A Letter to My Younger Self – specifically 17 year old me:
I’m looking at an album of pictures from your trip to Germany and I have to say that your appearance disturbs me. It isn’t for the reasons you think. Ok, the hair is a bit scary. (Fair warning: In 16 years it will be about 2.5 feet shorter.) But I’m talking about the skinniness.
What skinniness, you ask? You were always the fat kid in school. You weren’t teased overtly or anything it was just a fact. You were in the top 5 of largest kids in the class. So I’m looking at the pictures now and guess what? You were skinny.
I say this because I would kill someone to be at that weight again. I’m 50 lbs heavier now. It is blowing my mind to think that I’ve always thought of myself as “the fat girl” and now I realize that that description was applied to me at a weight I fantasize about now. The facts aren’t wrong. I was the fat kid but apparently I went to a school of anorexic freaks.
I was mentioning this to the husband last night (yes, we have one of those). He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what I meant when I said that I was dealing with pictures of me “50 lbs ago.”
“You were 50 lbs heavier than you are now?”
“No. I was 50 lbs lighter and thank you for making me say that out loud, dear.”
“How? Did anyone ever actually say you were fat?”
“It was just accepted as fact. I was a lot bigger than the rest of my class.”
“That’s impossible.”
I love his cluelessness at times. (Cluelessness was not so good earlier in the day when I was talking about a male kitten and he was convinced that I was trying to tell him a male cat had kittens.)
So, chin up, younger me. You look good. (Or you think that it goes downhill from here.)
