My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

--> “The holidays are a difficult time for almost everybody,” my therapist tells me, “let alone someone who’s been through the trauma you’ve experienced.”   I know her job is, in part, to validate my feelings, and she does, but I also seethe at the thought that I’ve become a cliché, moping through the sparkle and cheer of Christmas and New Years, alone and miserable about it. When I was single, in my life before him, I didn’t feel crappy about the holidays.   In fact, I really liked them.   I was still young enough to consider my parents and siblings as my ‘main’ family, and to me Christmas was about spending time with them, getting and giving gifts and eating plenty of deliciously unhealthy food while the colored tree lights bathed the house in a particularly Christmassy glow and Sinatra sang old holiday classics in the background.   Being with or without a boyfriend seemed like a tangential thing: it was a bonus if I had someone to kiss under the mistletoe, but it was

I was supposed to get married yesterday.   I had the dress, the caterers, the guest list – most importantly I had the man, whom I loved with a certainty I’d long thought impossible. But I didn’t.   Get married, or have the man, as it turned out.   I was cut brutally loose, with little warning, and spent the summer floundering and desperately trying to weave together some semblance of a life for myself from the shreds of who I was before things imploded. The good news: I’m getting there.   I’m in therapy, which is helping me strengthen my emotional core; I’m dating new people, which is a constant reminder that I’m not totally worthless to every male member of the human race; I’m actively looking for a full-time job (and the health insurance that comes along with it); and I’m reconnecting with my amazing, wonderful girlfriends, a gang of whom spent the weekend with me at a vacation cabin in Healdsburg, distracting me from my sorrows with booze and laughter a

--> Of all the terrible things I saw as possibilities in my future, being cheated on was never one of them. I always figured I wasn't attractive enough to have to worry about cads who couldn't keep it in their pants – anyone who wanted to be with me would, by necessity, be too good a person to cheat.   He would be with me because he truly loved who I was, and he would never want to (or be able to) do anything to hurt me that badly. Obviously, I was wrong.   Either about the caliber of man who would seriously date me or about how people’s intentions control their actions, or both.   Whichever I was so incorrect about, the facts are now clear: I’m not immune.   And it’s partly the shock of learning this that has made it so hard for me to face what’s happened and move on. I have whole weeks (like last week) where I’m mostly okay.   I go on dates, act whole and human, then come home and text with my ex and get sad, but then I go to bed and I’m still mostly okay.

It’s been a month.   A whole 31 days since I found out my fiancé had been having an affair and my world fell apart.   I really thought I’d feel better by this point, but I woke up yesterday with the same sharp pain in my chest that I had the night I found out – I spent the morning hours doubled over with the same kind of sobs I cried then, too. In some ways, things are getting easier: I’m no longer in London so I’m somewhat less reminded of our relationship every single second (it doesn’t help that we spent a lot of time in SF, where I’m currently living); I’ve finished all the packing and shipping and logistics of getting out of the flat where we lived together for four of our seven years; I’ve gotten rid of some of the wedding decorations that were haunting my closet.   In other ways, though, the pain is endless: I’ve hurriedly left behind the city and friends who made up the majority of my life for the past five years; my wedding dress still hangs in my bro

For seven years, I’ve been in love with the same man.   It started as an insecure, whirlwind infatuation, then grew into serious affection and concern for his future happiness and well-being, and by this time five years ago I had stopped using every bad argument as an excuse to look up flights from London to San Francisco – convinced by his conviction over so many months, I was finally operating under the assumption that we would share our lives, or at least as much of them as we could bear to share before things got too hard.   A couple of years later I dropped the caveat.   I was all in: my future family became our future family, my dream home our dream home, my career plans inextricably linked with his, less flexible career plans. I did the one thing I’d always said I could never see myself doing: I gave myself over completely to another person.   I was proud of how little my pride had come to matter, after years of extending arguments in its favor; I was only slightly asha

“Well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” my mother says when I tell her I can’t eat and I’m losing weight as a result of my most recent heartbreak, “maybe when all this is over you’ll look in the mirror and –” I have just enough strength left in me to stop her before she completely echoes the voice in the back of my head, the one that’s been telling me that not eating for days, while it might fuck up my metabolism in the long run, might also make me more attractive to potential new men in the short term. But I don’t want to be attractive to new men – never mind the nagging fear that it's impossible.   I just want my man to come back and erase everything he’s done to me in the past nine months.   I want to wake up tomorrow and have this all be a bad dream – the cheating, the lies, the images in my mind of him holding that conniving, revolting, vile girl in our bed, the searing pain in my heart that keeps me awake nights – and I want to roll over and playf

