I’ve wanted to lose weight as long as I can remember.  I think I was 12 when I started my first diet. My self esteem was so centered around my weight that by the time I was 19 years old, I had no friends and honestly believed that no one would ever really like me unless I was thin. I was so concerned about what everyone else thought of my looks (which is mostly just what I thought others thought about my looks - since most people won’t call you fat and ugly to your face) that I thought about it constantly, everywhere I went.

Of course I wasn’t only critical of my looks, I was also critical of others’ appearance. I mean what fun would it be to only judge yourself and no one else, right? So I would be relieved if someone was fatter than I, had skinny legs but a huge double chin, a nice butt but terrible acne. And if all else failed, I’d just tell myself I was smarter than that pretty bimbo flirting with my man.

‘Whew. They’re not better than me.’ - That’s ultimately the point of these thoughts, right? The perceived competition between your looks and the looks of those around you? But the the truth is that judging other people’s looks might make you feel better about your own insecurities, for a millisecond, but ultimately just not being so insecure is SO MUCH BETTER.

A couple weeks ago I had a party at my house and four of my friends comments were so telling about our perceptions of appearance.

“I just love women. Honestly. I can find something beautiful about every woman, every person that I meet.” He also went on and on about how beautiful his wife is, but how he thinks other people think he’s not attractive enough for her. I was completely shocked to learn of this insecurity, because I think he’s just as attractive as she is.

“My nose is horrible. My stomach is so fat and flabby. My blah blah is not perfect and so I’m hideous.” This was coming from one of my gorgeous girlfriends. She’s a size 0. ZERO! She has the best figure of anybody I’ve ever met in real life. And yeah, her nose isn’t going to land in Plastic Surgery Monthly, but it’s unique and beautiful.

“You are so gorgeous. I mean you are gor-geous!” - Friend A, “You are so beautiful” - Friend B. These comments were said to me! Me who thought I was too hideous to even have friends 10 years ago! They even accused me of be conceited and knowing how hot I was! As if! I let them in on my little secret:

It’s not that I think I’m so hot. It’s just that I think I’m hot enough, and that’s good enough. And if it’s not good enough for you, then don’t let the door hit ya…

These days I’m still fat, in fact I’m fatter than ever. But I’m still hot. I get hit on, my fiance is constantly pawing at me and my friends think I’m gorgeous. Sure someone at the bar might think I’m fat, or ugly or whatever. But who the fuck cares? It’s all about perception. I’ll take the good and forget the rest.

And of course I still judge myself and wish I looked differently. I wish I had thinner legs and perkier boobs and a clearer complexion. But ultimately, I know it doesn’t matter THAT much. I don’t dwell on it. My worth as a human being has very little to do with what I look like. So I quit judging myself so harshly. And when I quit judging myself, it was much easier to quit judging other people.

Ultimately, it isn’t a competition. There is no prize for having the best abs or the biggest boobs or the most muscular pecs, at least not a worthwhile one. The idea that there is some kind of looks competition is just what marketers use to get you to buy fancy face cream and cheap body spray. If you quit thinking your looks matter so much, they won’t matter so much to other people. And if you quit worrying about other people’s appearance, you might actually get to know them for who they are and have less superficial relationships! Imagine that.

I’m not saying that if you think lots of happy thoughts the Ford Modeling agency is going to be knocking on your door. I’m saying have confidence in what you’ve got, forget the rest and realize it doesn’t matter that much. Stop complaining about your nose and your hair and your thighs. It’s selfish and annoying and it’s probably the REAL reason I had no friends at 19. They all got sick of listening to me complain about myself.

More importantly: Our kids our listening to us. When they hear us judge other people, they learn to judge themselves. When they hear us talk about how our looks aren’t good enough, they learn that their looks, and therefore themselves, are not good enough. They also learn that if it’s okay to judge other people’s appearance, it’s okay for those other people to judge them, and more importantly that other people’s judgements of them somehow matter. When ultimately they don’t.

