time to move on

i thought i was hugely fat in this picture.

i was five or six.

i didn't smile with my teeth because i had
recently realized that my teeth were really
crooked, and this would result in my wearing
of braces until my sophomore year of high school.

i thought i was as huge as huge could be. elephant sized. ballet-dancing hippo sized. moo cow big.

funny how things never really change. only now,
after having gained about two hundred pounds
from the time this photograph was taken, and then losing nearly one hundred of those pounds, i know my mental view of my appearance is really, really fucked up.

for some reason, i always thought that being thin would solve everything. if i were thin, i'd do better in school. if i were thin, my mom would stop drinking and like me more. if i were thin, people would want to talk to me and be around me and hug me and care about me and love me.
my sister used to keep all of her issues of seventeen and ym (a not-very-good teen magazine that doesn't exist in print anymore). i folded over the corners on all of the articles about weight loss. i was, like, nine. and completely and totally obsessed with my weight. which, of course, didn't make me lose weight. i ate vast amounts of food, and exercise was boring and for attractive people. volleyball players and such. there are no fat girl sports besides rugby, and i didn't know what rugby was at the time. so i did absolutely nothing but believed that someday, i'd lose weight. and everything would be perfect.

woops.

so i eventually lost a lot of weight. got down to a size that is admittable in public without people looking at you like you're roseanne barr circa 1994. and then i realized that there are so many other things wrong with me. my feet are really flat. my underbite was noticable. my neck is too short and and too thick. my shoulders are out of proportion. my hair is too weird. my nose is too wide. my voice is terrible. i lisp (i can barely record a cell phone answering machine message without going into OCD panic). my forehead is really big. and im still not as thin as i want to be.

i remember not thinking about this as much freshman year of college. i guess i was busy, and i lived with a girl who was my size and who had an actual social life, so i realized i could too. but living with the people i live with, realizing im really, really behind on a lot of social normalization (ie: normal people had their first "relationship" when they were like, eleven. i was busy being fat and getting made fun of during that time. that takes up a lot of valuable time.) is making me worry about my appearance more than ever. its like i think that my appearance is the number one thing about me people don't like.

its not that i'm really, really irritating or really, really immature or really, really self-involved (or haven't you noticed?) or anything like that that could be the actual answer for why people have to be drunk to try to get with me. its not like i have thousands of really annoying characteristics that are off-putting and could possible mark me as having autism. i don't know why i assume people look at me all the time-- granted, i look at other people all the time, but that can't be everyone. can it?

when do i get to start thinking about something else? when can i stop looking up prices for orthognathic (jaw) surgery and nose jobs and other various plastic surgeries that i would have to take out loans to get (though the jaw surgery may be covered by blue cross/blue shield)? when do i get to just... live? when im eighty?

the truly horrifying thing is that this is probably the best that i am ever going to look. at age 20, i have peaked, and im awkward as shit.

fabulous.