Hey, Carrie.

I don’t like Peeps either. I think most seasonal candies are disgusting, the exceptions being chocolate bunnies, Cadbury eggs, and Milka eggs.

Speaking of Milka eggs, I dare you to find a better chocolate egg. I double dare you.

Well, maybe not a story because while it has a beginning and middle, it doesn’t exactly have an end. Perhaps vignette is a better choice, but who ever heard of “vignette time”? I posted this earlier on twitter, but it would be nice to have it in a more accessible place. It also gives me a chance to edit my thoughts and get away from the verbal diarrhea that site inspires.

I’ve always been a heavy girl. Well, maybe not always — I was fairly slender until elementary school — but for most of my life. By the time I was graduated high school, I was very very close to 200 pounds, which is a lot on my 5’1” frame.

I went to college at NYU, where I was necessarily a lot more active, walking everywhere because that’s what New Yorkers do, and ended up dropping 10-15 pounds freshman year; fuck you, Freshman 15! By the time I was a junior, I was about 40 pounds lighter than I was in high school.  I’ve been slowly gaining back the weight I’ve lost since then, especially since I moved back home last year, although I’m still quite a bit smaller than I was in high school.

Let’s go back to sophomore year, though, that’s when I got off the meal plan, lived even further away from campus, and lost even more weight. But this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. See, I was so paranoid about not having enough money to buy food that I basically stopped eating. And, of course, the weight flew off, and even though I was sinking into a deep depression, I began to like the way I looked: a dangerous cycle. I came very very close to an eating disorder. It took the bosses at my internship and my roomates to snap me out of it.

Fast forward to about 30 minutes ago. My mom found photos of me when I was a high school junior. It’s still a shock to see just how big I was, I didn’t even realize it, nor did my parents. Mom told me how proud she was of me that I had lost the weight, and of course, there’s that ellipses bubbling from under the surface of her praise. So I said, “What, are you disappointed in me now that I’ve gained some weight?”

And she of course answered that she was.

Even though she doesn’t know anything about the issues I had in college, it’s like she’s… affirming that self-destructive state of mind. And it’s frustrating. Frustrating and saddening.

And she doesn’t realize that comments like that don’t make me want to lose weight, oh no, quite the opposite. It makes me both not care about my looks and my health and spiteful.

And she wonders why I’m “disrespectful” and angry.

More specifically, I had an appendectomy when I was 14. I was out of commission for two weeks, but one of those weeks was Spring Break. So while I only missed a week of school, I also spent that school holiday recuperating, barely able to walk, with an IV feeding me antibiotics.

Yay.

No, seriously.

That’s exactly what happened to my father about thirty-five years ago, long before I was born.  At my mother’s insistence, he visited a few doctors and they told him that there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. And they’ve stayed that way to this very day.

Like floss and my glasses.