Sure, you might not get that one job, or that one date or that modeling contract because of your looks. So? There are better jobs, better people to date and better aspirations to have. So the next time you make a comment about someone’s looks, ask yourself: What are you really saying about that person, YOURSELF and what’s important in life?

If there’s anything relevant to be known about me, it is probably that an optimist, I am NOT.

It’s a little fuzzy prior to junior high, but as long as I can remember, my life has revolved primarily around two things: Drama, and DRAMA. The first kind of drama is the type I like to create to get attention, AND to unconsciously contribute to the second kind of DRAMA, a.k.a. neurotic emotional responses to even the most mildy unpleasant happening. Of course I’m not the only gen-xer with this propensity. I mean, hello, Kurt Cobain? DRAMA! Angst is kinda our theme. Pretty much every one of us can look at our lives and see how we unwittingly choose drama over pleasantness. I mean, why have fun when you can have pain and suffering?

But me? I’m a fucking drama expert. Give me a fun, relaxing event with some chit-chatting, some good food, some games: Yawn. Add a little gossip, some infighting, or even a mildly catty fight about religion and I’ll perk up faster than nipples at a strip club. And that’s just the beginning. As a teenager, my mission was to make the worst of every situation. I’m too fat. I’m not pretty. She’s prettier than me. Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I guess I’ll go eat worms. I just believed that happiness was over there. There was always something I needed to achieve in order to be happy. Or something I needed to have. Whatever “it” was, that was going to make me happy, I definitely never had it. I spend a lot of time crying and moping and doping and wallowing.

When I was twenty years old, and I had finally moved out of my parents’ house and was living with my boyfriend, it finally occurred to me that maybe I was depressed. The medical diagnoses of depression had been getting publicity for a couple of years, but I was an evangelical Christian, so of course, I knew that depression really meant that I was just an evil sinner. I also knew that I shouldn’t ever trust psychology because Dr. Dobson said so, and also because my mom had a book called, Why Christians Can’t Trust Psychology (a.k.a. science). So of course, I would never have self-identified with depression. But after I moved out of my parents’ house, I started to think that religion might be bullshit, and I pretty much quit believing in it. I mean, if things all happen for a reason and god has a plan, why does everything suck so much? And why does he hate most of us and want to send us to hell just because we don’t believe in or don’t know of some antiquated story in some book? I started to think to myself, why do I believe this story? It certainly wasn’t because it rang true for me or I found it to be useful. So like so many angsty gen-xers that had come before me, I decided I was agnostic and got a prescription for antidepressants. The antidepressants worked awesome, as both an antidepressant…and a sedative. I was very calm and emotionally stable, and sleeping nearly constantly.

Laying around on the couch and watching tv all day is great, once in awhile, if you’re normally active. But if you’re not active and you do it all the time, you will get fat, vitamin D deprived, and become a boring person to be around. I took the pills for about a year, and I was constantly tired, albeit even-keeled. I finally decided that it wasn’t worth the every-10-second-yawns and weaned myself off them. But goddammit, sans the pills I was just as depressed as I ever was.

In the middle of my pregnancy I happened upon this weird book by some “spiritual teacher”. I had purchased one of his other books in a prior fit of self-loathing and depression, but never quite “caught on” to what he was saying. But for some reason this new book just struck a chord. It talked about two different kinds of suffering, the kind that is inevitable: death, pain, etc. and the kind we create for ourselves in our head, by thinking about our problems really, really hard and magnifying them 100x, not to mention telling everyone about our problems and complaining ad nauseum.

Complaining is one of my most effective drama-creating techniques. If complaining were an olympic sport I would get the gold twice over. Complaining is fun because it often results in sympathy and reciprocal complaining from the other party! Yay! Double the drama! Not only that, but because it doesn’t do anything to solve problems, or require any action to be taken, it’s great for people who would rather create drama and have problems than be happy and solve problems. So as you can imagine, being nauseous and pregnant for five or so months, I had done a whole lot of complaining! But for some reason, complaining never really made me feel better! So I read this new-agey book and it argued that instead of bettering my situation, drama and complaining might actually be making it worse! Whoa! Could it be true?

