Insecurity

So, today I'm feeling very insecure. About my looks. This happens a lot. Way more that I admit to. Like, I was still changing my clothes at 2:00 this afternoon looking for that one perfect outfit that would hide all my flaws and make me look beautiful. I've been looking for that outfit for years.

See, I used to be heavier. Never actually fat, but kind of roundish. All my life I was like that. And I was perfectly happy like that, too. I made the normal complaints that everyone makes about the size of their thighs or what have you, but I didn't really care. I was always healthy and active. I've been a vegetarian for years and years. Sometimes I wore a size in the double digits, but it never fazed me. I was happy. Then life happened. All kinds of crazy and rotten things that were totally out of my control, but affected me anyway. And I lost weight. Lots of it, pretty quickly. Not that I was trying or even wanted to, but my body reacted to the situations I found myself in by not being able to eat - no appetite, sick to my stomach, all kinds of stuff that made eating unpleasant. I actually became too thin. Kind of skeletal looking. But a funny thing happened. People (okay not a lot, just a few key people who had always been pretty critical of my weight, but still...) started to tell me that I looked good. That's not something I was used to hearing. That's a nice sweater, sure.... The occasional your hair looks nice today. But never that kind of overriding compliment. And I kind of liked it. The compliments. Now, mind you, those closest to me were telling me that I didn't look healthy. The word anorexic was brought up more than once. But I heard the compliments. Not the concern.

Now life is life and the bad times eventually get better, and I eventually started eating again. And when I did, I started to put some weight back on. Not nearly as much as I had lost, but some. Like, I looked like a human again, instead of a corpse. No one has yet to say anything about it, the gaining some weight back. But now I'm all self-conscious about it. In a way that I never ever was before. I'm so critical of how I look in (or out of) clothes. Hence, days like today where I have to try on everything I own to find something I'll feel okay in. And the thing is, I know, logically, that I look fine! I can look at pictures of me from that unpleasant time of life and see that I look like a skeleton; see that I don't look healthy at all. But.... I have to admit that I kind of liked being that way. I liked having thighs that did not touch at all. I liked having a stomach that was flat without having to suck in at all. I don't have those things anymore. And I really didn't have them for long, but I did have them. And I did like it.

Of course, I don't ever ever ever again want to go though anything even remotely like what got me to that level of thin. And I don't want to deprive myself of things like chocolate to stay that way. And there were lots of not so good side effects of the thin thing (like losing what little bust I had to start with, and digestive issues that are still being dealt with). But I still can't help but beat myself up about my appearence on a semi-regular basis and sort of kind of pine for that way I was for that brief period of time.