A picture is worth a thousand emotions…

May our days be filled with tangled fingers

I was the last child of four.

This means that by the time I was born the excitement of taking pictures of drooling faces and sleeping angels had worn off. I have one baby picture (outside of the obligatory hospital photo) that I didn’t even know existed until after my mother had been gone for close to ten years and I had just been in contact with a father I didn’t know was still alive until I had spent 30 years on this earth.  My paternal grandmother had kept it, waiting for me…and after all that time of wondering if we would ever cross paths, she sent it to me: It was of my mother holding me in her arms.

I was the child of a single mother.

This means that when elementary school pictures were being taken I often took an empty envelope to school. I don’t remember what it was like to sit on that small black stool and be told to brush my hair back, look into the camera and for the love all that is pure to please smile. I do remember what it was like when pictures were delivered to our classrooms and I went home empty handed. If there were any pictures of me growing up they were few and far in between.

May our days be filled with shy kisses

I was the child of mentally ill parent.

By the time I reached high school, my mother had pretty much checked out. She was here, but it was more important for her to be sharing bar stools and lonely stories with her “friends” than it was for her to be making lasting memories with her only daughter. While the popular kids in high school were getting full page coverage in our yearbook(s) I was getting my one picture taken and hating every minute of it. By this time I couldn’t stand to look at a picture of myself. My perception of what I thought I looked like was skewed. I thought I was obese. I thought I was ugly. I thought the only thing I was good for was giving boys what they wanted just so I could feel loved for short moments in my life. If there are pictures of me and the few friends I had coming into my adulthood I am unaware of them.

May our days be filled with helping each other with the little things

I was a meth addict.

Deep in my depression the idea of having my picture taken was like a slap in the face. Why in the world would I take even three seconds to try and capture this time in my life? I spent so much time trying to get high and forget about who I was that you’d be dead crazy to think I’d stand there for you while a picture was snapped of me.  I think there is one picture of me during this time in my life. I had decided to get clean and got checked into a clean and sober house. The house was about to be shut down due to lack of funding after I had been there for close to 6 months. Reporters came to use our sad stories to pull at the heart strings of their readers. I was featured on the front page standing against the house. It was the first picture I actually liked of myself. I was getting healthy for the first time in my life. I felt good about the choices I was making to get clean and there was this look of hope coming from my eyes….

May our days be filled with laughter

I was the child of terminally ill parent.

Just before my 21st birthday my mother left me and this world. Even though we didn’t have a relationship I would call healthy under any means she was still my mother. While she was alive there was always the hope of making memories. When she took her last breath, she took those memories with her. What did I look like as a baby? Did I cry a lot? Was I easy to rock to sleep? Were you happy I was a girl? Left alone to fend for myself and not having drugs to turn to any longer I returned to what was comforting for me as a child: Food. I found comfort in boxes of macaroni and frozen dinners. I found friendships in those people behind the counter that asked me if I wanted to super size my fries or if I wanted to add an apple pie dessert to my #3 meal. If there are any pictures of this time in my life I’m sure I’m making some comical facial expression or hiding behind someone as the self hatred and depression once again blanketed everything I knew to be my life. To protect myself from what I thought was a world that didn’t love me or think I was deserving of anything good, I began to add pounds to a body I had no idea how to love.

May our days be filled with such closeness no one can come between us.

I was 270 pounds

It didn’t happen overnight. In fact it took two marriages and 20 years of sitting around watching my life go no where. Finding myself 100+ pounds over weight, depressed to the point of what I thought was no return and afraid to take the necessary steps to change my life for the better you can imagine I was not one to jump on a photo opportunity when one was presented to me. It wasn’t until I began to take monthly pictures of my weight loss did I begin to look at my body differently. I was excited to see the changes that I couldn’t see looking down. When I began to cross finish lines with numbers pinned to my front, I looked forward to what pictures were being captured of me. Did I remember to look up? Did I remember to smile?  Wow, I look really sweaty at mile marker two. As I began to find comfort in who I was seeing in the mirror every morning I began to find some comfort in the pictures I was taking on a daily basis as I learned how to shop for clothes, buy food not from a drive-thru and become close to the one person I thought was lost for good.

May our days be filled with kept promises.

I am who I no longer was.

It’s been a long 20 months. Who I was when I first stepped up to the starting line of this Life Changing Journey is gone. I still have days of self doubt and days where looking in the mirror comes with difficulty. I have days where I still think of myself as obese and wonder how I’m going to get into the single digit jeans in my closet. I have days where the tears fall heavily as I mourn relationships lost and changes made that I never saw coming. I have days where I don’t think I can keep moving forward and wonder how I can help those succeed when I don’t feel like I’m much of a success myself. But now there are these really wonderful things in my life that prove everything I do is worth it: pictures. They aren’t easy to take. I still find myself trying to be comical even when I should be serious. I’m often too critical of what I see (a wrinkle here, some loose skin there, a smile that looks a little out of place). But in those pictures are proof of what I’ve done to get to where I am today. In those pictures are proof that the choices that were hard to make were exactly the ones that I had to be strong in making.

In those pictures are the proof that even when you think life is as good as it gets…

It only gets better.