It suddenly occurred to me that I should consider having a positive attitude about my pregnancy. And even more revolutionary… maybe I should consider having a positive attitude about life in general! In a few short months I was going to begin, literally, to shape the attitude of a brand new human, by my example.

I realized that happiness is a choice.

If you see the negative in every circumstance, your experience will be negative. If when something bad happens you magnify the experience with lots and lots of thoughts, complaints and attention, you make the situation worse! If you focus on the positive, your experience will be positive. If you accept and deal with your feelings immediately when having them and then move on, you will be happier. Wow. This was a total philosophical turnaround for me. It was almost a primal urge. Call it pregnancy hormones if you will, whatever. My attitude and my pregnancy finally took a turn for the best…

Catch Up: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

We left Planned Parenthood and headed back out to the interstate. To err, celebrate, or something, we stopped at Krispy Kreme. No sooner had I downed my first donut than I started to feel a bit weird. I had a funny feeling, I couldn’t quite place. By the time our trip was over the funny feeling had gotten a bit more specific. Ugh. I was definitely going to be sick. I ran in the house, and my extended and intimate relationship with the toilet began.

Now…I’d always heard about so-called ‘morning’ sickness. And while that might the common term, I like to refer to it as ’constant sickness.’ I don’t mean to be dramatic (blatant lie) but seriously, it’s not bad enough that in nine months I have to push a human through a passageway, that to be absolutely frank, hasn’t accomodated some generously sized penises without injury. But now, when I’m just getting used to the whole pregnancy thing, I have to deal with constant nausea, and vomitting in excess of 8 times per day. What the F? Evolution has not been kind to women. I mean, seriously, what do men have to go through that is remotely close to even menstrual cramps, let alone birthing a child? Pregnancy sucks!

I should note that I have a very small family. I haven’t been around ANY babies, like ever, and I don’t think I’ve changed a single diaper in my life. I have no siblings, and only two first cousins. I’d always been hippie-ish, and skeptical of convention. So instead of talking to a obstetrician or a family practice doctor about my pregnancy and impending childbirth, I decided to talk to the one Certified Nurse Midwife available in my insurance plan. At my first appointment, I was depressed, sick and, um, depressed. So she gave me a prescription for LSD.

Just kidding, but seriously, it might as well have been. The anti-nausea medicine felt like an acid trip. I got really drowsy and fell “asleep” on the couch. I say “asleep” because my dreams were psychotic. I felt like I was 15 again, watching posters melt off my girlfriends wall. And while, I might have been technically “asleep”, resting, I was not. It was the most fitfull sleep I had gotten since the night before my first day of high school. I woke up and puked immediately. Great. It didn’t even work. Not to mention the fact that I had insomnia for the remainder of the night.

I tried to be positive. It will get better eventually, I thought, and it probably won’t get worse, right? Wrong. Hello influenza.The combination of hypermeisis (clinical term for severe ‘morning’ sickness) and the flu was just too much for me. I literally lived with my face in the toilet for two weeks. At one point, I honestly thought I was going to die. But I didn’t, and after a couple visits to the ER, and some IV fluids, I was back to just being nauseous constantly. Yay! I even started to get hopeful that it would go away eventually.

The first three months passed, and I was still sick. I figured I was just one of those women who had morning sickness for a little longer, but eventually it would go away. Four months passed, still nauseous. Five months passed. Six months. It was around seventh months, that I finally gave up hope. By eight months, I feared I’d have morning sickness even after I gave birth.

Being pregnant unexpectedly and then so sick, and then even sicker was really hard on me emotionally and physically. There was definitely a time when I hoped for a miscarriage. Every day at work, when I was barely functioning at my job and spending most of my time in the bathroom, I hoped that they would fire me so I could just curl up on the couch at home and sleep away my problems. I pretty much lost any shred of enthusiasm that I had left for life. But then something really strange happened…

Like any American, I have lots of problems, issues and neuroses.

The biggest of these is my inability to take action. For as long as I can remember I’ve had lofty goals and ambitions. I will take a few steps towards them, mostly in the form of extensive research. Then, I will methodically search for every conceivable problem that could possibly arise in the process of attaining these goals, then give up, eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and watch Sex & The City reruns for 4 hours straight every night for 3 months. Pick new goal, rinse & repeat.

