The lastest delusion

Feeling fat... yep, that's me these days. I have been feeling fat, frumpy and kind of uneven all over. Maybe it was getting on the scale at the gym the other day - in the evening - and finding it weighed me as 6 pounds heavier? Whatever source, it appears to be the latest delusion by my mind to undermine any sense of accomplishment for losing weight.

I gave away a few more bags of clothing that is too big last night. I felt a little strange, thinking to myself, "Oh no, what if I need those clothes again!"

Not that any of my clothes are too tight. None are too big now either. I'm down to clothes that actually fit for the most part and seem to have stabilized around a size 8/10 (small/medium). Regardless of the preponderance of evidence my mind has been stuck in the feeling fat mode.

In a sad irony about food cravings, the fatter I feel the more I crave cookies (really, baked goods in general). I am trying to watch this arise and crash around. I feel fat and lumpy, then I crave a sweet to make me feel better, which then gives fuel to feeling fat... And around and around we go! Thai food has been high on the craving list too - pad see ew particularly.

Instead I had a big salad for dinner and after we got back from the Dharma center I had a little sweet, sugary cereal. I spent the two sitting periods just working on Metta for myself some more. Trying to get back to answering the rising self-criticism and random anxiety with loving-kindness.

This Body

I was a skinny person who became obese. I was underweight at birth, throughout my early childhood, and was pretty thin until the last year of college when the combination of traumatic breakdown, plentiful rich food, a foundation of disordered eating habits, and injury combined to really add weight onto my frame. I left college at least two sizes larger than I started.

Then another injury while my brain was still fragmented from trauma, locked into silence. I broke my left ankle playing volleyball after work. Within a year I'd added a couple more sizes. Throughout my 20s that's how it went, a size creeping on nearly every year until by the time I was 30 I had gone from a size 5/7 when I started college to a size 24/26.

I never was comfortable with my thin body, especially as a teen. This is the place where body issues, PTSD, and sexual orientation meet head-on. In my thin body as a teenager I was encouraged that girls wear sexy things. I was directed away from my "tomboy" style as much as possible, especially for dressier occasions. It didn't feel right on so many levels.

Dressing up, showing off my thin body like girls were expected to brought attention that made me uncomfortable. Even at my largest I was never entirely comfortable in the various dresses, skirts, high heels and corsets. It was always a costume, I was always reserved, a bit stiff, and very self-conscious. When the attention of men lead to intimacy with men I felt incredibly awkward most of the time, sometimes I would feel entirely disconnected. It has been painful, but illuminating to figure out in my 30s that part of the problem all along is that my sexual orientation is strongly directed towards women, learning to use the words "Lesbian", "gay", and "queer" more openly.

Losing the weight has felt like this slide right back into adolescence at times especially being combined with all the sexual confusion. Yep, just like being 15 all over again, but with mortgage payments. Here I am back in a body that gets attention, especially from men. If anything I'm more hyper aware of my discomfort around my attractiveness because I'm no longer disassociated from the traumatic episodes. But I'm also not in exactly the same body and driven by the images of bodies we are surrounded with, so I'm quick to judge the way the extra skin moves very harshly and am sometimes so distracted by it I am not fully present to anything but feeling ashamed of my body.

I'm still trying to pick my way through it all. When I first lost all the weight I was entirely without all the girly clothes that had been my costume when I was obese. My back condition had already made it so I'd given away all my high heels. I swung back to being a "tomboy" with a vengeance. I even got into a fight with my Mom over it when I'd bought a really nice outfit for her wedding that was based around some green trousers.

I still have the skirt I bought in protest, I was wearing it last weekend. As uncomfortable as I felt with my body in the black dress I bought, there's part of me that enjoyed wearing it a little bit. It is the same part of me that occasionally enjoys the way a skirt moves around my legs in a breeze. I am finding some element of compromise between the "tomboy" and the girl who never got to pick being the "princess" on her own terms.

Body

It was one of those realizations during zazen that felt like it kind of thumped into me. Why writing about, talking about the weight loss is so difficult.

I feel shame for having gained all that weight in the first place. For having abused my body so much.

