My high school reunion is in a little over a week, and I'm actually pretty excited about it. I'm going with Natalie, who's my better half when Mike's not around. Sometimes even when he is.
Until very recently, though, there was one teeny, tiny thing messing with my mind when I thought about walking into that bar next week and it was this: in high school I was much, much skinnier than I am now. Instead of thinking, you've lost nearly 35 pounds this year and are running races and running websites and have a career and a great husband and a baby boy whose smile should be bottled by world leaders for peace keeping strategies, I thought I'm not as skinny as I was when I was 17, people are going to judge me.
Except I wasn't just skinny in high school, I was sick in high school. I was very, very sick. I would go to abandoned parks at night to throw up in garbage cans, so I could convince the people paying attention that I was fiiiiiiine. (They weren't convinced.) My friends sat me down during what I thought was a fun girl's night once to hold an intervention. My mom took the locks off the bathroom door. My drill team director pulled me into her office to talk about her concerns. Once, during an eating disorder support group, a girl told me I didn't look skinny enough to have an eating disorder, so I set out to prove her wrong and went two full weeks without digesting a bite of food. Natalie, who wasn't in my life during a year or two of high school, came to my house and broke our stubborn and stupid silence to tell me she was worried about me.
I told her not to be.
I wasn't well in high school, so why on earth should I care about people comparing me to that.
That wasn't such a super great place to be.
This is why I have such a hard time with the knee-jerk reaction so many (including myself) have that if someone's gained weight, it's because something's broken in their lives, and they're fixing that break with food. Sometimes this is true. But, sometimes thin equals late night purging in an abandoned park so the caesar salad you had at Applebee's doesn't keep you up at night, making you hate yourself, and thin or not, that's no one's idea of happiness, is it?
I've enjoyed food more this year than ever before. I enjoy tasting food, celebrating with food, cooking food, serving food, talking about food. I don't hate myself for eating food with fat in it or for having dessert or for sipping wine and eating carbs. While I'd argue I was never more obsessed with food than the six years I had an eating disorder, it's not hard to believe I was hardly enjoying food back then. But, finally, I can say I enjoy it.
So this is why I'm excited to go to my high school reunion, even though I can't fit into the jeans I was wearing back then. No matter who knew me -- or how much they knew of me -- very few of them know me now, and I'd love to introduce them to this person.
This person who runs races and runs websites and has a career she enjoys and a husband who holds her hand and a baby boy who's got it all and then some. Have I mentioned his smile?
This person whose hip bones you might not be able to see from across the room but who hasn't been in an abandoned park in a really, really long time.