I always liked myself better for what I could be than for what I was — especially when it came to my body.
This started at age 3 in dance class, where the other girls, unlike me, had thin arms and legs. The other girls’ tights, unlike mine, didn’t dig into their waists like a pink belt around teddy bear fluff. Their cheeks didn’t glow red after class. They could do splits.
By the time I was 13, my body had stretched and thinned, leading my teacher to say, “You finally look like a dancer.” Ten years of childhood passion couldn’t get me there, but puberty did.
Nine years later, once puberty had run its course, I learned that I could accomplish a similarly magical transformation by simply not eating.
Thinking back on that time now feels like waking from a nightmare: bolting upright at 4 a.m., blinking and breathing as you try to reorient yourself to reality and reconcile the things you did in dreams with the person you are awake. This is how I give context to memories like the time, nearly five years ago, when I started a loud public fight with my college boyfriend because he had bought me a slice of pizza on a Saturday night.
My argument went like this: “I said I didn’t want a slice of pizza. I can’t just not eat pizza if I don’t want it. It’s not that easy. You never listen to me. You don’t even respect me enough not to buy me a slice of pizza. When I say no, I mean no.”
Yes, that’s really what I said.
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I can’t explain to him what happened because we don’t speak anymore. The breakup was unsurprisingly messy, borne of our emotional mismatch — his optimism (“Can’t you just be happy?”) versus my depression (“That’s not how it works.”). One night, as our hurtful exchanges snowballed, he went for the jugular: “You’ve gained weight.”
Love may feel intolerably complex at 22, but one emotional equation, for me, was starkly simple: skinny + pretty = good.
After he and I broke up, I went on a diet and tried to feel as little as possible. Dinner was often alcohol (cooking vermouth straight from the bottle, sometimes with vodka) and ineffective antidepressants. Breakfast was two scrambled egg whites with tomatoes and 50 calories of mozzarella. Lunch was a microwaved potato with ketchup and fat-free sour cream.
Sometimes I had an apple for dessert. If I had chicken breast and broccoli, I felt as if I had done something wrong. I dated too much, flirting and living for the up-and-down stares that did more to keep me on my feet than all the carbs I wasn’t eating.
During that Saturday night meltdown over the unwanted pizza slice, I didn’t realize I was really yelling at myself, not him. Yelling at my body for not looking the way I thought it should. Angry that it was so hard for me to be small. If I were smaller, I would be better — though I would settle for numb — and I would love myself more.
Young women are gifted in self-loathing, but we chubby ones can be self-loathing savants. I didn’t have the words for it as a child, but something in me was sad and sharp enough to hoard all the moments that told me I wasn’t good enough.
Ballet resonated with that ruthless, self-critical part of me. In ballet, you don’t stop until you get it right. When you’re dizzy and your lungs are drained and your muscles are screaming like a teakettle left on too long — that’s when you look in the mirror to see if you’ve mastered it. If you haven’t, you find the part of your brain that’s telling you to rest and hold it underwater until the thrashing stops. Keep going. Point your toes.
Starving yourself is a lot easier when you have 15 years of training in overriding your survival instincts.
By the time Ian and I met, I was finally so thin. Sometimes I wondered if being that thin was wrong (a thought I doused in alcohol). Ian was fun and grabbed my behind in bars and wanted to sleep with me. We were dating exclusively before I even noticed, and I was in love with him before I had realized how well we fit together.
Another person’s comfort with you can make you forget your discomfort with yourself. We went to bars and got only pleasantly drunk, ate butter popcorn at the movies because it was fun. We started making small accommodations for each other: Moving my gym routines for more time to be together. Eating a second dinner because he texted unexpectedly and wanted to see me that night.
Those butterflies were a pretty distraction — until I gained a little weight. Then the creeping insecurity and self-loathing came rushing back, threatening to overwhelm the comfort of this new relationship.
I told the therapist who had seen me through all of this — who had listened to me skim over the bad breakup and make jokes about my body and who wasn’t at all surprised to learn about my vermouth dinners and drunken purges — and she gave it a name: “This is an eating disorder. You have an eating disorder.”
That’s when I really plummeted. One night, when I was so depressed I couldn’t get off the floor, Ian came over to pick me up. My therapist told me to stay at Ian’s apartment for the week as an alternative to inpatient. I spent mornings on the floor in a corner of Ian’s bedroom, swaddled in a comforter, wailing because I couldn’t speak in complete sentences anymore and my brain — my beautiful, Harvard-trained brain — wouldn’t work right. One day Ian’s roommate heard me crying and was never comfortable around me after that. I don’t know if I blame him.
Eventually I got better. I had to. I would have been useless otherwise. I found drugs that helped. I ate more and kept it down. Ian didn’t leave me, because he thinks I’m the most sensible person he knows. That’s one of the nicest things I’ve ever heard.
Sometimes — less and less often — I still curl up under the covers and can’t leave the room, and he’ll hold me while I cry and say, “You’re my favorite person.” His favorite person had gained 60 pounds since meeting him, but he has said those words — those words, the poison ones — only once: “Well, you’ve gained weight.”
I don’t blame him. I had pushed him to say it, wanting to validate my self-hatred, but that’s just not how he looks at me. The words lost their venom coming from him.
I don’t have an ending. I have gained more weight since. As Roxane Gay puts it, I’m “Lane Bryant Fat.” There are stores that sell clothes for me, but most don’t. I am coming to terms with the fact that this is the body I am genetically meant to have, that I’m not Courteney Cox playing young Monica in a fat suit.
I am coming to terms with how the world sees me now: like a problem. Sometimes I embrace that difference, but it’s hard. It takes work to feel like your body isn’t a trap you’re caught in. It takes work to accept what you are rather than fight it at every turn. But this is the work you must do.
I eat balanced meals. I call myself fat and feel O.K. about it. I get tattoos. I drink too much but take Prozac like it can save me, which it has. I have spent thousands of dollars finding clothes that look nice on fat women. The leather jacket I bought myself for my 19th birthday will never fit me again. When I’m in a restaurant, it’s hard to tell how much space I need to slide between tables. Sometimes I underestimate and get stuck.
Last summer was the first time a stranger called me fat. I was on a narrow sidewalk that accommodated only one. He was riding his bicycle behind me and wanted me to move so he could pass, and I wouldn’t. So he said, “I’ll run your fat ass over.”
I wanted to go for his throat, but instead I stepped aside with spread arms and said, “Go for it.” He stared, and I beckoned him past like a doorman at the Ritz.
I walked the two miles home crying, then sniffling, then messaging my online support group asking for love. Fat isn’t bad, they said. And they’re right. But I didn’t text Ian. He knows me as a person, not a body, making him both a perfect refuge and the worst resource for understanding.
One day I will be more healed and more like Ian in loving myself unconditionally. And if someone makes a rude remark about my size, I will say, “Thank you. You can’t imagine how hard I worked for this.”
