Humble Pie

Tomorrow is the first day back at school post-Christmas break. I'm running later today--whenever Kevin gets back from the farm. But for right now, I'm sitting on my bed in our bedroom with a pile of about ten pairs of jeans, eight or nine shirts, and various other pieces of clothing I've weeded out from my closet. It's humbling. At one time, I fit into all these articles of clothing. I didn't realize how far away from fitting into all these pieces of clothing I had gotten until I tried them on this morning.

I hold onto clothes. I think I'm always right around the corner from losing the weight that it will take to put these clothes back on. But when I went through these clothes this morning, I realized that even if I were to lose the weight to get these clothing items back on, I probably wouldn't want to wear them anyway. I wouldn't buy them if I were in the store with them today. That's my litmus test.

Still, I'm trying not to beat myself up, but it's hard. I want to kick my own ass for getting this out of shape, for putting on weight (like so many people do in their first years after getting married even though I swore to myself up and down that that would not happen to me), and I'm trying not to beat myself up about losing that discipline that I know I once had.

It's hard, at times, for me to not go back to this move to Kentucky as the root cause of this. Yes, a lot of good has come out of the move, and I'm ultimately glad that I did it. But at the same time, it's hard for me to not see a series of decisions that I made when I first got here in reaction to the stressors of that job that I took. I get this really victimy feeling about the whole thing... as if Mary O. (my old boss) was holding the puppet strings. I gave away too much power, and whenever I go back to thinking about it, I'm giving up that power again. But it's a tough row to hoe, I guess. I'm working at it.

So I'm donating all these old jeans and all these shirts that I never wear, and I've traded them out for some beautiful clothes I got in Michigan this last week, and I'm trying to regain some confidence and dig deeper to balance out the parts of my life that I love with the parts of my life that I miss. I can have both of those things at the same time.