--> Life has been full of lows lately – tears in public, anxiety about moving abroad, work dissatisfaction – but the worst of them have been in my relationship.   I was finally getting used to using the word ‘fiancé’, to talking about wedding plans and thinking about vows, when cracks began to appear.  Big, jagged, terrifying cracks like the ones that earthquakes make in asphalt.   The kinds of cracks that seem bottomless, that you hope won’t stretch or widen, that you hope you won’t fall into – but then you do. The cracks started in April, with a trip home to visit parents whose unbelievably hideous behavior sent the first obvious tremors through our relationship’s crust, but the fissures had been there in the core for months.   Something had been happening to him, and those fractures in his mind spread fast and deep into the bond between us.   April and May were rife with cruelty and tears and torturous indecision, until I felt split apart in so many ways I couldn’t e

This afternoon, while coming home from coffee with a friend, I decided to stop for an ice cream bar.  Now, I rarely eat ice cream unless it's something special, like handmade gelato, because it makes me sick very fast (meaning I get little mileage out of it) and I don't actually like it enough to suffer for it most days, so I haven't had a mass-produced ice cream in probably ten months, maybe a year.  But today was the first really warm sunny day since I've been back in the UK, and I've had an inordinately stressful couple of months (for reasons that, if you can believe it of me, are too personal to explain), and I was wearing a cute sundress and felt like having an ice cream bar.  So I bought a Magnum in the little shop at the end of my road and proceeded to eat it on my way home. Not two bites in, I passed a middle-aged man, fiddling with something homewares-related on his front stoop, his pit bull watching nearby.  He looked up and caught my eye as I went past,

So I've been engaged for what feels like five minutes (I know, it's actually been a month, but I still refuse to believe I need to finish planning this budget-friendly wedding in the extremely budget-unfriendly Napa Valley in the next couple of months), and it will come as no surprise at all to most of you that my anxiety levels are riding high.  Not only am I in full-on panic mode about my guy's visa, and trying to keep a level head about planning this wedding spectacle from 5000 miles away, but tomorrow is my first dress trying-on day and I'm kind of freaking out. From what I understand ( from too many Say Yes to the Dress marathons ), wedding sizing is different from 'normal' clothing sizing – specifically, in a move that can only be motivated to make already-stressed brides-to-be feel even more anxious, wedding gowns are apparently made two sizes smaller than normal dresses.  So if you're a size 12 at Nordstrom, you'd be a 16 at Kleinfeld.  What.

This past year, and especially the past two months, has/have been crazy for me: exciting, surreal, stressful, surreal, and extremely busy.  I mentioned surreal twice because that's the feeling that comes through the strongest whenever amazing things happen to me – this is probably because I spent so much of my life thinking I'd be content just to hit 'average' on the excitement/pleasure scale of life (no pun intended).  Whatever the reason, it's a serious issue of mine; when something wonderful happens to me, I'm so blindsided and disbelieving that it's actually hard for me to enjoy it.  It took me a year and a half to relax into my relationship with my boyfriend; I went through the entire book publishing process in a fog of disbelief, and I'm still not sure I believe it; and now I have something else to convince myself is true: I'm engaged . Yes, my boyfriend is now my fiancé.  I won't give you any proposal or ring details, because I'd

Something weird has been happening… through the publicity process, through all the interview questions I’ve been answering and short-form pieces I’ve been writing and conversations I’ve been having with strangers who have read my book, I’ve come to understand myself a little better, and maybe cut myself some slack.   It’s been a long time since I’ve had a body meltdown – for the past six+ months my nerves have been too overloaded with book stuff and work to even consider making room for self-image – and I’ve even begun to realize that a lot of the things I talk about aiming for in the book are already beginning to happen, some in more pronounced ways than others.   Most notable: I think I’m starting to have a normal relationship with food. Now, of course, the first thing we have to do is define our terms, right?   By a ‘normal’ relationship with food, I mean that I’m not obsessed with it, and it doesn’t control me.   The GB has done its job in a lot of ways, m

This post is just a quickie as I'm dying from a chest cold and swamped with admin stuff, but I had to share this super weird tidbit with you guys: according to The Independent , the inventor of the Segway has applied for a patent for a new invention that essentially sucks food out of your stomach after you've eaten it, before you can digest it.  The article claims this is an alternative to gastric bypass, to which I say: not only is it GROSS but it's totally opposite the point of weight loss surgery!  It basically encourages people to stuff their faces without consequence, while the point of GB and its ilk is to impose harsh consequences on the patient, thereby (at least theoretically) changing his/her behavior through conditioning.  Ugh.  Gross.  And how very dehumanizing of fat people to think this is what we need.

The news has been so full of body-image- and obesity- and weight-related articles lately, to the point that I just haven't been able to keep up!  So in the spirit of the new year, and because the media interest in bodies/weight/health doesn't seem to be waning (so I'm sure I'll have plenty more material in the future), I'm cleaning house: here are all the articles I saved up in my email account in 2012 to write individual posts on, which I'm going to share instead through one big link-filled post.  I hope you find these links as interesting as I did (and still do)! This astoundingly brave young woman is doing a similar thing with a photo series to what I'm trying to achieve with the book – I can only hope I've produced something half as affecting and powerful as what she has created. Months ago I stumbled across this website with images of real women's bodies, sometimes accompanied by a paragraph or two about how these women feel about their