We talk a lot about how much we hate our stove. “I hate this stove,” I say. “This stove is awful,” E says. This stove is a relic, this stove is a piece of crap, this stove is one thousand years old and why, god, why have you cursed us with a stove [...]]]>

We talk a lot about how much we hate our stove. “I hate this stove,” I say. “This stove is awful,” E says. This stove is a relic, this stove is a piece of crap, this stove is one thousand years old and why, god, why have you cursed us with a stove that makes us drop to our knees, every single day, and weep olive oil tears while we beat at our chicken breasts and wail at the uncaring heavens?

It came with the house, I feel like I should tell you. And the first time I saw it, I thought it was adorable, I should confess. It is so old timey! Look at the adorable uh, knobs! And things! Isn’t it cute the way it uses electricity? Maybe it made me feel like I was back in my childhood, where every single thing in the house was electric, including our baseboard heaters and our boogie woogie woogie.

It may be a beautiful old piece of history (ha ha ha ha ha!) but it is also the worst kitchen stove in the world. Ever. In the history of the stoves and kitchens. The burners are all crooked and heat unevenly, and the oven hasn’t decided yet what temperature 350 degrees is, and it’s small and stupid and we hates it, we do.

We have a home warranty, and we managed to successfully obtain a new dishwasher to replace our antique dishwasher inside of which was an actual, ineffective little dinosaur with a little scrub brush. We thought, let’s get a new stove! A man who was one thousand and four years old came out and looked at it while I hovered over him, desperately trying to convince him that it was broken forever and ever. “It doesn’t heat up! It heats up too much! Sometimes, um, it catches on fire! But sometimes it won’t even start! WE HEARD VOICES COME FROM DEEP WITHIN AND THEN IT FOUNTAINED BLOOD!”

He said, “mm hmm,” and charged us thirty dollars and went away, and we still have the same stove that we have always had, which we are pretty convinced is going to be buried with us and probably also get the best epitaph, too.

This is sad because we want to cook. We want to cook every! We want to cook all. Because—well, have you ever met someone who has eaten fast food for every single meal for weeks on end? Yes, that’s us. Yes, we’ve seen Super-Size Me. Yes, we’re ashamed and our hearts are as fatty and enlarged as our butts.

But the thing is that we cook for a week and then we can’t stand the crooked burners and the weird uneven heat and the teeny little stove and the dark little kitchen and suddenly we’re on the road again, arguing over whether it has been long enough since we’ve eaten Taco Bell that our intestinal microbes have forgiven and forgotten.

We need a stove. I used to think that if I got a windfall of money first I’d pay to have my name lasered into the moon, and then I’d pay off my credit card debt and student loan, and then I’d get a full-body tuck, where all the parts of me that stick out are tucked in. But now I’m thinking a windfall of money is first, going straight up my nose and secondly, going right into a fancy nuclear-powered stove and thirdly, I am getting my name laser-carved into the moon.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten weight loss surgery—five years, I want to say. Maybe six? Maybe less than that. Maybe somewhere in between that. I could get up and find the stack of paper I have, a whole folder’s worth,about as thick as ream of printer paper, of documentation and [...]]]>

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten weight loss surgery—five years, I want to say. Maybe six? Maybe less than that. Maybe somewhere in between that. I could get up and find the stack of paper I have, a whole folder’s worth,about as thick as ream of printer paper, of documentation and medical records and instructions and manuals and permission slips and checklists and diagrams and insurance bills and medical bills and leaflets and pamphlets. Weight loss surgery involves a lot of paperwork, and I’ve saved all of it like I’m afraid there’s going to be an open-book test and I’m going to really regret spending an hour shredding everything.

If there were any kind of test about weight loss surgery, though, I’d fail it. I could never really, and I still can’t, describe exactly what they were going to do up inside me, what with the intestines and the re-routing and the cutting out. I know you’re supposed to eat primarily protein, but I don’t remember amounts and grams, and the final word on fat, I don’t think I ever really waited around to hear it. I also still have no idea how to pronounce duodenal. Doo-odd-en-all? Duo-dennal? Something like that. I had it switched. Whatever the fuck that means.

What it boils down to: an uncertain number of years ago an unclear procedure was performed on unconfirmed areas of my digestive system, and subsequently, though I was unsure about and unprepared for what I was supposed to eat and when and where and how and to what extent, I lost a lot of weight. I lost all of the weight. I lost so much weight that people were starting to say Jen, where did your weight go? Do you need us to help you find it? Here is a sandwich. He is very helpful at looking.

Weight loss surgery was a fucking miracle. I lost a lot of weight, no matter what I did. I was free! I was clear! The world was a beautiful place because I was cured! I had no tits, but I was cured!

I wasn’t cured. That’s the secret surprise ending. I still have this candy issue. And I don’t like to exercise. And I’ve gained weight back. Not to the point where I’m fat-by-society’s-bullshit-standards, I think—but the bullshit part is that I feel fat. I am the size I dreamed about being my entire life—this is one hundred percent a true fact. I used to daydream about being a size 12. I thought 12 was such a good number. I have my boobs back; my butt’s always been there. I have curves, I can shop off the rack in most straight-size stores and can still go thrift store shopping and you can’t see my ribs and that’s a good thing.

