My, How You've Changed!

While you'd think this is finally a blog entry concerning my weight loss, considering it is  a weight-loss blog, you'll be sad to find that this is yet another entry concerning my personal life, outside the bariatric world.

Today is my ex-boyfriend's birthday.  Haha.  While I could write a novel about the should-have-dones, could-have-dones and what-went-wrongs, this is more about me than him.  When I met, hmmm, let's call him "Craig", I was 14. A spring chicken. We met at a mutual friends birthday party, and were inseperable basically until the time we started haivng issues. Those came and went as we were in a long-distance relationship and things weren't easy for a 14 year old and a 16 year old to make things work without self-reliance or independence. Or a driver's license. But damn it, if we didn't try.

At that time in my life, I was having these deep, dark issues concerning parents, and acceptance, and moving, and self-esteem. Craig was the answer to all of it, at least in my 14 year old mind. I kissed the ground he tread on, I worshipped him as a god, and I put aside everyone else in my life in a moment's notice if I knew he was going to call.  As one might predict, it caused some major riffs between my mother and I.  She thought he was mentally unstable, I thought he was sensitive. She thought he expected too much of me, I saw it as stepping my game up for the preparation of marrying him (!). How dumb I was, looking back.

11 months came and went and we found ourselves broken up, and our hearts on the mend.  Along the way, I met some other unsavory characters, did some even more unsavory things, and before I knew it, I was 17 years old, and going out on my first date with my future husband.

I suppose what I'm getting at here, is that I feel like I've came a long way since then. While it is obvious that the age difference between 14 and 21 years is substantial in the way a young woman matures, I feel like I can look back on it all with a smile.  He and I are still friends, chatting here and there on Facebook, and I have dealt with, and moved on from something tremendous in my adolescent years. I'm married, I'm happy, I'm a full-time student. I've had major surgery, and my heart is on the mend from years of self-torment. I am calmer, and more collected. I take major problems in stride and deal with them as they come, rather than agonizing every little detail like I used to. 

It's amazing, really, how  much I really have changed. I certainly hope Craig would agree.