My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

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...

--> One of the most difficult things about dating in the aftermath of my last relationship is the question of when to oh-so-casually mention THE WORST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME and how to paint it in an authentic but not terrifying light.   It’s complicated stuff: bring it up too early on or emphasize the trauma too much and I give the misleading impression that the betrayal still rules my life, but mention it too offhandedly or gloss over the pain I’m still working through and I give the equally inaccurate impression that I’m completely over it – or worse, that I wasn’t completely devastated because I didn’t invest my entire self into the relationship. It also brings up the complex issue of my self-confidence.   Nearly everyone assumes that my self-worth must have been completely shattered by what my ex did to me, but it wasn’t.   Which is kind of odd, given how fragile (at times almost non-existent) it was before.   Yet somehow, although the b...

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...

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...

“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 ...

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. ...

Today is my 28th birthday.  That seems both really old and really familiar, due to my habit of saying I'm older than I am for a couple of months before my birthday makes it so.  Anyway, whether I'm old, young, or a 'spring chicken', as my BF calls me when I lament our age difference every year on his birthday (he just turned 25), I'm definitely exhausted.  The past couple of months have been manic: I started a new position at work, at essentially the exact same time that book publicity began in earnest, which meant interviews and photo shoots* and writing and tweeting and generally being much more involved in the world than usual, and on top of that came personal dramas and Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and the general year-end pressures we all face every year around this time.   Suffice it to say, my body and my heart and especially my brain are all knackered. So all I want for my birthday is a break, and for once in my life I'm doing my bes...

I just watched an hour and a half long TV show on BBC called ' I Want to Change My Body ', which follows 30 young people who have different things about their bodies that they want to change, from their weight (obviously, since that's usually the #1 complaint), to their boobs or noses or skin or receding hairlines.  It basically validated what I've become more and more sure of in the past ten years: that nearly everyone has issues about something to do with his/her appearance, and a lot of us are tormented enough to take extreme measures (define extreme any way you like: surgery, juice fasts, obsessive makeup use) to try to 'fix' ourselves. The show was fascinating, of course (I'm convinced that learning about people's deepest insecurities is far more voyeuristically stimulating than watching them have sex), but it was also really sad to watch.  I feel like our society is getting more image-obsessive and more neurotic by the year – I'm certainly n...

I just had a little breakdown over my body, the kind that's bad enough to make me cry, but not bad enough to completely incapacitate me.  And when I got up, wiped off my face, and set about bustling to take my mind off my thunder thighs, I realized it had been a pretty long time since I'd cried over my size. I don't mean that I've been particularly happy with my body lately – on the contrary, I've been far too inactive, physically, and far too lax about snacking and such, and as a result I've been feeling a bit like a blob.  But I've been too busy to dwell on it, really.  I'm working a lot , and thinking about the book process, and trying to be more social and spend more time with my boyfriend (we had a period of not seeing each other much and it was hard on our relationship), and I just haven't had time to indulge my negative thoughts much.  I mean, I've had them, a lot of them, but then something else has come up and I've had to re-focus....

Things have been crazy lately.   I’ve finished my MA, started looking for a full-time job, and gotten an agent and a book deal, all in quick succession.   It’s all happening really fast, and it’s almost all good news; as my friend pointed out on Facebook when I announced that I had a publisher, I’m finally profiting from my all-consuming neuroses.   They’ve always been the source of my self-deprecating humor, these nerves of mine, but they were never much good for anything else until now.   Suddenly, I have an audience for my particular brand of crazy, and everyone around me seems to be thrilled on my behalf.   I should be thrilled too, and I am , I keep insisting… well, my logical brain is thrilled. The thing is, in my heart I’m terrified.   Publishing a book about my body anxiety publicizes it, and while I’ve always been one for publicizing my issues on a conversational level, I’ve never really had to deal with a large audience before.   ...

I had a total meltdown last night.  Some of it was triggered by the usual stress (I just got back from a wonderful trip to SF, and I'm homesick and worried about catching up with work, and I had a massively important writing deadline yesterday), but mostly it was about the doctor's appointment I have tomorrow.  And the weigh-in that awaits me there. I know I've ranted about doctors before.  And I've told you about this one , specifically.  The short story is that if my BMI goes up one more point I'll be cut off from using Nuvaring, which is the only form of hormonal birth control I've ever tried that hasn't made me feel crazy and disinterested in sex.  So I booked this appointment last month, making sure to make it for a day when I was unlikely to be PMSing and likely to be writing at home instead of in the office.  But I didn't factor in the vacation beforehand; suffice it to say, my weight is not low enough that I feel totally confident strutting i...

Writing all these chapters about my life and my body is kind of intense.  Last week, I wrote about a panic attack I had over my body three years ago, and I could feel my pulse racing as I wrote it; re-living the experience actually made me have another mini-attack.  It's amazing how much I seem to have blocked from memory.  The smell of surgery recovery, the pain, both emotional and physical, that I've continuously put myself through in the fruitless pursuit of bodily normalcy... but I've forgotten good things as well. Today I was writing about my recovery from plastic surgery, specifically abdominoplasty and brachioplasty (arms).  And I was remembering the horrible, excruciating pulling at my stomach, and the fear that if I made one wrong move my belly would split open and all my insides would tumble out.  But I was also surprised to remember how happy I was after those surgeries, and how confident. The accompanying lipo made me retain so much water, I wa...