Every day I'm reminded of it by the skin. I mention it sometimes, like wanting to wear something with long sleeves to cover my upper arms, the underside of which have a great deal of loose skin. People shrug and say how that happens to a lot of people, it is genetic.

Only really, this isn't like that. It is extra skin. One of my dearest friends, who has had a lap band surgery, calls them her "Bat Wings". More exercise and different body care products will not make the skin go away. There or any of the extra on my belly (upper and lower abdomen), breasts, and thighs particularly. There is quite possibly 10 extra pounds of skin. That's what happens when someone goes from 290+ to 140 +/- (I stay within a few pounds of that in either direction).

I mentioned it to Chozen and Hogen after sitting. I was reminded that instead of shame I need to honor my accomplishment by helping others. I joked with Hogen, asking if he kept a tally sheet under the sazen cushion for how many times I'm told this lesson. He laughed and said only for me. Chozen noted that I needed to go back to the piece I'm writing for her with this mindset.

And Loving-Kindness, of course.

I haven't done it yet. We were in Sacramento all weekend visiting CK's family. It was an inferno there compared to Portland, painfully bright. There was a lot of family dynamics and tension I was getting introduced to at the same time. It brought up some tough stuff in my past.

On top of that CK's step-dad, a professional photographer, took a series of photographs of me. Well over an hour of going through yoga poses again and again, turning to get different angles. It was exhausting on so many levels.

I shouldn't have looked at the images mid-way, but he was making a light adjustment for me to do standing asana, so I looked. He was complimenting my chaturunga, how great it looked to get it in series. He does yoga, so often he had a comment or suggested a couple of poses I hadn't done.

I couldn't stop looking at the way the loose skin on my upper abdomen hangs down. Gravity being what it is there's just this round line. It doesn't matter how strong or lean my core muscles are in my abdomen, nothing will make that skin hang smooth against my body again.

I continued on with the asana, working up a real sweat in the warm house in my yoga outfit with long sleeves and pants. CK expressed surprise several times, noting how I could do some poses she didn't even realize I was capable of. I wasn't able to move away from feeling shameful about my body for a while, it wasn't until I looked at other poses that I could work my way back to appreciating my alignment in the asana the way a teacher would. Moving towards looking at my body as just a students, not actually my own.

Back to the writing for Chozen. Now that I'm out of excuses and have zeroed in on at least one big reason I'm so uncomfortable with it. I suspect there's others but this appears to be a good one to start with.

Writing About the Weight Loss

I've gotten OK with writing about quite a lot of stuff. I've now even managed to write three things to be put into zine-type publications and have the work be personal, from my own experience. Writing about the weight loss is tough, weird, and it is one of the topics I think I get asked about the most.

Chozen was at the Dharma Center tonight and thanked me for writing a nice review of her book on Amazon. This prompted me to blurt out that I'd finished a draft of my assignment from her but I was still unhappy with it. I noted that CK had thought my voice seemed distant in it. She said usually reading my writing seems as though I'm there talking with her.

Off to the zendo and zazen I went with that little burst of anxious, "bad student" guilt, courtesy of my Inner Critic. It struck me in that first period why I find writing about the weight loss so difficult, why I try to distance myself from it. I feel ashamed for having abused my body with gaining that weight. Every day I see the loose skin as some kind of testimony to my guilt.

Second sitting period starts. I breath in... and Hogen's telling us to work on feeling satisfaction with ourselves, our breath, our bodies. Ugh! I feel like I've just been double-teamed by my teachers. Then I directed the madly spinning brain wheels to some Metta practice.

In chatting with both my teachers after sitting I was reminded of what I am told again and again. To take this history, the lessons I've learned from it, and use it to help others. Turn it all into potent medicine to heal the world. I sighed and laughed, feeling a bit sheepish (which is a variation on the bad-student anxiety, only with more kindness).

Chozen reminded me that she asked me for this writing because it means more for me to say that it is possible to change your life through mindful eating. She said that they might listen to hear about struggling with chocolate desires, but I truly speak the voice of someone who has successfully lost 150 pounds and kept it off. Proof that there is a way.

