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? the people who told me that I should be ashamed of being fat, both the well-meaning people who told me for my own good, and the assholes who take fat people personally?—wherever I got the idea, I had it internalized.

No matter how illogical I knew it was. No matter how often, when I was being very considered and rational and reasonable, I reminded myself that my weight was not the problem, I had a secret tiny flower of hope, of conviction, that once I lost all the weight I had to lose, I’d never have any problems, ever again. And even if I did have problems, I’d be too happy to notice them. Skinny = beautiful, beautiful = happy, sign me up for weight loss surgery.

I lost 160 pounds, or thereabout. I am very, very happy, in many, many ways. Strangers don’t find me disgusting and feel the need to share the roots of their revulsion. I don’t stand out, and I can fit just about anywhere, in this world that’s built for a specific size of person. I can breathe more easily, walk more easily, I have been known to break out into a run. Things have been good, in a lot of ways. So many ways. Enough ways that I do not regret having gotten weight loss surgery, even though I deeply, absolutely regret all the years I spent hating myself for something so stupid, and waiting for my life to start and things to get better once I found a way to not be fat any more.

I don’t think I gained weight in order to hide from the world—I think that weight and size are much more complex issues than that. But I think it was comfortable and easy to let fat be my whole problem. And when I was left with no fat, but plenty of problems—I was the only one left to blame. It’s like I’ve cleaned out the flooded basement, which is great and all, but now I have to actually address the cause of the flooding, and it’s harder than you think. It’s so much harder than I was led to believe.

I should have known; I mean, I did know. But I didn’t believe it. I think the feeling is so much more common than anyone thinks. I think the focus is “lose weight! lose weight now! lose weight fast!” but no one ever, ever talks about what happens once you’ve lost the weight. You’ve spent so much time being fat, trying to not be fat any more, you never had a chance to really think about what it meant to be skinny. You’ve spent your whole life with a fat-person identity, and then you’re left as a skinny person and no idea how to reconcile the two parts of your life. You’re supposed to forget all about the person you were, and just be happy and thankful.

I’m not asking for pity and compassion and tiny golden tears rolling down the struts of your tiny golden violin. What I am trying to say is, yes, I am glad to not be fat, to not have to deal with all the physical and emotional realities attached to being fat, because it is truly hard. But being faced with the blunt, raw psychological reality that I’ve still got problems to work on—that losing weight was just the beginning, and never was anything but that—is more disheartening than you can imagine.

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. It’s hysterical and bumbling and all over the place; it rushes through the important stuff (and then I got surgery!), and lingers over the less important stuff (I believe it was fifty degrees that day, or maybe about fifty-five? It looked like rain, too; I enjoy cheese!; Have you ever seen a puppy? Like, really looked at one?)

And that? Was six months in the writing. So that’s six months of me talking about myself in way too much insane, bizarre detail, to myself. That’s six months of wallowing in my neuroses, my mistakes, my neurotic mistakes, all my flaws and everything that’s ever made me cringe about myself. That’s a lot of whining. That is entirely too much of me for entirely too long.

Holy Christ, am I tired of myself.

I think it’s going to be a good book, once I whack out the whining parts, shore up the brutally honest parts, work on getting to the point, the meat, the heart of the matter, throw in a couple of knock-knock jokes. I think once I revise it without mercy, readers will hopefully not get sick of me and my voice and this thing I did and this story about a person I was and the person I became and the person I stayed all the way through. I hope it’ll be a book that means something to somebody. It means a lot to me. It means I wrote 120 thousand words, for one. Those are a lot of words! For two, it means my agents will have something of substance to shill, besides my promises that I am totally awesome and can write a totally awesome book.

It’s all printed out (WOW IT IS A LOT OF PAGES) and waiting for me to get to it with a red pen and a steely resolve. In the meantime, I am writing a YA novel that is based on how much I hate a very terrible song that I kept hearing on the radio, and I am having so much fun with it I cannot even stand it. I love this. I want to keep doing this. Because this is what I have figured out: I want to write. Someday I will write a Magnum Opus, a Masterpiece, my Am I Robert Penn Warren Yet? Work of Art.

But mostly, right now and right always, I just want to write, and I want to keep writing, and I want to write everything. I want to write romance and fantasy and YA and romantic fantasy YA and science fiction and humorous essays and urban paranormals and voice-driven literary fiction and maybe I will even take a whack at mysteries or thrillers or horror or some new kind of twisty genre that I make up out of my own head. Pretty much anything that’s not a memoir, really. I want to write it.

