My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

My head fills with blood, pumping in a rapid thud, thud in my ears.  My shoulders and wrists ache, my hands are slipping toward the front of my mat, and my hamstrings refuse to budge further as I attempt to 'ground my heels'.  The bead of sweat that slipped down between my breasts during an earlier pose is now creeping back up my sternum, sliding past my throat and up behind my ear into my hair.  All I can think is how much longer, how many more breaths, oh right, breathe, in through the nose, out through the mouth, breathe into the pose and try to relax because the next one will probably kill us. "Don't forget to relax your jaw."  The tall, handsome yoga teacher's big paddle feet go past the edge of my visual field.  I try to remain in the moment but I can't help cracking a grin.  He's been telling us to relax our jaws periodically throughout this class and every time I react internally like a 13 year old boy.  Same deal when he has us open our hips...

--> 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...

“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 ...

--> 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...

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...

... but the dude over at Egotastic has finally posted photos of someone above a size 2.*  Not only that, he defends her hotness against those people who would say she's too fat to be attractive in a bikini!  AND since the blog doesn't have a comments section, I can just pretend that's the end of it.  No trolls!  Hooray huzzah and yippeeee! That is all.** * Yes, I'm aware she's probably still only a size 6 or something, but just let me have my moment anyway. **Okay, yes, I am aware that I haven't posted in forever .  There's a post-in-waiting about my recent trip to Mexico (and bikinis), but this was more pressing, and less work, so you'll just have to wait for the mexico post.

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...