So, I have been writing a blog for over 5 years now. It hasn’t always been here, and it hasn’t always looked like this, but it has always acted the same.

It’s always been just like I am – afraid to talk about what matters most.

I can’t think of a better night to go ahead and talk about one topic that I have intentionally avoided.

ahem.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that you can adopt whatever persona you want. You can be anyone. You know the best angle when you’re taking a self-portrait, right? It’s the same way with a blog. You can make yourself look prettier, smarter, more clever, and skinnier than you are in real life.

I have a condition that the people who know me in real life know about.  I don’t talk about it on my blog because I am afraid that nobody wants to read about it. It’s at times debilitating, physically and emotionally. Sometimes I forget that I even have it. Sometimes it defines me.

Sometimes it goes beyond defining me, and it eclipses every last good thing I have ever done and serves and the only true benchmark as what I failure I truly am.

The condition is listed in my medical chart right between Hypothyroidism and Mononucleosis.

“Obesity, Morbid.”

It’s scary just to type it out. It puts tears in my eyes just to look at it there, so much so that right now my eyes are rooted to my keyboard the way they might be if you and I were face to face right now. I’m ashamed of it. I am afraid that someone who just stumbles across this blog will not care what I have to say once they know that a fat person wrote it.

But the reality is this: I am the kind of fat that people point at in public, that they call their friends over and whisper about. I am the kind of fat that needs a seat belt extender in an airplane, that is afraid to walk through a turnstile, that is afraid to sit in a folding chair because i actually broke one once. I don’t go to amusement parks. I don’t want my picture taken.

I was always kind of overweight. But I went through a rough patch in high school (OK, so high school WAS the rough patch) and I ate my way through it. I gained 50 pounds my sophomore year. 50 pounds my junior year. I think you can see where this is going. I ate for comfort, I ate for escape, I ate for control. I ate because I was lonely, because I was bored, because I was scared. I ate because I didn’t know how to do my homework. I ate because I thought I wasn’t good enough. I ate because I thought I was stupid and I would never amount to anything.

I went to a dietician last Wednesday, because I am finally near the end of my rope. As part of the appointment I had to write out my dieting history. And I realized that as of next year it will be 20 years that I have been obese. I have gone through my entire life thinking that 5 years from now I would finally be thin. Even when I set my goal with her, I said that I would like to be there by the time I am 40.

I have counted carbs, calories, and points. I have thrown up, I have starved myself, and I have tried to stop dieting and eat intuitively. I have cut out meat, I have cut out dairy, I have cut out sugar and caffeine.

And I can’t do it. Somehow, no matter how hard I try, no matter how diligent I am, no matter how many good days I string together, I always fall. I always fail, and I always grow back into my too-big clothes.

Except, the reason I am here today, spilling my guts and my fat rolls all over the internet, is because I actually, finally, really think I can do it. I think I can see collarbones one day.

I can feel mine, when I push down and move my shoulder funny. I touch them every day to remember what I am after.

Every day, I eat an egg and some toast first thing.  I try to move more than I want to. Every day, I try to think about what food will help me if I put it into my body. I try to listen to my hunger signals, my thirst signals, my tired signals, my stress signals. Every day, I try to breathe in and breathe out. I stretch. I walk. I chew. I set small goals. I rejoice in the little things.

Every day, I try. That is my new plan, believe it or not. When someone asks me if I have been sticking to my diet, I don’t think about what I have been eating. I think about whether or not I have given up. If I am still going, and I am still moving, and still walking, and still breathing, I consider my plan a success.

Try, every day. That’s my diet now.

There is someone out there who loves you the way you are. He will pick you first, over a state full of women who look like movie stars.

You will not have to compete with other women to get your man. You will not have to play games or bend yourself into someone you are not.

We are worth being able to be ourselves:

Brilliant, hilarious, loud, crabby, cheesy, mousy, snaggle-toothed. Bon Jovi fans, book lovers, cat lovers, overeaters, hard workers, super slackers. Grammatically correct, politically biased, and challenged in the kitchen. Mopey, hyper, Type A, antisocial.

We are who we are. We like what we like. It’s what makes us… US. It’s what makes you… YOU.

You, no matter who you are, deserve to have someone who loves you and wants you for one reason:

Your “you-ness.”

Don’t doubt yourself, and don’t sell short your awesomeness. As I used to like to say, “There is a lid for every pot.”

As I also used to like to say, “Where my lid at?” It’s hard to wait. I know it’s heartbreaking. I used to burst into tears waiting in line to get an oil change, because I wanted to meet my husband so badly.

But the thing that is more important than being in a relationship, finding the one, getting married, finding that dang elusive lid?

YOU. You matter. You rule. You are so cool. There is nobody like you, nobody with your laugh, your eyelashes, your weird triangle of a little toe, your memory, your singing voice, your sense of humor, your tenderness, your beauty, your strength.