Anyway, what has happened? Firstly and most obviously, Jennette Fulda of Make My Blog Pretty has—wait for it—made my blog so pretty. We are now called “Awesomesauce!” Because really, there’s no other word for it. I’ve switched to a bloggy kind of format, so that I can post entries more often, shorter ones with no pictures, if I don’t want to make a picture go, which makes it ever so much more totally and completely likely that I’ll be putting words up, I can’t even tell you. I loved my last theme, but it was an arduous task that took the lives of my brave women and men each and every time I endeavored to post a new entry about things and the business. So if I wanted to just jabber about hair product or Hershey’s kisses, instead of writing something substantive, it wasn’t going to happen. But now it can! Holy crap, I can write entries about my toes every single day! I won’t. BUT I COULD. And that is such a beautiful thing for me and my muse. And by “muse” I mean “check me out, I’m a pretentious asshole!” (Note: I don’t have a muse. But it’s possible I’m still a pretentious asshole! Yay!)

Anyway, contact Jennette if you want someone fast, furious, talented, communicative, wonderful, affordable and who smells nice. To design and code your blog, I mean.

What else. I moved in with E and his roommate; I have a writer’s garret upstairs and I can’t even stand how awesome it is. Okay, it’s more “where I keep my stuff” than “writer’s garret,” but it is pretty much still completely lovely. Living with E is as terrific as I had hoped; I am fond of Roommate J, we all take turns cooking (some of us, and now I’m coughing into my hand but it sounds like I’m saying “me!”, much more terribly than others of us). We grocery shop. We’ve stopped eating fast food more or less. I have quit drinking diet pepsi, and now spend all day drinking water and tea. You can go back and reread that sentence, flabbergasted amongst you. I know. I don’t fucking believe it either.

I still have the best agents ever in the history of them—they are supportive and smart and savvy and one hundred percent on my side and holy of holies, etc. I’m writing my book now, and it is a big kind of flailing mess, but I’ve got an amazing writing partner who cheers me on hard and pats my head and tells me “hooray!” and kicks my ass when I don’t write and I think I’m going to have a (bad) draft by December 20. Then a holiday break, and then a rewrite and we’ll see what happens from there. Hopefully only good things. I have ideas for YA novels, and YA fantasy novels and regular novels, too, and ideas for tearing apart my grad school novel and rebuilding it in a bionic sort of fashion, and I feel happy about that, and more hope is there too.

I paid off my car; I’m in the process of figuring out my significantly five-figure tax bill and that is such a relief I can barely stand it. I am considering, seriously, plastic surgery for the poof that is my belly, which drives me nuts and makes me self-conscious. I had a consultation, during which the nurse invited me to admire her excellent and professionally done boob job. It really was spectacular. It’s still just a thought.

My inbox has three things in it; I visited San Francisco for three weeks and lived like a damn hell ass king, and came home with a new freelance client. In general, I feel good about my life and my choices and the choices I’ve made for my life, and I like candy.

So that is to sum up.

I’m sure that there’s lots of stuff that I will remember that I wanted to talk about, and the exciting thing is that now I can! And totally will! This is what I hope. I miss this, have missed it, don’t want to miss it any more. Hi, you guys! I missed you too.

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

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? Did you put torn-out, jam-printed notebook pages under your pillow one night where the book fairy would find them and make them important and permanent and forever? I didn’t worry too much about it. I figured it would happen, because I made stories, and stories became books, and books were awesome and someday I would have one.

There has never been a point, ever, where I have quite relinquished that idea. The conviction, kind of. Quiet and small, in the back of my head, but catching the light, every once in a while, a glinty little beam. Even when I gave up writing in disgust, even when I couldn’t write, even when I didn’t want to write, even when it had been years and years since I had written a sentence. That was okay, because someday, I would have a book.  And even as an adult, I remained pretty fuzzy on the details, but was really holding out for the book fairy.

At some point, I took up writing again, and I got an MFA in creative writing, even. And at some point during my MFA career, they had sat us down and took our hands tenderly in theirs, and in a gentle voice, had kindly explained that the book fairy did not exist. Instead, there were things like Publishing Houses, and Editors and Agents, Book Deals and Query Letters, Book Proposals and Soaring Dreams, Heartache and Rejection.  Just because you had written a book, it turned out, didn’t mean that you were going to have a book. As had countless writers before me, I clapped my hands over my ears and I rushed from the room sobbing, my sack of skin jingling bloodily with the broken shards of my conviction.

So much work and effort and luck and hope and rejection to get an agent, who would only be the first step towards finding an editor who would only be the next step towards convincing a publishing house to let you make a book. Too much work, too hard, so unlikely.

I tried anyway, because I am stupid.

I queried agents, because that is what you do. I got turned down, and down, and down, and I was not surprised. I was vindicated! I told you! Too hard.

And then one day I found myself with a handful of dizzying emails from dizzying people. And then soon after, I stood at the window in my living room, looking out at the mountains and the highway and hoping those agents, the wonderful ones who had been on the top of my wishlist and who were far away in New York telling me that they wanted to be mine, they couldn’t hear in my voice how  I had just almost dropped the phone and burst into violent tears. I remained calm, and professional, and not at all psychotic, mostly. Then I hung up the phone and dropped on the couch and waited to burst into tears because you know, maybe it’s true that someday I really will have a book.

