lets be honest, society sucks and the media is vicious.

so, i wasn't planning on really writing much tonight. stress makes me zero fun to talk to slash read about and as you've probably gleaned from my previous post i'm slightly stressed. along with being zero fun to talk to i become a master procrastinator and as such i was going through my old facebook wall posts to reminisce of sorts tonight (it's way fun, highly recommend it). while doing this i ran into a picture of myself from about a year ago. 

warning: this picture is way unflattering. 

that picture was taken on june 23, 2010 when we dropped jesse off at the mtc. at the time i didn't really realize just how big i had slowly gotten over the past few years but the second i looked at the pictures my dad had so graciously taken of me i couldn't get the image out of my head. i had managed to gain almost 40 lbs since my sophomore year of high school. i was huge and i hated it. 

fast forward a few months: when i moved up to college i was scared to grow up. i was scared to make sure i woke up on time, i was scared to have to pay for everything on my own, and most of all i was terrified of the supposed freshman (or in my case the junior) fifteen. once i moved up here though, i realized my reluctance to spend money on food, my spread out classes all over campus, and my new found love for grapefruit were totally working on my side. by the time i visited home in october i could barely keep my jeans from falling off; i'd already lost ten pounds. 

it's now a little over a year since that first picture was taken and this is what i look like today (literally today):

(ignore the mess, i'm packing... kinda. that excuses it, right? not really? awesome)

i've lost almost 20 pounds, i'm back to wearing the ridiculous purple shorts i loved so much my senior year of high school. i'm finally comfortable in my own skin again. i don't want to say something shallow about how what you look like and how much you weigh should directly coincide with how you feel about yourself as a person, but lets be honest, society sucks and the media is vicious. living in today's world is hard enough without adding a few extra pounds to be carrying around. 

i'm just glad that i'm back to cringing at pictures of myself because of the faces i'm pulling, and not because of how many of my chins are showing.