Life is Healthy

It was about a year ago that I went to Minnesota for a family reunion. I weighed 133-134 pounds and felt pretty confident. People made the usual “Oh my god, you’ve lost so much weight!” comments, as was expected, but I was still just ordinary Lynn, only a little smaller.

On Sunday I’m going to Minnesota again, only this time I weigh 128 pounds and I’m a bundle of nerves.

What happened? Oprah happened. And People. And the Today Show. And Entertainment Tonight. And CNN. I’m in mid-metamorphosis, still shedding my skin, trying to digest everything that’s happened to me this year and to catch up with it all, and so my confidence level is on par with the mortgage crisis, only the government isn’t going to bail me out.

I’ve never been able to nail confidence down to a permanent feeling. Seems it always runs hot and cold. I’m overly sensitive and highly aware of the feelings of other people, particularly as they pertain to their expectations of me. Sometimes my intuition is off, but I’ve always worked within the framework that when I sense I’m not living up to someone’s expectations, I have to do something to change myself so I stop disappointing them. I manufacture who I am to manipulate as best I can how someone perceives me, how I want them to think of me, to control who they think I am. Very few people know the real me. Hell, I hardly know the real me. But during this year between Minnesota visits, I’ve been trying to figure out the real me and how to be me all the time and not a “fill-in” substitute for who I think people expect me to be.

So how do I do that when I feel like I’m on display? I get really uncomfortable when someone calls me a “celebrity” or brings up my weight loss and subsequent media appearances to other people when I’m in their presence. You can argue, “Well, Lynn, you should have known that would happen when you agreed to do all that media,” but the thing is, I didn’t know. How could I? I’d never been on television before. I’d never been in a national magazine before. I was excited to talk about weight loss because I wanted to motivate others to think about their own bodies and minds, to treat themselves with kindness and to lose weight for the right reasons and in the right way. I never thought about it being for me or about me. So when it comes to people talking about me and what’s happened this last year, my stomach turns into a knot.

And I’m pretty sure the subject will come up more than a few times on this upcoming trip to Minnesota.

I know it’s only natural to want to ask someone you haven’t seen in a long time what it’s like to meet Oprah or to make at least a comment about their weight loss. I mean, it’s not every day your cousin or aunt or sister or old friend loses nearly 170 pounds. I understand that. Heck, I’d be all over my cousin, aunt, sister or friend if that happened to them, asking them questions and wanting the dirt on Matt Lauer. I admit that. I’m trying to see it from the perspective of people who haven’t seen me in years. But to help me stay real and to salvage my confidence, I’m learning the art of steering conversations away from my weight loss by asking direct questions about the person I’m talking to. I’m always more interested in someone else’s story than my own. I’ve lived with me this year and believe me, I’m kind of dull in real life.

On this trip, I want to be gracious and patient, but I also want to introduce the real me, the woman I’ve come to know the last 12 months and to not manipulate her like a Chinese acrobat into something someone else wants or needs her to be. The girl they remembered from the past is morphing into a unified woman, someone who isn’t comfortable being so many things to so many people anymore. If I disappoint someone because I am who I am, the problem lies squarely in their lap, not mine.

Can I do it? I’ll let you know when I get back. In the meantime, I will try to blog from the road. This blog and you readers have been two of the best things to happen to me this year. I’m not a real huggy kind of person (being a Norwegian (ex)Lutheran Minnesotan and all), but I’m sending this {{{grouphug}}} because I really mean it. Thanks for letting me work all this out with you this morning.