I promise no ranting. Like, actually. It's frightening, but hold fast; we'll get through.
So I've been losing some weight lately because I am a gym person. By which I mean I started going to the gym and regularly working out ~4 months ago and I have not stopped. Now I can't go to the gym anymore, because I'm not at college and there isn't free gym access (the real world is kind of crappy), but I'm still working out SO IT COUNTS. And I've started counting calories, in a really easy using an app kind of way. And it's been working! I'm down ~10 pounds (wow I'm really into the squiggly approximation mark today), which is fantastic. I've also passed a particular milestone that I don't care to share, but WOO MILESTONES.
The only problem with all of this is my parents and my sister. I mean, working out is great; I feel better and sleep better and think better and blabity blah everything they tell you about working out is actually true. But I'm a little late on my family's weight-loss bandwagon.
I'll set the scene: My mother is now approximately 40 pounds lighter than me, and my dad is something similar. I like to think it doesn't show that much, but look at that number. It's huge. It's like, the size of a small child. I'm slightly taller than her, so maybe it sits well on my frame or something, but seriously. There is no denying that number. And I didn't notice how much she was widening the gap until it was far too late, because I was at college eating literal tons of dorm food because I swiped for it dammit and I'm going to get my money's worth. Long story short, I came home from school to find that my mother was drastically thinner than me.
Okay. Let that sink in. My mother is a middle-aged woman. I am in college, so deduce my age (too slow, I'm 19). Nineteen. Not. Yet. Twenty. And my middle-aged mother is much thinner than me.
Let me describe to you how that feels:
Imagine your self-esteem as a bunch of cute little glass jars filled with self-esteem jam. They have cute checkered lid-cloths in fun colors! They have ribbons! It's adorable! You have a jar and some jam for each thing you like about yourself; you're funny, you're smart, you're pretty, you're good at drawing, you remember everyone's birthday, etc. Maybe the jars aren't full, but boy howdy it's nice to look have jam in them.
Sometimes things take a spoonful out of the jam. Could be failure. Could be insults. Could be other people's success. And you can see the dent in the jam from where the spoon dug in. It's upsetting. But it's only one jam-jar at a time, so you live with it and you keep on making jam (out of positive-thinking-berries?) and you move on.
My mother being almost 40 pounds lighter than me feels like she's taken a civil war cannon and blasted it straight through every single goddamn jam jar I have ever known. The contents are spilling all over. It's soaking into the ground. My jars are broken. People are bleeding. It's chaos.
Now I like to think of myself as a person who doesn't place too much emphasis on looks. I'm not totally shallow, I don't only like pretty people, my entire self-worth isn't my appearance, I pay my taxes. But when your own mother is that much skinnier than you and you have literally always disliked your weight it's hard to keep the jam in the jars, fellas. It's hard.
(Now I'm wondering if you maybe put the self-esteem jam onto life fulfillment toast and it makes it taste better or something, but let's stop before this metaphor really gets away from me.)
And that's not including my sister. (My dad doesn't count; sure, he's super thin, but he wears baggy shirts and cargo shorts and he's a man and it just doesn't count for some reason okay stop hounding me.) She's also skinnier than me, but heaven only knows how much. She's lived way out west for the past 9 months and I haven't stood side-by-side with her since around Christmas. We'll see when she gets here, but it's possible she will pick up the spilled jam I have been collecting and attempting to sort and smash it directly into my face.
We'll see.
The ultimate point (I got distracted by jam) is that even though I'm pretty consistently losing weight, I don't feel like it's good enough. I'm always downplaying my achievement. I don't have enough positive-thinking-berries to make any jam out of my weight loss. (See, it came back around.) I'm always thinking, yeah, whatever, I'm still not thin so what does it matter?
And that's bad for my jam. Or what's left of it.
In totally unrelated news, remember my fifth-wheel-related five-stage jealousy?
Almost completely gone.
THANK GOD FOR DISTANCE.
As they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend; and since the enemy of relationships is lack of contact, it has been kind to me. Not being around all my friends and their girlfriends and in particular one of those girlfriends has lightened my jealousy so much that I almost feel like a real person again.
IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL. I recommend it.
Okay. One long fruit-spread-based metaphor and some capital-letter happiness is enough for a post, I think.
Tell me about your self-esteem jam. Tell me about your lack thereof. Tell me about something. Prove you're alive.
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