The French Skinny Experiment: Day 57 from France: The Roots of Everything

Shaboom sends us her update from Paris Scandinavia...

It's spring in Scandinavia and the days are starting to get longer. I sit in my room with my computer on my grandmother's desk - the only thing I asked for from her house when she died as I was six thousand miles away and in shock and crushed to hear my absolute favorite person on earth would no longer hug me and bring me half-eaten cookies.

When SwimSwim and I first met, I had just gotten out of an eight year relationship with a man who refused to even consider moving to be closer to my family. SwimSwim and I knew within the first week of dating that this was it, the rest of our lives. So I told him that I had to walk away immediately if he wouldn't be willing to move way over there so I could raise our potential future children near the people who love me and from whom I'd been separated since I was a very young girl.

He expressed that he had no problem moving here and I was ecstatic. We talked about giving his career a shot in Los Angeles for the next 5 years and then, if it hadn't taken off, we'd move. When 4 years had passed, I started making plans to move. His career was fine, he was making good money, but it wasn't the kind of success that changes your life necessarily. When he understood that I was preparing our move, he told me he couldn't leave LA and it was silly of me to have thought so in the first place.

I rebelled and mended my heartbreak by traveling like a madwoman for the next year, trying to get my wanderlust out of my system. I needed that time to be away from him, our life in LA and I needed to be completely consumed by what I wanted and needed instead of by our home together, his career, his art and his ego. I came back after that year of travel happy and acceptant of our future in California. I was okay with this change in plans, though it took me a year to get there.

We started FINALLY having many sessions of indoor cardio per week, sometimes multiple times a day. This was quite the advancement of affairs for us as for some reason we had never been so physically active. My sister and her boyfriend came to visit for a month and we'd even have to excuse ourselves from their presence in the middle of the day to go run a few quick sprints around the bedroom. It was glorious!

Then my granny died and I went went into my mental cave of darkness for a few months. I shut him out completely. At the time I thought it would be safer and kinder to keep it all to myself and leave him out of my doom and gloom. I didn't want to lay my intense pain on him, didn't want to weigh him down. He just saw me disappear and was angry and didn't understand. Then I went to Paris on a quick vacation a few months later by myself.

When SwimSwim came to LAX to pick me up from my Paris trip, he was amazed at how great he thought I looked. He told me Paris really suited me. I agree, Paris DEFINITELY suits me, and I admitted to him that I had always wanted to live there. Having seen how miserable I'd been the last few months, he was happy to see me so bright and smiley. He suggested that I move to Paris temporarily. He said it'd only be fair since he knew how much I was compromising to continue our life in LA. He didn't want me to wake up one day resenting him for keeping me in the States.

I bought a one-way plane ticket a week later.