Please Keep Trying!

I swear I’m being haunted. Ever since I started putting “pen to paper” about my weight loss, I keep sensing a fullness in the room. Or I smell a stray scent (it’s been cigarettes the past two days). Or a flavor from meals past (bacon bits as a remembered flavor is weak). And sometimes when I recall a particular instance outdoors, I can actually feel the sun on my face. When I crawled into bed last night I felt a strange mixture of old emotions, old thoughts, old guilts.

What the heck’s up with that? Why am I being haunted by a past I thought I reconciled with? I bet it’s because of the stupid book. Writing eleven pages has drained me more than a round of weight training with Biff. You’d think talking about how I changed my life would be uplifting and reaffirming, yes? Ahhhhh, yeah, well, I haven’t gotten to that whole “life changes for the better” bit yet.

I thought I’d start at the beginning and work my way forward. Then I realized, well, that’s taxing, and figured, why don’t I write about the teen years? The teen years, turns out, were just as taxing as the toddler years. Huh. I don’t know why I can’t just write about the past three years and work from there.

The past three years were the life changing years, but my mind has its own agenda. I think my head needs to work out some prior junk in order to face the good stuff. I don’t want to examine the nitty gritty of my life and dissect it all over again; I already did that. However, I didn’t apply what I learned to my weight gain.

We’re all the sum of parts and everything we experience, negative or positive, affects us in some way; negative or positive. The ghosts haunting me are the new perspectives I have on old experiences. It’s like looking back in time and finally having the tools to understand what’s going on. A good example for this comes to mind, in how people in earlier times believed dinosaur bones were the remains of dragons or horrible monsters from hell. Fast forward to the golden age of archeology and everyone has a good laugh over how naive we were. While I never believed my childhood memories were the bones of demons, I can now look back with an appreciation and insight I didn’t have before. But I still have to look back, and look back hard.

I got a chance to talk with my mom face to face yesterday about some of the things I remember so vividly. Talking with her, like an equal, with no animosity, no hurt and no anger made me realize how hard it was for everyone to raise me and my sister with the problems we had as family. I’m so grateful for the chance to talk with her like that, and to finally laugh at some of the stuff which would have previously made me all weepy.

Not all the ghosts lingering around are the kind I want exorcised, some are from some very good times. Some of my ghosts are the memories I wish would haunt me more often, like the memory of my mom feeding me some of her homemade zucchini bread with her lopsided smile. I love that smile. But the weird cigarette ghost, he’s gotta go.