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.

It could have also been the fact that I did not eat before I went out, and I forgot to bring my water bottle, and my iPod conked out so I tried to time my intervals in my head but kept losing count and erring on the side of “I will jog for an extra twenty, thirty hours just to be safe.” But it is easier to blame Jennette, really, because then I get to demand recompense. I prefer it in the form of cookies.

The next time I went, I did not make those mistakes. I made lots of different, interesting ones, but not those ones, and when I finished up my run with my shoelaces untied and my iPod cord tangled around my head and my sweat jacket trailing along the path behind me and the sun burning my eyes and a long trail of spilled water all the way down my front and somewhat unsure where my keys were, I felt absolutely fucking fantastic. I felt like a goddess. A damp, sweaty, squinty, total mess of a goddess who had just jogged, very slowly and with poor form, probably an entire total of 100 feet, and was absolutely and entirely, absurdly proud of herself.

I jogged! Outside! I was wearing spandex and a sports bra, in public, under the great big blue sky where anyone and god could see me, and I ran and ran and ran until it was time to stop and I wanted to do it again and again and again.

I managed to do it three times more before a trip out of town got in the way. I packed my running clothes and my shoes and I had very determined plans and yet somehow, ended up at a breakfast buffet, face down in a pile of waffles and fresh cream and ripe strawberries instead of on a treadmill in the bowels of a hotel in Vegas. Weird. But I missed it! I’d start again on Monday! Except I was sick on Monday, and tired on Wednesday, and on Friday I had missed both Monday and Wednesday so what was the point?

The point is that I miss it. I have never run outside, not on a treadmill before, and it was spectacularly awesome. It was fresh air and changing scenery, trees and grass and dogs passing by (I am a fan of all these things) and running through the shade and out into the sun and alongside the river all the way up to the dinosaur park  and back and it was just about one of the best things ever, and I am saying that about exercise, I want you to understand, and I miss it.

image by Today is a good day

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.

I keep waiting for the credits to roll, I think, and that is my problem. After the credits roll, I can stop thinking about my body, and what I eat and what I drink and if my intestines are going to be difficult that day. I can stop worrying about how I look in jeans and that my belly is still sort of poochy and I can stop hating my boobs and I can just go on and live my life the way life is supposed to be lived, after a happy ending—completely off-screen, without a director’s commentary, without wondering what’s next.

As I understand it, that happens pretty often when you reach a goal. You plant your flag, you look around, and you go “huh. Well. That’s done.” And you realize that there’s nowhere to go but right back down. Here’s where the mountain stops, and it looked pretty high when you were down at the bottom, but now that you’re up there, it looks pretty boring.

I’ve lost all the weight, I’ve gotten the high fives, I’ve gone woo! And now I am waiting for the flourish of trumpets to let me know that I can stop waiting–well, for the flourish of trumpets. Now I am just kind of torn between relaxing into just giving up and forgetting all about it (this is who I am, now, and this is how it’s going to be and things are easy-peasy, from here on out) and fading undramatically into black, and being very disappointed that there’s not more to it, getting mad that there’s nothing left.

Things were so exciting when I was losing the weight. Things were dynamic, ever-changing, and it was a Thrilling Adventure, Full of Spills, Chills, and extra, additional Thrills.  And now things are not exciting. Things require work. Pushups and running and vitamins and being healthy without the immediate reward of five pounds down and a compliment every time I see someone I haven’t seen in ten to fifteen minutes.

A few weeks ago I visited San Francisco—my incredibly talented friend Josh Mohr was having his book release party for his (awesomely best-selling, completely amazing) novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me. He was in my grad program; people and instructors from the grad program showed up, and over and over they gasped, and hardly-recognized-me, and told me I looked wonderful and asked how I was and it was startling, to be in that place again, where it was all new and fresh and completely astonishing, how much weight I had lost and how different I look and how awesome everything in the world was and how totally I rule.

