What I've learned in the last year

My goal in posting this is so that if you are still pre-op that you are prepared for the ways your life will change in ways that don't have anything to do with the number on the scale and for the people that are post-op to know that if they had to deal with any degree of these feelings that they aren't alone, because I know sometimes I thought I was crazy for feeling this way: So...my one year has come and past and as I look at the last year of my life I reflect... Having the surgery was definately one of the best decisions that I have ever made in my life. I don't regret it at all. My life has changed more in this last year then it had ever done-through all aspects of life in my entire life. I have experienced more this last year then ever before. I have learned more about myself, my limits, my abilities, my feelings, my tendancies, my friends, the way that I think...everything. I look back at the year and there were definately hard times, many in fact, losing the weight didn't solve all of my problems like I initially thought that it would. I learned that I was blaming too many of the bad things that were going on in my life on my weight and after losing the weight now, I have had to learn how to deal with those things and how to deal with the feelings that came from learning that it wasn't just the weight, but that the weight was just the easiest scapegoat. I look back at the last year and I concede that college is a time for experimentation, college is a time about learning about yourself, college is a time of change, college is a time of personal growth, but when you add the fact that I was also undergoing a time of drastic physical change, a time of drastic change in social oppertunities, a time of drastic change in available oppertunities, a time of drastic change in personality (with a new sense of confidence), it is just so much bigger. There were a lot of times that I look back on that I just think, "What the hell were you thinking?" or "I can't believe that happend!" or "Why did I let that happen?" or "Who is that person?" I think that with my weight change all of these other oppertunities came into my life: guys, partying more, new friends, challenges with the old friends, spending too much money on clothes, family challenges, feelings of jealousy from others, my own desire to be in the "middle of everything," my inability to say no (which comes from never being able to say yes before), my lack of trust in what God has planned for myself...there is just so much that I learned about myself when I lost my weight and just kind of let myself live not thinking too hard about anything else but what was directly ahead of me-and sometimes not even that. After all of these challenges came though, they went. I grounded myself and reflected on my life. I took the experiences that I had and appreciated that I had them because if I hadn't I would never have learned from them. I took the challenges that I had undergone and remembered the things that I liked about myself before and took what I liked about myself now and created a person that is a mixture. Hopefully it is the right mix, probably not perfect yet, but a mix none-the-less. I now realize that I have been given the best oppertunity of my life, I have been given the oppertunity to re-create myself. Over the course of a year I have tried out a lot of different types of people...I have done a lot of different things, some good, some bad, some indifferent. And I realized that I don't need to be any one catagory of person, I can be whomever I want. And I think that I know now what I want. I want to be a girl that is focused. I want to be motivated, I want to be committed, I want to be diligent, I want to be a good listener, I want to be a follower sometimes and a leader other times, I want to be fun, I want to be able to party when the time is right and go to bed early when the time is right, I don't want to feel guilty about my choices, I don't want to hurt the people around me, I don't want to be a conformist, I don't want to be a Monday through Friday Christian, I don't want to be obsessed with what others think of me, I want to be confident, I want to be reassured that there is only one love that I am striving for everyday-God's, I want to be uplifting to others, I want to be satisfied, I want to be healthy, I want to enjoy what I have and be happy for others who are enjoying what I want and they have. I want to love myself the way that I am and I want others to love me for the way that I am. Without this surgery and the experiences that followed it I would have never learned all of this. I thank God everyday for the oppertunity to not only get healthier from this surgery, but for the oppertunity to get to know the real Jennifer that I knew was there, but just couldn't find on my own.