Always Different

How much am I like everyone else?

I've been asking that questions since I was little. All I wanted to be for so many years was like everyone else because when you're like everyone else it's the only time you're accepted. I would have given away everything. Given up anything. But I was never enough like everyone else. Never could be. Never would be.

I've said it elsewhere in this blog, but I've always been fat. That right there separates me from the majority.

Can't be like everyone else if you're not like everyone else, no matter how you wish or try.

My mother once got angry at me for repeating that I've always been fat. She insisted that I wasn't. That I'm not remembering correctly. But I remember...

...shopping in the "husky" section for pants. I learned to hate the word "husky." A special word separates like numbers and adjectives never can because numbers and adjectives never have their own section. At the worst they have their own hanger.

...having my blood drawn when I was seven to check my thyroid. I wasn't sick. Not even the flu. But there I was, sitting in a hospital hallway, my little hand in my Dad's, waiting to have a needle suck some blood from me. When the results came back, nothing was wrong with me, according to the tests, but not according to my parents' faces.

...the nurse at my doctor's office taking me aside and reassuring me with a chart, that although I was, she paused before saying, heavier than others my age, it was following my growth chart perfect. I was consistently fat. I think I was eight and my tonsils came out a few months later.

...sitting in a nutritionists office hours away from home. The whole family had to come on this stupid trip on a Saturday so that the nutritionist could give me lists of food that it was okay for me to eat. I was handed lots of piece of paper filled with never and sometimes and anytime food. Pickles and unflavored rice cakes were anytime foods. I'm glad I liked pickles, even though I didn't like them THAT much. I don't remember this list being shown to my brothers. I don't remember the basic meals we ate as a family changing. I guess it was supposed to be up to me to follow the new rules on my own. I had just turned nine a couple weeks earlier.

...filling out a chart in a book listing the calories of all the food I'd eaten and the calories I'd burned and my weight each morning. I was ten and it was summer. In the back of the book my mom had stapled some graph paper so that I could graph the ups and downs and the sames of my weight. So I could SEE the change. My mother had a book and so did my grandmother. My brothers and father did not.

(The numbers set off other problems I have that I hid. Numbers and tracking and more tracking and numbers and running numbers to see how they could be combine. These are notes and such that I hid from my family, that I'd stuff under my bed, that I'd burn in the fireplace if I woke up early enough to make sure no one would find them.)

The weight thing was always there even after that, but I don't remember any really direct efforts from anyone to change it because NOTHING changes. I went through a growth spurt, but I stayed fat. Friends and enemies in school hit their growth spurts and they had at least a year or two before they got fat again. I just never wasn't fat.

Which is why I knew I would never be normal. No matter what, I would always be different. Always be noticed for being different. Unable to blend, properly, into a crowd. Maybe not standing out, but never being like the crowd enough to just be part of the crowd.