Another Loss (not the pound kind)

Several months after starting this blog, I did a post on "the benefits of being fat". I did that post in order to help mentally prepare myself for things I was bound to lose along the way. The loss of many of those benefits was relatively instant. In particular, the loss of unrestricted access to food pleasure. Later, I lost the "excuse" of not doing things I really didn't want to do because of mobility issues. I had to face up to refusing to do certain things because they weren't important enough for me, particularly in the face of my sensitive nature and tendency to feel overwhelmed more easily than many people.

I realized yesterday after my funk, which induced the "I wish..." post, that I was deep in the throes of another loss of a certain benefit of being fat. I realize that I am just now coming to the point where I was losing another benefit of being fat. This time, I was losing the ability to blame any sadness I felt in life on my weight or relationship with food. Sure, I'm still plenty fat (at about 255 lbs.), but it's reaching a stage where my sense of "mastery" over food makes it feel almost inevitable that I will be able to keep losing. It's much harder to hang my unhappiness coat on that "fat" hook than ever before.

Before, every time I felt down or depressed, I had my weight and disordered relationship with food to look to to blame. I'm sad because people treat me badly every day because of my weight. I'm unhappy because I'm in pain every day and can't even accomplish easy tasks like buying groceries without suffering. I'm depressed because I can't stop myself from eating even if I try.

Now, I have to face the fact that maybe I'm sad because I'm sad. Maybe there's no reason for it. It may be a fact of my nature emotionally or biologically to be sad at times. Since I live with a husband who is about as emotionally well-balanced in every way as a person can be (and is really the most wonderful person in the world - and I'm not exaggerating), I do not have recent experience with people who just get sad for no reason (or at least they don't tell me that happens to them), so I think there must be a root cause. My first response is to believe that it's a way of being broken that I have to "fix", but maybe that's not the way to handle every problem.

I think I have to just live with the negative feelings I'm having and stop trying to find concrete reasons or fixes. There's a hole in me that maybe cannot be filled intentionally, but that will find its own closure through time.