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 ...

The minute I clicked ‘Enter’ I knew I’d done something incredibly stupid.   How could I have been taken in by an Instagram ad, for anything , let alone diet pills ?   I felt disgusted with myself, even as the disgust mingled with an unmistakable tinge of excitement and curiosity – surely after more than twenty-five years of experience with diet culture bullshit, and at least a decade of continuous counter-culture reprogramming, I must know better?   But, well...knowing better didn’t stop me.   I figured five bucks was a cheap price for a very unlikely potential payoff. I went to lie down on our hotel bed with my boyfriend, who was zoned out in front of his own phone, half-listening to an episode of The Simpsons and trying to digest all the rich food we’d been eating on our trip to New Orleans.   I didn’t want to admit what I’d done; I knew he would be disappointed in me, and frustrated with my continued negative body image.   We’ve discussed it a hundr...

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...

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....

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...

--> 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...

--> “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...