So I'll pick it up again over the next few days. Read it aloud, feel the words and where my discomfort rises up around them. Practice Metta and remind myself why I'm writing about this stuff (to help others, not so I won't feel guilty around Chozen... OK, maybe both).

A Vegan Way

It was in 2006, after being a vegetarian for a little over 5 years, I really decided to just switch to a vegan diet. Primarily I was making a final attempt to get my high cholesterol down. I also had started to seriously look at the way dairy cows are treated. It was bothering me.

When I started teaching yoga in October 2005 I also began to incorporate the other "limbs" into my practice. I started attending zazen, somewhat irregularly at first, with the Zen Community of Oregon. This helped me look closely at the cultivation of concentration, meditation, and wisdom. It was while I was taking a class on Life Vows from Hogen that I vowed to uphold the Yamas, the "Rules of Life" in yoga practice.

The first of the Yamas is ahimsa, non-harming. I'd read some things about the Buddhist Precepts at ZCO and found that the first Grave Precept is to not kill, but to affirm life. I also had spent a lot of time reflecting upon Thich Nhat Hahn's book Anger which begins with a discussion of diet. He felt that it was important that we not consume, nourish these bodies which practice, with the panicked, dying, suffering energy of an animal slaughtered for food.

In the spring of 2006 those things came together for me after listening to Howard Lyman speak at the NW Veg VegFest. After spending a day listening to people talk about dairy I finally committed myself to doing what had been considering doing for months, I stopped eating all dairy products the next day. That was the last step, I became a vegan.

Because I live in Portland this was a fairly easy transition. I just became used to assuming that most places I went to, most gatherings I attended, would not have food I would eat. I would make dishes and bring them to share to be certain I would have something as well as show how tasty vegan food was. Most of the time it didn't matter, sometimes it hurt to feel the way this choice put me even further outside of the mainstream.

My focus all along has been to improve my health. To avoid as many as the diseases that plagued the women in my family - diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attacks, angina, and obesity. Once dairy was taken out of my diet I began to lose weight again, finally dropping the last 40 pounds to have my weight fall into the "healthy" range for my height.

The weight loss alone caused my doctor to shake his head and smile, but when my cholesterol started to drop dramatically he told me not to change anything I was doing. By 2008 my cholesterol had dropped 100 points and I was still losing a few pounds. I went in for a chemical stress test to get a clear picture of how my heart was doing and was told that people 10 years younger than me should have a heart working as well. This spring my doctor called me "skinny".

I feel as though my commitment to changing my diet to improve my health has created space for me to appreciate the choice of being a vegan even more. Over the past several years I've moved more and more to trying to buy organic products, local ones where possible. I have never lost the lessons of the Outdoor School program, of the interconnectedness of everything on the planet and how the choices I make do matter. A vegan diet is an environmentally responsible one that makes a commitment to improving the health of the planet.

When I was at the Loving-Kindness sesshin this past April I had a lot of opportunity to think about this. Because the sesshin really awakened some emotions long buried during my childhood the feeling that I was not included was rather intense at times, especially on nights where during formal tea everyone else would be served a beautiful, fancy cookie while I was served the same store-bought ones I'd brought out to the monastery. One night there were steamed carrots, but only a very small portion without butter set aside for me and it brought up sad feelings.

Later that night, in the dark, cool zendo I would have time to breath through and comfort the child inside of me who felt left out, hurt. In my mind I talked with her about the importance of not having the fancy cookie, that the cookies I'd brought from the store were ones I liked and that I still got a cookie with everyone else. By the time I was served the same cookie I had most of the week that child inside of me and I were both OK with.

What had hit me through keenly feeling the separateness of my vegan diet was that I have been slowly moving my life towards peace. That is what the path of yoga and zen is for me. It is the cultivation of tranquility and calm-abiding. For me there is absolutely no question that the literal foundation must be nourished by food that supports this path. Since we are constantly in change, our cellular structure constantly going through the death/birth cycle, then the base components for that structure must nourish peace. This is how my practice is built, it begins with what I put into my body.

