(This post is a little hard to write. But I'm going to take a deep breath and just do it. At the very least, I will have purged my negative thoughts for a little while. At most, somebody will have a nugget of wisdom to share that will bring about sweeping change in my life (but no pressure or anything.) And somewhere in the middle, I will probably get a hug or two. And bitches like hugs. So here it goes.)

I am a fat person.

And normally I'm pretty okay with being a fat person.

I don't love it, but I don't hate myself or walk around thinking I look terrible. I made the decision a long time ago to rock the shell I have. It encases a powerhouse of awesome, so it needs to be just a little bit bigger than average, that's all.

I have a sluggish thyroid and a hormone condition. Both those things = shitty metabolism. But I still work up a good sweat at the gym and go on walks and eat fairly well and feel pretty good about myself.  This is my body's current set point. It doesn't like to move much from here. Normally, I'm relatively comfortable with that. I have hope it will change, but I'm trying to be patient about the whole thing.

My sister is getting married next weekend and I am in her wedding party with a group of girls who are, like, ten years younger and ten sizes smaller than I am. They're gorgeous and make it look effortless.

I was feeling generally okay with that until I saw the pictures from the bachelorette party. And then I suddenly realized just how much I stand out. I am so much bigger. And now that's all I can see all the time: how big I am.

I'm the fat girl. And, suddenly, I'm not okay with that.

Then, while feeling pretty shitteous about the whole thing (preemptive pun intended), I went over to a friend's house last week and broke her toilet seat.

Yep. Broke. her. toilet. seat.

Snapped it right in half.

I'm nursing a hamstring injury and shifted my weight to the non-injured leg to stand up. I guess it put too much pressure on one side. The final blow to my ego was in the form of a loud snap! and the denial that came flooding in: Please don't be the toilet seat oh my god don't be the toilet seat I will be so embarrassed if it's the toilet seat I can't even look...

But I looked. And it was broken. And I was mortified. Shame poured over me like a good tar and feather. I couldn't just laugh it off like I normally would.

This was about the time I realized I'm too far down the rabbit hole to find these things funny right now.

I don't like it down here. Rabbits are smelly.

For years, I have actively refused to tie my self-worth to my weight. Not that I wouldn't love to be smaller, but I promised myself that dress size would not be what defines how I feel about me. I spent too many years feeling exactly opposite; viewing the numbers on the scale as a global representation of how well I was doing in life.

And now? Once again, I find myself viewing fit moms as more successful than I am because they do everything I do and look good in their jeans at the grocery store. Sigh.

But here's the thing: I'm pretty sure this isn't actually about weight.  I mean, it is, but it's more than that. My confidence has been dragged through the dirt this year, and it's finally manifesting in the one place where I have a weak spot: my size. This is a symptom of a greater problem.

Weight is an easy target when you're a woman. The idea that we should be thin is everywhere. It's so much simpler and less frightening to focus on that than to point a finger at my parenting or my near-stalled writing career; two things that are infinitely more important to me than how I look in a bathing suit.

I'm raising a transgender child in a world where transgender people are still very misunderstood, and I'm still trying to figure out how to instill as much confidence in her as I can before I can no longer shield her from the bulk of that misunderstanding. That's the shit that keeps me up at night. 

I'm homeschooling her for the first time in grade 7, which is overwhelming, to say the least.  I never planned to homeschool and I'm not the world's best teacher. We're both learning how to do this. Meanwhile, she has two brothers who also need their mom, so I'm doing my best to give them as much of my time as I can, too.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, I love to write. It feeds my soul like nothing else. But I'm not writing much these days, as my time and energy are more limited than they used to be. When I do have time, I often can't get the words out. My inner critic likes to tell me I'm too uneducated to write (remember how I'm a high school dropout finishing her last credit right now?), and that nobody wants to read what I have to say. He's a bastard and I would very much like to throw a broken toilet seat in his direction. I have a book inside me that needs to come out. Like soon. And I swear if I hit my deathbed without having published it I'm going to be one pissed off ghost. I'll haunt the Starbucks and shit for all eternity. Trust me.

So what I'm really upset about is that I feel like I'm failing at life right now. This all came to a head a few hours after I broke the toilet seat, when I was driving on the highway and spontaneously burst into tears, sobbing my face off all the way home. It started with feeling bad about my fatness and quickly morphed into bigger things:

I don't know if I can do all this.

I don't know if I can figure out this new life plan.

What if I totally suck at it?

What if I'm a terrible mom and the world's least successful writer at the same time?

So yeah, I'm fat. It's not fun. I'm dreading the wedding photos next weekend. And I owe my friend twenty bucks for breaking her house.

But more importantly, I need to climb out of this rabbit hole and figure out that I'm awesome again in other respects, because The Maven is not behaving very mavenly these days. 

I don't want to have to rebrand myself.  That shit's more expensive than toilet seats.

So figuring out how to come back from this starts right now. Right now. 

After coffee.