Don’t sell yourself short, and don’t change a thing. You are worth so much more than that.

In case you were wondering:

New York is my heart.

i am turning another year older next wednesday, and to say i have not been taking it like a champ is an understatement.

i am outgrowing my own life at the speed of light.

i have not planned ahead for this, and now i am feeling like i have nothing to wear, metaphorically speaking.

i am so ready to move on, and i think this birthday might be just the push that i need.

When I was in college, I had to take a foreign language for 4 semesters to graduate. I felt that I was pretty French-ed out from high school, and I had always wanted to learn American Sign Language (ASL), so I enrolled.

On my first night, I already knew the alphabet and how to say “my name is”, but that was about it. Thankfully, I really took to the language. It was very easy for me to learn. I also had a completely awesome teacher. He was just so clear and easy to imitate.

I had a few opportunities to use my signing skills. I did a bit of tutoring for other students. I dabbled in interpreting at my church at the time (TERRIFYING). My ASL instructor was in the audience during my first shot at interpreting, which I thought I had completely bombed. He described my interpreting compared to the other interpreting something like this: a radio that was playing static got tuned to the right station, and suddenly everything becomes clear (how a deaf person can whip out an awesome analogy like that, i didn’t think to ask!).

I love ASL. I am also terrified of it. I have the same fear of ASL that I have had of everything in my life: that although I am good? I am just not good enough. I have wanted to become an interpreter, a teacher, ANYTHING to let me use ASL more in my life. I think in ASL while I am driving to try to remember words. I haven’t signed with another human being since… maybe 2003.

Until tonight. I saw two women signing in the produce section at the grocery store. I couldn’t help it. I caught one of them as she was leaving the produce section and asked point blank if there was a sign language group of any kind in the area. Then the woman she had been chatting with, who turned out to be her (deaf) ASL instructor, came over and told us that there is a deaf coffee chat on the second monday of every month.

My heart leaped! The ASL instructor wanted to know where I learned ASL, if I lived in the area, and that kind of stuff – and probably the second thing she said to me was:

Your sign is good!

My sign is good. I wanted to cry. I am so happy right now. I have spent the last hour talking to Mr. Thor about sign language, teaching him some fun signs, and just reminiscing about how great my own ASL instructor was.

At the end of the night, Mr. Thor just looked at me and said, “You’re a really cool person.”

Tonight, my husband and I went to my parents’ house to help them with some gardening work. They have several nicely landscaped and mulched areas, but they haven’t really been able to get around to weeding and mulching them yet.

We spent an hour pulling and digging and grunting and squatting and bending over. Honestly, I did most of the grunting and complaining, because I’m kind of dramatic that way. We filled up two wagon-loads with weeds and invasive plants and dumped them in the woods. OK. Honestly, HE dumped them in the woods.

Even though I got filthy and sweaty and kept forgetting i shouldn’t use a muddy, mulchy glove to push my hair out of my face? It was amazingly fun. I already hurt. My poor knees. I have elderly knees, I fear.

It also got me thinking about roots. I mean, above the ground, there is this green thing. Maybe tall and spindly. Maybe with dark green, broad leaves. Maybe with odd, purplish pods. And you look at that thing, and you think, that’s that. That’s a plant. That’s what I need to pull up.

And I understand that you need to pull things up by the roots. But man!

The roots are a whole other world. They are colorless, and dirty, and stinky. They are spindly and strong. They are wide, and when you pull them up, stuff moves. The surface does not look the same, just without the plant. Mulch that was underground is now above the ground. Worms and spiders erupt from the ground at the disturbance. The roots break and run.

Tonight, I was pulling tall grass. The really thin stuff with a little plume on the end (not a gardener). And you’d think – OK, easy! It’s skinny. It can’t have these gnarly roots like the blue things! And it doesn’t. The roots are thin. But they also snake up to a foot away! So pulling up the grass upsets lost of other stuff. Even stuff I didn’t want to pull out of the ground came up because pulling the grass root up just kind of bumped the other stuff out.

So, of course all of this got me thinking metaphorically. And I was thinking how sometimes when you get the root of weeds in your life, you accidentally knock some other plants out of the dirt too. But, I guess the good thing about plants and dirt, even metaphorically, is that with some care, you can usually get things to grow again.

Mr. Thor and I just got back yesterday from a whirlwind trip to Boston. Don’t you love when people say “whirlwind trip?” Maybe I shouldn’t say it, because there was actually a tornado in Mass today. Do you think we left our whirlwind there?

We said that we were just going to take it easy. No plans, just meeting up with friends on Sunday afternoon and a Red Sox (!!) game on Monday night.

What actually happened? We were both like kids in a candy store, unable to stop moving, looking, touching, walking… until our bodies simply gave out under the forces of heat and/or exhaustion.

