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...

“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, ...

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...

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...

It’s weird. My scars haven’t even faded yet, except in miraculously transparent patches, and I’m already forgetting they exist. Now, when I raise my arms to tie up my hair (something I would never have done in public just a year ago) and the man at the next table looks at me a little too long, I feel an urge to make sure I’ve shaved my armpits. It’s only when I not-so-slyly slide my fingers into my shirt that I feel the abnormally smooth stripe of skin and realize what the man was staring at. And I’m so much less strict about hiding them. Last week at work I wore a sleeveless dress and one of the nurses asked about my scars, and I realized I hadn’t told anyone there about my weight loss and all my surgeries. Even the other receptionist, to whom I feel fairly close. And so I told the nurse, because I’ve always maintained that if I hide my history with surgery then I don’t deserve the benefits of the procedures. I promised myself that I wouldn’t be ashamed of my plastic surgery, a...