*Trigger Warning: Talk of disordered eating

Hey friends.

I started going to pilates in January, and I absolutely love it. I go twice a week to this pilates, yoga, meditation hybrid class.

But…this thing happened where I start going to gym and my brain goes, “How much weight can we lose?”

I start counting things. Calories. Reps. Steps. I start looking up healthy recipes or making “healthy” swaps. I start thinking about what’s the least amount of calories I can eat.

It gets dark up there. And exercise stops being fun because my brain equates it to weightloss.

At the tail end of my twenties, I gained weight, and then continued to gain weight throughout my thirties. All the while, I’d look (and still look) at myself in the mirror and wonder who that girl is. There’s this disconnect between my brain and my body sometimes, and the shame of being bigger, of taking up space after years of being thin can be all-consuming some days.

There are also days where I look in the mirror and go, “Look at you, hottie!” So, it’s not all bad.

When I started doing pilates, my husband and I also started going to the gym. And I had so much hope for weightloss because I thought I’d be getting back to some better version of myself. It’s like I was trying to find who I was at 25…except now I’m 38.

And then I heard a song on TikTok and the lyric scratched an itch in my brain.

“I was never looking for her, til I found her, now I find her everywhere.”

Well, hm.

It’s a love song, but I initially heard it out of context from the subsequent lyrics and thought the underlying meaning was gorgeous.

What if the version of me that I’m looking for isn’t the me I was at 25…but instead is a me I haven’t even met yet?

And, anyway, aside from having a killer body at 25 (I’ll show you pictures sometime), I was kind of a mess. Like I did some really stupid s**t in my twenties. And life just felt out of control all the time. And I didn’t have boundaries. And I let things happen that I shouldn’t have. And there was a lot of crying and smoking cigarettes in my bathroom with the fan on while playing ukulele in my empty bathtub. (I don’t even know what to say about that. So, we’re just going to let it go, ok? Great.)

But now I am 38 (for another few months). And I know how good life can be because I’m living it. And it’s better than I could have imagined. And why would I want to go back to all that uncertainty? All those Marlboro Menthols.

I like this version of me now, but I feel like this is just the beginning of something.

The point in all of this is that, when I think about it, I don’t really want to go backwards, but backwards is my only point of reference. How do you become someone? Or is the becoming in the being?

For now, I’ll go to pilates and the gym and stop counting because I never liked math anyway and maybe one day I’ll meet the me I was never looking for, but once I find her, she’ll be everywhere…in the best way.

Until next time, friends.