The plastic smile

I have mastered the “plastic smile” that everything is OK or good and I may seem like an open book to most people that know me but I tend to hide a lot of things.  See, when you are overweight and/or have a debilitating disease, like MS, you want to conceal yourself in one way or another, either by wearing dark clothing so you don’t stand out or just by being everyone else’s cheerleader to draw the attention away from you.  I don’t just do this to my friends and family but I also tend to bury things deep inside of me. Things I just don’t want to think about because they hurt too much, meaning anything from feelings, pain, embarrassment, etc.  This maybe one reason I ate so much.  Maybe I was trying to keep down all of my hurt and vulnerable feelings by eating.  I know that I have heard that said many times on talk shows about loosing weight and dealing with your feelings but as I sit here and try to open up, I think there maybe some truth to it.  There are times when I’m alone, and I know I’m not the only one, but I start thinking and all of these feelings that I have deep inside of me start to like bubble.  Resentment is a big one.  Resenting things I have done or should have said to someone,  Also the dreaded ‘missed opportunities” that I should have taken. I’m starting to realize that I tend to use my MS and my weight as a crutch or talk myself out of things.   Things that looking back now, I know I could have handled or have had a lot of fun doing.  I need to stop doing this but how?  I’ve lost the weight so now it’s just the MS that’s the crutch.  How do you stop doing something that you’ve been doing for so long?

I was never really heavy until Chris and I moved in together and we had that “honeymoon” stage where all you do is go out to eat.  You know what I’m talking about, the “we are comfortable with each other” so lets eat a super sized sundae from Friendly’s just about every night.   Oh my goodness, thinking back to all those times we would get our 5 scoop sundae from Friendly’s and eat it like it was nothing, now makes me sick.  That was our relationship.  My husband and I.  We would as he says, eat to eat, even if we weren’t hungry.  I guess that was a big part of our relationship for a good 13+ years.  Since loosing the weight, we have a different relationship, a better one I think.  It’s not all about food anymore or sitting on the couch watching tv.  We work out together, kayak together, activities that I never imagined I could do again with this disease.  I actually started reading again and am enjoy it, now that could be because of the trashy romance novels I’ve been reading but who cares, I’m reading!  I’m trying to show my kids that things like reading or kayaking for the first time, even in my 40’s, is something you can do, that age or weight or a disease shouldn’t stop you from living a life, a life that can be so much more that what it used to be.

You know, when you enter a journey of loosing weight, you think it’s just about the weight until one day you look at yourself in a mirror and don’t just see the new outside you but you start asking yourself who the person really is on the inside. Something you don’t do when you are overweight because you don’t like looking at yourself in the mirror.   You start to question if the people around you are good influences or bad.  You feel good about yourself and what you have accomplished and being around negative people or negative influences can be difficult when you are on such a high, a feeling that you never really had before.  So relationships start to change.  I have had to cut out some of the negative people in my life, mostly family believe it or not, some friends.  I didn’t do this because I want to be mean but because I’m still learning and trying to figure out who this new me is or who I want to be.  I know that I want to be a great mom to my 2 kids, a supporting and loving wife to my husband but what else do I want from this life?  That is a hard question to answer and it takes time to figure out.  I’m hoping by opening up on this blog of mine that it will help me figure out this question along with some other questions I have.