Skeletons in my closet

I am weird. I know this. Years ago I chose to just accept my fate as an unusual creature and roll with it. As a result, I kind of amuse myself sometimes. Also, I’m terribly socially awkward.

I started a project yesterday that illustrated this fact. After months of procrastination, I’ve finally decided to tackle my closet—something I’ve been saying I will do for about a year. It’s scary in there, people. My closet is a wasteland of sizes that don’t fit me anymore but still hang around so that I don’t have to run around naked. There is also a pile o’ stuff lining the floor of the closet due to lack of storage space in my house. As such, my closet is literally full of surprises. Hello, size 20 skirt I didn’t know I still had. And good afternoon, random box of craft supplies.

Yesterday at the very back of the pile I happened upon a bridesmaids dress that I wore for a friend’s wedding in September 2007. Naturally, I wondered if it still fit, so on it went. It’s a size 16 dress that was kind of tight on me to begin with (girdles were almost necessary), and let me tell you there is room to spare in it now. Inches and inches of spare fabric are left empty where my body used to fill the space. It was odd. I know I have made my body smaller, but sometimes I still forget and surprise myself.

The thing of it is, I have some really bad memories from around that time period involving my body. Several nights before the wedding my friend’s neighbor mistook me for someone else and asked what was with my beer belly, mocking me before he realized he’d never met me. There were other things, comments from friends that they probably didn’t realize hurt me, dress shopping adventures where I had to try on a size 8 sample size and used humor to cover the fact that oh my god, that was just a ridiculous idea. It probably didn’t help that very little sleep was had for about three days prior to the event, but man did I feel like crap when I got home. I left for that wedding feeling pretty good about myself—I’d lost about 30 or 40 pounds at that point, and was in better shape than I’d been in for years. When I arrived back at home a week later I can’t say that I felt the same.

I remembered all of that last night when I tried the dress on. I can so clearly recall buying the size 16 and being excited that I was that size. I never thought I would be smaller than that. But here I am, able to put both my arms inside the dress along with my body and still have room to spare. How did that happen? I know that if I want to keep this weight off I need to fix things on the inside too, and so it’s important to think about how my mindset has changed. Part of the problem I’ve had in the past, I think, is that I never believed I could lead a life where I wasn’t fat. The saddest thing is that I think people around me thought the same thing. I believe in myself now, but does everyone else? I wandered my bedroom with the size 16 dress hanging off me, and realized that I loved myself then, and I love myself now. It isn’t so much that my mindset has changed, as it is that my ability to believe in myself is different. This was some deep Tuesday night thinking, my friends.

As I pondered, I found a really cute pair of shoes that I bought for $2 a long time ago. And that is how I came to find myself wearing a fancy red dress, with green sparkly heels, sitting on the floor of my bedroom cleaning my closet last night. I mean, that’s not that weird, right? You’ve all done it too? The closet never did get really clean, but at least I looked pretty bangin’ while I got distracted from my project.