A different person

My older brother dropped by the house this morning. We hadn’t seen each other in over two months and he was taken by surprise:  “You’ve really lost weight – you’re almost a different person!”

I’m gradually getting used to my new body, which is both much slimmer and much healthier than last year’s model. Sometimes I think that I’ve been trapped in the wrong body for most of my life and getting diagnosed as fructose intolerant has been the answer to many previous problems.

After this long battle everything is getting easier. I now function at around 80% of where I think I should be for my age – compared to about 40% this time last year. I’m three months into my “gut healing” diet and a week into the pill-popping regime prescribed by my doctor. The only items of clothing that still fit are my socks. Not having worked for over three years my funds are a little low, so I can’t go out and replace my entire wardrobe as I’d love to. But I live in a swish part of town generously apportioned with charity (“opportunity”) shops where some careful searching finds me well-made and barely-worn clothes from up-market stores for just a few dollars. Clothes shopping for a size 10 “small” is so much fun – suddenly I look good in almost everything!

Federation Square, Melbourne: with Krispin Fernandes, visiting from Timor Leste.