I missed that, I realized. I’ve been just ordinary for a long time, and sort of coasting along, waiting for someone to tell me that things were over and done with, and I missed the rush of it. The validation. The high fives and the wows and the holy, holy that comes when you do something dramatic and people recognize how very dramatic it is. I had forgotten, a little bit, where I used to be and what I used to look like, and how I had passed through the gates of paradise and had been issued my passel of virgins and my portion of olive oil and grapes and been warned that this was the way it was going to be, from now on. It crept up so slowly, the complacency and the odd, ungrateful boredom.

There’s plenty I can do—I can declare that my next goal is Ultimate Fitness. My next goal can be a marathon. My next goal can be a six pack. My next goal can be buttocks which can crack a walnut. My next goal can be a triathlon. My next goal can be curing cancer and finding missing children and rehabilitating abused hamsters and looking for the face of god and brokering peace in places that are broken. My next goal ought to be accepting that I had a happy ending, even if I can’t reach out and place my finger directly on the moment where that happened—maybe as far back as when I saw the scale drop below 200 pounds, or the first time I walked up a flight of stairs without dying, or the time I realized that I was worth something, that I had been worth something all along, that I would always be worth something, and I took the batteries out of the scale and gave it away, cue the triumphant kazoo.

I’m done losing weight, and I have been for so long, and probably it is long, so long past time to stop being vaguely dissatisfied, maybe, and figure out what’s next.  Cue the extra-triumphant entire band of kazoos.

image by LunaDiRimmel

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. I sat down and it passed, and I got up again to circulate, had to sit down again. It passed; I had lost my drink somewhere. I bumped into the host on the way back to the kitchen but had to excuse myself in the middle of a sentence because the dizziness was climbing up the back of my neck and closing over my head, and I couldn’t breathe, and the sense of wrongness and terribleness was overwhelming. The bathroom was locked, and I sat in the dark bedroom next to it, on the floor with my knees drawn up, hoping that I wouldn’t make a mess on their nice wood floors when I expired.

When the door opened, I launched myself inside, locked it, and laid full-length on the tile floor and breathed slowly, waiting for it to pass, whatever it was. And I mentally reviewed every single thing I had put in my mouth today, every sip, every bite, every possible crumb that had passed my lips. I laid there and berated myself for being an ass, for ruining everything, for always doing everything wrong, because that is what I do. Self-Recrimination is my middle name, which makes it hard to fill out forms.

I laid there for a long time, listening to the voices go up and down the hall, until I thought I could stand up again without fainting. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands, in case anyone was out there monitoring my noises and wondering what I was doing (and as if taking an epic poop was less embarrassing than trying not to faint in the bathroom), and I went and found E, told him we had to go. He assumed that I was sick because of something I ate, which always makes him mad–he does not want me to be sick. He wishes I would stop making myself sick. “Honey,” he said. “What did you eat today? Were you eating junk?” But he touched my forehead, realized that I was, actually and for real, sick.

“Really?” I said. “You’re way hot,” he said. “What about my temperature?” I said, because even death cannot rob me of my comedy. “That too,” he said. He got us home, tucked me into bed and fussed around me until I fell asleep happy, despite feeling like hell. It is lovely to be taken care of sometimes, and even lovelier to know that something is not your fault. Less lovely–how my entire life revolves around weight loss surgery. Every thing that happens in my body, every noise and grumble and pain and itch and tingle and lump has something to do with weight loss surgery. Everything in my life goes back to the fact that once upon a time I had weight loss surgery. Some days it feels like my epitaph–Liked Pudding, Had Weight Loss Surgery.

