thelesbianlifestyle.com

New glasses. Loving TLL!

Being late isn’t easy. There is a lot of fretting and thinking and procrastinating and forgetting involved. There’s list-making, and list-losing. There’s emailing myself with points to ponder. People in the creative biz can tell you that sometimes it’s only a looming deadline that can push a project through the banner. I now see that January is almost February, and this month includes a topic that I really wanted to write about. It would be my first post, related to health: what kind of impact weight loss surgery has had on my life. My little gay and/or bisexual life. I’m late coming out, I’m late losing weight, I’m late figuring my shit out in general.

Oh, those crazy deadlines.

I’m going to be 38 this year. Sometime before my 30th birthday, my family care doc proclaimed my blood sugar was high enough so that I needed to go on diabetes medication. It wasn’t in the 200 range, but over the “line.” Diabetes runs in my family, and this news scared me to death. Or rather, scared me away from death. I began researching my options for serious weight loss. There was no bathroom scale that could tell me what I weighed. All my clothes were mail ordered. My divorce had been finalized about a year prior, and I had a 5-year-old counting on me. And I could put away nearly a whole bucket of extra-crispy, and follow it with Oreos in the double-digits. It’s difficult now to look back on that kind of self-abuse, but I understand why it’s so important to keep tabs on that history.

As for the gayness, well, it’s actually relevant. I had been bicurious forever. My first sexual experience had been with my best friend at 12, and she and I experimented fairly often until we were 15 or so. There was no romance, only getting off, or learning parts. No real qualms about the acts, only knew that getting caught was not an option. I had messed around with a couple guys during and after all that, and then no physical contact whatsoever from 16 to 22. In college I was attracted to a classmate who I never spoke to, and never really thought it was odd that I found her alluring. I had roommates that I didn’t lust after, and mostly pined for boys. Fell in love with one, and we married in 1994. I was madly in love with him when we said our vows, and was badly in love with him by the time we divorced five years later.

After my surgery, which rerouted parts of my intestine and stapled my stomach down to the size of a thumb, weight came off quickly. And at first, it felt like I was shedding my sanity as well. My sister was with me for several weeks as she stood by as my rock while I surfed stormy seas of despair, and thinking I had surely brought upon myself a slow and horrible death. Who chooses to go under the knife to make it so you can eat three forkfuls of food for each meal? All the reading and researching and support groups and doctor visits could not remedy the very real and raw emotions that upend themselves. After all, carrying around 400 lbs is some protective measure. And suddenly I had to hit restart on my alarm system. Nothing prepared me, although I did have an inkling that I’d have a hard time. But, a hard time certainly didn’t scratch the surface of where my emotional and mental state would change.

My hormones changed. I lost my hair by the fistful. (It grew back – from straight to curly. Weird, huh?) Clothes I’d buy one day, would hang on me the following week. Lots of great accomplishments and things that average-sized people take for granted, like fitting into airplane seats and booths, crossing my legs, getting cordial customer service. Co-workers regaled my accomplishments, and the accolades from family and friends was overwhelming. It all happened so fast, and I was seeing the same person in the mirror as I always had – a huge one. And with all this attention I started drinking more (did it help reconcile the me I saw with the me everyone else saw? I don’t know), going out to party – hey, this is a second chance at the adolescence I never truly had. Certainly did things I wasn’t proud of, but mostly just had a great time. And found myself more and more attracted to women. Was it just my time? Or was it a serious and severe hormone tilt that propelled me to the same team?

I fell in love with a woman for the first time three years after my surgery. It was unrequited and while we tried to be friends, I found it agonizing to watch her begin and end relationship after relationship when I was positive I could be the right one for her. She was aware of my adoration and accepted my offerings, but it was so painful for me. I finally decided that I needed to pursue this new found attraction just in a different direction. So I made my first foray to a lesbian bar here in the Dallas area. I was terrified, but met someone that very first night. We danced, and even kissed, but we went to our own homes that first night. We dated for about six months, I saw a therapist for about the same amount of time, trying to figure out what loving women meant. He wasn’t the right therapist for the job, and I wasn’t the right lesbian for the therapy. There were too many emotions I just didn’t understand.

So there I am, not even thin by the standards of today’s America, but a hell of a lot smaller even than my wedding day in 1995. I was trying to stay with my weight loss support groups, learn about these new feelings, date and not rush headlong into situations I didn’t understand. And above all, parent my daughter while I was steering thru some rocky shoreline. Her grandparents were there for me so much in those early years. They were not aware of my attraction and relationships with women until I met the woman I live with now.

In 2005, I had been meeting women for coffee, slept with a couple, and in general was trying to “learn the ropes” as well as maintain my rigid food-intake routine. This crutch, the comfort food, wasn’t available to me, or shouldn’t have been, but it’s amazing how we push boundaries even when we’ve tried to save our own lives by taking desperate measures. My stomach was stretching so it could hold more food, I was vomiting a lot from overeating and drinking with meals. Research had come a lot further by then, but a lot of my brain just wanted to block out doing well with my eating so I could concentrate on dealing with the fact that I could be gay. Like, really, truly gay, a homosexual, lesbian, woman-loving, dyke.

Plus, I wasn’t sure what to do with the fact that I was still often attracted to men.

Gradually, I’ve come to realize that my attraction to men has a lot of contingencies. I tend to appreciate feminine-looking men, and recollect having this tendency my whole life. So am I bisexual? It’s how I self-identify at this stage in my life, and I imagine this could change over entirely to a lesbian label, and I’m ok with that if it were the case. And considering I’ve had a commitment ceremony to the lady I now live with, and we co-parent my daughter and a couple of terriers, I’m living a lesbian life.

Dealing with my food addiction has been far more agonizing than coming out to friends, family and coworkers. I’ve always felt alternative anyway, and it comes across in all my other relationships. So the people who loved me accepted me, and wanted me to be happy, with only one or two exceptions. Loving and accepting myself has been a bit tougher, and is a constant reminder of how giving up a fight only makes the war that much tougher to defeat. Just trying to put one foot in front of the other to put off The Big Deadline as long as I can. And live an authentic life full of exploring and understanding and loving.