Revelations

The other day Mr. E and I were walking into the mall because I had become obsessed with this corduroy jacket I had tried on at American Eagle and so after thinking about how cute it was and how much it would make me look like a Harvard undergrad I had to back and buy it and as we were walking in I caught sight of myself in the window of a restaurant. And in that instance of seeing and recognizing the me that I am now I was overcome with this feeling that I think has been creeping up on me for some time. Instead of being proud of myself for losing 60 pounds, I'm mad at myself for letting my weight get so out of hand that I had to expend such an enormous effort, such an enormous amount of energy, simply to get myself back to "normal", back to a reasonable center. In some sense my achievement is only admirable if you know what I weighed before. I've worked SO SO SO hard, and my reward is to be REGULAR.
Sometimes I wonder what I could have accomplished if only I hadn't had sixty pounds to lose. Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve to be proud of correcting something that I fucked up so totally and completely in the first place. And sometimes I feel like I'm going to wake up one morning and be fat all over again - as if all of this has been a dream. I feel totally insecure in my size 4'ness.
I know time will heal a lot of this. But the me now needs to think harder about if I want to be proud of losing sixty pounds because I want people to give me accolades and tell me I'm skinny, or I want to be proud of the fact that I can run seven miles and I have leg muscles now and I eat healthy and I'm not ashamed of what I look like anymore.