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This is post #1 in BLOGATHON 2009 Hello to all my visitors! Please take a moment to comment when you arrive. Consider helping Looking Glass to build a Canadian National Treatment Centre for Eating Disorders, and maybe you can help give someone their life back so they can really live. Up to this post, my greatly appreciated sponsors have pledged $155. Make a pledge if you'd like to help me meet or exceed my $1000 goal.

Myself Or a subtle veneer of makeup over myself My Grad Photo, May 2009

Every year for the Blogathon I try and re-define myself. How do I appear to others, and who am I? What image do I present to the world when words are not enough for everyone, though they are so much to me?

I am vibrant, pure color. I wear brilliant colors in swaths and stripes, I desire the most stunning colors in every accessory – I have neon orange luggage with a neon green tag, a bright red bag with a deep purple water bottle and a purple iPod cover.

I am passion. I am filled with art and artistic ideas. Details in sidewalk cracks and weeds caught in railings capture my attention with their beauty, sounds make music for me, and I use words to capture just as I use a camera. These things – words, images, sounds – they make up the chief experiences of my life. Touch is a more recent addition.

I am strong and I walk with confidence. Sometimes when I’m alone in a crowd, I walk like I’m on a runway. I wonder who sees me, and if they see me at all.

I am weak, and I believe that life should not be lived in isolation. Sometimes I feel invisible. Then someone catches my eye and we trade smiles, and I feel like I’ve been a part of the best commerce in the world. Sometimes nobody does, and I wonder why so many people have come to live inside themselves.

Every few days I will see a good looking man staring at me and wonder if he’s thinking, “Look, there’s a fat girl.” And at that moment I can tell how I’m doing emotionally, because I will either realize that I don’t really care, or I will pause for a minute and wonder if he’s thinking of me at all or if it’s just in my head. And sometimes someone will look at me with desire in their eyes and I know it's not really about that, but those days have been few in my life so far.

I feel like I have “It Factor” but it’s buried under a layer that for a very long time I could not control at all. Fat. I am obese by any standard, and there's a reason for it. A disorder that I've struggled with since puberty.

Welcome to the life of a mind and heart trapped inside a body - a body that she is trying to see as a valued whole, not a mind trap. But the truth of the story lies in where it’s going, not in how it looks. Welcome to the resistance, the healing chapter, the happily ever after.

I want to share it with you. My life. But first, I must take a page from Lewis Carol and begin at the beginning.