My Glow Up Diary, Part 5: Shedding The Old Me
It clings to me like glue.
The funny thing with a glow up of the mental variety is how I’m often in a state of paralysis.
Since my teens, I’ve had disordered eating. I had a solid decade of anorexia and bulimia. When I’m 99lbs, I curse myself for not being 96lbs. My metabolism is all kinds of fucked up.
Today I weigh more than I have in a while. It helps when you’re not dating and worrying about getting naked with anyone. Being this weight for a week would normally put me in a state of panic.
Instead, I look in the mirror and don’t cringe. I grab at my muffin top and think, “When I get fat grafting into my face, I can have them suck it out from here.” That may seem equally unhealthy but for me, it stops me from going into a starvation spiral.
Not that I’m going to continue eating like garbage. This week has been pure trash out of stress from my job and distracting myself to not think about Jeremy. In eleven days it’ll be thirty days since No Contact. It should get easier after thirty days. It has to.
I can expense my dinner tonight. I look at Grubhub+ (free membership from Amazon) and notice the address saved is Jeremy’s because I’ve only used the membership once. I choke a bit and immediately change it to my address. I’m trying to not fall into my traditional route of falling into a puddle crying.
As part of my Glow Up Plan, I’m supposed to go out for dinner on Thursday nights without my kids. I got a laser peel yesterday (an impulse splurge using funds I saved for a facelift that I’ve accepted I’ll never afford) and my face isn’t ready for makeup.
I’m meeting a friend for lunch instead. It’s not the same but it’s the best I can do today.
Dinner is stressing me out. If I have lunch with my friend, I’ll have leftovers. I could eat those leftovers for dinner. But this is the only night I can expense dinner, so I feel the need to take advantage of free food. That’s the problem with growing up in a Clean Plate Club family; you forever think food is scarce.
Then I think, do I expense what I really want or should I opt for something healthy? I’d like to think “Go with what you want!” but with my weight gain, I know there’s a limit before my eating disorder panic kicks in.
I couldn’t work out yesterday and I’m not supposed to today because of the laser peel. They said I could go for a walk. To me, that’s not a workout but it’ll be good for me and with the overcast weather, I can slap on sunblock and a hat (after a laser or chemical peel, one must avoid the sun like the plague). It meets my Glow Up Plan’s requirement of being outside for 10 minutes a day, not including errands.
I’m struggling with loneliness. Dating someone feels like at least I have someone to text and think about when I’m alone. Now I’m truly alone. Without my kids, tonight will be rough. I’m sure I’ll write fifty Medium articles to ease my heart.
Next week is my first golf outing. I’m scared. But it’ll allow me to meet new women and use my brain to learn something. This weekend is my pickleball lesson with my son. It’s huge for him because he never, ever, wants to do anything athletic. He showed a sliver of interest and I ran with it, getting us a private lesson.
Tonight, I’ll get my taxes submitted (we Californians in some areas had an extension). That’ll keep me busy and one less stressful thing off my plate.
I’ll also go through my wonky summer custody schedule (it’s not a normal cadence) and plan things for the days I don’t have my kids. I’m also trying to figure out if I can afford to take them to visit a cousin in Vancouver. If I can get the cash payout from the guy who hit me a few weeks ago, then that will cover the trip because I’m fine being ghetto with my car having a dented front bumper.
Why the eff is airfare so much more expensive now? Why is everything so much more expensive now?
I printed out a vision board I made in 2020. It was my wallpaper back then (I do too many screen sharing Zoom calls to leave it up on my current desktop). It has the following images:
- Someone writing in French, because I need to get back to being fluent
- Three large, gorgeous mansions
- Athens, because Greece is my bucket list trip
- A woman doing indoor rock climbing
- A woman doing the splits (I’m fine giving up on that goal)
- A before and after of a woman’s facelift (fat grafting will have to suffice)
- A plate of beautifully decorated cookies
- A woman kissing two happy kids
- A woman showing rock-hard abs and leg muscles
- A stack of books with no title (because I’d love to be a book author but I have no idea what I’d write about)
- A woman and man in bed, looking at each other, with their hands touching the other person’s neck
A few months ago, I looked at the vision board and felt ecstatic that I found a guy who coincidentally looks similar to the guy in the picture.
It’s hard to look at this board and feel optimistic. I’m decent at sugar cookie decorating but practicing quickly gets expensive since the icing isn’t reusable. I’m desperately saving up for a shack close to my ex-husband’s ginormous house, without a second income there’s no chance I’ll end up in a large-ish house.
It’s also hard to feel like I’ll find someone who will look at me that way ever again…and for me to look at them that way too. But I allow myself the mantra of manifestation and when I go down a wallowing path, I say “End of June! End of June!” which is my manifestation that I’ll find someone long-term at the end of June.
Do I believe it’ll happen? I dunno. But it stops me from spiraling, which is all that matters. Otherwise I’ll do something drastic, like sign back up on dating sites to hook up with guys who barely have any teeth.
Part of me wonders if I could turn my Medium writing into a compilation like Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Even if it were possible, I couldn’t market it because I need anonymity.
I don’t know why I realized this until now: I should make a new vision board.