Accidental Vegetarian

Several people have heard the story of how I "accidentally" became a vegetarian and I've talked with a few people about why I'm vegan. During the Loving-Kindness sesshin in April I had a lot of time to deeply look at how important my veganism is to my life. I commented on this during the sharing time at the end of the sesshin with my fellow retreatants, but it really seems like something worth sharing with a much larger audience. This is a part one of two posts that cover over 8 years of my changing my diet from the Standard American Diet to a very healthy, vegan diet.

How does one "accidentally" become a vegetarian?

Back in 2001 my cholesterol was 290. On top of that the "bad" cholesterol was really bad, the "good" wasn't anywhere close to good, and those pesky triglycerides were just as sad. Yep, those levels where the doctor starts to use words like "statins" at visits. My blood pressure and blood sugar levels were OK, but when you added those bad numbers to my weight and a family history of women having heart problems -- well, it wasn't good.

I'd lost some weight, about 30 pounds, but was still obese and those numbers weren't budging. Yes, "obese", I'm not going to say "large" or "heavy" or any other of the nice words that take the sting out of it. At not quite 5'5" I weighed about 260 pounds even having lost 30 pounds.

Facing all of this and the knowledge that statins can often have a side-effect of joint pain (since I already have chronic pain in my back I didn't want that added to the list) I decided to stop eating as much meat. Meat is loaded in cholesterol and the foodie in my just saw trying vegetarian options as sampling a type of new cuisine. I was still eating sushi. This was back in 2001.

In 2002 the sushi fell by the wayside one afternoon over a spicy tuna roll and some seared salmon. These were two of my favorite things and sushi was the only flesh I was still eating. I was happy when I was presented my little plate of fish, took a bite, and while chewing my mouth reacted strongly. Chew, chew, chew.... "Ick, what is this!? We don't want this in our mouth! EEEEW!"

A few weeks later friends were over for dinner. Some lovely smoked salmon ravioli had been picked out for the evening and I was looking forward to it. Great conversation, nice wine, yummy veggies... The ravioli? Same mouth reaction, only more insistent. Chew, chew, chew.... "Ick, what is this!? We don't want this in our mouth! EEEEW!"

I honestly thought the ravioli were rancid. Something seriously wrong with the meal. I looked around the table and realized everyone else was happily munching away. I was the only one fighting the urge to gag as I spit out my second bite into a napkin. At that point it seemed obvious that I'd become vegetarian without even trying. My body just found meat gross.

In 2003, while answering a craving for scrambled eggs, my body reacted the same way to eating eggs. I knew the signs immediately. Chew, chew, chew.... "Ick, what is this!? We don't want this in our mouth! EEEEW!"

By now I'd lost nearly 100 pounds. People were amazed. In a way it didn't really feel amazing to me at all, I was there just eating differently, exercising more. It wasn't until my shoes were too big that I really was able to acknowledge how dramatically my body had changed with the weight I'd gained. I certainly was feeling better, so I didn't feel inclined to return back to the way I had been eating.

Cheese was the last great hold out. Particularly Gorgonzola, brie, Stilton, and strong Cheddars. I loved cheese and would happily have entire meals of nothing but an assortment of cheese with some bread. Yep, still vegetarian. Made sure everything I got was not made with animal rennet.

The side effect of this cheese love? Well, my cholesterol had started to inch down a little when I first switched to a vegetarian diet, however, the increase in all that high dairy-fat cheese in my diet sent it right back up again! Once that had happened my doctor was really wanting me to see a nutritionist and go on drugs. I asked him for one more year.

Remembering Dad

Kind of a heavy post today. These thoughts, the poem below, have been banging around in my skull for several days now. Nearly feels like the noise them make gets in the way of trying to write about things for my Zen community, a piece on my weight loss for Chozen to post to her blog site, or the poem that's lurking around in there (an homage of sorts to Neruda's Ode to Tomatoes).

The other day I was looking for a safety pin and came across my Dad's wedding ring. I've had it since the day he died. I very clearly hold in my mind taking the ring off of his hand and putting it onto my hand. For a while I wore it, when I was 130 or more pounds heavier. I was a bit sad when I'd lost enough weight that I could no longer wear it out of fear of it falling off.

