Thrilled you've found your way back to those pieces of yourself! Truly heartening to read. Definitely worth recognizing as a genuine win. And nice work getting back into whatever activities actually spark real joy and make life feel worth living.
Most of my own weight gain traces back to the pandemic years, and isolation was already weighing on me well before that even hit. In the time since, it's like I've never quite fully escaped that isolated mental space.
Given all that, the social piece of this whole thing is genuinely something I'm working through right now. Through most of my teenage and adult years, I hovered around what I'd call a reasonably fit weight for my body. Never skinny, but healthy enough. (Aside from one stretch in my mid-twenties when I genuinely looked fantastic and completely failed to appreciate it, comparison and toxic messaging from that era stole a lot of that joy from me at the time.)
Then out of nowhere the extra pounds showed up right alongside middle age arriving. And the way others treated me genuinely seemed to shift around that same window. Back then I brushed it off as just aging and becoming less attractive by whatever conventional standard society uses, for lack of a better term. To be fair, I'm not suggesting anyone was outright cruel toward me, or that the weight itself carried some absurdly outsized
