me 1996
With positive change comes the desire for self betterment. Today is the day i am committing to making positive life changes.
Although this is supposed to document both the past and the present along with progress of goals in terms of my weight, i suppose the reality is that to do that in a complete and simple manner one would have to document general life outlook, stress, health, exercise, food, and life choices.
And thus begins the blog about me. A memoir of who I used to be and how i got here along with a commitment to a journey towards where i wish to go and how i wish to live.
The Past
Well, one always wonders where to start. I guess the real beginning would be the actual beginning. I was born in 1977 in Bulgaria to a politically dissatisfied father and a stable, passive mother. As most in those days we were the working poor. I still remember that red meat was a rare delicacy my grandmother would prepare for us when we visited her. Visiting her, became a thing to look forward to and happened morewand more, until i found myself practically living with her in the early and mid 80's. I do remember food being rather scarce in my mothers house and even, when my parents decided to purchase a car, i remember weeks of eating stew made of the leaves of radish bunches.. along with.. you guessed it, radish salad. Well... I suppose my love affair with food started early as i savored any tidbits that were thrown my way by relatives and friends.
I spent more and more time with my grandmother as my parents sought ways of exiting the country, traveling to the US to seek jobs (pointlessly). During those times I was spoilt with various Bulgarian culinary delicasies and generally enjoyed my grandmother's cooking.
Back in those days i had formed into a cute little penguin child with rosy round cheeks and a chubby disposition. In the late 80's my father had found an exit strategy and we found ourselves in the gorgeous bread basket (no more!) of Africa. The warmth, physically and emotionally, of Zimbabwe swallowed me whole and i embraced it as my own.
Unknowingly i fell in love with the continent and it in turn infected me with a passion i carry with me even now. I melancholy craving of things past (and sadly now gone) and a constant loop into memory lane. In Harare, i spent 4 idyllic years, the closest i have ever come to paradise. Food, no longer a focal point for me, was but an after thought. I vaguely remember weeks of sadza and kiwi, and the occasional banana cake, and i am sure these are but signs that our intellectual excursion to Africa did not benefit our finances much.
In those four years i transformed form a penguin into a giraffe... ha ha. After i graduated from Groombridge primary we spent several months in New York visiting our 'beloved' aunt (tongue in cheek on this one). From the hot African summer to the freezing Christmas in Queens. I am not sure what the real purpose of that trip was, I suppose to submit emigrant applications for Australia away from the watchful eyes of the Bulgarian secret service members ingrained in our expatriate community in Zim. To me it was just a strange vacation of Crescent croissants and Cops on TV.
It was when we returned to the sunny homeland and I started school (mid year???) at Vainona High in Borrowdale, that the penguin had become a giraffe. Somehow i had sprung up and thinned out.
In the very early 90's we flew to Sydney, now officially residents of Australia. That became a time of frustration and confusion for me. I had not realized i had become a pretty tall little lady by then, but my parents had. As Eastern European as they can get, they stood guard and let few people into my life. Suddenly, with the flight from Africa to Sydney, i had transformed form a wild, and free spirit to a homebound captive. This was accentuated by the suggestion that i should model, an idea my daddy dearest came up with from who knows where.
The years of my puberty were but a blur of strict, paranoid parental supervision, juxtaposed with the loose and wild model lifestyle, and a concurrent race of various fad diets due to my baby fat. Although i have plenty of pictures form those days i will gloss over them as but a sideshow of the nightmarish period of my life where i questioned my self, my identity and my right to be an individual. Questions that still haunt me.
