Emotions....HELP?!

[k9ophile]

These places give us that semi-anonymous ability to say and discuss things we wouldn't necessarily discuss with somebody face to face. I think you will talk your way through your transition and finding your new identity.

I think Scott's words were lifted from my brain by ESP or something, so I copied and pasted them. Thank you for sharing. Being that open is being vulnerable. I am honored that even though we don't discuss things face to face, we have this safe place and you felt safe enough to share this with us. That in itself, seems like a giant step towards changing your psyche along with your body. Yes, we can share with others, yet only those who have been there, somehow feel safer to talk to.

 

[Munchkin]

I have said this since I was a teenager!!!! I had a fun, bubbly personality that everyone liked, I was just missing the acceptable body. I too was convinced I would be a slut if I was thin. However, sex is the furthest thing from my mind right now lol. My mind is racing with things I want to do: white water rafting, hiking, kayaking, playing volleyball, travelling.....like...who the hell is going to have time for sluttery when there is so much LIFE to catch up on lol.

And I want you to do it all! Post DS and before I became poor I kayaked the Amazon, rode a horse across Mexico, spent a lot of time diving in Tahiti, and went rappelling. And incidentally I still found time for sluttery!

 

[Butterfly]

What I told a friend of mine when she told me she was too old to go back to college to finish her Associate Degree...
And how old will you be in two years if you don't do it?

She went back to college, not only finished her Associate but a Bachelor's AND her Master's. When she got her Master's my husband and I paid for her license to be a counselor for kids. She had to pass but also had to pay for the license. We gave her the money do get it as a graduation present.

What a sweet soul you have to do that for her. I'm sure she appreciates the support you've given her along with the present of her license.

I'm attacking this school thing as a gotta-do-it thing. I have spent so many years, wasting my life, hiding and doing nothing. I will not accept failing at this. I'll finish my 2 year associates, get my nursing license, and then move on to my BSN. I know that my age and weight will slow me down a little in comparison with some of the other students, but I'll work harder and make sure I'm doing all I can.

I just refuse to live like this anymore. Underemployed, broke, and miserable are going to be part of my old life.

Thank you for this forum. I'm grateful I was pointed this way.

 

[southernlady]

What a sweet soul you have to do that for her. I'm sure she appreciates the support you've given her along with the present of her license.

Yes, but she also likes to remind me its ALL my fault she is deep in student loan debt! I just go "yeah, yeah...but you love what you do!"

 

[Munchkin]

For a while postop it made me angry that it took weight loss to make me accepted as a person. Weight loss didn't make me suddenly more intelligent so why was it that people at work(mostly men) suddenly realized I had a brain and knew what I was doing? Seriously...men I had been working with for years finally noticed I was there. The changes were pretty dramatic in my personal life too. Men suddenly started treating me like a human being.

I felt like Stockard Channing in the movie The Girl Most Likely To. A seriously campy pretty bad movie where the heroine suddenly loses weight and runs around killing people who treated her badly when she was fat and therefore ugly. If you ever get the chance, watch it!

One day I was cruising around a forum and ran across a post about this very same thing. A very smart person responded that you can't hate people for doing things they aren't even conscious of doing. Fat people are worthless and invisible is inculcated into our society from birth. People are not even aware they have this deep rooted prejudice. It's OK if Grandma is fluffy but that's about it! After bouncing this around in my head for a while I decided it made no sense to despise people for prejudices they weren't even aware of. Plus all that hate was using up too much of my resources, it was just smarter to let it go! And I was part of the problem too. I was so used to being invisible that I found it very awkward to be counted as a member of the group.

 

[k9ophile]

But are they really unaware? Some. maybe. I think if we could read minds we'd find that many aren't unaware. They were taught to be like that at one time and now it's so ingrained that perhaps they may not be aware of it now. Just my opinion.

 

[DuodenalSwitchaRoo]

I have no hatred towards anyone, Im angry at society. Not even raging angry, just irritated angry, but I refuse to be quiet about it. When I notice different treatment I talk about it, I post about it. Here's what I put on FB the other day:

After weight loss don't let anyone tell you that people treat you differently because of 'confidence'. A practice nurse who has been a straight up bitch to me going on 7 years was just all smiles and praise towards me. I didn't say 2 words to her (and I was on my back with my pants down in front of another nurse) so my demeanour had sod all to do with it. Medical professionals hate fatties period :/ it makes me sad.
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This nurse, whom I have had several encounters with over the years has always been very short with me to the point of rudeness. Not that day. That day I was a celebrity and it felt gross and dirty.

It's experiences like these that validate my experience of my new thin privilege and not some reflection of my own newly found confidence...as I haven't found that yet. Trying to find my footing within my new identity in the privileged group of which benefits I have never been privy.

 

[DianaCox]

I hope someday you can give her her comeuppance - either to her face, or by reporting her rudeness and the clear basis for it.

In the meantime, vent away here!

I wasn't "that" big (293 or so at my peak) or for "that" long (5 years), but big enough to be noticed as usually the fattest one in the room. And I was usually acutely aware of that fact, as well as how shop clerks didn't seem to see me as easily as when I was thinner, nor would men hold doors open, etc.

