Beauty, Disrupted

by Carre Otis

  “Yes, of course,” I answered. I always tried to walk my heart rate down after a workout.

  “Well, my dear . . . your heart is still racing. Let’s just have you sit for a bit.” In fact, my heart was pumping dangerously, at over two hundred beats per minute. Not the norm for a thirty-year-old supposedly in great shape. I didn’t tell anyone else, but these episodes continued to happen with some frequency. I could usually feel when a blackout was coming and would try to get to the ground as quickly as possible to prevent falling. I’d lie to anyone who asked, insisting that I was just light-headed and needed some rest. I was concerned and did suspect that it had to do with my eating habits, but I wasn’t willing to stop the momentum of my life right then to deal with it, so I chose to forge ahead and hope that it wouldn’t get any worse. As far as I was concerned, it was still manageable.

  The Sports Illustrated crew included my old friend, photographer Antoine Verglas. It was a great group of folks, and together we flew down to Puerto Vallarta, then made our way inland to an absolutely stunning resort. The backdrop was idyllic, with an enormous pool, waterfall, grassy knolls, and colorful cabanas. Hammocks swung in the gentle breeze, while an open restaurant complete with a bamboo bar stood as the hub of the resort. The rooms were more like suites, and there was a masseuse on duty to tend to anyone’s needs. It was an atmosphere of style and decadence, exquisite cuisine included. We were waited on hand and foot, left to sun between shots or just float in the pool. While most of the girls opted to relax and take in the amenities, I continued my insane exercise regimen, thinking of it as more of a maintenance program. I ran in the midday heat under a blazing sun, did lunges across the grass and squats in the gym. I couldn’t seem to stop myself; the fear of putting on even a single pound while on location had me running on empty.

  During meals I would watch enviously as my young co-workers sipped margaritas and nibbled on chips. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I would excuse myself from the table and from temptation. My illness was ruling my life.

  CNN was filming behind the scenes to present a firsthand look at the creation of the Millennium Issue. They interviewed the models, too. And because I was one of the oldest models SI had used in its history, I became the poster girl for the thirty-something demographic. Outwardly I embraced the opportunity, but inwardly I was more and more uncomfortable with the constant comparisons to the younger models, as well as with the general fixation ­people had on age. I was thirty—so fucking what? Why, I wondered, do we need to obsess about age in the ways that we do? But clearly I had bought into it; I was uncomfortably aware that I was drawing near the expiration date I’d been hearing about since the day I arrived in the modeling world. Perhaps I was already there. Expired.

  With the Sports Illustrated shoot completed, I flew back to Los Angeles and collapsed. I was beyond exhausted. It wasn’t like me to have so little drive, even with a cold. But the energy reserves I’d once been able to draw from were all gone. Just as I was falling into a pit of despair, I received a welcome call from my brother, who was passing through town.

  “Hey, Carré! It’s your bro!” Jordan said cheerily.

  “Hi!” I answered. It was so good to hear his voice.

  “Can I crash with you for a ­couple of nights?” he asked. Of course. I was thrilled to have the company.

  We hung out and watched movies that first evening. I tried to shake myself from my funk long enough to work out, but I was still too exhausted. Early the next morning, I tiptoed into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, but this time when I sensed I was about to black out, it felt very different. As I fell to the floor, I could hear a consistent and rhythmic banging sound. It was faint and in the background, but it was there. And as my confusion cleared just for a second, I realized it was my head banging on the floor. My body was flailing. I was having a seizure.

  It was a miracle my brother was there. He immediately took me to the emergency room, where it occurred to me just how worried I was. The doctor in the ER put me through some tests, and I was referred to Dr. Anil Bhandari, a cardiac specialist at Good Samaritan Hospital.

  After another battery of tests, Dr. Bhandari came into the room and asked if he could speak frankly with me.

  “How is your diet, Ms. Otis?” he inquired.

