Day two Hundred and thirty One!!!!!!!!!!!!!

High school.


High school is a weird time, your hormones are raging. Peter, who was a foot shorter than you has now sky rocketed to a 6’2 tower, and you only have clear skin when no one is around. When I was in high school I started my weight loss journey, and by grade 12 I had lost 70 pounds. A lot of people noticed, especially my friends; I remember once I was at my locker and Jane (not real name) skipped over to me and congratulated me on my weight loss. I was always bigger than my friends, except for one, who was scarily over weight. I realized later, during my journey that her weight was because of her ongoing trauma.


As the years have gone by I am at now my lowest weight, again. The other day I entered a store in my hometown and briefly caught a glimpse of a woman I used to know, Jane. Our entire high school career she was smaller than me, she even started to lose weight around the same time I did. But when I saw her in the store I was shocked to see that she had gained probably 80 pounds. I was shocked.
I saw another girl from my high school who used to be stick skinny, but when I recognized her in Pennington’s I was shocked to she had gained around 100 pounds.


Seeing people who used to be much smaller than me and yet now heavier than me now, really made me think about our previous relationships. Jane was always high on herself and was the epitome of “well at least I’m not that big.” You know those people, the people who can do no wrong because at least they are not doing as much wrong as they think are being done by other people. When I saw her in the store we made brief eye contact, but she immediately darted her eyes away, needless to say she didn’t skip over to me and congratulate me.


I am incredibly hard on myself about my body, every suggestion or comment made towards me is carefully filtered through the ‘was that an insult?’ part of my brain. Looking at my former class mates and how they have ‘let themselves go’ has and I say this at the risk of seeming like one of those ‘at least I’m not’ people, allowed some leniency towards me on myself. I haven’t lost the weight that I thought I would by this time, but I have not gained all the weight that I had lost back, which is a feat in and of itself. 


Even though my friend was high on herself, hard to get along with at times, and talked about her music teacher crush unrelentingly, I felt bad for her. I understand what it is like to not feel at home in your body but I have learned to live with it. Jane however must be experiencing this as a new hurtle because she was relatively thin her entire life that I had known her, until now. Another point I want to mention is that high school really is the first season of a reality TV show, in some kind of ongoing and relentless TV sitcom. I have waited years to see how Jane has turned out. I knew Jane’s mother in high school. My mother always told me, if you want to see how someone will turn out just look at their mother/father. Jane’s mother was always been very large, I am going to guess 300-350 pounds. That is her genetics. Jane has not gotten to that size yet, but she’s working on trying to achieve it. I am however, trying to work against my genetics. No small feat!