PHOTOS

Looking at myself in the mirror everyday has made me immune to any changes I have had over the past couple of months. I mostly rely on the reactions I see from others to really gauge how much I have changed.  Only when I started to look back through some of my photos from Facebook could I begin to tell the changes my body has gone through in the past 4-5 years. I went from about 350 (when I started at Texas State) to over 400, (right about senior year) to currently being about 300.  To see this almost 100-pound transition really shows me how much I have put my body through.

 

At the same time it makes me realize that for a good portion of my teenage years I did not take photos of myself. I remember trying to find some about a year ago, and I realized most of the photos I had were just the standard school photos you had to take. I have minimal pictures of myself under 300 pounds. It makes me feel like there is a time that I don’t really remember myself. It is between the ages of 12-18. It started when my parents got divorced and I moved in with my father. We never really had a camera and we never really did much that required photos. Most of the pictures of me are from photos taken by friends and family during those years. As a result, I don’t have many to really judge myself by where I am at right now compared to when I was younger.

 

When my parents were together, my mom and my dad would take tons of photos of me. There are a bunch of photos that I love looking at when I am in Houston visiting my mom, and there are definitely some ones that I don’t like to see (One particular one of me in the bathtu.  Note to parents: it is just plain creepy to take photos of your children in the bathtub!) Unfortunately I was always a chubby kid, but I didn’t get morbidly obese until about 8^th grade, so these pictures do not really help me out.

 

The whole point I am trying to get at is that I wish I could go back in time and take some photos of myself, but I know I can’t ever do that.  I won’t ever to be able to look at some of my fondest memories of high school because I was too lazy to take pictures of something that, later on in life, I would have loved to look back on. But I am glad that I have pictures from college, and the more recent photos that I can look back on 20 years from now and say that, at this time in my life, I made decisions that changed everything at the age of 25.  With these photos, I can come back to what is becoming the happiest year I have experienced so far.