  I was stunned. “Well, it’s fine, I guess. I mean, I am a model. I don’t eat a lot. But I eat.” I was trying to reassure him.

  “What does that mean to you? Do you or don’t you eat?” he asked me in a rather serious tone.

  “Of course I eat,” I said, laughing, trying to make light of the situation.

  “Carré, I am asking you this because it appears you have three holes in your heart. I would like to try to understand why a woman at your young age would have them.” He looked at me, and there was no smile in his eyes. This was serious. And all of a sudden, I was scared. My entire life flashed before me.

  “Whoa . . . Can you fix them? Will I die? What can you do?” I sounded panicked. And I was.

  “Take a deep breath. Yes, I will explain the procedure we can do. But let’s go back to that last question about your diet.”

  He wasn’t going to let me off the hook. I looked around the stark room, but there was no escape. There was nowhere left to go. I knew at that moment I needed to face that last dreaded little piece of me that I was still hiding, the one fragment of control I was still clinging to so desperately. I was as scared of the situation I was in now as I was of letting go and fessing up. The sad fact is, I was anorexic. And I had been for the majority of my life. After a long conversation and an honest intake of my history, I was admitted to Good Samaritan and underwent a noninvasive heart surgery. The three holes were ablated, and I was told to expect a full recovery.

  Jeffrey was my chief confidant during that time. My family was still far away. It was the beginning of yet another layer of recovery. But this layer was different. I had managed to dig down deep enough to the place where the subtlest seeds of turmoil in my life had been planted long ago. I recognized a different kind of opportunity in arriving there. Everything in my life was about to change yet again.

  PLUS-SIZE MODELING

  I was on an emotional roller coaster during the weeks that followed my heart surgery. I had never felt so open, raw, or exposed. I reached out to friends and finally to family in an attempt to close the gap that I had created between the world and me. I could no longer compartmentalize my life into discrete boxes. I needed to have everything on the table, to open a dialogue about what it was I was going through. I began working with a new therapist, one who specialized in eating disorders, and I slogged my way through some painful truths. I needed to understand the origins of my illness—how, why, and when it had all started. The surgery drove home the obvious point that my eating disorder could cost me my life. I had no choice but to try to get to the root cause of its existence and to its solution.

  At the “heart” of the matter lay a very fractured sense of self. The loss of connection I’d experienced with my mother and the absence of the feminine in my life at an important time had been the major impetus for my disease. I’d had no mentors, no warm hugs, no reassurances as my body changed. There were only unanswered questions, feelings that were forever suppressed, fears and concerns that were never voiced because there was no one emotionally there to receive them. I had never been taught that I could say no or have a say in anything. I felt that I didn’t have any rights; my voice wasn’t worth listening to.

  As a result, my opinion of women was dismal from the start. I was repulsed by my own femaleness. I began to equate women with the meek and the weak. And from a very young age, I was not at all convinced that I had been born into the right body. I didn’t want to be a woman. The vulnerability that lay there seemed unbearable. As puberty hit and my body began to change, a sense of absolute betrayal came over me. How could this happen? Breasts? Pubic hair? Hips? I was disgusted. And even further enraged that I had absolutely no control over any of it.

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bsp; The open stares and furtive glances from older men taught me early in adolescence that a woman’s body was not a safe place to live. That much was clear. It infuriated me. The repeated sexual and physical abuse I suffered from the men in my life was more proof that being a woman wasn’t what I had signed up for.

  I recalled the day I had run my hands over my rib cage, relieved that there were no breasts yet. I looked like a little boy. That lean, linear shape made me feel safe. As changes began to take place, I did everything in my power to maintain that flat chest, trying to keep myself looking like a boy for as long as I could. The only way of accomplishing this was through diet. And for years, even prior to modeling, voluntary and chosen starvation was something I endured almost every day. Not only did this work to keep me physically thin, but it provided me with a much-needed sense of control, too. Everything around me might have been out of my power, but I could at least manage what went into, or didn’t go into, my mouth.

