P Minus 10

Happy Samhain, or All Souls Day, as it now happens to be. I did not pig out on candy, though I did buy a bag in preparation for the 6 trick-or-treaters who came by a day early. I do not understand the whole concept of Halloween-on-a-day-that-is-not-Halloween, but I will save that rant. I now have less than 10 pounds to go to reach my target weight, and that is what I wish to write about today.

My stated and immediate reasons for starting this little dieting journey were health-related. Those were certainly the catalyst, but I've come to the realization that there's another reason I'm doing this. I'm also shedding the baggage of my relationship with S. When I reach my target weight, I will be about 5 pounds above my weight when I started dating S, and I may well go on and lose that additional 5 pounds, as all of it was a product of that relationship.

You see, when S and I started dating, we both gained a fair amount of weight fairly quickly. This was most likely a product of my love of cooking and his love of all things starchy, but the weight eventually became a physical manifestation of emotional baggage - largely that which he was dumping on me. S had a problem with fidelity, as it turned out, and in the end, the relationship was based pretty much on his lying while he fooled around behind my back for 4½ years. When he dumped me a year and a half ago, he claimed that all of it - the cheating, the dumping, and basically everything in between - was because I wasn't hot enough for him. Because of the weight gain, of course.

Now, he weighed just as much as I did, had gained as much weight as I had. And he'd basically undermined every attempt I'd made to lose weight by throwing temper tantrums when I tried to cook healthier meals. He also threw temper tantrums if I tried to listen to any music that wasn't Bach while he was home and ignored me if I tried to talk to him while Bach was playing or Law & Order was on TV and was generally not an easy person to live with. And even though I am a fairly self-reliant and self-confident person by nature, this took an emotional toll which made the weight loss even harder. But it was still ultimately my fault, in his mind, that he was cheating.

So I've come to realize that losing this weight is, in part, ridding myself of the weight of that relationship. Not long after I started dieting, S e-mailed me with details about his refinancing of the house - the last major step in disentangling our affairs. At the end of that e-mail, he expressed a wish to resume being on speaking terms. I took a few days before responding and then, as civilly as possible but in no uncertain terms, told him that how he had treated me was abusive and that his actions were his own doing and were no fault of mine. I also told him that unless and until he could fully own his actions and quit trying to rationalize or excuse them, I didn't feel it was in my best interest to have any contact with him. I've not heard anything from him since.

Now, I will say that I don't believe that S is completely bad. He was certainly nowhere near as awful as Franklin's Mr. Ex, and though he did some pretty awful things in our relationship, I do still care for him and do hope that he someday learns to deal with his own baggage. Still, ridding myself of the emotional and psychosomatic baggage he saddled me with has been wonderfully liberating, and I look forward to seeing the rest of it go.