That moment where I took off Dad's ring has been fresh in my mind now. The further away I get from his death, the more I am able to pull apart the frozen way I felt at the time. He's become a big part of the reason I changed my life, lost the weight and began steering my life always towards health. It hurt so much that he would choose alcohol and cigarettes over me. In some ways I now see more clearly how the nearly 25 years he was my step-father were never free of his addictions and that those addictions were closer to his heart than the love he tried to show me. It hurts to think about, but I try not to let that anger & pain completely obscure the ways he really tried to be a good father.

This December it will be nine years since his death. I still have some of his ashes in a glass jar in my house and his ring in a box in my room. I remain profoundly sad to have lost him and sometimes feel like I am one of the few people who actually remembers the ways he tried to be loving. He wasn't very good at it but he was the only one who tried to fill that "father" role in my life when I was a child.

I was reminded of all this during a final scene in the last Battlestar Galatica episode. It combined a couple of things I hate about crying (I have a very long list of things I hate about crying) -- crying in public (was watching with a crowd at the McMenamin's Bagdad) and crying because some television show or movie is written in such a way to tug at my pentiful heart-strings. I feel like a weepy sap and embaressed there are people there who might see it. No, it doesn't matter if other people are crying too.

It was a scene where a ring was exchanged between the living and the dead. I watched and felt the weight of my Dad's hand in mine. How I had to move his fingers to remove his ring. He felt lifeless, truly. His body was an empty shell and I knew my Dad was gone. There was only his ring left, heavy on my hand.

Dad, December 11, 2000

I stood there; still,
Silent, holding tears.
Mom gestured at me
To take his ring.

His hand was
Still warm
As I slid off
The ring and put
It on my finger.

The heavy gold
Didn’t really know
The change from
One cooling hand
To one cold with
Grief and anger.

He didn’t look
Asleep, at rest.
He looked dead.
My heart was filled
With the enormity of
This final withdrawal
And I didn’t know
What to say
Or do, aside
From putting
The ring on.

Nine years later the
Ring no longer fits,
My fingers are
All too small.
It sits in a box
In my room.
My heart still
Pulls tight
In my chest.

My Picture in a Zine

My article came out today in the Sangha newsletter, Ink on the Cat. It seemed a little strange to me to see myself there, printed, in black & white, looking out from something I could hold in my hands. I'm not sure if I've ever had my photograph next to something I wrote. When I think about it, the only time my photograph has been printed is in things like year books. Once or twice in small, local papers when I was a kid participating in a school or civic event.

In high school and college I had things I wrote show up in the school papers or literary zines. Mostly poetry, I wrote so much poetry throughout my teens and twenties. I moved onto just having a website and putting up my own poetry there when I was in my twenties. The poetry seemed to just stop showing up, years ago. It feels strange sometimes to not have poetry swimming around my head all the time. Once in a while something occurs to me, just in a flash and mostly whole. Haiku shows up in those flashes.

At times it feels like the PTSD burned through that language. When the anxiety caused by it is at a peak it feels like I am entirely cut off from any ability to think coherently, much less communicate. Being able to get any words out is a physical fight. In finally naming what left me feeling like I was broken and trying to work on it, the words no longer arrive in the spare beauty of poetry.

And yet on all sides I am being encouraged to write. My Zen teachers and community, my Hatha yoga teacher, my loved-ones, and co-workers. Tell the story of my weight loss, my realizations about myself as I study yoga, coming to a place of peace. All of is why I write a blog, trying to come up with some practice that would help me figure out how to tell whatever story decides to come up.

I feel a little at a loss as to where to start. Really all of those stories are the whole story. The free-fall of personality I experienced, was because of my weight loss. That loss of my carefully constructed personae that I defined as me left behind the stark reality of my PTSD. Peeling back the layers of the trauma leads me inexorably back to my childhood. The way out of all of these things has been the yoga and Zen practice.

