It was also hard because Felicity and I had good times. We weren’t friends just because I was fatter than her. She was brave when I was cowardly, passionate when I was hesitant. She was living out loud while I had the volume turned down so I wouldn’t disturb my neighbors. She’s still the only person I’ve sung “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with badly and boldly while driving along the interstate with the windows down.
I eventually sent Felicity an email telling her I thought our friendship had run its course. This still ranks in the top ten shittiest things I have ever done in my life. She at least deserved a phone call, but I knew I’d just break down and start crying over the conflict. In Felicity’s life story, I don’t doubt that I am credited as “Mean Girl #3.”
I fear a high school reunion because Felicity’s the kind of person who would slap me. And then throw a drink in my face. And then stab me with a toothpick. We’d sometimes go for walks on the perfectly trimmed grass of the park near my house and talk about how thin we’d be by our high school reunion. I wonder how she’d feel about the fact that I actually did it. She might have done it too. I wonder if it made her feel less miserable about her body, or if after all that walking she ultimately ended up in the same place she started?
Being fat was traumatic, but the food was amazing.
I ate like most people would dare to only if an asteroid were scheduled to demolish the planet tomorrow afternoon. I’ve never been on the set of an XXX video, but I’ve seen food porn up close and personal. Culinary voyeurism, just like shocking tales of sexual exploits, will make you sit back in stunned silence thinking, “She put a what in her mouth?” I didn’t get fat because I had mad broccoli cravings. I ate frozen orange juice concentrate straight out of the can. I sucked on spoonfuls of Tang crystals. At restaurants I would grab packets of jellies and jams from the center of the table, peel back the silver covers, and lick the gooey insides off my fingers.
My daily lunch during sophomore year of high school was a box of Everlasting Gobstoppers I bought from the librarians as soon as the bell rang. My breakfast was four slices of whole-wheat bread.
I slathered slices of white bread with butter and ate them raw. If I had thought to sprinkle sugar on top, I would have tried that too. I bought bags of mini-marshmallows and popped the cylindrical puffs into my mouth one by one, counting how many I could dissolve into a gigantic, high-fructose blob without suffocating.
When my family was away for a week, I made a no-bake Oreo cake so I could eat it all myself. I snacked on rocks of brown sugar. I drank maple syrup straight out of the jar until the sugar burned the back of my throat.
And it was good.
As freaky as these tawdry excerpts from my childhood food diary are, I didn’t eat like this all the time. Incidents involving a collectible Care Bears glass from McDonald’s containing equal parts of chocolate syrup and milk are memorable because they didn’t happen every day. You don’t get to be five feet and nine inches tall without having some nutrients in your diet.
I’m not sure why I did these things. I could say it was a way of burying my feelings. I could say it just tasted good and I didn’t know better. I could spin some story about how food never judged me. But I don’t know if any of those things are actually true. I just know that I ate the whole pizza.
I obviously knew making chocolate frosting as an afternoon snack was wrong; otherwise I wouldn’t have secretly made it in the basement with a hand mixer. It was wrong in the same way that downloading MP3s off the Internet is wrong—I could do it without much guilt. If you could eat half a bowl of cookie dough without feeling guilty about the chocolate chips melting in your mouth, wouldn’t you? And if we lived in a magical fairyland where cookie dough had zero calories, would there be any reason not to?
After college, I lived with my mom for several years while I paid off credit card debt and college loans. Occasionally she invited people over, people with functioning visual cortexes, people who would see how fat I had become. This wouldn’t do.
My relatives were coming over. I obviously needed to hide.
I’d never been social. Even before I’d become fat I’d been the last girl in first grade handing out valentines to all my peers because I didn’t know their names. For several years in middle school I refused to answer the phone, which couldn’t have had much to do with my fat because my voice didn’t sound particularly chubby. In college I wondered if I might have social anxiety disorder, but my research revealed those people were terrified to simply go to the grocery store. Obviously I didn’t have that problem.
Once past the 300-pound mark, I avoided seeing old friends and relatives so they wouldn’t know how out of control my problem had become. I now lived in a different city and state than where I had gone to high school, so I never ran into old friends at the mall, not that I ever went to the mall. I had outgrown the largest pants at Lane Bryant, so there was no reason to face the packs of skinny teenagers in lowrise jeans. Meeting strangers wasn’t any better because I knew the first thing they’d see was my fat, which I found to be rather disgusting. I would look at myself naked in the mirror before I took a shower and try to wash away the self-loathing with the “hard rain” setting on the showerhead. If I felt that way about myself, how could I expect other people not to?
Several of my aunts and uncles were dropping by on their way home from my cousin’s Little League game in Bloomington. I wanted to leave the house and hide in the dark of a movie theater, if my butt would fit in the seats. But I stayed and greeted my aunts and uncles at the door for my mother’s sake so I wouldn’t appear rude. Then I hid in the back den at the first possible moment.
Fifteen minutes went by. Then thirty.
How long were they going to be here? Weren’t they in a hurry to get where they were going? I heard my young cousins dashing around the sofa in the living room and decided I need to make a dash for it too. Now. I crept out the back hallway into the garage and into my car. I pushed the button on the automatic garage door opener and left without telling anyone where I was going.
