Three years + one day

Three years ago yesterday I had gastric bypass surgery.

That wasn’t a really fun day. I mean, in terms of the day itself.

My terror around what could go wrong in a major surgery was overshadowed by my terror around giving up food and beginning life with an altered, unfamiliar body.

And of course, excitement. Of course I was excited about what this new life could be like.

Looking back, my expectations around the recovery process were entirely inaccurate. It was far worse than I had pictured. The first days and weeks were dreadful, and the first four months were filled with intense fatigue, a mysterious back ailment, and a woefully downplayed (by my doctor) bout of constipation. I threw up. A lot.

And I was dropping pounds every day and sliding out of clothes as fast as I was acquiring them.

My expectations for how I would be, physically, three years later, were also inaccurate. I can eat a lot more now than I’d thought I’d be able to. I am a lot closer to normal.

I’ve also gained quite a bit of weight back.

dungkh dungkhhh.

But I think that my forecast of my personal journey was not too far off.

I was open to there being a lot of unknowns. I didn’t have solidified expectations. So that helped.

But here’s what I did think would happen. I’d start getting a lot more attention from men. I’d date more. (This is where the Fat Activists start getting really pissed off at me.) And I would really enjoy that.

Also I figured at about two years it would be time to go to therapy.

Right on all counts.

I wrote a lot about my early, transitional bar/drinking/picking up men adventures on my myspace blog (before I brought it over here).

I worked my way through a kind of adolescence, and fortunately, I’m a quick study. I understand that many women who lose the kind of weight that I lost find themselves illequipped; unable to cope with the attention. Not me. Nope. Not a problem.

One concern I had was that I would become an angrier person. (And I’d already acknowledged that I had become a harder person than I was content with. I’m still working on this.) I was worried that I would be angry at all the men who were digging me now, when I was so oft undug before.

Not a problem.

The ones I was (am) angry at are in their own very special category; men who had met me several times, hung out with me (while perhaps among a group of friends), seen me ‘do my thing’, (whether that thing be simply shine in a crowd or perhaps break out my guitar and sing), but because they were so dismissive of me sexually, and because they were so focused on those that were, in their opinion, sexually viable, they never took me in, noticed me, or remembered me from one time to the next. I hated those guys then, and when I lost weight and they did finally pay attention to me… those guys are seriously on the list.

The thing is… I’ve adjusted. Nearly fully adjusted. I’m not saying that I don’t have some residual, and that in some ways and in some instances my self-perception is off. But for the most part, I have embraced this new role.

It isn’t easy to fully express how bad my self-esteem was, but I’m gonna try.

There was always this guy. Over the years of my life he was a hundred different guys, but who he was in my eyes, (and who I was in relationship to him) was pretty consistent.

He was cool. Really cool. Tres sexy. And he liked me. Thought I was funny. Got that I was getting the jokes that the prettier girls were not getting. Got that I was the coolest one in the room. He might have been my camp counselor or teacher , or years later a guy in a band, or a boss, or even a friend.

And here is what I knew… KNEW I tell you, that we BOTH understood. 1) He would never want me. 2) He knew that I wanted him. 3) He had all the power because of my hopeless, pathetic crush on him that I had no chance of fulfilling.

And, by the way, who this guy was, was often inappropriate in other ways. Like, he was married or too old or young or had a girlfriend. None of this factored, for me, into why he wasn’t interested. It was ONLY because I was fat and not to be considered.

I believed all this, all my life. I never even considered a subtle, mutual attraction as a possibility. I would get intense, overpowering crushes, and I always assumed that the guy knew that.

These crushes, for the most part, served as my love life.

And any actual real guy that did come close, if he ended up hurting or disappointing me, was getting all my hurt and disappointment that I was living with every day, that I was sucking up each time this ‘cool’ guy (whoever he was at the time) gave me attention for coolness but wasn’t trying to sleep with me. Any time any one ever rejected me, (or didn’t want me, which to me was the same thing) it was because I was fat. I was sure of this.

Yikes. What a pathology. No wonder I was an angry person.

This week I noticed that it’s gone. That particular psychodrama is over.

There is someone in my life who I met this year. He is married. And he is damn sexy. And funny. And we have much in common. And he gets my hipness; appreciates how I get things that other people don’t. And oh yes married.

And how I have thought of him all along is someone with whom I have a little bit of a flirt, and a lot of mutual respect.

Just like that.

I haven’t declared him a CRUSH with all its implications of me-as-subordinate. I haven’t dubbed him ‘too cool for me’ or ‘out of my league’. I have not even bogged myself down with trying to figure out if he finds me attractive.

And I just noticed the other day that in the past, he would have been in that role. I would have been out of control, and instead I am happy to have this friend.

There is flirt there. There is affection there. And it all gets to remain right-sized.

(Kind of like me.)

This elevation of status that I have permitted for myself, it doesn’t go away with weight-gain. I get to keep it.

(And as for the therapy, about 3-4 months shy of two years, I started really feeling fragile. And as we know, it took me all this time to get myself into treatment.

I knew, as part of my decision to have the surgery, that there was a certain level of work, of me, that I could not access, unless I lost the weight. I knew that the surgery would make my life better in some ways, and by doing that, I could sort out what were weight issues and what were the rest. And that’s what happened. I am now exposed. And off we go.)

There is much work ahead. But I’m glad I had the surgery.