So my winter jacket is too small for me, now. Read that: my WINTER JACKET. How is a winter jacket too small? And, moreover, how is a winter jacket too small FOR ME?

I’ve always been tiny. Always been short, skinny, petite. During the high days of my eating disorder, one might have added frail, bony, and skeletal to the list, but those times are long gone. All in all, I was always on the slighter side of normal. Now, I might be plump. And, you know, that’s cool. A sign of healthy eating, or, at the very least, EATING, which I didn’t really do for awhile. So we take that as a positive, I suppose, in our moments of darkness.

But the question, really: as a person who was once so eating disordered, how am I not constantly tortured by this weight? I mean, we’re not talking a month or two of overzealous dieting here, we are talking, like, sixteen YEARS of bloated nightmares come to reality in one solid flesh. The answer came to me last night, merging onto rte 16 at dusk, having just purchased a wardrobe’s worth of size-medium shirts from the local Target.

I’m just happier now.

Before, my weight, whatever it was, was a bone of contention. Another way I had failed, or, conversely, a measure of how I’d achieved superiority. I could be 98 pounds, I could be 118, but, depressed, neither was acceptable. Neither was attained by conventional means, so my weight, my body, became a symbol of my illness. Now, with the depression more (or less) under control, I can begin to be OK with who and how I am otherwise. I’m not saying I don’t wish it weren’t so – some mornings I think I’d take a week of misery for a day out in my size-24 skinny jeans – but I’m not compelled to make drastic changes to my eating patterns as a result.

Unless “drastic changes” means “more apple crisp”, in which case I’m totally game.