Eleven Months Since Surgery

The New Normal and traveling


It has been a slow month for weight loss.  I am down a total of 124 pounds to date.  I've been doing some more scrounging through closets and drawers in recent weeks looking for old things that I can wear again.  I have a meeting coming up with my music fraternity students and since it's one in which we will recognize graduating seniors and install next year's officers, we dress in white.  So I went looking to see what I have that will work, and I was pleased to find several options for the occasion.  I just need to decide which one to wear.

I also started packing for our upcoming vacation.  I am notorious for over-packing and I always have been.  It's hard to predict the weather and I'm always afraid I'll need something and not have it.  I know I have too many clothes in my bag already, and I'll probably unpack and repack at least once between now and when we leave.  I am not much of a shorts-wearing girl, and the only ones I have are way too big, but I'm taking them anyway.  They have drawstrings so I can cinch the waists in and make them work.  I'm not buying new shorts until my weight is settled where it needs to be.

Packing my "health and beauty" bag will be different this trip, and from now on, because I have so many vitamins and supplements I need to take with me.  This is our first trip since my surgery so I'll be super-vigilant about making sure I've packed all the extra bottles, bars and pouches.  Just another part of The New Normal.

St. Simons Island is such a relaxing vacation spot, and over the years we've discovered a favorite little cafe there called Palm Coast Coffee.  We originally went there because it's an Internet cafe and we wanted to check e-mail and whatnot.  We also discovered that it has great food and wonderful regional atmosphere, with local artists' paintings on the walls and available for purchase.  Our last trip, on our way out of town, we stopped there for scones to take with us on the road, (something of a leaving-the-island tradition) and I asked if they had t-shirts with their logo on them.  I bought one in the largest size they had, knowing that, right then, it would not fit me...but knowing that eventually it would, once I had my surgery.

It fits me now and I've packed it to take with me, along with the fabulous Kissy Shirt that is way too big.  But I will never part with it, and I'll certainly never take a vacation without it.  A big part of The New Normal is figuring out what I am willing to let go of and what I am adamant about keeping.  And clothes are only a part of that process.  I am having to learn what attitudes and self-perceptions are still valid, as well as the ones that aren't accurate any longer.  I am no longer always the biggest person in the room, for example, but I still usually feel like I am, because I was for such a long time.  I am, in fact, getting really close to being of "average size", something I have not been in decades, and even when I was, I still felt fat because I was always hearing that I was fat.  I don't think I've ever felt average-sized, or more pointedly, normal.  In the words of a favorite author of mine, Patsy Clairmont, "Normal is just a setting on your dryer!"

The New Normal isn't about what I look like.  It's the way I live my life now in order to get and stay healthy and strong.  It's eating a new way, working activity into my routine and valuing myself enough to make the changes I need to make.  What I look like is just a by-product of The New Normal.