When I first moved to Amador county it appeared that everything was divinely ordained. I had a job I had found, interviewed and been hired for after 1 solitary application. A staff member I had met at the interview had a house she was leaving to go to New York and I could rent it well within my price range. The house was beautiful. It even had a yard. And a perfect sized doggy door for zippy the wonder beagle. It was as if God had descended from heaven for the soul purpose of setting me up with a decent paying job with regular hours and a landlady that didn't mind noisy beagles and didn't worry about the smoking so long as I didn't bring it inside.
It was divinely orchestrated. It was guided by arch angels.
The job fell through in six weeks.
My landlady hated the place in New York and decided to return. With her dog that looked as if he regularly had beagle as an afternoon snack. We had made provisions in case Laura wanted to come back, we would go from land lady & tenant to roommates. But she was a) a stranger and b) a roommate.
Great.
No job. House full of people I hardly knew and something that for all I knew might have been a cross between a pygmy elephant and a rabid dingo muscling my 15 inch high, flop eared friend out of the way of the tailor made doggy door.
Great. I could see God's descent from heaven had been a mere jaunt rather than an actual habitation.
I had another job in no time though, one that even paid rent and bills and wasn't unpleasant. I had good hours and was locked away in a slow paced office most of the day. It was the perfect venue for a 277 pound woman; I wouldn't have to be on my feet all day and would never be seen wading through cubicles, pushing people's chairs in so I could get through the aisles.
The key to my workplace bliss though was that I would be left alone. I had loved being around people in thinner days, gave parties, had been a professional trainer and had even done some public speaking. When I had come back to the states after college and work abroad I had discovered I had almost no friends left. I was so disconnected from my family some of them had to be reminded who I was. I soon got used to being isolated. I told myself I was tired of human companionship. Maybe it was that my countrymen were as shallow as my foreign friends had accused them of being. Maybe I just didn't like the ones I was meeting. I suspected people were just becoming jerks. Meanwhile the thirty or so pounds I was putting on a year had not exactly motivated me to get out and socialize in places where people might wonder how I'd gotten to be that size, or how I lived with myself, or what I must eat to get that big.
So when, a year later, Laura finally did follow through on her threat to return from the hated New York State, I was terrified. By this time I was about half a year and 50 pounds into my weight loss regimen. From my memory, roommates were people with the pesky habit of getting in the way of things like eating or drinking too much, forgetting to exercise, or just being a slob sometimes. They watched you like hawks. They knew when you weren't sleeping enough or were working too hard or forgetting to clean your bathroom for too long, and the really annoying ones went around mentioning it out of something they disguised as concern.
Roommates were a pestilence at best. A plague at worst.
And who knew what Laura and her boyfriend Don and her Rabid Dingo-Elephant Chance would even be like.
It had been years since I'd shared a home with anyone. Since the time I'd lived with my mother just after arriving back in the states. Back then I had gained the weight in order to become isolated from people I felt were letting me down. Then the weight had served to further isolate me. By the time Laura got back from New York almost a year after I'd moved in I was so deep into my weight loss program I was once again utterly isolated by that, too.
I would come home from working out at 7:30 or 8 at night, eat my pre-cooked, simple meal and head upstairs to watch TV for what remained of the night. I dealt with having a roommate mainly by pretending I didn't.
Laura meanwhile made an effort to relate to me in a way I had given up doing with others. She stopped by my door to chat every night, even when America's next top model was on and I was transfixed. She sat at the table while I was eating even though she was long finished with her meal. She chatted with me about exercise, the only thing I seemed to be interested in. She extended dinner invitations to Gramma which I of course never passed on.
She was kind to me. And before I knew it I began to become attached to her. At Christmas time she and Don went to visit his family in the San Francisco bay area.
I planned to blast the heater, run around in an overripe bathrobe, eat ice cream and drink beer.
Instead I just missed them. Every time I heard a noise I turned around to say something and there was no one there. I didn't eat all the ice cream. The beer didn't taste very good.
I had to wash the bathrobe.
As much as I wanted to be isolated, I wasn't any more. I had people around and I liked them. I no longer felt they were an invasion of my privacy just for breathing.
They were suddenly very... dear.
What was more there were things I felt the undeniable need to tell them. What had happened to me at work. Funny gramma anecdotes. My dog tried to eat the mail man. Their dog ate another sponge.
I was happy. I was sad. I was angry.
And I felt inclined to listen, too. I heard the sound of Laura's voice when she was anxious and when she was relaxed and when she was stressed out or hurt or excited.
And I was really glad to be part of that. It had been a while since I'd been a good enough friend to anyone to know what mood they were in, let alone trust them to know mine.
Over the year and a half of my weight loss adventure Laura sat at our kitchen table helping me sort through all the problems I would have eaten in the past. She proposed solutions to things I only wanted to rant about before digging in to a giant pizza and piece of chocolate cake. She even tried to help me learn to knit when I quit smoking and needed to put something in my hands so they couldn't put anything in my mouth. I swore afterwards that I hadn't actually been Trying to poke her eye out, and miraculously Laura seemed to believe me.
With Laura's help I had learned to be around people again. I had begun to reestablish my faith in friendship, to trust that someone other than myself could actually be genuinely concerned about me. I began to want to be a part of things where other humans were present.
I took up salsa dancing. I joined clubs and associations. I stopped running away the moment church let out and actually stayed to talk to people.
I had a friend at home and I began to make more all over the place. Friends I could tell things to when I felt like just forgetting everything and knocking back a days worth of calories in one chocolate shake. People who could help me solve problems instead of just paving them over with chocolate flavored mortar.
Slowly but surely I was being cured. I was becoming more able to reveal who I really was because I could be more and more sure the people around me weren't going to let me down. And that, if they did, I would always have help picking myself up again.
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