I used to identify as a fat girl; maybe this is what has rushed in to take its place, to fill the void where the boobs used to be. That is a chilling thought. But it is one of the major facts of my self, and my self-identity, and of course, a lot of that is of my own making; body issues are interesting to me, and weight loss surgery has directly and unavoidably affected my body and my body image, and I think about it, and write about it, which means I think about it and write about it. But even with all the attention I pay to it and spend on it, it still surprises me to realize that it has become such an intrinsic part of my life, so intertwined with everything I do and everything I feel–again, sometimes that is my own making, but sometimes it is something that can’t be dodged–eating, thinking about eating, drinking, talking about going to get coffee, getting dressed, getting undressed, being touched, feeling guilty about not going to the gym, running after the dogs but not being able to keep up, taking a supplement every four hours. Sometimes directly related, sometimes peripherally, all of it adding up to feeling like I’ve remade myself in the image of The Eternal Weight-Loss Surgery Patient.

It was a damn fine book, and a good read, and I was proud to know Shauna and I was very happy and it was all good and you should all read it and these were all things that I had expected, when I had picked up my copy and prepared to tear my way through. What I didn’t expect was the feeling of longing it would engender in me, the weird restlessness, the sense that things were not as they should be and what was I doing, sitting on the couch and not wearing pants when I could be at the gym, doing a Body Pump class. Lifting iron! Sweating to the music! Going Rahr! and kicking ass and taking names because I am Powerful and Strong! And sitting on the couch, not wearing pants.

It is kind of a cliche to read a book about someone’s big, life-changing adventure and say that it is inspiring and inspirational and makes you want to achieve something inspiringly inspirational, but there it is. Shauna writes about going to the gym and finding these group exercise classes and becoming completely addicted to them, going religiously, loving how they made her feel, ending up splashing out on a gym even when she was adventurous yet poor after moving to Scotland. Body Pump! I put down the book, when I finished, and I immediately went to my gym’s website and looked up the Body Pump class schedule and wrote down the times and days and I was ready to put on some pants and go pump! My body!

Except it has been about two weeks and my body has yet to be pumped. At the gym, I mean. And I am itchy. I keep looking at the schedule, keep thinking about putting on sneakers (and pants), keep thinking about getting out there and getting pumped and how inspired I was and how good it would feel and maybe if I pumped my body a lot somehow I would get to move to Scotland or something, and yet I remain, on the couch, pantsless.

Inspiration is a wonderful thing, but it turns out that it is not enough. Maybe I only have enough room to fit in one small good habit at a time. I’m writing regularly, with great verve and happiness and a feeling that to not write would be a terrible thing and also impossible and wrong. I will concentrate on that, for awhile, build up my Responsibility muscle, stretch and bend and work the shit out of it in front of the computer every day, without pants, putting together a book I am proud of, so far, for the most part. And eventually, when I feel that my grasp on this new habit I have is less tenuous, less liable to shatter into a million pieces and leave me pantsless on the couch eating cheese doodles and forgetting how to write a sentence, when I feel like I have got this one, important habit carved so deeply into me that it has decorated my bones, I will see about adding a new one that involves weights and clothing my bottom half and muscley things.

Maybe that is a cop-out, laziness, a fear of pants. But I have this image of me as a plate spinner, adding one too many (two) and having everything crashing down, and I think a plate to the head would kill me. I’ll get there, and you will be so impressed with me and all my magnificently whirling plates, and I will be impressed too.

Image by kReEsTaL

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. But what I’m missing, what I’ve lost, is the sense of unhappiness and inadequacy and constant awareness of every physical flaw I perceived myself to have. It was all-pervasive, oppressive, endless, all-encompassing, and it got to the point where I just didn’t notice it any more. I moved through my life as if it were perfectly normal and ordinary to hate yourself and everything about you, to be absolutely flummoxed as to why any one would ever think you were beautiful or worth loving, or worth any time at all.

In pictures, I was a beautiful girl. I looked like I knew that I was beautiful, too. That was a lie. There are pictures of me at my absolute highest weight, three days before my surgery, and I am laughing, dressed up like a Devil in a Blue Dress, with flaming red hair and bosoms for acres and I look beautiful, unselfconscious, as if I am happy and full of ineffable joy, confident in my loveliness.

