Now Playing: bjork - post
Topic: self-portraiture
On Friday morning I had two separate dreams.
In the first dream Karen said to me something along the lines of "You've lost weight, but you're still overweight", specifically identifying to me where I still held extra unsightly baggage. David chimed in agreeing and they took a guess at my weight, about 3kg more than my current weight. Although they didn't seem to be attacking me about it, I was upset with them for making such an issue out of it and being so blunt about it, and argued with them, defending myself and saying that their guess was wrong and that although I still knew I needed to lose more weight, that I am within the healthy range for my height (which is true of my current weight).
In the second dream, taking place after awakening with my alarm and falling back to sleep, I dreamt my younger brother, my mother and I were discussing my weight and on looking in the mirror I saw I was quite emaciated and that my mother and brother's concern about me wanting to lose more weight was valid. During the course of the dream I discovered that I had apparently been committed to an institution previously for issues relating to excessive weight loss - a place I no longer recall the name of from the prospectus about it, but that the title included the words "Life" and "Parole". The photograph on the cover of the substantial brochure showed a grand building rather like the institutions of the past found in Europe and the UK, though it did not appear familiar to me as somewhere I had visited, or resided for a period of four years, as I was told by my brother and mother that I had. As we talked more about it, I realised that what they were saying was the truth, but that I had blocked the memory of those four years out of my memory as it was a time in my life I had not wished to remember, though on speaking about it now I wanted to revisit the institution to see if in fact it did bring back memories of my time there.
By midway through last year I had put on another 2kg to reach my heaviest weight ever to date. By the end of December I had lost those 2kg and I have subsequently lost another 9kg since the start of the year.
I have taken to wearing my old chunky-soled trainers with the pin-striped pants I bought last July to avoid the cuffs of the pants dragging under my feet as they no longer sit on my waist, they hang on my hips.
I am now close to the weight I got down to during the first half of 2006, within my healthy weight range for my height, and about 6-9kg off my ideal weight. I am much happier about my figure though I would still like to lose those extra 6-9kg.
Last night Feih told me that she knows I had a bit of extra weight on me, and that I've lost a lot of that, but she couldn't see where I could possibly lose more weight from. I could make a list, draw a diagram, but I won't.
I'm aware of the warped body images that so many women have, it's something I've been even more aware of since I put on extra weight. When I was in the UK and weighed myself in 2001 for the first time in about 1.5 years and found I had reached 62kg suddenly I realised how ridiculous it had been for me to be so weight-conscious and self-conscious about my figure when I had been 52-53kg. On reaching 72kg last year I was again reminded of it.
So with all this thinking about weight and body issues and such, I felt inspired this evening to shoot a similar set-up to my Sanctuary image from day #171 of my 365 Days project as a comparison. The image isn't an exact replica of the original and I didn't want it to be, but it gives a good comparison for me. My upper arm alone shows how much weight I've lost.
*This is the first self-portrait shoot I've done since finishing my 365 Days project.