  It wasn’t until I met Nan and stayed with her on the farm that my beliefs about women and about my body were challenged. I had been impressed by the women I saw there. I’d even mimicked them to a certain extent, but I could never let myself go completely. Inevitably, I would scramble back to my haven of control, reining myself and my impulses back in. Though I had been drawn to these women, I hadn’t been ready to soften as they had. I was not yet ready to embrace the beauty of the strength that lies within vulnerability.

  I had never voiced these feelings before. And it was painful but relieving to finally be able to express my innermost secrets. I was sad that I felt disgusted with myself. Although it had been a long time since I’d felt disgusted by other women, I continued to disgust myself. I was mortified to go into a supermarket and get Tampax; it was humiliating to speak about my body. Anything that had to do with my being a woman seemed upside down and backward. It took a tremendous amount of courage to look into all of this, find my voice, purge myself of the loathing, and create a new and healthy inner dialogue.

  As I worked endlessly in therapy, I also began to introduce something new to my system: calories. Per my doctor’s orders as well as under the watchful eye of my therapist, I began to plan my meals. In those first weeks, I would sit down with my nutritious self-made meals and virtually fall to pieces. I was terrified, fearful that food would make me fat. The anxiety would swell and surge, usually resulting in a call to my doctors. It took a lot of coaxing for me to begin to eat three meals a day. At first I could handle only a few bites. As I moved through this period, I allowed myself the room to break down. I kept a journal, noting my emotional responses to learning to eat properly. I put nothing on my schedule other than the task of nourishing myself, and that looked different every day. I took long walks as opposed to hour-long runs through sand; I opted for a massage over time in the sauna. I was trying a kinder, gentler approach. It was around this time that a house came on the market in Malibu that was in my price range. I had been living for two years under the shelter of the Palisades home, and I was feeling ready to put down some roots of my own. Driving to Malibu one crisp fall day, I rounded the bend on the Pacific Coast Highway and smiled to see the view of Zuma Beach fan out below. “I could do this,” I thought out loud. “I could live here.” Within a month escrow had closed and I’d moved dogs, belongings, and myself to Broad Beach Road.

  I continued my therapy sessions and worked on being present as I ate my meals. But a new challenge was soon in front of me. Part of the healing work resulted in a weight gain, a gain I’d never experienced before. And all the issues I’d once grappled with were now multiplied threefold. My body was in fact out of my control.

  Because I’d been in starvation mode for so many years, my system could not trust that what I was putting into it wouldn’t be taken away in a week’s time. I had destroyed my metabolism. Only time and patience could repair it. In the face of the weight gain, I had to make a decision: Would I proceed with the protocol, trust my doctors and the fact that my body had the intelligence and wisdom to heal in ways I had yet to understand, or would I fall back on the same old patterns of control that would eventually kill me?

  I was sick of the fight, so I surrendered to what was one of the most ironic and profound teachings in my life. My body did balloon. I gained close to thirty pounds. It challenged me in ways I had never been challenged before. But it was then that I had one of my most liberating revelations: I am not my body; I am so much more than my size.

  I remember driving home from a therapy session and seeing a woman walking along the street where I lived. She stunned me. She awed me. She must have been my size at the time—a twelve, perhaps—and she moved with such sexiness and confidence. I wanted to stop her, ask her questions, and get to know her. Instead I held this image in my mind every time I had doubt and self-loathing. I recalled her boldness and pride. Beauty is not a size. Beauty is presence. Beauty is certainty. Beauty is the body.

  I started to think about work. I felt this growing motivation to represent publicly all that I was going through. I knew that other models I’d worked with would rather be unemployed than work as a size twelve, but that route wasn’t for me. I was finding my voice and purpose. Why should I have to hide myself away? Why would I be ashamed to come out as a larger-size woman? And with that, I decided to call Jeffrey.

