thousands of miles around the world because I swore one day I’d fit them again. The cute top I bought before I met my husband. The swishy skirt I couldn’t live without when I saw it on vacation. The sweater my aunt gave me.
They’re all getting donated.
I am finally ready to admit that those clothes will never fit again.
… no, no, no need for applause.
It took me over two years to reach this conclusion.
Two years ago, when we were packing in Alaska, I found the bin of College Clothes and pulled them out. My then 14yo daughter tried them on and found them too small. This is the kid who has been on a high-calorie diet since she was 2 because she is perpetually underweight. And the clothes I wore in college were too small.
Do the math.
I did.
I realized that maybe – MAYBE – my weight loss goals weren’t as realistic or healthy as I wanted to believe.
I kept the clothes anyway. Because they made me feel pretty. Because they were some of the first clothes I bought with my own money. Because they were part of my recovery from a horrific period of my life.
A nagging little voice at the back of my head says, “It wasn’t that bad. Other people had it worse.”
That’s right, they did have it worse. But pain isn’t a game. It’s not a competition. There is not a finite amount of suffering in the world. Saying I didn’t suffer doesn’t mean someone else suffered less, it means I remain silent and do not get the help and do not recover as I should.
Watch out for that voice. It’s there and it lies.
For me, my teen years were a horrifying blend of emotional abuse and manipulation, high pressure, anxiety, and depression. My parents were both going through their own traumatic miseries, suffering depression, and my mother was dealing with cancer. There was no active support network. Like most teenagers I felt lost, unloved, and under a great deal of pressure to be as perfect as I could because that was the only way to get into college.
I thought what made me special was being a year younger than everyone in my grade and being thin.
Those are very weak things to hang your self-worth on.
But I clung to them. I clung to them so very hard because they were all I had.
I wasn’t talented at anything. Not singing, dancing, art, math, science, anything… I was okay. I was average. I was passing.
I wasn’t pretty. My hair wasn’t blond. My eyes weren’t blue or green or a stormy gray. I wasn’t tall and makeup took away precious sleep time.
Everyone tells you when you’re little that you are special as you are, but it’s so hard to believe when everyone around you seems so much more interesting and wonderful.
When I left home and was on my own for the first time – buying my own clothes, doing my own thing – that was the start of me finding myself after the mess. I was trying to figure out what I wanted, what I liked, what I needed. And for the past 17 years those clothes have been an anchor of sorts. A reminder that I was pretty and lovable once even if I don’t feel like that now.
Today… I put them in a donation bag.
I don’t need them any more.
It’s been a long 17 years, but I think I’m finally at the point in my recovery where I can accept that I’ve changed. I’m still changing. I will keep changing.
This of the Perfect Me that I created in my teens doesn’t need to be the Perfect Me for my 30’s, or 40’s or whenever.
I’m 37 this year, and I’m short and I’m fat and I’m getting a double chin. And you know… I’m all right with that. I’m okay with my brown hair and brown eyes and the freckles on my arms. I’m not the thinnest. I’m not the youngest. I’m not the smartest. I’m not the prettiest. I don’t need to be. I am me, and I’m the only one who can ever be me.
There’s no competition here.
Whoever I am today, that’s the best I can be today.
Tomorrow I’ll be someone different.
That’s how life is meant to be.