But I will never forget a comment that my usually very sensitive son made when he was 16, a year before I had my DS, and I took him on a business/vacation trip to Paris, Berlin and Warsaw. We were walking* down a boulevard on the Left Bank, when he made a comment that I'm fairly certain was meant to be an observation about the lifestyle of the Parisians - lots of walking, buying their fresh food for dinner on the way home from work, or eating in restaurants which served small plates and wine - but the way it came out of his mouth was something like "You are the fattest person I've seen in Paris." (I should note that I could still walk relatively comfortably at that time, and he actually complained on that trip that he didn't want to walk as much as we were doing.) I was SO hurt by what he said, but it was true - we didn't see that many fat people in Paris. And I didn't overlook the likely implication that he was noticing people looking at me with disgust.

 

[ampt]

It so wonderful that I ran across this posting, as my husband and I were just discussing this type of thing the other night. Growing up fat ingrains so many cruelties in your mind... I told him even being half of what I once was , HW 287, CW 151, AND just having had hernia repair and belt lipectomy, in my mind I'm still the fattest person in the room. Identity crisis, indeed. I went from a 24W to 8/10 size. I put on my "fat" pants from time to time to remind me how far I have come (yes, let my biggest pair from pre-DS). I just wish my brain could catch up.

We think our daughter was even ashamed of us, my husband also had DS (HW 390, CW 210), just picking her up at school... She would quickly grab her backpack and not walk with us but ahead of us. Since our surgeries, she is more than happy to see us, give us hugs AND kisses in front of her friends and hold our hands on the walk out to the car. She would never judge us, but the cruelty of the older kids probably made her embarrassed.

I, too, always imagined the skinny me, the "prettier" me. And while my outside is COMPLETELY different, my insides (besides my stomach and intestines) are the same. I'm the same person... Funny, loving, caring, sarcastic... But the new and different reception and ATTENTION from others that were always there is just disheartening. I hope after all this we can ingrain an accepting attitude with our own children. We have to start somewhere!!

I'm definitely with you, Roo. I look forward to keeping up with this thread and hopefully supporting you on your journey, and mine, ALL of ours. We are all always a work in progress. I don't believe we are ever finished...

 

[DuodenalSwitchaRoo]

ok, so I haven't update here much as things went from not great to worse with the wound. It opened up. Well, some of it did. The line from my breastbone down to the bottom of my belly healed up perfectly and the left side of my body is 99.9% healed, but the area between my lady garden (ha!) and my belly opened up into the depths of hell. Cue district nurses coming to my home every day to pack it with aquacel (its tunnelling 3 different ways). I've been fighting with different counties to get a wound vac for about 3 or 4 weeks now. Total pain in the ass, but today SHOULD be the day. At 12 noon I should have between 5 and 10 nurses here in my home. I have invited them in as a learning opportunity as no one knows how to use a vac and was the reason they pushed back in the beginning....so I told them that anyone not busy or who is interested may come in and watch the vac be fitted. Im all about helping future patients.

So with all this wound crap AGAIN!!! (remember my fun DS experience) It kind put the psychology and self analysis on the back burner. I'm having to eat like an olympian so weight loss is on hold for now. I got told off for dropping so quickly post op and I was flirting with (and was/am technically in) protein malnutrition. Soooooooo, it's probably my own goddamn obsessive fault that the wound broke down in the first place...but it is what it is. Im not weighing and Im eating like someone pregnant with quintuplets. It's working. My wound is visibly changing daily, but damn, the head games are REAL!!!!

Something else I have noticed: everyone else looks so much bigger!!!!! I don't even know how to explain it lol. Every single person I see looks large. Not really fat, but just large. People I admire and always thought were so tiny, now look large to me. The only way I can explain this is me deflecting my insecurities on THEM. I feel very large. I am now their size (what once to me was quite thin), thus, they must be large. It's weird and Im not explaining it very well at all, but meh.

Yeah, so this is why I have been quiet. I've been dealing with the huge ass wound..again...and just sorta in my own world focusing on getting better.

 

[DuodenalSwitchaRoo]

Wound vac didn't happen as I expected. It's one mess after another! Oh well. Onward and upward. It IS healing and there is a lot less exudate so there thats the positive

The negative is I might have to put off my right hip (due in Nov) as cannot have any hint of a wound when messing about with bones. Oh well, everything will happen in it's own time.

 

[Spiky Bugger]

Have you read about folks who, blind since birth, suddenly gained sight? You (not the wound episode, the confusion) remind me a bit of them. Their way of KNOWING everything drastically changed. They were expected to understand that an orange was the ORANGE one and the apple the RED one in the fruitbowl...from across the table. Their entire lives, the orange had been the rougher one and the apple the smoother one...and you had to get close to know.

I think that you are going through that big a change...and gifts, even great ones like vision, sometimes take a while to adjust to.

 

[Butterfly]

@DuodenalSwitchaRoo, I'm so sorry you're going through this although I'm glad to see that you're seeing daily improvement with the wound.

What an incredible journey you've been on. You're bound to have a lot of head games to sort through, your life seems to have changed so drastically. Be sure to get as much rest as you can and keep on healing.