And holy crap, I hate it. Holy crap, what is wrong with me? I have no idea! I still have no idea how this whole weight loss surgery thing works! I want to go back to the part where I was just happy to have lost all the weight and didn’t have to think about food or dieting or exercise ever again. I want to be peacefully stupid. I want to be happily ignorant. I want to be a size six again, and I want to punch myself in the face for saying that, and then keep punching myself in the face.

I did learn one thing, during this whole weight loss surgery-type journey I’ve been on: if you are not happy with your body and in your skin, it doesn’t matter what size you are and what other people think you look like. There is no objectivity when it comes to being comfortable with your body. There is only you and all your subjectivity and it doesn’t matter if someone tells you that you’re crazy and gorgeous—if you are unhappy with your weight or your size or your muscle tone, you need to do something about it. Diet, exercise, self-actualization and peaceful letting go—whatever works. It’s all good, if it’s healthy.

And yet I still want to punch myself in the face for being unhappy and ungrateful with the body I’ve got. I feel like I’ve been rescued from being 300 pounds—and I’m being churlish and ungracious about it.

I’ll do something about it. I’ll probably start walking the dogs, instead of just standing there and chucking the ball for them. I’ll probably try to eat just a little less of the candy that makes me sick (candy makes me sick? I say wonderingly, every single time I’m sick after eating candy). I’ll probably try to self-actualize. I’ll find a smarter way to spend the next five to six years. Maybe figure out how to pronounce duodenal.

The problem with happy endings, though, is figuring [...]]]> 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.

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

It happened with a quickness that is still a little puzzling to me, and makes me think that it was some extended practical joke that was broadcast live somewhere in a European country where smoking is still considered sexy. Things were rough, for a bit—a crazy man and threats of having my [...]]]>

It happened with a quickness that is still a little puzzling to me, and makes me think that it was some extended practical joke that was broadcast live somewhere in a European country where smoking is still considered sexy. Things were rough, for a bit—a crazy man and threats of having my dog put down, and money woes, always the money woes, and endless, neverending, eternal fucking winter—but there was Mexico! Sunshine! Sunshine in Mexico! I will be cured! And for a week I was the happiest thing in the land.

And then I came back to a happy cat and my clean apartment and was glad to be home, except that things started to feel inexplicably bad, and badder, and the worst, until a week or so later I was up out of my bed and googling “painless suicide” in my underwear.

Googling “painless suicide” will make you feel a little bit like a dipshit; it will also, probably usefully but not in the way that you hope at three in the morning in your underwear, not provide you with the answers you’re looking for. Which will also make you feel Even More Alone and really totally unclear about what to do next.

I’ve been depressed before, terribly so, can’t-get-out-of-bed depressed, wishing-it-would-all-go-away depressed, endless-fits-of-utterly-prone-and-snotty-weeping depressed, but I have never hit that sweet spot before, where you’re depressed to the very specific degree that you want to die, and can also still function adequately enough to make that magic happen.

Usually I am far too weighted down with woe to do anything about it. This active, go-getter kind of despair was a new one on me, and having the possibility, the option of a way out, was, luckily, flummoxing enough that I wasn’t entirely clear what to do with it. You mean I really could just, you know—stop? Quit? Flip over the board and storm off? Take my ball and go home?

(No one would miss me, and no one would care, and people would probably even be better off and why shouldn’t I? What’s stopping me? I was talking myself into it, even if it would hurt. It would hurt for just a second, right? Unless I fucked that up, too. Oh, look, a rabbit hole, back around the way we came, and two, and three, and four.)

The idea was appealing, and the appealingness of the idea was terrifying, and I spent a lot of time terrified of myself and what I could end up doing, if that makes any sense. I’ve done stupid shit before, in fits of impulsiveness. I could do the ultimate stupid thing from which there is no handy Ctrl-Z.

Luckily I am no good under pressure, froze up, and waited it out quietly. A flurry of wretchedness, of isolation, of something that felt like perfect clarity but was as muddled as simple arithmetic after a jug of vodka. Keeping a secret, keeping it all secret because I felt like a ridiculous teenager.

Eventually confessing to E. I am alone, and lonely, and isolated, and scared of what I could do. And the look on his face was like a punch in the gut. Sometimes you need the punch in the gut.

Clawing my way back, every step careful, conscious, calculated. Add in: vitamins. A walk. More water. A protein shake. Start answering the email that’s piled up. Send out a short story. Finish my book proposal, send it out; start writing again, even just the tiniest bit. And think oh, hey. That’s what hope feels like. Interesting.

Enough measured, deliberate mimicry of human behaviors, and eventually you become a human being again. Eventually you feel human enough to count, to take up space in the world and not feel like you’re wasting it. Eventually you’re the person you think of as you, again, and not the heaped-up pile of mistakes and errors and trash you started to feel like, instead. I can hang on for a little while longer. Especially if spring comes soon.

photo by Kruggg6.