I just need to be sad for a minute here.

In addition to anxiety, I think I'm mildly depressed. Right now I feel so far removed from my goal, so helpless, and so unsure of whether what I'm doing is working, that I feel totally despondent and hopeless.

I was just looking at pictures of a childhood friend on Facebook. I would say she's an average weight - not overweight at all, but not really toned and athletic or really thin. In one picture she laments having a 'double chin,' about which she says 'ew.' I can't even identify with that. All my life - or at least since I was six or so - I have felt like an outsider in this regard. I've never known what's like to be able to see your ribcage, or to feel a tight stomach that doesn't have it's own bulk. Even when I was at my lowest weight after I was done growing, which was 155, I still had some belly left and thought I would be perceived as overweight.

It is incredibly difficult to look at thin girls my age who are having fun, wearing cute clothes, being pretty, and know that I don't and have never really felt that way - and even more difficult to imagine being at that point, and how I will get there, because I'm SO far away from it. How can you imagine something that has never been real? I believe that encompasses Plato's theory of forms, doesn't it? Well, there's me, and then there's thinness, so the two ideas are obviously real, so maybe not. But you know what I mean...imagining myself at a healthy weight and feeling confident and good looking isn't much of a motivator, since I've never felt like that, and have never been that. If I weren't at work I'd probably take a minute to be all verklempt and cry on my dog, but oh well.