Sorry guys, I’ve been slacking a lot on posting lately because school is sucking me in… I’m taking Psychology, Latin American History and Chemistry and they’re very, very difficult classes for me right now (mostly Chemistry, but the other two just add to my misery)…
Starting Weight: 266lbs Highest Recorded Weight: 283lbs Current Weight 162lbs Total Lost: 104lbs
I felt compelled to post this story that just happened the other day because it’s left my head spinning…
Fridays are Chemistry lab days. We go to class for 4 hours and work on mixing different chemicals and hopefully, not blow up the school in the process. This past Friday was what the teacher refers to as a “dry lab” meaning we do no mixing, we just have a normal class time where we learn as if we were in a regular classroom setting. The school I attend hasn’t updated their facilities since the school was built (they are slowly making the changes, but it will be a long time before the Chem labs are fully updated), so we’re forced to sit on these very uncomfortably old stools. During regular lab days, we don’t have to sit in them the whole time because we’re getting up and moving around gathering supplies, mixing stuff, etc. However, because this was a dry lab day, we’re all forced to sit the entire class.
We were about an hour in and my butt just couldn’t take it anymore, so I decided to grab the teacher’s chair (he wasn’t using it) and turn to face the board using his desk. Since surgery, I’ve lost about 90% of my weight in my butt, which wasn’t really big to begin with, so I find sitting to be incredibly painful at long stretches.
The teacher had given us a short break and while on this break, two of my lab mates (both guys) had started to chat with me sitting between them, when one asked if he could take my stool. I told him no problem, I had grabbed the teacher’s chair because the stool was killing my butt and we commented on the fact that the stools weren’t that comfortable.
I had let it out that I was worried about grabbing the teacher’s chair for fear of it being broken and totally flying backward in the middle of class in front of everyone.
If you’ve ever been big, youknow that fear of breaking chairs.
We giggled about it a little bit and the guy who’d asked for my stool had started to talk about when he was in another class, a guy “who was kinda big” had broken a chair he sat in. He started to say that it was really hard not to laugh, but it was so funny he couldn’t help it. The other guy was in agreement with him and before I knew it, I was saying how that had been one of my biggest fears when I was bigger. I then mentioned I’d lost 100lbs and it was really scary when you’d see a plastic chair or otherwise flimsy chair and worry if it was going to hold you up.
They quickly changed the subject and the conversation moved elsewhere.
That’s when it hit me. If I were bigger, they wouldn’t have been talking about such things right in front of me.
My perception of myself is that I’m still morbidly obese. I’m still the fat, lonely girl walking through life as a wallflower, unnoticed and unwanted. People are afraid to talk to me, or too prejudiced to talk to me, they gawk as if I’m a circus side show freak or as if I’m the reason they shouldn’t buy that scoop of ice cream.
But I’m not.
They were talking about this in front of me because I’m not, for lack of a better way to define it, 
abnormal. I’m one of them.
It’s strange.
My friends all know me and they know about my surgery. So hearing them say things like, “you’re a stick!” or “you’re disappearing!!” is nothing new. To me it’s almost as if they’re saying it just to be nice. As if they don’t really see it happening, but they want to make me feel good. I find myself asking the man all the time if I really do look that different.
He of course tells me I am, but I’m either too thick skulled or just really stuck mentally in that mode of being the fat person.
It’s only been 10 months since my surgery and I know it’s not going to change over night. It’s just very rough trying to not react to something like this. It’s like someone blowing sand in your eyes and trying not to blink.
This is definitely not something I could prepare for before surgery. It’s just so… strange…