Where was I going? How far would I have to drive before I escaped myself? I wasn’t so different from my dad after all.
After an hour browsing the dollar bin at Target, I struggled across the parking lot and headed home. I slowed down at the stop sign three lawns from our house. I turned my head left and peered down the street. My mother was talking to my aunt, who was smoking a cigarette, in the front yard. They caught a glimpse of my maroon car and started waving at me.
I took my foot off the brake and kept driving. I’d been made, but I couldn’t go back there. They’d invaded my safe zone, my land of denial, the place I felt comfortable being fat. But I had nowhere else to go. I drove and drove. I think I stopped at a Starbucks. Time passed. I drove by our front yard again, and finally all their cars were gone.
I entered our house through the garage so the neighbors wouldn’t see me.
“Are you okay?” my mom asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Where did you go? Didn’t you see us waving at you?” she asked. “We were worried.”
“I’m sorry.” I said. “I just had to get away.” Too bad it never worked.
What I regret most is all the stories I don’t have to tell. I wanted to take a swing dancing class in college, but I didn’t go because I couldn’t foresee anyone flinging my fat ass into the air. At a birthday party held at a hotel, I lied and said I’d forgotten my bathing suit, which was actually hidden under my Rainbow Brite pajamas in my suitcase. Let’s not even talk about the times I tried to play on the teeter-totter.
I was an accomplice in a hate crime against myself. I was a mime feeling up walls that didn’t exist but that I thought separated me from the world. I don’t have any stories about the high school prom because I didn’t go. I could have gone with a gay guy, but I said no, escaping at least one fat-girl cliché. I didn’t want to face a ballroom filled with my peers. I didn’t think I would look good in a dress either
, if I could manage to find one that didn’t make me look like a cupcake. I don’t particularly regret not going, but I regret that I thought I couldn’t go. Even if I were the ugliest, fattest girl on the planet, I didn’t owe it to anyone to be pretty and thin.
A decade later, I lost more than a hundred pounds to weigh what I had senior year. I bought a black and pink dress with a delicately embroidered rose on the bodice to wear to a cousin’s wedding. It was the fanciest dress I’d ever bought. I was still fat, but I felt stunning. I also looked like a bridesmaid because no one told me the wedding colors were pink and black.
I went through old photos recently trying to figure out how fat I had been at different times in my life. I found one from middle school, back when I felt like a human dump truck. I looked so thin. I wanted to invent a time machine for the sole purpose of going back to smack some sense into myself. You are almost never as fat as you think you are. If I could teach the fat girls of the world one thing, that would be it.
But eventually I got fatter than I’d ever been, and a positive attitude could help me only so much. Some problems had nothing to do with my self-image or what magazine editors in New York put on their covers. When I was morbidly obese, restaurant booths were too small and seat belts didn’t always buckle. It was the inverse of the days when I was a child, when kitchen counters were too high and chairs were too big. The world was not sized to fit me. I felt like I didn’t belong.
Ironically, while the items in the world frequently seemed too small, the world itself was often too large. One summer I attended a lawn concert on the river and had to walk half a mile to and from the parking lot. I was mortified as people constantly passed me, effortlessly walking by on an evening stroll, while I struggled all 2,600 feet just to reach my car. Out of breath and sweating, I told myself, as I told myself every day of my life, “I really need to lose weight.”
That thought was as much a part of my mental routine as thinking I’m tired or I need to clean the litter box. No matter how good your life is, I suspect everyone has an inner voice that whispers that life isn’t quite good enough. It tends to do a lot of talking after high school reunions and unexpected meetings with happily married ex-boyfriends. Mine spent a decade telling me I was a fat ass. It was like watching the TV movie of my life but constantly being interrupted for ads selling self-loathing cream. There was a lot of good programming on my personal television network too, but it doesn’t appear in this book. It has been edited for content and to run in the allotted time. I just wanted to recast the lead character as someone thinner.
When I think about how I let myself get so absurdly fat, I think of a box of clothing patterns my mother gave me when I told her I was launching a search and rescue mission for the lost art of sewing. I didn’t dive into the box of patterns within the first week I had them, so the box eventually became a part of my apartment’s landscape, marking its borders with deep impressions in the carpet. After a week it felt less urgent to pop the lid than it had during the first few days when it was a new thing. Similarly, if I didn’t start reading a new book within the first week, it stopped being a book and became a multipaged dust collector for my bookshelf.
When people asked me how I could possibly let myself go, that’s how. All that weight was a box of dress patterns in the corner or that library book I renewed for the fourth time. I said I would get to them, but I never did. It became part of my terrain. After a point, so much weight piled up that the task seemed insurmountable. It was the difference between reading one book and reading the entire Library of Congress.
The fat lost its shock value. It didn’t scare me like it scares a skinny girl who’s just put on ten pounds and can’t fit into her favorite jeans. Ten pounds was a trivially small percentage of my overage. Who would notice if I lost only ten pounds? The necessity of losing weight today was no more urgent than it had been yesterday or would be tomorrow. I built up a tolerance. Being fat became normal. It became as much a part of my identity as being the smart one or the girl who was good with computers. Other people were skinny.
