Monday, October 04, 2004
A blog about a blog
I’ve been working on summing up my diary in a way that makes it accessible to anyone who wants to understand where I’m coming from.
It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be!
First of all, rereading my early posts, I’d forgotten how bitter I was with my weight. I remember not being happy at 460 pounds, but WOW. It’s hard to recapture the emotion that I experienced then, as it’s not even a memory to me. If I sum it up, will the summary be true?
Second, I find myself thinking about it all. There’s so much from the last few years: new jobs, new city, new friends, rekindling old friends, missing other friends. And of course the physical changes! I love that my body always feels a little alien to me, and I love that Ian’s body isn’t quite how I remember it. But it’s been going on for years now. Again, what I think I remember and the truth are obviously very different at this point. I remember Ian being grotesquely fat at 300 pounds, and now he seems unfulfilled at 523 pounds. How can both things be true?
I am glad to have written the diary as it is. I love that my thoughts are on record. I love being able to think back to how life was, and what I was dreaming off in a future that is now the past.
Have I gotten everything I want out of life? No. How many 29 year olds have?
Have I gotten everything I expected out of life to this point? No. And yet, what I expected 10 years ago was so far removed from what has happened, that I wish my expectations had been different.
Am I happy with my life to this point? Dead on yes. I’d hoped to do more, and yet I’ve done so much that I hadn’t planned on. I would trade my experiences, yes, but for fair value, they’d be at least what I was expecting.
If I could go back, would I do things differently? Yes! However, I don’t think it would make life any better. Just different. I love different, I love having experiences, and if I could go back and have different ones, I could. I wish I was fat in high school. I wish that I’d joined a gym and become a bodybuilder. I wish that I dated fat men in university. I wish that I had a clutch of kids. I wish I was living in Vienna. I wish I was backpacking in Asia. I wish I could actually paint something to sell.
One person I chatted with suggested I simply write up what I feel about Ian’s weight gain. I’d love to do that, and probably will (perhaps writing several parallel autobiographies? Do people do that? Write about different streams of their lives? I suppose there are biographies about what the president did when not being presidential. Aren’t there?). Of course, summing up what I love about Ian’s weight isn’t all that simple either. I could go for pages about it (and I will, when I get the right seed germinated).
Someday it’ll come to me.
And then, then I might have a happy reader or two!
It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be!
First of all, rereading my early posts, I’d forgotten how bitter I was with my weight. I remember not being happy at 460 pounds, but WOW. It’s hard to recapture the emotion that I experienced then, as it’s not even a memory to me. If I sum it up, will the summary be true?
Second, I find myself thinking about it all. There’s so much from the last few years: new jobs, new city, new friends, rekindling old friends, missing other friends. And of course the physical changes! I love that my body always feels a little alien to me, and I love that Ian’s body isn’t quite how I remember it. But it’s been going on for years now. Again, what I think I remember and the truth are obviously very different at this point. I remember Ian being grotesquely fat at 300 pounds, and now he seems unfulfilled at 523 pounds. How can both things be true?
I am glad to have written the diary as it is. I love that my thoughts are on record. I love being able to think back to how life was, and what I was dreaming off in a future that is now the past.
Have I gotten everything I want out of life? No. How many 29 year olds have?
Have I gotten everything I expected out of life to this point? No. And yet, what I expected 10 years ago was so far removed from what has happened, that I wish my expectations had been different.
Am I happy with my life to this point? Dead on yes. I’d hoped to do more, and yet I’ve done so much that I hadn’t planned on. I would trade my experiences, yes, but for fair value, they’d be at least what I was expecting.
If I could go back, would I do things differently? Yes! However, I don’t think it would make life any better. Just different. I love different, I love having experiences, and if I could go back and have different ones, I could. I wish I was fat in high school. I wish that I’d joined a gym and become a bodybuilder. I wish that I dated fat men in university. I wish that I had a clutch of kids. I wish I was living in Vienna. I wish I was backpacking in Asia. I wish I could actually paint something to sell.
One person I chatted with suggested I simply write up what I feel about Ian’s weight gain. I’d love to do that, and probably will (perhaps writing several parallel autobiographies? Do people do that? Write about different streams of their lives? I suppose there are biographies about what the president did when not being presidential. Aren’t there?). Of course, summing up what I love about Ian’s weight isn’t all that simple either. I could go for pages about it (and I will, when I get the right seed germinated).
Someday it’ll come to me.
And then, then I might have a happy reader or two!
// posted by Charlotte @ 3:12:00 PM 