I feel a sick fear at my Mother finding out what I've written and still managing to punish, humiliate, or at the very least make me feel guilty for embarrassing the family. There's a voice that says that I should wait until she is dead to write about her. I guess I feel like I don't know how to write this story because I'm still living it and most of the time lately I feel like I have no voice of accomplishment to speak from.

Yet here is my picture, printed in the newsletter next to my words. Someone from the Sangha has already emailed a compliment to me on my words, adding their voice to both CK and AM's.

Craving Sweets

I'm craving sweet things tonight. Chocolate, cookies.... Even the ads for sweet, non-vegan, overly processed things on the television look good! I had some more yams and broccoli with some slightly sweet, Thai-style peanut sauce (thin kind), which addressed the craving a little. I'm guessing I'm still feeling the major sugar-fest of Halloween and Diwali. So many yummy treats from Sweet Pea, so much sugar!

I am more aware now of the cravings, more mindful about them. Before I just indulged them when ever they came up. Really I know the cravings were more emotional based, just wanting satisfying things to eat because I was unsatisfied with my life. It isn't that I don't feel that kind of craving from time to time, I just am more aware of it, much more able to say to myself what my body needs as opposed to what my mind is clamoring for.

One thing that has changed about it is the ability to notice how the body does crave sugar, above and beyond the mind wanting to be satisfied with something sweet. Whenever there's a few days in a row where I have sweets I find myself feeling my body craving them.

Open to the World

Once again I slept poorly. I just couldn't seem to fall asleep, my mind was racing around. Not even truly anxious, just busy. I kept controlling the breath, trying to focus on it, but only would start to doze before I ached and needed to move or I felt my brain start planning work, planning conversations, planning, planning, planning. When my alarm went off at 7AM, which I had planned so I could get up at sit zazen, have a shower, and work for a little before we would take me to my office and DW to her appointment.

Instead I tried to sleep a little longer, getting up at just before 8AM to get on the daily status call. I found problems as I checked my mail right as the call started. Spent part of the day dealing with that, re-doing work from Saturday night, and sitting in on meetings. Around 2:30 I left to pick up CK at the airport.

She looked tired and I was so glad to see her. I drove us back to her flat and we looked at her photographs from the trip, had some popcorn and chai. It was nice just sitting with her, talking and being close. I rubbed her feet a little bit and then had to change to go over to the community center and teach.

I put up the picture of myself from October 1999 on my Facebook account. My friend MP commented to me how he'd been thinking "how concentrated" I had become. It made me laugh and wonder if I wasn't dilute before. Just aspects of personality filling up the space, not the whole me.

At times it begins to feel less awkward. I guess I'm getting a little more used to my skin, even the extra, leftover skin. It is that I feel any less exposed, like I'm just making it up. I guessed I'm getting used to being that way, being open to the world instead of only interacting with it through a narrow slice.

Ghost

I happened to spot an old picture of myself from October 1999. When people ask me how overweight I was this is one of the images I think of. Nine years ago I loved this photograph me, I thought I looked lovely in it and used it for some of my online profiles. Now it is like seeing a ghost.

There was a time where I was entirely comfortable being that person. I weighed over 290 pounds. I could be loud, brash, imperious and over-the-top, knowing about sexuality. This was the person I became in response to a life filled with distractions; food, sex, video games, television & other media, trashy novels... really anything that kept me from thinking about why I was trying so hard to entertain myself at all costs.

Nine years later and I weigh less than half that and look much more like the person who graduated from Beaverton High School in 1987. Seeing 1999 Sherri, thinking of who I was then, is almost this sad experience. This larger-than-life personae I invested everything into. This facade who needed a substantial dose of anti-anxiety medication to keep her on an even remotely even keel. Who was avoiding the misery in her life, a long history of it.

I'm not sure what started to change first, video games I think. When I split up with my ex-husband, AP, he took all the computers so the LAN games were a thing of the past. I quickly grew bored with the Playstation games I had, which has always been the case with every console game I've owned.

When I started changing my approach to food it began to affect other things. I was vegetarian by 2002, not really intending to go that way but ending up there after meat began to taste very bad to me. It was my cholesterol I was trying to change, not my weight, so I'd started trying vegetarian dishes hoping it would be healthier and found them so good I just opted for them. In the end my cholesterol would increase (all the dairy), but I would fairly easily loose 100 pounds.

