Beautiful

I spent a large part of my life somewhat to very overweight.  Now I weigh a hundred pounds less than I did in high school and I’m baking cookies and cupcakes like flour is being discontinued.  Sometimes I pass windows and mirrors and have to double take because I rarely recognize the blonde I see reflected wearing the same dress I am.  Every once in a while when I’m brushing my teeth or checking the hem of my skirt, I catch my own glance in the mirror and have to stop and take myself in.  It’s not a vanity thing, I don’t think, but more of an information-gathering exercise. “Oh, so my nose does that now…  My eyes look different this way.  My arm looks like that…  Oh, so my legs look like this when I do that...”

I don’t feel like the chubby girl I was in high school any more—I didn’t even feel that size when I was that size—I feel like the very curvy, well-padded girl I was at the halfway point:  fifty pounds less than when I walked across the stage to get my diploma, but still big enough to be “plus-sized” for several years.  I feel like that girl every time I leave the house, every time I go to a restaurant, every time I enter a crowded room.  Pretty but slightly ashamed. 

But I think I’m coming to terms with it, I think slowly and ever-increasingly I’m coming to understand who I am and what I look like in this new body.  Never in my wildest dreams would I have believed that I would EVER be the size I am right now.  I dreamed and longed to be this exact size, but only ever in the deepest, most secret recesses of my heart and imagination because I thought there was no way it could happen.  I honestly didn’t think it was possible unless I went on Survivor or something…

But now here I am, and things are not as I always imagined they’d be here in this daintier, bonier land.  Men don’t approach me as much as I thought they would.  In fact, I think I get less attention now than I did forty pounds ago.  I still can’t wear a bikini.  That sucks.  It’s a little more uncomfortable laying in bed with my laptop now that my hipbones are more prominent, and unpadded chairs can only be occupied for a few minutes at a time. I get cold easier.

I don’t really feel like I’ve won.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many advantages to being a woman on the cusp of being underweight in our society…  Right now I’m sitting in a painfully trendy café, and I know I fit in.  My hair is curled, and my emerald sundress is pulled down off of my tanned, lean shoulders.  I never have to think if I’m the biggest girl in the room any more, or wonder if a store’s largest size will fit me.  Dainty little flip flops with wispy straps always felt ridiculous on my pillowy feet, and now a delicate gold sandal hangs from my pedicured foot…  I can wear “skinny girl sandals”.

But sometimes I wonder what it all means.  I think of all the people who slave away at the gym and read about celebrity diets and are practically killing themselves to be thin, to be beautiful, to feel what I feel…  And it doesn’t seem worth it.  This?  This is what I agonized over for so many years?  This is why I cried myself to sleep so many nights?  This was the holy grail, and now I’ve got it and all I am is confused.

Nobody ever tells you this in Weight Watchers.

The victory that I’ve found, however, just comes back to all the truths I knew when I was bigger, but never allowed to sink in: that regardless my size, no matter what I look like in that dress or those jeans, I am beautiful because I am a daughter of the King.  And better than I look in the perfect outfit, I am more stunning, more outrageously beautiful holding a baby I love, or talking with the old lady at the supermarket who likes my sweater, or sitting on the cold bathroom floor with my sick friend in the middle of the night.  My heart makes me beautiful.  My smile can set the world on fire.  Not because of who I try to be, but because of who He is making me to be.  And that is worth finding.  That is worth seeking with all my heart.

I just wanted to be beautiful.  And I think I’m getting there.