Periodically, I would go through phases where I would panic, having not attained any of my goals, or achieved any “success” in the eyes of the world (education, job, money, possessions), and would rush to gain “success” only to have a nervous breakdown and stop just short of actually finishing something. Case in point: I might hold the record for the most undergraduate semesters taken to achieve an Associate’s Degree. Yes folks, it took me a whopping five and a half years (11 semesters) to get a 2 year degree. Now I’m not stupid. I just can’t make a decision and stick to it. So I started at one school, transferred to another, transferred back to the first and then transferred to another, had a nervous breakdown, and then gave up.

So how does this relate to the discovery of an unexpected bun in my oven? Well, when I realized I was pregnant, I had finally gotten a job that paid enough for a gal to actually live on, and might even keep my brain stimulated long enough for me to forget about my personal problems. I figured I was finally on the right track. So getting pregnant was the last thing I wanted to happen. I mean, if I hadn’t achieved my goals as a single girl with very little responsibilities, then having a baby was going to slow my already excruciatingly snail-like pace to a near-standstill, right?

An abortion just seemed like the most logical decision. And while my boyfriend didn’t seem to share my feelings about the situation, he respected my choice. Now, in the state where I live, an abortion requires 3 office visits. The first is an evaluation and counseling session. The second is the actual procedure, and the third is a checkup to make sure your parts are all okay afterwards. So we packed up and drove 90 minutes to the nearest Planned Parenthood for the first visit.

The first visit went off with out a hitch. I got an ultrasound and saw a ‘yolk sac’. They determined I was about 5 weeks along and I made a second appointment to have a chemical abortion. A chemical abortion is a series of pills you take that make your uterus inhospitable to a developing embryo. I was going to take the infamous abortion pill.

As an aside, many people like to call the so-called ‘morning-after pill’ an abortion pill. However, the morning-after pill is really a mega dose of the same hormones in your standard birth control pill. My understanding of the morning-after pill is that it prevents implantation of a fertilized egg. So if that’s an abortion, fine. But since as many 30 percent of pregnancies end this way naturally, many times without a woman even realizing she’s pregnant, it’s hard to muster up any moral outrage at the situation. I, on the other hand was taking the real deal. The real ‘abortion pill’. I would be terminating my pregnancy at about 5 weeks gestation. Approximately 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage by this time. Plus, due to my health issues, I had a 30-50% of miscarrying naturally, anyway.

The night before I was to have my 2nd office visit at Planned Parenthood, my boyfriend started having a problem. He had vented to his friend about the situation, and rather than be supportive, his friend decided to get up on his moral soap box and tell him what to do. He called us selfish, irresponsible and said he would never be able to look at me the same way again. Lovely. So now my boyfriend isn’t so supportive anymore. He’s got questions. Were we being irresponsible? Selfish? I didn’t think so. After all we both struggled with serious emotional issues. We both deal with anger and rage issues, and I have been diagnosed as clinically depressed and deal with some pretty serious anxiety. Maybe it was selfish NOT to have an abortion. This is when things started to go down hill.  My confidence in my decision was gone. I didn’t want a baby OR an abortion! A deep uneasiness started to rise in my chest. This wasn’t going to be as easy or as simple as I thought.

In the end we decided to go ahead with the abortion. We took our second 90 minute trek to Planned Parenthood. The first appointment was easy. No drama. No nonsense. This time though, of course, there had to be protesters. Here comes the drama. We bypassed those insensitive fucks and made our way through security and up to the 3rd floor. We prepaid and sat down in the crowded waiting room and waited. And waited. And waited. As I waited, the anxiety started to build. I started to panic. I thought, what if this is what’s supposed to happen? What if I’m supposed  to have a baby? Maybe, ironically, having a baby would be the catalyst that would change my life? Fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck. I just sat there, gripping the chair, the room swirling around me. What if they called my name now? What would I do? Could I go through with it?