Time Now for a Commercial Break in the Ongoing Saga of Delilah’s Mirror

I thought at great length about my new year’s resolutions for 2002. All the old goals are in full swing and working, so repeating them was redundant. But my personality demands a new year’s resolution, and so I thought and thought.

When I was a child, learning how to play the piano, I would go back and correct the mistakes I made. The sour notes, the bad timing, the stumbles and bumbles of learning. My teacher and my mother, also a pianist, would tell me repeatedly to stop trying to correct the mistakes. It made them more noticeable, it made your concentration for the rest of the piece shatter, and it ruined your confidence in your ability and talent and training.

Life has its sour notes, bad timing, stumbles and bumbles of learning. I have been holding on to all my old hurts as “mistakes” that I need to try, somehow, to go back and correct. Losing weight has FORCED me, because of the new way people interact with me now that I’m visible, to look at these things. Now that people “see” me, they feel free to intrude upon my space, my time, my thoughts, and my peace – a situation which my best friend summed up in one deadpan statement: “Welcome to the world of normal people.”

I’m not sure I like the world of normal people. I’m encountering new hurts I’ve never encountered before and I don’t have room in my soul for the old ones *and* the new ones too. So what to do, what to do? I came up with these options:

Keep holding my old hurts. They are comfortable and familiar and maybe I can go back and fix some of them and clean them up. Now, the kicker to this is that I would have to gain weight to do this, as the new hurts come from having more interaction with people. So I sat down and asked myself, “What’s so bad about being thin?” And the answer is: Everything. It’s the unknown, the frontier.
Release some old hurts to make room for the few new ones I’m willing to accept. There’s logic to this. I can get used to a few things at a time. But you know what? They don’t come a few at a time at a rate I can absorb them and disseminate them. They are coming fast and furious and I can’t keep up.
Let them all go. Now, this is terrifying. What will I do without them? How can my obsessive-compulsive personality accept that I CANNOT “fix” them? Do I really want all that room in my soul for brand new hurts that are uncomfortable and unfamiliar? And… letting them go means to hurt some people, let some people think I’m a flake, accepting that I just can’t fix some things and that some things aren’t meant to be fixed, and that some things weren’t mine to fix in the first place.

In the midst of a crying jag about some of these new and improved hurts, during a time when I’ve bounced between 233 and 255, cheated with deliberate intent to anesthetize myself with food, I said to myself, “I don’t have to do this. If I gained back the weight, I would be in familiar territory again.” And I had to ask if being thin and open to new and different hurts was worth this pain.

“Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.” Well, I knew it was hooey then, and now I know it for even DEEPER layer of hooey. Being thin (especially when one has never been) is scary as hell.

So…I knew I didn’t really want to go back to the physical reality of being that heavy. And I know too much to “un-know” it, so that would make me miserable. And… well, maybe, somewhere deep down inside, I *want* to experience the new hurts. And I’m a clothes fiend and I WANT to wear some of that stuff. Maybe I want to become that woman that I’ve been “trying” (ha) for so long to become. I cannot become that woman if I am unwilling to walk through the fire of the fear of the unknown.

My churning thoughts and my need for a New Year’s Resolution merged, finally.

I decided to let go of my old hurts. On December 31, I wrote a list of the things I’m grateful for. On January 1, I wrote a letter to my old hurts and burned it. Now, this isn’t automatic, I found – it’s an ongoing process.

As I become more and more aware of the old hurts I am letting go, I feel my soul opening up and becoming light and airy (even as other, unfamiliar types of hurts come in). My other goals (non-weight-related) are starting to come to fruition. And funny thing… the old hurts are starting to “fix” themselves.