Starting Anew

I'm back.

but "I'm back" doesn't sound right when you want to start fresh, so I'll try again--

I'm here.

After posting with some degree of diligence on my "previous" blog, I left any remaining readers high and dry at the end of spring semester last year. At that point, I had just joined weight watchers and felt that I no longer had to keep the blog up in order to hold myself accountable for my efforts to get healthy. I considered the blog to no longer be relevant to what I was trying to accomplish. What's more, I was feeling that these days someone creates a blog every other day--as they should--and the existence of so many similar blogs somehow lessened the importance of my own.

I continued to stay mindful of foods that I ate and tried to keep exercising, but I simply lost motivation after a while. I'd reached something of a mental plateau. Of course, my commitment to resume the journey remained firm, but I just kept saying "it can wait until tomorrow."

By re-instating this blog, I hope to re-affirm my commitment to reaching my goal...but I learned from my last blog experience, and this blog will be different. I intend for this blog to be much more personal than its previous incarnation. I don't mean "personal" in the sense that I would use this blog to bitch about petty grievances. I want the blog to be a reflection of my perception of the struggle to lose weight in a world that tells you to do it for all the wrong reasons.

So, when I say "personal," I mean that I will be writing about my daily struggle to form an identity that is neither "fat" nor "thin". Because when you've lived your whole life defining yourself as "fat," and believing that others define you that way too, the struggle to break free of that fatness is far more psychological than physical.

The tone of the blog will definitely be different, because--and this is the most important part--I'm really not writing this for anyone but myself. My hope is that some people will read it, and that those people will read it because they truly give a shit...because I know there are a lot of other blogs out there to read, and mine probably won't have as many pretty pictures and flashing lights as the other ones.

I guess that's the long and short (but really just long) of it. I'm going to try to write every single day...mostly because writing on a blog, no matter how quirky or trite, is a better use of my time than being on facebook.

TO NEW BEGINNINGS!
Mandy