  “I want to work,” I said boldly.

  “Honey, you’re still recovering,” Jeffrey said quietly, not understanding exactly what I was saying.

  I laughed. “No, Jeff, I’m not talking about losing weight to go back to work.” I wasn’t sure he would go for it, but I figured I would ask. If anyone was going to back me up in a controversial move, it would be Jeffrey.

  “What are you talking about, Carré?”

  “Well, what if . . . what if I started to work at the size I am now? What if I worked as a plus-size model?” I said excitedly. “I see the girls out there. There are a ­couple of magazines, and there’s a ton of catalog work. Why not?”

  My excitement was met with silence. I knew Jeffrey well enough to know that he was taking it in, ruminating over my idea. I pressed on.

  “Jeff, I could make a difference. I can take a stance. Why should I stop working just because I’m bigger? First of all, I still need to work. Second of all . . . second of all, I have something to say. Something important.” I waited.

  “Actually, Carré, it’s not a bad idea at all.” He meant it.

  And so we began to plan a course of action. I wanted to “come out” and do it with pride. There was no shame. I was ready to take on the role of a spokesperson for all the other women who had struggled as I had and whose bodies were not those of typical models. As I researched my role, I began to understand just how few women are anywhere near a size two.

  And with a few calls, a lot of courage, and some great support, a new career began. One in which I was able to share everything I’d learned, to speak out loud and clear. This was one of the greatest lessons of all, and the irony of my situation never escaped me. It took my surrendering the control I’d clung to for so long and becoming what I’d feared most to actually find my voice and my purpose.

  DISCOVERING MY VOICE WITH OPRAH

  The funny thing about being a plus-size model, as I would soon discover, is that there is a certain emphasis on size in that world, too; if you fall below the minimum size expectation you could lose out on a job opportunity just as easily as you could if you exceeded the size expectation in my old modeling world. There was a time when I was in limbo between those two worlds. As my body finally adjusted to its new healthy regimen, I’d actually settled into a range between sizes eight and ten, depending upon the cut of the clothes and the designer. It was during that time that I received a call from Jeffrey saying that O magazine wanted to fly me to the Bahamas to shoot a summer story. I was eager to accept that particular job because I assumed I wasn’t expected to show up rail thin. O magazine had an older demographic than most fashion magazines; I, just like everyone else in Am
erica, knew about Oprah Winfrey’s very public battles with weight. She spoke out courageously about size acceptance as well as women’s rights. A part of me felt flattered to be able to represent those values.

  For the first time since my surgery, I was excited to get back on a plane. Harbour Island, Bahamas, awaited me.

  I was met by the photographer’s assistant at the small island airport and escorted to the quaint hotel that sat on the shore of a famous pink-sand beach. It was a treat to be there—in the balmy warmth, under the palm trees—and unlike on so many other shoots in my career, it was wonderful to be able to join the crew for a real meal. I retired early to get a good night’s sleep, and when I awoke, I headed into hair and makeup to begin what I assumed would be a long day’s work.

  I endured the obligatory fitting to see what were the best looks for each location. It began to dawn on me as I shimmied in and out of outfits that the clothes were a bit on the tight side. Despite all the progress I’d made, I found myself struggling to manage the emotions that were welling up inside. The discomfort of being squeezed into a size six was both physical and psychological.

  “Hmm.” The stylist raised a brow as I sucked in my breath to zip up a pair of linen pants. “Things are not quite fitting as I hoped. Did you gain weight?” she asked in a tone that sounded to me as if she already knew the answer.

  “I sent word along that I’m a size eight. These are all size sixes.” I knew I was coming off as defensive, but Jeffrey and I were always careful to be truthful with clients about my size so that I could be comfortable and confident at all my shoots—especially during that transitional time. It was all I could do not to cry. I tried to hold steady and remember that this was all just part of the job.

  “Well,” she sniffed, “I think you’re more of a ten or a twelve.”