That was not me–not the me I felt like on a daily, hourly, minute-to-minute basis. I could struggle out of my unhappiness for whole moments at a time, but I’d always collapse right back in, more exhausted than I had been before. I went home from that Halloween party relieved to be leaving, excited that my surgery was in only a few days.

I was not healthy at my highest weight–my blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, they were all fine. But I couldn’t breathe when I walked, and I could barely walk. My knees ached and my hips throbbed and my chest felt tight, always. I scratched myself raw and bloody from the never-ending yeast infection. I peed when I laughed or coughed. My heart fluttered. At my highest weight, I was desperately unhappy and uncomfortable, and because of that, I was unlovely, crouched down out of the way, head ducked like I was prepared for a blow, shoulders rolled forward, slumping, miserable. I was not beautiful at my highest weight because the self-loathing had ground me down and the disgust had worn me out.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably go on saying it–I wish I could have found a way out of that. I did need to lose weight, because 316 pounds did not feel good, was not something I could carry around for the long term. But I had been weights all the way up and down the scale, between 200 and 300 for practically all my life, and I had been healthy, and I had been beautiful. And I could have been happy, maybe, if I had tried harder.

Instead I bowed out of the game completely, ran fast and far away, as quickly as possible, and only when I stopped and caught my breath was I able to turn around and see where I had been, and how small it all seemed from here. It took so much to gain a sense of perspective.

photo by StuffEyeSee

I felt as if I could be seen from space, sometimes, and everyone in it, and that they had all commented at one time or another. That it was a fact which followed my form, that I would excite commentary wherever I went all across the world because my body was out of the ordinary. Extraordinary, extraordinarily interesting, something that no one could keep from noticing, even if they politely refrained from commenting which sometimes seemed to have been a herculean task, and I got sick of it. I got sick of sticking out in a crowd in all directions. I got sick of having a very specific physical characteristic. I got sick of being looked at. It was my dream and my hope and my wish to lose one million pounds and sink back into the crowd. To look normal, for a given value of normal. To be so ordinary-sized that no one would ever find it necessary to compose a remark which pointed out my characteristics of ordinariness. Water is wet, the sky is up, you are regular-sized.

No one talks about normal-sized bodies, am I right? I’m not right. Everyone talks about bodies, everywhere. Everyone’s body, it turns out, is ripe for discussion. But if you’re not fat, the social barrier of politeness that keeps some people from commenting  (because it is rude to note that someone is fat), is suddenly gone, and they can talk freely and openly about the size of your arms and the width of your hips and the shape of your thighs. They can tell you, “My, you’re getting so skinny! You’re getting too skinny! You’re SO SKINNY!” in that mock-horrified kind of way that is supposed to indicate concern and admiration and jealousy all at once, and you are meant to be flattered. It is so great that you’re skinny! You want to hear more about how skinny you are! I will tell you all about how skinny you are!

It’s like a hilarious joke, because I wanted so badly to be skinny, without thinking what that meant, and now I’m too skinny and trying to gain some weight back, and I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to act like it is The Greatest Thing on Earth that I am small. I don’t want to talk about my body, I don’t want you to comment on my body, I don’t want to be looked at and judged and measured inanyone’s head. I don’t want someone to say “You’re SO SKINNY!” and then see them do the calculations in their head, trying to decide if I am as skinny or skinnier than they are.

Also hilarious, possibly ironic, definitely hypocritical: I do it myself. I do it constantly. I spend so much time looking at other people’s bodies and trying to superimpose myself over them, to see if my outline matches theirs and I can finally see how I might fit into the world, when I look at them. That is how much space I take up? Okay. But the difference, I guess, is that I would not go up to that woman and say YOU ARE SO SKINNY. Maybe she’d take it as a compliment. Maybe it’s not wrong to take it as a compliment, when someone feels compelled to remark on your body, and maybe I am being too sensitive, too easily offended, too annoyed about the implied message, that it is so great to be thin to the point where your bones are visible, that scrawniness should be admired, and that my body is absolutely yours for the remarking upon. The next time someone says YOU ARE SO SKINNY, I will say “Oh my god, I know! It is SO GREAT! Doesn’t EVERYONE wish they were AS SKINNY AS ME?” And with my luck, they will reply, “Yes.”

