A Run Around A Tired Mulberry Bush

I'm going to be very real and vulnerable for a few minutes. Aside from all the ranting and ramblings, I feel that as a writer, it's important not to hide behind my writings and show you that I'm a real person. Now is going to be one of those times.

I'm not doing this for attention-I'm not. And if you think so, then you can stop right there and go back to whatever it is you were doing. It's not enjoyable to put my heart out there for someone to go all kinds of judgmental on it.

I can hardly walk by a mirror or reflective surface without glancing at myself-not for vanity's sake, but to see if I'm beautiful yet. Some of these times, I really like what I see and continue walking with my head held a little higher. Most times, I can't stand the face and body staring back and me and want to hide in a hole where no one can see me.

It's been this way since after I hit puberty. For a little while, I didn't even care what I looked like (obviously leading to my major weight gain). Then I wondered why I never got attention from the opposite sex and I realized I was not what most guys were looking for. That's where the depression kicked in.

After a year or two of moping, I figured it out and lost a lot of that weight. I felt more comfortable with myself than I had ever felt, and even though a lot of people complimented me on how I looked, I still felt somewhat fat. I ended up gaining some of that weight back and here I am today.

I guess once you've been fat, you will always feel some kind of fat, even if you're not. That feeling is attributed solely to anorexia today, but to me, that's an incorrect assessment. When you've been overweight and you lose it, you're not used to being the skinny person or the fit person. You're used to beating yourself up all the time; there's still a period of time where you look at your nice body and still think "Okay, those thighs have got to go".

My self image at this point is not the greatest. Somewhere along the road, I learned to compare myself: TO EVERY FEMALE I SEE. I don't mean that to be funny either; it's true and it's scary. If her arms are skinnier than mine, I hate myself all over again. If her belly is more visible than mine, I feel a little better.

But I am never completely happy with myself. And that is a feeling that is constantly haunting my mind, no matter what I am doing. Anytime I go out, it is a battle to find an outfit that I am truly comfortable in and helps salvage a sense of semi-confidence (part of the reason I don't go out often). I try to keep pretty healthy, work out, all that jazz. But for some reason, God chose to bless me with a body that makes it harder to lose all the extra stuff. I'm sure He wanted me to learn my worth, no matter the size of my thighs.

It isn't just my body, either. It's my face. I really don't like it. My whole life, I've been told how "cute" I am. Solely based on my face. And at almost twenty years of age and married, I would trade "cute" for "sexy" at any price. Or even to hear beautiful more than cute. When someone struggles with her self image as much as I do, "cute" is the last thing she wants to hear. If I had anything but a cute face, I could probably get away with being the weight (and the age) that I am.

I daily (sometimes hourly) tick through the list of things that make me unhappy with myself and uselessly wish I could magically become normal. Bah. What the heck is normal. It's a myth. Why I spend so much time wanting it, I don't know. I must be insane.

Normal probably isn't the best word, because I shouldn't base my happiness on numbers on a scale or a clothing size (those are more fickle than anything anyway). I want to me happy with myself, confident in my skin. I want to be able to look at celebrities on TV and not make myself feel like garbage because I don't look like that. I want to stop beating myself up every hour of the day. It is so hard to enjoy the journey of life when you don't love the vehicle you're in.

(As a side note, my husband is a perfect gentleman. He does tell me I'm pretty every day or that my weight doesn't make me less attractive to him. He builds me up as much as a husband should, if not more. But if I can't have mercy on my own self, then it's difficult to take his words to heart, no matter how often or how sweetly he says them. A man can't make you feel like a queen if you won't admit you have a queen inside of you.)