I was too hot to eat much, and in the mornings I couldn’t handle more than coffee. Mr. Thor, on the other hand, was an eating machine.

I want to write a more extensive post, maybe even a little hotel review here. But for now, I leave you with this. Sunday night, I totally and completely “crapped out” – no more walking, no putting my glasses back on, not really even getting out of bed.

However, I was also completely ravenous, as I had eaten approximately one cannoli and five slices of portabella mushroom that day and walked approximately 73 miles, also.

Apparently, Mr. Thor was more tired than he initially let on, because it took me 2.5 seconds to convince him to… order ROOM SERVICE!

The previous night, I had tentatively pulled out the menu and he scoffed. This night, he asked to take a closer look. Hallelujah.

I ordered a cup of clam chowdah, a wedge salad, and a cheese plate. I think Mr. Thor thought this was completely ridiculous. OK, I know he thought it was. He kept shaking his head (as he shoveled in steak) and saying, “I can’t believe you ordered THAT.”

It was wonderful, and marvelous, and everything in between. I wish I could touch 39 any night of the week, honestly.

While I was still processing my Oprah-tastic insights, I stumbled upon something in my google reader lineup that made me stop in my tracks. I almost skimmed right over it because of the post’s title (“pleasing dishtowels and good for them“), but i caught a glimpse of the dishtowel fabric and i really liked it.

The blog, is, to oversimplify, a sewing and craft blog. I love the tone, the inspiring fabrics, the tutorials, the title, and the coolness. This is exactly the kind of blog that spurs me to want to create. Which means that in the end I usually just do nothing and feel guilty and inferior to pretty much every crafter I have ever known or seen.

But this post gets at how we should kind of stop doing that. And that is what stopped me in my tracks. She presents this idea: rather than examining the achievements of others and possibly comparing them to your own achievements…maybe just letting it go. To say “good for them” and move along.

When the film Garden State came out, it crushed every dream I had ever had of making a movie. I had a very Garden State-ish phase in my late teens and early 20’s, and I had sort of fictionalized it and cleaned it up and made it into a movie in my mind. And then I saw Garden State. And then, I called my friend Stephanie on the phone, and I said, “Zach Braff made my movie.” And I cried. Hard.

Which leads me to the other earth shattering, yet completely common-sense point that Amy Karol brought to light in her blog: There is enough.

Saying to myself “good for them” also reminds me what I have believed for a long time now—that there is enough. Enough creativity, success, achievement, accolades, attention, for everyone. The achievement of any one person doesn’t take away the potential or realized achievements of anyone else. There is enough for all. By saying “good for them” I take myself out of the comparison—it has no bearing on what I do. Or what I choose not to do.

I chose to quote her directly because there is no better way to say it. I can’t stress enough how important it was to see these concepts in print. Creative people are sensitive, and also critical of other creative people. And also, themselves.

In the end, everything I do is about me. It’s not about other people, it’s not about expectations, it’s not about disappointment, and it’s not about making stuff that is better than other people’s stuff.

It’s about, “what is in me that I am willing to move to the outside of me as a work to share with the world?” It should be that simple.

Yesterday, one of my facebook friends posted a link to the transcript from Oprah Winfrey’s last show. I have never been a huge follower of Oprah, but I have definitely admired her for her accomplishments.

OK. I would be a serious liar if I said that I never watched one (or maybe several) of her shows and just bawled like a little baby.

Oprah said that the episode was her love letter to her followers. She said some lovely things about her time on the air. I have always been amazed by the level of grace with which this woman seems to operate. Even on her final show, the words she chose conveyed such a level of grace and wisdom.

What struck me the most as I read through the transcript of the last show was the sense Oprah gave of passing the torch. She basically said, “Thank you for doing for me what you claim I have done for you. Now go, and do unto others.” She spoke of our circle of influence and how we can have an impact on even a small number of people.

This really resonates with me. I have always wanted to be a person who can make a difference, somehow. I don’t care if I ever cure a disease or end hunger or suffering (although, who wouldn’t want that if it were within the powers of one person?).

Honestly, more than anything, I just want to get to the end of it all and realize that I did the best I could with what I was given – the best I could to show love, patience, kindness. The best I could to make people feel welcome and not alone. The best I could to listen, understand, and “be there.”

The only problem that I see with this grand mission of mine is… well, me. I am tired. I am unfulfilled. I am lonely. I have needs. I am creatively stagnant (and that is an understatement).

It takes all I can muster, once I am done with the commuting and the working, to do things like: go to the grocery store, pack lunches, go to the library, and stop eating ice cream. I have a ridiculously short attention span. I have a ridiculously low level of follow-through.

Some days, I can’t even find my pants.

So. Oprah. Dear Oprah. How does a mildly ambitious (when I am paying attention), bleeding heart, compulsive eating, lucky-to-even-be-wearing-pants kind of person even begin? Where is the love letter for that?