photo by tombothetominato

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. When I was out with a boyfriend, I would point out women on the street–”Is that my size? Is that how I look? Is she about as wide across as I am?” And I never knew, and I still don’t know, but every time, whatever size that woman was, they’d say, with great scorn, “No! You’re not that big! Are you crazy?”

Of course, sometimes I’d point out a very large woman just to hear those words, to be assured that there was no way that I was that heavy and I had nothing to worry about in the world. But then I’d say her, look at her, and it was a woman who really was, I thought, the same as me. We’d wear the same size dress, swap sweaters, compliment each other’s butt in our jeans that we borrow back and forth. My sister in body size! That was what I looked like! But still the scorn–no! No way. You’re not that big.

If someone guessed my weight, it was usually a full 80 pounds lighter than I actually was–but then you have to add back at least twenty pounds for politeness, and then account for the fact that no one has any real idea of what the numbers on the scale mean. 200 pounds to most people sounds ridiculously, hugely, grotesquely enormous and obese because people are insane and ignorant and fat-phobic.

The end result, though, was that I had no idea what size I was. No one would tell me, for fear of insulting me. I know people who love me were trying to protect me, but what feels insulting, now, is that idea that I needed protection. That my size was such anathema, and the truth would have hurt me, that I had to be insulated from the reality of the enormity of my ass.

Now I feel medium sized, generally. Normal and unremarkable in a fucked-up world where it is better to be skinny than fat. I look at the number in my pants, how I fit in chairs and the bathtub, how people look at me and how I feel when I look in the mirror, and I think I am normal. But people have been telling me that I look skinny, far too skinny, that I’ve lost more weight and too much weight and that I ought to gain some weight back. That I am getting scrawny, and that is a terrible word. And now I am back to looking at people in the street and saying–do I look like her? What about her? No, my boyfriend says. You’re smaller than she is. What about her? No. Not her, either. Or her. I have no idea what size I am, or what I look like. People say things like “you barely weigh a hundred pounds!” and I wonder if I look scary like Nancy Regan with a lollipop head and  ribs showing at the top of my v-neck, terrifying Rachel Zoe who, as popular parlance goes, needs to eat a sandwich.

I have no idea what size I am, and I am tired of it. I’m tired of being divorced from my body at whatever size it is. Like so many millions and billions of things on the list that I thought would magically improve, become easier and simpler and just plain better when I lost weight, I thought this, too, would resolve itself, this feeling of active separation from my physical person, this feeling I have of not having any idea what shape I am in the world and what impression I leave behind. I want to stop asking other people, to stop feeling like I have to ask other people to tell me. I want to just be complete. I want to just know.

The idea of nutrition and aerobics became inextricably entwined with the idea of losing weight and getting thin. The only reason on earth anyone would eat well was to become thin; the only reason anyone in their right mind would strap on shoes and get out there in the world and sweat was to lose weight. If you were skinny, you sat around and ate cheeseburgers and the only exercise you ever got was breathing in and then breathing back out. That’s at least a couple of calories a day, and really all that can be expected of you. What is the point? There is no point in the world to any of it, except for fat people who didn’t want to be fat anymore and people who thought they were fat and it was a bad thing.

So I got weight loss surgery, and now I am skinny, and my doctor has told me I should be exercising–aerobic, anaerobic. The doctor told me I should be eating properly–lean meats, fresh vegetables, whole grains. And this entire time, the whole of the time since the moment I looked into the mirror and thought okay, I’m not fat any more. Would you look at that? I have been resisting the idea. Primarily because I am a lazy, lazy, intensely lazy human being whose fantasies of independent wealth may sometimes include hiring someone to do everything for her, up to and including putting her socks on and brushing her teeth. But also because the idea of exercise and losing weight is absolutely inextricable, in my head.

