My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

A lot has happened since my last post, and yet little has changed. My body still feels… alien to me in a way it hasn’t since my mid-twenties; I still haven’t seen a doctor (I actually did try, a lot, but it seems that post-GB follow-up is not something bariatric doctors are willing to do with people they haven’t sliced open personally); and I’m still struggling to find the balance between making healthy choices, like getting more cardio in, and making my peace with the changes in my body. One thing that has changed is my state of unemployment. Since we moved to Washington I’ve been in a kind of limbo where my career is concerned – you can read more about the writing side of that over on the author blog , but besides that I’ve been unsure what to do about a day job. The ultimate goal is teaching at the college level, but while I work on that I’ve been living off savings, and as I’m sure you can imagine that is unsustainable. So I picked up part-time w...

“It was weird, though,” I say, turning to look briefly at my boyfriend’s face and check my blind spot before turning off the main road into our little potholed neighborhood. “I’m standing there, surrounded by all these beautiful dresses, and half of me is like ‘ooh, yeah, I am so coming here when we get engaged,’ and super excited about the selection, and the other half…the other half is basically like ‘are you really going to do this again? Are you really going to try on dresses and put down deposits and announce to the world that you're happy and in love – and trust that the world isn't going to laugh in your face and bitch-slap you in return?’” I pause for a breath as I turn onto our block, dodging the ancient, rickety trailer that haunts the curb at the corner. He’s quiet, so I try to smooth over the rough stuff I’ve just let fly: “Don’t worry; I’m working on all this. I’ll figure it out.” I’m not at all sure I’ll figure it out, but I’m desperate ...

When I told my brother I was counting calories, a vulnerable admission of defeat, he reacted just as I should have expected: he rolled his eyes, sighed as if he was exhausted by my weight struggles, and told me “don’t be mom!   Just be balanced.”   As if it were that easy.   I made the mistake, at first, of trying to explain that after years of balance and reasonably steady weight, I was no longer stable and I felt the need to do something drastic to try to reign in my body; I gave up pretty quickly, after multiple interruptions and dismissals. It’s not that my brother is insensitive – he’s actually more sensitive than most dudes and most of my family, not that that’s saying much – but he doesn’t have a lot of patience for any kind of struggle to which he doesn’t relate.   Worse are the struggles he thinks he relates to, like weight.   A few years ago he felt he was getting ‘tubby’ and so he cut out junk food and cut back on carbs and started doi...

Between cheap dinners out with the new boo , a very stressful and time-consuming new job (and the thousands of Goldfish consumed weekly to keep me on my feet), and all the yoga-defying illnesses my little petri dishes have passed me on their homework assignments in the past nine months, I’ve noticed that my clothes have been getting tighter.   Like, a lot tighter.   As in, I find myself wincing as I take off particularly unforgiving dresses at the end of the day – dresses which, nine months ago, fit just fine, or were even a bit baggy at the waist.   And now I’m faced with a dilemma I haven’t faced in years: how to lose bulk, if not necessarily weight.   If you’ve been reading this blog (or known me personally) for the few years, you know that I am majorly anti-dieting.   And if you’ve known me for the past decade, you might recall that the last time I succumbed to societal pressure and tried to lose weight, through a strict-but-real...

“If you think I’m hard on my body now, you should have seen me ten years ago.” My new boyfriend looks at me with his eyebrows raised, uncharacteristically disbelieving. Then he says, with a slight edge to his tone, “but I didn’t know you then. I only know you now.” I pause for a second to try to figure out why this irritates me so much, when he brushes off my explanations of my past as if it has no bearing on the person I am now. It’s always surprising to me when he does this, partly because to me it seems obvious that my past is a huge part of my current self, and partly because he’s usually so thoughtful and understanding, and this kind of invalidating reaction is unusual for him. I take a deep breath and try to articulate my frustration. “You have to understand that where I was then is important…it informs where I am now. And for you to say that the person you know, the particular body image issues of the woman you’re dating here and now, are all that matter…for you to say that...

“If you throw that in a hot wash and then tumble dry it, I bet it’ll tighten up a bit and fit you better.”   I try to contain my glee at the sight of one of my favorite skirts from college, a blue cotton floral number with a wide band that used to be snug on my hips, not-quite-falling-off T’s narrower frame.   Not only is it a pleasure to think that my friends might get some use out of some of the fifty or so items of clothing I’ve brought to the swap – most of them much-loved pieces that I wore over and over again until they were put away in storage by my mother and my style slowly outgrew them – but it is a surprise and an untold joy to see how many of my old clothes actually fit these girls. My whole life, I’ve been significantly larger than all of my friends.   Even when I lost the weight, I remained a good two to four sizes above my largest girlfriend.   The first time I went to a clothing swap, years ago with my friend Courtney, ...

As Jennifer Lawrence cried perfect, beautiful tears of rage onscreen, her home in ash and rubble around her, my gaze settled lower down on something inside the theater: my legs.   Tessa and I were sitting in the prime seats in the front row of the back section at the AMC, our feet propped up on the bar in front of us, and for the first time I could remember I had a moment of positive revelation; my legs are normal-sized , I thought, with so much surprise that the moment was instantly notable. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt abnormally large.   For much of my life, reality was at least mostly in line with this self-assessment – I was larger than average, or at least larger than any person I knew.   Later, as I got smaller, I still felt massive.   It took me years to force myself to believe that my idea of my body was out of proportion to how ‘freakish’ I actually was.   And even then, reality was often on the side of my ne...

I never thought I would miss having more body at my disposal, but I hate how this new(ish) single life I'm living feels like a loss of mass, like I'm missing part of me all day, every day. I don't mean just metaphorically, either. I remember, early on in my relationship being solidly long-term, marveling at the feeling of knowing another body so intimately that it was almost an extension of my own – I could touch it and interact with it almost as freely as I could my own, and that freedom came without the chains of disgust in which my own body was wrapped. Similarly, I found I loved 'belonging' bodily to someone else. Once I became less twitchy about him randomly touching parts of my body I usually preferred to 'pose' in preparation, like my stomach, I was filled with happiness at the thought that he might just reach under the dinner table and lay a hand on my leg, or slide a hand across my lower back while we moved through a crowd. The idea of ...

Have you ever been through something so traumatic that when you look back on it from a healthier space you almost can’t believe you survived it?   That’s how I feel when I re-read the blog posts I wrote during the end of my engagement; I can see how fine that last thread I was hanging from was, and how close I came to it snapping every single day.   I can still remember, on a visceral level, just how painful simply existing was, and I’m genuinely shocked I didn’t self-harm or try to end myself. These days, as I creep up on a date which, in a parallel universe, is my eighth anniversary with the best man I’ve ever known, and which is now just another April day on which I don’t even know who I agreed to marry a year ago – these days I’m mostly better.   I’m currently experiencing a pretty tough downswing in mood, brought on by an ill-advised trip to Mexico with one of the more intimately loved-up couples I know, so it’s not all rainbows and moonb...

--> “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 mi...

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 w...

--> 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 st...