...in the pathless woods...

Today I went to brunch with my best-friend Elle, and two friends who we had not seen since 2008. Maybe 2007. Allie and Lisa were in our group of close friends in high school, and were a year younger than we were. We were best friends. Some of our friends fell out, and I fell onto one side. We all “lost touch”. That’s a like a passive-aggressive way of saying we “stopped actively pursuing our friendship”. So strange.

We were all so close. We drove in each others’ cars, we listened to each others’ iPods, we had fights over AIM that we resolved with “<3″. We drank Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice, we cackled and laughed on a back deck on warm summer nights. We snuck into country clubs and jumped into deep pools. We made collages for each other when we went to college. We had each others’ backs, and we took group photos caption affectionately and post to our Myspace pages. We gossiped about this one and that one. We went through hook-ups, break-ups and supported each other through some tough stuff. And somehow, naturally, we “grew apart”.

And today we finally got together. It was actually surreal. To meet again as older, wiser and more mature adults. Their voices sound different. They look different. We’re all working, making life happen out in the big bad world. I’m married, Allie is engaged. Lisa is working and living in Manhattan. We were all dressed differently, in fine wool coats with funnel collars, carrying neat leather classic purses.

Are we not still the same? It made me think about change in myself. I observe this incredible growth of these young women who were just once the girls I called my group, and realize, I have changed like that too? I have undergone transformation and change. It has happened to me too. Sometimes you have to see it in other people.

I love when people post, or re-post a photo of something and write “goals”. And by love I mean, I find it amusing.

Anyway, I am going to try to stop eating everything, and start working out again. I’m getting in my own way.

I’m also going to try to get comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life. Someone posted something on Instagram about whether we could wake up in our “perfect body” without any financial stress, would we be happy or just create new problems? I truly think we would create new problems.

When I was on Topamax for migraines I ended up losing a pretty significant amount of weight. I’m 5′3″ and I went from 150lbs|34DD|size12|large to 100lbs|B|size4|small. And I still had the same dysfunctional thoughts and feelings about my body and self. I have to keep reminding myself of that. That even when I had my “perfect body”, I still felt the same about myself. I still felt painfully uncomfortable in my body. And of course when all of my hair fell out, and I started feeling like a different person and I stopped taking the medication, I gained all the weight back and then some. Ha.

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

I applied for some jobs and it's starting to feel crazy real that I'm almost done with graduate school. A freaking Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Hell yeah.