At that point, January 2003, I began to investigate hatha yoga. After only one year I wanted to teach and would spend another year intensifying my practice toward this goal. Three years ago this month I would teach my first class. Now I am intensely studying again, working towards certification through Yoga Alliance. Two asana practices a week in addition to the two beginning classes I now teach and six hours of theory, anatomy & physiology, technique, assists, modifications, and ethics.

In 2005 AM and I both began to investigate Buddhism. While trying out meditation one evening at the Ch'an temple I discovered that sitting caused intense pain in my legs, hips and back. The herniated disc at the base of my spine irritating all the nerves, tendons and muscles into constant spasm. I would seek out a cushion and would in turn discover the Jizos for Peace project in the summer of 2005. In considering my beginning to teach beginning yoga I was drawn to the Zen Community of Oregon.

Last night, during sanzen, I asked HB if I could receive Jukai, to take refuge, next autumn. To all my anxiety and nervous energy around asking that's been building for months now he answered, "Sure, I don't see why not."

Now months to finish tasks. Writing about the precepts, all sixteen of them. Sewing the Rakusu, a representation of the Buddha's robe. Attending sesshin, which worries me greatly since getting through half that amount of sitting last winter at the women's retreat I was having muscle spasms during the last meditation practice. I am sure a way will be found is what I try to remind that anxious voice.

Seeing that ghost me increased my resolve to set myself toward this next goal. I've known for over two years I have wanted to do this, I've just been afraid I'd never really fit in. That if I wasn't playing the role of "Good Zen Buddhist" I wouldn't be able to join the club. Again and again I've been shown I am a part, that even someone who finds their way out on the edges, in the narrow margins is just another person seeking to settle and wake up.

Unrecognizable

A couple of weeks ago I was walking out of the Farmers Market, looking for where AM was waiting in the car. I wasn't easily spotting him in all the busyness. He hadn't waved at me or done anything to catch my attention. When I finally did make it to the car he remarked that he hadn't recognized me for several moments.

This is a strange, new milepost. AM has always recognized me even when friends, family members have done double takes upon seeing me after many months or years. I guess it is understandable since I sometimes do not recognize myself in the mirror and at times seeing my reflection go by feels as though I'm seeing the past. I more closely resemble myself at 16.

Most people at 39 would be thrilled to find that they looked so much younger would be reassuring, pleasing. It isn't that I'm not thrilled, it is rather gratifying to still be asked for identification when I purchase a bottle of wine. It is just part of the strangeness of it all, of letting go of the elaborate persona I must have started to craft from the moment I left Portland for college in Wisconsin. A bit of play-acting that become everything I was.

Online I've been been touching base with people I've not seen in years. None of them have mentioned the change so far. Maybe they think the photo isn't current or it just isn't as dramatic through an online photograph, but no one has said much. I can feel myself bracing for it, the questions.

CB and HB have both said I need to be proud of this and at times I almost think I can start to figure out how to do that. Then I run into the strangeness of not being recognized by someone who's spent a great deal of time with me these past 9 years or anticipate old friends wanting to know what happened. At those times I feel like I miss a step in embracing pride over the accomplishment.

Maybe it is the feeling of attention being called to it, to me, that leaves me a little uncomfortable. I can recall wanting to be the center of attention as a child, to be popular like my cousins. I would thrust myself into the center, yet was never quite comfortable there, the effort was always forced. By the time I was in college I was just starting to move from that kind of behavior, building the habit of staying to the sidelines that turned into kind of withdrawal.

In losing weight I never set out to be in the spotlight, to have attention drawn to me. I merely wanted to live a more healthful life. I wanted to be sure I would be here for those who love me, that I wouldn't suddenly leave due to heart problems or diabetes (two things that affect the women in my family quite a bit). Learning how to be in the center and have people truly interested in my being there feels awkward. Different from the forced quality of my youth, just awkwardness as I keep doing what I've been doing for the past few years; the behavior that has put me in the spotlight without seeking it.