Here is a chat I had with my brother today.

 

me: i am supposed to write a blog post but i got nothin

bro: i never understood blogging

me: you’d have to be like me to understand it

bro: people writing about things that piss them off, or things they find entertaining rather than actually doing things

online viewable diaries

terrible

me: someone who likes blogging and someone who doesn’t like blogging won’t be able to communicate effectively about blogging

sometimes, though, one blogs about her fun life and her goals

and the fun stuff after it has happened

bro: I guess I just don’t see the allure of sharing that with people across the world, I would much prefer to tell my close friends in person that I went bungee jumping or beat up a clan of ninjas

me: some of us don’t have any close friends that we see in person

most of my close friends are only available online. they live far away.

bro: road trip!

me: and i will blog about it

bro: incorrect

me: well, let’s just say

i am a pretty good writer

i am not able to write a book at this time

bro: or that you write well

boom englished

bro: haha its fun to be me

so you write short stories?

me: no, i write blog posts

short, true stories. about my life.

bro: well carry on

whatever makes you happy

me: it sounds kind of pathetic when i describe it.

bro: i’m not judging you out loud

me: i know, but i am very perceptive to your silent judgment.

bro: well then consider yourself judged, and then you can kindly tell me to stick it

 

I think the entire internet can hear me sighing, deeply.

I am starting a blog challenge. I know that there are others of you out there, those of you who REALLY want to blog but can’t seem to get into the swing of posting.

Fancy a challenge? It’s EASY, I promise. ONE post to start – anyone can do that!

Head over to the Mrs. Thor facebook page and comment on the challenge post.

And no, this post does not count as a post for the purposes of the challenge! 🙂

I make my husband a sandwich just like this most weeknights.

Not pictured:

The salad I make most nights

The apple I cut up most nights

Also not pictured:

The dishes Mr. Thor does most days

The coffee Mr. Thor gets ready most evenings (with a timer!)

The garbage that Mr. Thor takes out most weeks

…OK, now it looks like my contributions are puny! I do laundry, too.

Which brings me to what is also not pictured:

how much I love being married.

 

I have been absolutely inundated with spam comments today. I typically get a few every day, but today I have received over 70 (and counting). To try to alleviate some of this spamming, I have installed a captcha plugin. I tried to select one that it pretty easy to read. Please let me know if it’s OK for you, if you have trouble reading it, whatever. There is a little bar under the code so that you can make the text larger or smaller.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. 🙂

… is to read a Dilbert strip and say, “huh. I don’t get it.” I’m not quite there yet.

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.”