We were at Body Worlds yesterday, and here in Salt Lake it is called Body Worlds & The Story of the Heart. The story of the heart was told over a series of plaques on the wall. It talked mostly about the poetry of the human heart, its allegorical and spiritual significance. But then I came across a very flatly scientific sign–a picture of a running man, the text that said something along the lines of Your heart is a muscle. Like any other muscle, lack of use will cause it to wither. A shrivelled, raisin-like heart is going to kill you, asshole.

Oh. Right, then.

I can feel my heart in my chest, now, and it feels shrunken and leathery, weak and pathetic. It could cough and sputter and die at any moment, taking me along with it, because I am so myopic. I really thought, back when I decided to get weight loss surgery, that losing weight meant I would be out of this game, finally–that somehow with the weight loss I’d also lose all those weird and wrong associations and misapprehensions and stupid ideas. That I’d become smart, savvy, wise and sane about my body and health and fitness and self-image. It is the strangest thing, how they’ve somehow managed to follow me and keep clotheslining me in the most ridiculous ways. But maybe this is how the process works–I get clotheslined, I go, oh yeah! and another myth or wrong idea orstupidness collapses in a puff of cheese doodle dust and I am that one step closer to being all-around fit, healthy, happy, sane. That’s all I can really hope for, right? The alternative is too terrible.

Sometimes I can shake it off, usually by shaking off his hands in some ingenious way. Leaning down, leaning back, switching positions, distracting him with the parts of my body that might be acceptable. Sometimes, everything stutters to a halt. Everything comes crashing down into this one fatal flaw of mine, this one particular blemish–that having small breasts should be considered a blemish is, in my rational moments, an astonishing thing. They fit my frame, my body size. They suit me. They are perky, adorable. They are perfectly reasonable. They are, in a dark place in my head, not only not good enough for me, they’re not good enough for my boyfriend no matter what he says or how he demonstrates his actual admiration, and I want to say I’m sorry.

It’s a terribly rude question, and I just want to know. I don’t need to know, or have to know. It is not vital to national security that I discover why, exactly, her skin is like it is and whether she is okay with it and how she really does feel in her body and how wonderful it is to see her exercising her ass off every time I am here. That is none of my business, any of it. Her body and its history is none of my business. But I wanted to talk to her, and I wanted it to be weight-loss surgery, and I wanted to be able to talk about weight-loss surgery with someone who has gone through with it and whose life has been changed however it was changed by it. I wanted to talk shop. I wanted to have a conversation with someone who maybe can tell me what I need to know–sometimes I feel like they forgot to give me the manual, and there’s so much I need to know.

This incredible, powerful urge to talk to her was so different from my usual urge to talk about my surgery, which springs from my usual sense that I have to apologize for having gone from a fat person to a skinny one, from having experienced a “results not typical” kind of weight-loss transformation like you read about in ads in the backs of gossip rags. I get positive feedback for my appearance in a way and a quantity that I have not previously experienced as a fat girl–I was hot when I was fat, but it turns out that fewer people in the world think that fat girls can in fact be hot. So I get this attention I’m not used to, which embarrasses me, and I feel like I need to qualify it and to test it, even. Well, yes, but surgery, and fatness, and do you still think I’m hot even though I am, in actuality, a fat girl lurking? She could burst through a brick wall like the Kool-Aid man, dude. Watch your back.

Confessing, all the time, asking for absolution. Talking to this woman wouldn’t be a confession, but a me too, hey, I recognize you. A statement of fact instead of an admission of guilt. I’ve never spoken to her though, and I probably never will. She is entitled to her personal history, to not be required and called upon to testify. To have me mind my own business while she minds hers. And with my luck, if I did talk to her it would turn out she has some kind of rare skin disease and I am even ruder than I thought.