Image problems

I have an image problem, right now.
Namely, that I have almost no pictures of myself at a weight much  lower than what I have now.
You see, I used to be the person with the camera.
The one who never appears in the pictures because she was the one taking them.
And I do not have access to the pictures that were taken of me when I was younger (long story there, perhaps for a later day).
So, almost all of the pictures I have of myself were taken when I was already far gone into the process of becoming obese.
These pictures show what was, for over seven years, the mental image I had of myself.
A fat blonde in frumpy, ill-fitting clothes.
Not that this was ever what I wanted to look like. The clothes were what I had convinced myself would make the fat invisible. What they really did was make me look even fatter than I would have looked in clothes cut closer to my body.
But that was something I did not want to see, even when looking at those pictures. What I wanted was to camouflage my weight, to make my body invisible. To be able to move in the company of slim people without attracting those looks of part pity, part contempt, part revulsion.
If something like a bourqa (sp?) had been offered as part of traditional western garb, I would probably  have worn it.
That not being an option, I kept wishing for some other kind of invisibility cloak and wore those fluttering, crinkly wide linen garments in the meantime, effectively calling attention to the very thing I wanted to disguise.

At the weight I am today, I have been able to declutter all of those clothes. I also did buy myself some clothes that are cut to shape, fitting me exactly. Or so my husband had to tell me. The problem I have is that after waking up to the fact that I had been blinding myself to what I looked like for such a long time, I don´t trust my own perception of my body any more.
I know that my body has changed, a lot. DH tells me I even walk differently. But all of this hasn´t arrived in my head to form a complete concept of what I look like now yet.
So, every picture DH takes of me now serves as a building block for the image I have to build of myself as a slimmer person, one who wears fitting clothes, one who doesn´t want to be invisible any more.
Letting go of the things I did to hide my obesity is liberating.
Guess what, I even stopped wearing makeup and dyeing my hair, because for the first time in my life, I feel that what I look like au naturel is good enough. The surprise for me was that my natural hair color (which is by now mostly pewter mixed with silver)  did not make me look as much older as I had feared.

But that´s probably because I feel younger, too. And that´s what shows on every new picture DH takes of me.
Slowly, the new image of myself is beginning to settle. It is the image of a woman who is no longer a victim, not of people, not of circumstances, and not of obesity.


Julia