Yet the dream of thin never went away. Because it wasn’t just the dream to be thin, it was the dream to be happy, to be loved, and to be safe. It was the assurance that life would be okay, that I would be accepted. It meant the power of beauty, over men and other women. This was what being thin meant. It didn’t matter if it was true.
At night I would stare at the ceiling wondering how many years my weight was taking off my mattress’s lifetime and hoping someday I’d be able to start a sentence with the phrase, “After I lost all that weight after college ... ”
CHAPTER 3
The Snooze Button
It was three o’clock in the morning and I wanted to die.
I was home from college for the weekend and enjoying the familiarity of sleeping in my old bed instead of sharing a bunk in the freshman dorm. That was, until I was awoken by the worst pain I’d experienced in my seventeen years and eleven months on the planet. It felt like heartburn at first, but it quickly intensified to heart-inferno and then became a heart-supernova, threatening to implode in a starburst of pain in my stomach. I began plotting to cut open my chest with my retainer. My orthodontist had left a couple of sharp plastic edges around the rim that could make a clean incision.
Instead I crept to my parents’ room and knocked on the door. My mother rushed me to the downtown hospital where I was triaged and asked if I were on drugs or pregnant. When the hospital staff realized I was not yet eighteen, I was sent to the kiddie hospital next door without even receiving a lollipop.
I was wheeled to the adjoining hospital so slowly that my mother was able to move the car and start a conversation with the on-call nurse in the lobby before I arrived. Without the aid of a remote control, I rewound the last ten minutes of my life for repeat viewing: triage, medical questions, and the query as to whether I was a crackhead or knocked up, or better yet, a crackhead with a little crack baby in my womb. People always wanted easy answers.
I waited in the lobby, keeled over in pain, confused why no one seemed to be interested in helping me or at least considerate enough to knock me unconscious with an IV stand. Eventually I was shown to an examining room and asked to lay down on a bed covered in white paper that crinkled and folded awkwardly beneath me. Was I intoxicated? Was there a living being inside of me? The intern asked me those questions as she struggled to feel my organs underneath my layers of fat. She succeeded only in tickling me.
“If a syringe full of heroin and a hard cock will make this pain go away, bring it on,” I said. (Actually, I didn’t, but I really wish I had.)
It was at this point that I started to question the perfection of the medical system. Doctors are just human, after all, and as fallible as the rest of us. I hoped they were right most of the time, particularly when they were working on me, but the repeated questioning made me wonder if they had any idea what they were doing. My mother inquired twice, “Could it be her gallbladder?” The intern just shook her head no. Our family had a history of gallbladder disease, but I was rather young for it. When the pain finally went away, no thanks to anyone in a white coat, I was told it was probably gas and to take some antacids with simethicone next time.
In the following years I had several attacks similar to that first one but without the chaser of a hospital bill. A couple of weeks before my twenty-third birthday I awoke in the middle of the night to a familiar pain under the right side of my ribs. My internal organs didn’t even have the decency to malfunction during normal business hours. I rolled around in bed and moaned for five hours until the doctor’s office opened. My general practitioner was cheaper than the ER. When I finally arrived at the office, it took all of a minute for my doctor to determine I was probably having a gallbladder attack. Hardened stones of cholesterol had formed in my gallbladder and were trying to squeeze their way through my common bile duct. It was like trying to shove a cantaloupe through a garden hose.
The doctor prescribed painkillers t
hat made me feel so happy they should have had smiley faces printed on them. I had never done drugs before, but I started to question my elementary school enrollment in Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” program when the small white tablets quickly killed the nine hours of intense, stabbing agony. While I was glad I no longer wanted to reach into my belly to start ripping out organs, the pain had been an amazingly transcendent experience. I no longer feared childbirth. Pushing a baby out of my vagina sounded like a party with Jell-O shots and cheesecake after this.
Before this attack, my main motivation to be thin was to be dropdead sexy and wear a pair of calf-high leather boots that actually fit around my calves. But as I entered my twenties—or the three hundreds, depending on what I was measuring—I realized the sexiest thing was not being dead.
I had passed the one stone that caused me so much pain, but if there were others, they could become lodged in my bile duct at any time. Several days after my latest attack I went to have an ultrasound on my abdomen to confirm that my problem was indeed gallstones. If so, I would have to schedule surgery to have my gallbladder removed.
I got lost in the hospital’s shiny corridors until I finally wandered into the proper waiting room. I squished myself between the arms of a chair, my fat spilling over like a muffin top. I was soon called into a darkly lit room where a technician squirted gel on my stomach and ran a wand over my upper right quadrant. She barely said a word. I never liked small talk, but for the first time in my life I missed the static of empty words.
“Have you eaten today?” she finally asked, staring at the screen with a wrinkled brow.
“No,” I replied. She grunted and finished the scan without another word. This couldn’t be good. A couple of days later I got the call. I’d have to have my gallbladder removed. It was a pointless body part anyway, like the tonsils and appendix. I went to all the trouble of supplying it with blood and oxygen and all it did was cause me pain. The gall, indeed.
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