My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

“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 ...

It’s been over a year since I’ve written here, and a lot has happened.   I’ve moved to Oakland to live alone, spent the past nine months teaching middle school (which, in this internet age, has made me much more squirrelly about my online presence and what I say here), and continued to work on a book that feels ever more like chopped-up pieces of squirming earthworm in my hands – perhaps they can be fitted back together but every time I try to start I just want to throw up.    Perhaps most relevant is this: last time I wrote, I mentioned a new boyfriend.   Well, he’s still around, and not so new anymore.   We celebrated a year this January and we’re planning to move in together at the end of the summer, which is simultaneously surreal and wonderful and terrifying.   The last time I lived with someone I wound up staying with him for seven years, planning the next thirty, getting engaged, and then having my heart rot from the inside out over the cour...

“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...

--> A year ago today, I was supposed to get married to the man I’d loved for seven years.  I was never one of those little girls who dreamed of her wedding day – in fact, it wasn’t until we hit a visa dead end and realized marriage was the best way out that I even let myself believe in the idea of ‘I do’. I grew up with a solid feeling that I would probably wind up married with kids because most people do.  I never allowed myself to dream of a Prince Charming, a love of my life, because I was deeply afraid that if I could find someone to love that much, he would never love me back.  In fact, I wasn’t even sure someone I didn’t love that much would ever love me back.  The best I could allow myself to hope for was to meet someone I liked, who liked me as well, and who would overlook my physical appearance (which I considered to be my biggest flaw) and agree to spend his adult life with me.  We would be content, if not googly-eyed in love....

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...

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...

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...