Is that possible? It might not be. It might be that the language of bodies, the language applied to bodies, is too emotionally weighted, has got too much baggage surrounding it, to ever be stripped free of its associations and applied objectively and dispassionately. But that's what I want. I want someone to look at me, and tell me exactly what they see, because I have no idea, at all, what I look like. I've wanted that all along, all the way down the points on the scale. But now, I feel like I need to know.
I've got all this extra skin, see. It's far, far less skin than I expected--sometimes, I feel like it's way less skin than I deserve, after all those years of being overweight, and then obese. Shouldn't my skin have stretched to its breaking point? Oughtn't I look exactly like a melting candle? That's what happens, when you are fat and then you are thin. But I lucked out. I am droopy in the arm, and very small of breast. The flesh of my stomach crumples, and can be pulled taut, to either side of my waist. There's a pooch, where my fanny pack of fat, the part of my body I unfairly heaped the most hate upon, used to be, but it does not obscure my knees--it hangs down hardly at all. And then my thighs, which sort of ooze slowly downward, wrinkling into my knees, and my butt, rounding down to little folds just above the backs of my legs.
I want to take off my clothes in front of someone and say, What does this look like? I mean, is it awful? Do I look terrible? Do I make you embarrassed to look at me? Do I look a thousand years old? Do you think it'll all go away, if I start lifting weights like an insane mad person? It's all perfectly ordinary, right? Will that solve my problem? Is it a problem at all? Can I live with it? What do you think--could you live with it? Or would you start fantasizing about plastic surgeons, and thinking about how your body's going to finally be okay, once you get rid of this last barrier to being awesome and perfect, with absolute no hand-holds for mockery. There will be absolutely nothing for anyone to pick on me for, right? Once I get rid of the skin? I'll be inviolable, and unflappable. Literally! No flaps! Literally no hand-holds. Unless you count the enormous plastic breasts I'm sure I will be suckered into installing into my chest.
Maybe what I want is someone, with no stake in my self-esteem, with no reason to want me to feel happy, to tell me that it is okay. To give me permission to just give it up and get on with living my life in the imperfect body I've ended up with. I'm a smaller person, and it's changed my life in an uncountable number of ways, so many for the better. Isn't that good enough? It ought to be. That's what I got into this whole mess, with the weight-loss surgery, for. To be smaller, to be healthy, to get on with living my life, without worrying about my body. Did I really believe that would happen just automatically? It seems to me that I did. I can't believe, however, that I was really that naïve.
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