I Have the Flu

It started Tuesday. I think its letting up now, but I’m still pretty weak. I coughed so much that my voice is absolutely wrecked. I sound like an old lady who’s smoked cigarettes for 60 years who gets a kick out of whispering. I think just breathing air was pretty good exercise (haha) because it was really difficult. Its still not as easy as it should be.

I had a fever and invented a really interesting way to play chess, but I fell asleep and forgot it….

I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping, and not when or where I want to. I could be minding my own business watching TV or washing my hands and my body just decides its nap time.

I’ve used up a box and a half of Kleenex.

So that’s been my week. I hope your week was much better! Also Happy Valentine’s/Galentine’s/Palentine’s/Single Awareness/WTFever Day! ❤ ❤

This Week

I gotta admit this week was tough for me. I have this huge problem where I don’t really do anything for myself, I do things because it will make people I care about happy. I don’t get close to a lot of people, but if you get into that group, there is a 110% chance that I will care more about you than I care about myself. Most of the time that’s not an issue. I like making other people happy because that makes me happy, so if I make someone feel good, it makes me feel good about myself. But sometimes, especially when I want to improve myself, it becomes this huge road block, because I also want to please people I don’t even know or like.

Using weight loss as an obvious example: At every other point in my life when I’ve wanted to lose weight, my main reason was that I wanted to make people see me as attractive and desirable. I never thought about benefits to my health or anything like that. I wanted people to think I was hot. All I was thinking about was that I wanted my appearance to please other people.
I used to think I didn’t want attention, that I didn’t like attention, but when I actually thought about it, I realized that as long as its positive attention, I kind of love it. I think I might even get a little high off of it, which may be another problem for another day.

Anyway, I can’t really use that as motivation anymore. I don’t think I care that much about random people finding me attractive anymore. The thing with being in a excellent relationship for this long (and it being the first romantic relationship in my life that isn’t toxic as fuck) is that I’m so happy and secure that I can’t use my insecurities as motivation.

My insecurities have ruled my life up until now. The thing is, every person I’ve ever been attracted to until now, been in a relationship with until now, has made me feel like a lesser human being because of my weight. And there has almost always been a very vocalized threat that they were only with me because I was the best they could get right now and that if something better came along (and pretty much anyone was better) this person I loved would drop me fast. So when I had a boyfriend tell me I was fat and it made me ugly, I didn’t get offended, I just got sad and I wanted to make that person love me and that was my motivation.

It took me a long time, but nearly five years in, I realize that my fiance doesn’t think that way. My fiance honest to God thinks I’m drop-dead gorgeous, he thinks I’m a goddess of beauty. It puzzles me completely, but its true. And he would still think I was a drop-dead gorgeous goddess of beauty if I gained 140 pounds instead of losing 140 pounds. Ironically, this incredibly wonderful thing makes my life more difficult, because its making me have to change my approach to life.

He would love me literally no matter what. He doesn’t want a skinny wife, he just wants me. So I can’t have the conversation that I normally have with myself. “Why do you want to lose weight?” “Because I want to make X Person happy.” “That’s it, you just want to please X Person? You want to be attractive to them, like a trophy?” “Yeah, basically.”

I’m with my soulmate now. I’m with a person who would still look at me the same way, who would still smile that special smile at me if I lost 140 pounds like I want to, or if I stayed the same, or if I weighed 600 pounds and had no teeth and stopped washing my hair.

And I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me, my life now is a huge blessing. I’ve never been happier. But I’ve struggled with this problem a lot this week. If he is going to be happy with me no matter what and doesn’t care what I look like, and he is, then why should I care? Why should I bother. Basically, I’m safe here, and I don’t have to try.

I’m working really hard on trying to do things just for myself and not thinking so much about how it will affect other people. I’m working on trying to have a more healthy thought process, like, I want to lose weight because it will make me healthier. Or that I want to go to college because that would make me happy, and not because it will make my family proud of me. Because that should be a good bonus, not the actual reason.

But I’ve found out this week that I’m not ready to do that quite yet, and in order to do the things I needed to do (avoiding junk food and continuing to exercise) I still needed to find a way to frame it so that it was still me trying to please other people.

I’m in an amazing place in my life. I have a person who doesn’t give a damn how much I weigh or what I look like, because he actually just loves me for who I am, and who I am makes me beautiful to him. So I’m going to lose weight and be healthy because if I drop dead when I’m 40, he would have to live the rest of his life without me, and he’s made it very clear that that would be almost worse than death.