By this time tomorrow, I will be on the Mayan Riveria. I will possibly even be wearing the string bikini I bought if my courage does not fail me, and I will definitely feasting on buttery lobster that had been caught ten minutes previously. Icy, salty margaritas, hot hot sun, hot hot like the sun boyfriend, the beach. Oh, the beach. I may lie flat on the sand and not move the entire week, and it will be the best week of my life, after a week of hell. Or the hammock. The hammock is nice, too (to your right: an actual picture of our actual future hammock. Seriously. I KNOW).

I’m a lucky girl.

I’ll be back next week! And back blogging, too, for reals. I will bring you a coconut.

“Come!” I will cry out to my faithful companions. “We have mountains to conquer! Valleys to probe! Rocks to scale and small, tree-lined paths coated in sucking mud to wander down confusedly because we’re not sure exactly where we’re going! It is adventure we seek, for hikers we are! And we hike! Away!” The dogs will be wearing hats, too.

And then I will climb into my Subaru Explorer Edition SUV of Doom and roar off into the day and over to the hilly but nicely manicured golf course that sits at the bottom of the town’s mountain, and once more forge a path along the very clearly marked and heavily traveled Exercise Trail that, nonetheless, makes me feel like a real, live hiker person and dogs. With hats. I feel that the hats are very important.

My dog-walking adventures continue, and they continue to make me very happy. It is good for me, to break out of the house and the rut in which I am unclothed and unconcerned about my dignity; it is good for my Min, who continues to be charmingly batshit. It is good for E’s sweet Porter puppy, his boxer who enjoys to explore things and has very important missions to complete when we are out on the town. I have been taking them up to the golf course, which is acres and acres of rolling green (though recently, very white). They run, and I run after them. They stop to sniff things, and I fall down a hill and roll to the bottom. They come to sniff me. I limp up the next hill and throw myself back down. We frolic! They try to eat the other dogs we run into with alarming, frustrating regularity. A cross-country skiier comes cross-country skiing by, and they lose their ever-loving minds. Then we run out of golf course, turn around and come home.

It is a wonderful time, and it is good for them to go flying across the snow with their ears flapping behind them (and in Min’s case, a long, magnificently unbreaking silvery trail of drool), it is good for me to be flinging myself around the countryside, but I feel that we’ve been missing something, and that is a sense of purpose and direction. We have been missing a path to follow, a goal to achieve, a destination, an objective–ambition. Also it was getting frustrating, trying to herd howling, yelping dogs away from one another and from cross-country skiiers.

So today, when I discovered the hiking trail that led from the back of the golf course, through the trees, and breaks open far above the whole city and the wide expanses of snow, that feels so close to the sky, that has the mountains at our back and winds enticingly through groves and up through valleys and over streams and in between outcroppings, with signs that say things like “Waterfall 1.6 miles,” and “Canyon 2.6 miles,” I felt that we had discovered our purpose. We were hikers. We would hike. We could explore these intricately connected web of trails that lead all over the mountain and through it and next to it. We would discover canyons and water features and new, knee-deep patches of mud that would end up, paw-print-shaped, all over the upholstery of my car, and it would be good. It would be better than good: it would be great.

That is not to say that we will not be rolling down hills at points in the future. But, buoyed up by my discovery, and loads of sunshine and the lack of oxygen at high altitude and not having fallen down any hills, I have decided that hiking (sorry, “hiking”) is our new hobby, and though I will probably avoid buying specialty shoes, who can resist a big stick? Also, the dogs will look so cute in hats.

photo by Flickmor

In Mexico, there is no snow. In Mexico, I do not speak the language, and that would be nice for awhile, not understanding anything at all that is happening to me or around me or near me, and not being expected to because I might be slow or retarded and clearly have no idea what’s going on. In Mexico, there is the beach, and blue water. There is sand and the jungle, but also Mayan pyramids and luxuriously feathered birds in psychedelic colors. There is nointernet in Mexico. Or there won’t be, because I will have sold my laptop. There is no cell phone service, because I will have chucked my phone into the sea. There is nothing to do but wander lonely as a cloud with my trousers rolled, trying to write my name on the water and happily failing.

It’s nothing in particular, and it’s something that strikes me, every once in awhile, the totally unoriginal observation that everything keeps on going, in endless circles. You pay a bill, and then it comes back to be paid again. You empty the cat box and then you are on your knees emptying it again a week later. Dishes get clean but only so they can get dirty again, clothes are washed over and over, the floor is swept but not for long. Hardly a hardship. Sometimes a hardship. Sometimes just plain irritating. Seriously? I want to shout sometimes. Seriously, we have to just keep doing this?

In Mexico I would probably get very tired of eating plantains and then having to eat another plantain an hour later, of applying suntan lotion and then having to apply it again, shooing away the little curious monkey from my van and then shooing away another and another and another. Wading through one wave, and then the next and the next and the next. It is The Nature of the World. Or it is The Nature of Me. Or it is the occasionally unhappy combination of the two. Or it is Wednesday, and by Thursday things ought to be just fine.

photo by diankarl