on being fancy

A reporter wrote me and said, “I’m doing an article about the fairy tale of weight loss—can I interview you? And I said what? Of course! Holy crap! And the article came out today, and is here, and after some terror and then some encouragement, I managed to read it. The completely fabulous Pastaqueen is in it too, and says many smart things. And the whole thing turns out to be kind of awesome.

The article was a chance to talk about the conclusion I’ve come to, the whole point I’ve been trying to make this whole time: while being skinny is far, far easier in this world than being fat, being skinny does not solve all your problems. Losing weight does not give you the perfect life you’ve always dreamed about. I don’t know where I got the idea—the wicked media? the inside of my own crazy brain?

von piggleston, my faithful writing companion

So it took me at least three months longer than I had blithely assumed it would, but I finished a first draft of my memoir, the one that’s about the weirdness of weight loss surgery, and all the attendant Important Life Changes and mind-bending crazinesses that occur and blah blah blah etc. And when I typed “The End” I sat there for a full minute, looking at those words, expecting to—I don’t know. Burst into tears? Have my heart burst in a shower of sparks that spell out “YOU ARE JUST SO AWESOME” above my desk? Something. I expected a dramatic reaction, physical, emotional, emotional couched in the physical, but mostly I was just so relieved to be done with the goddamn thing, I shut my computer and went downstairs and out for a drink.

The book is—way too big. It’s 393 pages, 120,000-ish words. It’s enormous, bloated, a mess.

Driving home from work tonight, I fell into a game of What If. That thing you do when you imagine that something catastrophic happens in your world that destroys everything, grinds your life right into the ground, and you have to restart entirely. Have to—it’s not your fault, because there was the Terrible Thing. It alleviates the guilt of that occasional wish you experience, that you could just duck out of your life. Just throw your hands up and slip on a pair of sunglasses and kind of slip out of your life. New place, new name, new accent, if you want. Though I’ve always been really kind of awful at accents.

I decided that I wanted to go someplace warm, and probably that has a lot to do with the wind-chill factor and the single-digit temperatures that are whittling me down to a shivering little nub. And I’m going to leave everything I own. Even the books? Even the books. Even the pictures?

It’s been more than four months, hasn’t it? And that’s a very long time. So much can happen in four months! Of course, I am trying to remember what’s happened in the past four months, but mostly what I’m thinking about is how we have cheese in the fridge and granola bars on the counter and I have a lot of work to do and I want to get some writing done tonight and has anyone fed Porter yet? I am a distractible person, but for you I am ignoring the thing that’s shiny over there. As far as you know. There could have been a week and a half between those last two sentences! You don’t know! There wasn’t. But I thought about getting up to put the teakettle on.

Anyway, what has happened? Firstly and most obviously, Jennette Fulda of Make My Blog Pretty has—wait for it—made my blog so pretty.

Usually, when this happens, it is because of an outside force meeting the immovable object that is my self-esteem and my inability to truly believe, over long periods of time and through swamps and over hills and down into valleys and in ditches, that I have good qualities. The story goes how I was feeling fat/ugly/weird-looking/zitty/strange/dumb, but someone looked at me and said Wonderful Thing about my Beauty, either Inner, Outer, or Both, and I had an epiphany about my true, excellent self, and I felt that this was a real turning point for the way I feel about myself and the way I carry my little pea brain around inside my pointy head.

And it’s a magical story full of wonder, and you want to cheer about how beautiful it is to truly understand and have faith your goodness and your expression of that goodness in the world and how sometimes, when someone sees something in you, it is the most meaningful connection you will ever experience with a human being outside of one you have either just birthed or who has given you a pony.

A few weeks ago, as I do, I started running again. The Couch to 5K, that old reliable standby which removes your buttocks from the couch and sets you bouncing and cursing down the road towards ultimate health and total fitness, or at least the ability to run for 3 miles without passing out and then dying in a ditch and then being eaten by wild moose who have trampled down off the mountains when they heard that there was a buffet.

Jennette was my inspiration—she announced, I am going train for the 5K! Oh boy, that was totally easy! she said. And I thought, holy crap, it’s totally easy! I can do it too! And then I might have totally blamed her for leading me astray when, after rising bright and early for a vigorous dawn run, I staggered home and crawled into bed, safely out of range of mooses, and pretty much slept like the biggest Wuss in Wusstown, population me,  for the rest of the day.

I like happy endings. It’s why I read romance novels for so long—I want the romantic kiss and the sunset and the ever-after where the music surges joyfully and has got harmonicas in it and everything is swell and nothing will ever be sad, not ever again.

The problem with happy endings, though, is figuring out where the ending is. Sometimes, it is very very easy. The hero and the heroine kiss, that’s one. The family torn apart is reunited, there’s another. The small, wiry kid wins the national boating championship despite all odds and is hoisted up on his teammates’ shoulders and there is cheering.

Weight loss stories are supposed to have very definitive endings—you reach your goal! You have triumphed! There go the harmonicas, and here comes the hero of our story, wearing a slinky dress in size whatever, newly proud of herself and her accomplishments and her rockin’ bod, and there she goes off over the horizon and into the setting sun that is as hot as she suddenly believes she is and then the credits roll and you are dabbing away a little tear and pressing your fist to your heart because it is throbbing with the beauty of it all, so hard it might just thump right out of your chest.

When I was young, some ridiculous age like, say, five or twenty nine or something, I suddenly conceived of books as objects, that were created. They were wonderful stories full of magic and wonder and whatever the fuck, yes, true, but—someone made those stories. Someone thought up those  stories and wrote them down and other people, then, were able to read those stories. It was a kind of miracle, a book. That someone’s story could exist apart, have a place in the world, be real and tangible and permanent. It was awesome.

I made the leap at some point not too long afterwards—someone could tell a story, right? Well, you know what, buddy? That someone could be me.

I was still fuzzy on the details—how you went from Here is my story! to Here is my book! How it goes from being just yours to belonging to anyone. How did it happen? Where did you go? Who did you talk to?