I had the most hilarious / sad flashback the other day. I was sitting on the streetcar and saw a girl wearing what I thought was a very cute outfit – a brown belted tweed jacket, skinny jeans, purplish chuck taylors, and a big purple patterned scarf. I thought she looked so nice – but I wondered to myself if I would ever wear skinny jeans, even if I were ‘skinny’. Then I started thinking about what my ideal outfit would be when I get to my goal weight.
The happy thing is that I realized most of the stuff I would want to wear isn’t that much different than what I wear now – in recent years, I guess I’ve learned to not let ‘society’s’ expectations influence what I wear. So despite being 250+ lbs, I still wear cute summer dresses, strapless tops, pencil skirts, etc.
That said, I still look forward to fitting into a wider variety of clothes, finding coats that don’t bunch up around my hips and patterned tights that actually come in my size.
Anyway, this train of thought led me to remember a time when I was about 10 years old – already ‘overweight’, already on a diet. I flipped through the Sears Catalogue and picked out my DREAM OUTFIT for when I lost all that weight I was gonna lose.
It was:
- Tight yellow stir-up pants
- An over-sized plain white t-shirt
- Wide shiny yellow belt
- Pointy black alligator-skin flats
- Several giant yellow plastic bangles
LOOK IT WAS 1990 OKAY.
Anyway, I cut pictures of all of these things out of the catalogue, and taped them to a piece of paper, and I stared at it CONSTANTLY. I tried to imagine myself wearing those clothes – in my head I was always standing on a beach, with my arms spread wide in a catalogue-esque pose. In my mind I was the picture of happiness, not to mention good taste.
Thinking about all this the other day made me so melancholy – realizing just how unhappy I was, how unhappy I seem to have always been. Eighteen years is a long time to hate your body.
