a new but familiar chapter...

I’m invisible again. I’m in a bad place. My body is failing me and I’m feeling as if my best years are behind me. I had built such a beautiful and elaborate house of cards and now they are crashing down around me. How do I fix this? How do I find a better place? I just keep moving forward and one day blurs into another and before you know it, a week has passed...then a month...then a year. Look at me. I’ve made through another year...and each more painful than the last.

I guess I should back up and give an update about my last few years and the current state of affairs...so here goes. My husband and I moved about four years ago into a two story house. Selling the old house and buying a new one threw off my routine. My workouts started to fall off and my eating wasn’t much better because I was not cooking while we were trying to sell the old house. We moved into the new house and I dealt with about a year of construction, which also impacted my eating and workouts. As the weight began creeping back so did the shame and guilt, which enabled me to settle very comfortably into a delicious bowl of depression with a drizzle of agoraphobia on top.

I find myself joking with friends and acquaintances about the agoraphobia and they laugh with me...but my close friends will tell you it is no joke. I don’t ever want to go anywhere. I never want to leave my house for fear of running into someone who knew me at that one snapshot of my life where I was an acceptable weight by society’s standards. I fought so hard to stay there for about five years...working out faithfully six days per week, usually two hours per day, depending on what I had going on....and I’m not even counting the dog walks or weekend hikes.

After moving into this house, climbing stairs multiple times per day began to wear and tear on my body. That, coupled with the weight gain, began to wreak havoc on my knees. Following a few trips to the orthopedic surgeon after various injuries, at the age of 46, my doctor told me that my only hope was total knee replacements. My doctor wanted me to try to get into my 50s before I had surgery, but also acknowledged that my MRI reflected the knees of an 80 year old woman...and so began my dance with activity restrictions and physical therapy, peppered with cortisone shots every few months. Any given day of the month I can turn wrong and have a terrible pain in one of my knees that has me hobbling around for weeks. I look like a grandmother walking through the house these days. All of my joints ache deeply...the delicate mix of weight, age and genetics are taking a toll on my independence and the freedom to do the things I once loved. So yeah, depression and all of that good stuff.

So if you have read my blog in the past when I was going through the positive changes that weight loss brings, you are about to enter a new kind of experience. If you have ever been on the roller coaster of physical, emotional and mental challenges that come with weight gain, then grab a cup of coffee and settle in. I can’t guarantee funny,  but I can keep it real.