Okay, folks, fair warning: this is not going to be a fun blog post. This is going to go into a very painful time in my life that has a lot to with my weight gain: an emotionally and verbally abusive relationship. I feel, however, that it is important that it gets out there.
Last night, my husband George and I were leaving an amazing concert that we'd been looking forward to for the past few months. Only every ten years or so does Rammstein come to the Chicagoland area due to their pyro-heavy shows and for some bizarre reason we don't like fires in the fine city of Chicago. No idea why. Might have had something to do with that "No Cows Allowed" sign outside Allstate Arena. My fandom with Rammstein comes at a heavy price and past. And I was unfortunately reminded of that at the end of the concert.
As we were leaving, I look up and see him. Someone I hadn't seen in almost four years. Someone that I really had come to grips with in regards to how I was treated in the time that we were together. For three years, I endured emotional and verbal abuse from this man. We had been engaged and when he wasn't insulting my cooking, my housekeeping or my looks, he was ignoring me. It got to the point that I was finding attention from other men online, which he used as a catalyst to end the relationship after he put a keylogger program on my computer to monitor my chat conversations because talking to me about our issues was too hard. Before logging onto Yahoo Messenger, however, I had been coping with his passive aggression and insults another way: through food and booze.
When I began dating him, I was 135 pounds. By the end of the relationship I had gone up to 195. I love to cook. Most of my friends know this and love when I do for parties. I am always looking for new recipes to explore and how I can make it my own. I used to cook dinner every night for my ex. After about two years it became a stressful ordeal when he began to insult my cooking, mostly as being too fattening, and that he couldn't eat all the stuff I was making. I would end up eating most of it while he would drink a protein shake. My weight ballooned as I found guilty comfort in the food I was eating. Someone had to enjoy it if he wasn't.
Next came the booze. At the same time I was living with this man I was also working an extremely stressful soul-sucking job. The first thing I would do when I came home from the office was reach in the fridge for a beer. My favorite at the time was BerryWeiss, not a light beer in the least. If it wasn't that it was gin and tonics. I tended to go through between two to three drinks a night depending on how bad the day was and how abusive my ex was being that night.
I've been trying to get rid of this "asshole weight" ever since. Seeing him last night rejuvenated my desires to get back down to the weight I was before I met him. While I am still sitting here the next day fighting back tears as three years of abuse plays back at a constant loop, I am given a renewed determination to lose the weight, better my dance career and become everything that I couldn't be while I was with him. This painful memory will not hold me back, but push me forward. I will not let him control me again.
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