Which way is now?

I liken this blog to opening a vein and bleeding all over cyberspace...it will get messy, it will drain the life out of me and it will leave me weak. And yet, I can't avoid it anymore...it's time to cut myself open and expose my guts...no matter how gruesome or gory it may get.

My mother said that when I was very little I was an "itty-bitty thing"...an idea that is so foreign to me it still shocks me every time she says that. But somewhere around the age of 5 or 6, things began to change...food took center stage in my life and I began putting on weight. In first grade I was a little roly poly and by the time fourth grade rolled around I was attending Weight Watchers meetings. It was also around that time that I ceased living in the now and moved into the future..."one day, when I'm thin...one day, when I'm in shape...one day, when I have a slammin' bod..." 35 years later, that future has yet to materialize, even though those thoughts of "one day" still permeate my thought processes at least a thousand times a day.

Now I endeavor to journey back to the present - as strange as that sounds - to live for today. Such a simple idea - being here now - but an extremely difficult thing to do when you've placed yourself squarely in a time that will never exist - kind of like in the episode of the TWILIGHT ZONE where the parents awaken to their child crying in the night because she's somehow fallen into a different dimension and can't find her way back. That's me...the forty-year-old child trapped in a different dimension, just trying to come back to today.

I remember when I was having a rough time in my early twenties, my dad sent me a Family Circus cartoon that said "Today is a gift - that's why it's called the Present." While I've held onto it all these years, I don't think I really understood what it meant until now.

So there is my task...to find my way back to now. I figure that as I enter my 41st year on this planet, I should actually learn how to enjoy my life, and not spend my free time sequestered in my apartment using comfort foods and HGTV to quell the loneliness.

I have a couple of strategies in place to help bring me to the now. After a year and a half of the Hell Tour, I am finally ready to have the LAP band surgery. I started this process in March of 2009 and was rejected by insurance because I had to go through at least six months of medically supervised weight loss and begin an exercise regimen. Well, eight months later, I've done all they have asked me to do so the only thing left is to have the surgery...or not have the surgery...

The truth is, since I was rejected before, I'm gun shy and none of this will really feel real until the insurance comes through. When insurance denied me last fall it was as if they had taken my the basket where I kept every last one of my eggs and hurled it against a cement wall - it was brutal and I was so bitter that I took it out on myself through serious binge eating and putting on even more weight - pushing myself over 300 pounds for the first time in my life.

After flying into a fit of rage on New Years Eve because I found myself facing the same fucking resolution I'd had since I was five, I officially hit rock bottom and started the painful process of climbing out of the pit, which in my mind looks exactly like that hole where Buffalo Bill kept his victims in "The Silence of the Lambs." The stone walls are littered with the fingernails of my previous attempts to scratch and crawl my way out.

Today I had my "final" meeting with the social worker and the dietitian who are working on my case and came home and seriously binged for the first time in months. And I don't know if it's a reaction to the idea that this is really happening...if I needed to feel safe or numb. Whatever the reason, I feel like crap now...but it somehow propelled me past the seemingly endless preparatory phase of this blog where I endlessly futz with the insignificant details like what font you'll be looking at when you read this and what color background it will sit upon.

I'm determined that this time the journey is going to have a different outcome. I'm no longer going to strive for an unobtainable body or have unrealistic fantasies about a future that will never come. This time it's me learning to live inside of my own body - whatever shape it is. And while the process may not always be pretty, I have to remind myself that like beauty, ugly is also in the eye of the beholder. 

So here I am in the bus stop of my mind, a knapsack in one hand and in the other, a well-worn, dogeared post card that says "Greetings from Now...Wish You Were Here."