Stranger Here Quotes

“And when I had gotten down to a size that allowed me to sneakily fit into the rest of the population, I lost my shit entirely.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I wanted to make it funny, and make it meaningless, and make it nothing.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I didn’t want to be a person people thought I wasn’t allowed to be, either.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I was tired of letting things happen to me instead of making things happen. I was tired of being sad because there was nothing I could do, being weighed down by junk food and a closet overstuffed with clothes that didn’t fit me.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“What I had done, essentially, was look for a way out of my eating disorder without ever acknowledging that I had an eating disorder, a—let’s call it a troubled relationship with food.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“The constant, nagging exhaustion had dialed back, but craziness began to creep in—an anxiety that wrapped itself around my head and clung heavily like a wet towel. A feeling that I had done something wrong, was doing something wrong, was about to do the worst thing wrong ever, as I tried to figure out what I was actually supposed to be doing.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I’m very good at not thinking about the things that upset me. I’m very good at pretending everything is going to be a-okay. Everything was moving so quickly.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“was going to get weight loss surgery, and then my life could start. No one even hinted at the possibility that maybe I had been living my life all along.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I can do this.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I wanted to tell him about the hope that had started to bubble up inside me and made me feel lighter than I had ever felt, in a long time, how hope felt so much better than feeling wretched all the time, and was so much easier than trying to like myself.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“and I tried not to look significant.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I thought being skinny meant that the worry and stress and anxiety my body had caused me would be over. I wanted to punch my clock, step through the exit door, and be free and clear and with no obligations, in the Land of Eternal Slimness where problems did not exist.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“And more than that, it was an attempt to make my body beautiful. It was the white flag I waved at the world. If you are forced to look at me, at least now you have something beautiful to look at.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“My body felt like a lie—I was not the person that my body insisted I was. In my head, I wasn’t fat. In my head, I was lovely and bright and sprightly and confident and I could be a happy person. In my body I felt like I was trapped by gravity, earthbound, sure that anyone who saw me believed in all the clichés about fat people—that they thought I was slovenly, lonely, bad-smelling, alone.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I wanted someone to tell me I was okay. I looked for something outside of me to fix everything. I looked for happiness as if someone could hand it to me in a package. I gave up on a part of myself.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I thought I finally understood it—why some thin people were so angry at fat people for being fat. They thought fat people were breaking the rules. They assumed fat people got to eat the cake. They assumed that fat people never turned down anything. They assumed that fat people slept in a bed of ham with a pillow of bacon and never said no to seconds or shared their dessert, and they thought that’s not fair, and they were probably as angry at fat people for being able to eat as fat people were angry at skinny people for being able to be thin.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“And yet here I was, in a whole new life. Not fat. I had finally gotten what I wanted. Every day I tried to drown that idea.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“Oh, shit. I would have to tell my mother. I could have gone for the rest of my life without ever telling her. I could have said, lean protein! and long walks! and felt shitty forever. I was used to carrying around that low-grade sense of having done something wrong.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head