Limitlessness (a bit OT)
Limitlessness
Over the past 6 months or so I have worked very hard on self-acceptance by gaining a better understanding of my own personality traits, even those things about which I felt shame, and also by finally letting myself feel emotions to their full extent rather than trying to numb or smother them with food. Some of my friends and my therapist have helped and pushed me along the way. They will always have my gratitude for helping me find a sense of self, a feeling of wholeness I had never experienced before. My world suddenly seemed limitless with that personal awakening, ripe with all kinds of possibilities to follow my dreams, however fanciful they might be. Yet one cannot act without affecting those around you, so I took some time to ponder the potential implications of that fact. I don’t know if it was the multitude of possible consequences of upending some of the cornerstones of my life or my own fear and procrastination, but it has taken months to get myself to the point of being able to move forward into that limitless unknown.
More recently I have been comparing the cir****tances of my life and the choices I have made against what I now understand about myself, especially my abilities and my emotional needs. It is no wonder that I have felt like a stranger in a strange land for so long. The shame I felt for being an introverted, but imaginative, emotional, oversensitive, passionate person in a brute’s body led me to make decisions that pleased and satisfied other people, but the majority of those life-altering decisions were fundamentally inconsistent with who I really am and need to be. It would be easy to blame my parents, my wife or my various bosses over the years for where I find myself today, yet blame solves nothing and I need to take responsibility for what I choose to do from here on out.
In the last day I have begun the process of directly addressing the disparities between what I do for a living and my own peculiar emotional needs. I am afraid of the potential consequences of having done so because the degree to which I think things need to change seems likely to have far reaching impacts on most everything and everyone in my day to day life. It feels like I have lit a rocket under me and I don’t know if it will take me and the people I care about to new and wondrous places or explode into a million unrecognizable pieces of my lost sanity. Strangely, after months of fuss and worry, that joyful sense of limitlessness has returned, despite the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that lie ahead of me. …..and so begins another chapter in my life after weight loss surgery.
RP
In my case, after I lost the weight, I realized that my world had become incredibly small as I became larger and larger. I had retreated over a period of years, and suddenly I wanted to live out loud when I looked and felt good. It was jarring to me, my husband and my work relationships. But the pendulum has swung more back to the middle now, and I'm more centred. I enjoy my better health and am eager to try new things and see new places, but I'm also thankful for the love and support offered by my husband and others as I've gone through (and put others trough!) all these crazy changes. It's been a wild ride, and it's not for the faint of heart! Anyone who says surgery is the "easy way out" is nuts!
