Archive for the ‘bodies’ Category

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.

On Saturday there was a Chinese new year party at a friend’s parent’s house, and it was delightful, as their parties always are, and filled with excellent people who I want to talk to and good food and a lot of booze and I was very excited to go, because people! Conversation! Dressing up and wearing lipstick and socializing! It was all so exciting. I was careful all day, with my eating, because I did not want to embarrass myself with socially embarrassing gas or by getting sick. I wore red for luck, mascara and lipstick and it was all very exciting. E drove so that I could have a couple of glasses of wine.

The house was packed full of people, mostly around the food. I poured myself a glass of white wine, and hugged people and laughed and kissed and fed cheese to the pug and exclaimed and laughed and then had to excuse myself because I had started to feel hot, jangly-headed, flushed and nauseous.

Two weekends ago I tore through The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl–Shauna’s awesome book, based on her awesome blog. I knew it would be funny, and that it would be well-written, thoughtful, catch me off guard sometimes, that it would be moving. That I’d do that embarrassing thing where you snort out loud and choke on your laugh because you are in public and doing a Quiet Activity and because you are not supposed to be giggling to yourself on public transportation, because that’s just weird. And I got caught out without a tissue for the emotional parts and I got upset at the stressful parts because there was no one around to exclaim to about how worried you were about how things were going to turn out (even though you knew how thing turned out, because you had read the blog).

There is nothing in the world weirder than revisiting your past in great and glorious Technicolor surround-sound. I am working on a project about my weight loss surgery, about what came before and what came after, and I am spending a lot of time sitting down and looking through things I want to call relics–my old blog, my body of work posts on elastic waist, the countess emails I wrote when I was thinking about it.

Pictures, lists of measurements, a Word document I found on my computer that listed all the ways my life would change and all the things I would do that spoke more of the great bone-deep unhappiness I was filled up with than any determination or hope or ambition.

I was such a different person, two hundred pounds ago, three years ago. I am also exactly the same.

It’s like a hilarious joke, or something. One of the things that used to make me angry when I was fat was that my body was considered public property. That I had a very visible and distinct physical characteristic which people felt the need to comment on. As if the fact of my fat and my size needed to be acknowledged, strangers felt it was important to demonstrate their powers of observation, helpful assholes felt it necessary to remind me of my great and space-hogging size and how offensive it was to right-thinking people. That when someone would look at me, you could almost hear them measuring out my width in inches, comparing it to their own width, breathing a sigh of relief when they assured themselves that they may have Figure Flaws, but at least their figured wasn’t that flawed!

When I was fat, every size of fat from the 200s through the 300s, I played a game. I would look for women on the street, and I would try to decide if I was bigger than them, or smaller than them. In every room, I would rank all the fat people in terms of their size, and where I fit in. Was I the fattest in the room, or the least fat of the fat people? Where on the continuum did I fit in? What size was I really, and what do I look like, when people see me?

Because I knew I was fat–the number in my pants told me I was fat, how I fit in chairs and the bathtub, by how people looked at me, by how it usually made me feel, when I looked in the mirror–but I didn’t know how fat. I desperately wanted to know how fat I was.

For the great majority of my life, I was a fat girl who didn’t see anything beautiful or positive about her body, her size, her shape, whose only purpose and goal in life was to lose every one of those excess pounds because they were the only thing holding her back from being happy, fulfilled, and loved by everyone around her. Each individual pound could be traced back to a very specific unhappiness, and as that pound vanished from her body, so too would that problem. An inch from her hips meant no more anxiety problems, and each incremental reduction in the circumference of her thighs meant boyfriend, boyfriend, girlfriend, one night stand, marriage and babies forever and ever. Losing weight was, in other words, the end all, the be all, my body and its raging, enraging imperfection was the thing on the top of my mind at all times, and I knew exactly what had to be done–I had been told over and over.