My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

Tonight my boyfriend said he loved my stomach, and I couldn’t help telling him I’d let my doctor know. Then, when he looked me in the eyes and told me that if we’d met before my surgeries he’d still have loved me, I couldn’t believe him. And I told him that. I couldn’t just say “aw thanks, honey,” I had to go on about how he would have liked me as a friend, thought I was funny, a funny fat girl, but he would never have been attracted to me. Which, in all fairness, is unfair to him. He probably is the kind of guy who would have loved me anyway, but I never wanted to be loved in spite of the way I looked. Being fat was a catch-22 for any guy who might have loved me (not that anyone did, to my knowledge): if you love me for my personality, you must think I’m disgusting and are just looking past my looks, which makes you shallow. On the other hand, if you love the way I look, you are obviously deranged because I’m disgusting, and therefore you’re completely un-datable as a result of...

I found this written in one of my many random notebooks when I was cleaning the apartment today. I wrote it back in September when I had just moved to London: I saw a beautiful thing the other night. I was kneeling on the bed, leaning down on my elbows in a pathetic attempt to ease my stomach ache, when I happened to glance down my body. There, where my upper thighs have always met, for as long as I can remember, was a beautiful, shining triangle of light, a beacon of the life I’d always wished for and had never had. I lay there like that, on my elbows and knees, stomach-ache completely forgotten, and stared at that triangle of light, willing it to stay. Eventually, when I felt more confident that it wouldn’t just vanish unexpectedly, I began to test my triangle. I made sure my knees were pressed tightly together and shifted my hips, putting my weight first on one knee and then the other. My triangle twinkled cheerfully back at me. of course it was around this time that my boyf...

Raggedy Anne: Secrets of a Parts-Jumble Princess (This is the original, from which "Ongoing Process" was created) My brother’s name is Andrew. We never really called him Andy, and the coincidence was unintentional, or so my parents claim, but I’m sure we must have cleaned out the KB Toys stock of Raggedy Sibling dolls by the time we reached puberty. Puberty, incidentally, is about the point at which my weight became a problem, “a concern” to me, my family, and random strangers on the street. Unlike most fat kids, I was pretty popular. I was even the object of a crush every now and again. Of course I had my moments of miserable reality-check, but generally I was pretty happy, shockingly carefree. Most of the time. I grew up in a small suburb of LA, where I lived a sheltered enough life that my only tormentor was my brother, and even he wasn’t half as bad as he could have been, in retrospect. When I was ten, and just getting past ‘chubby,’ my parents moved us to San Fran...

This is an experiment. For 2 years now I've been writing essays about body image, and more specifically about my own relationship with my body after 4 surgeries and multiple other changes. I'm posting those pieces of writing here and I'll be adding on whenever I have a somewhat original or new thought about things. There's no denying it's self-indulgent, but I figured since I'm mildly obsessed with reading about other people's body issues, maybe someone will be interested in reading about mine. Maybe I can even help someone feel like less of a freak. That is, unless no one else feels the same things I do, which would make me the freak, I guess... Oh well, here goes! Note: The first piece was written in late 2006, so things have changed a little. Bear with me as I try to put these in chronological order. And if there are repeated ideas or even phrases, I apologize; some of the pieces were born as revisions of others, so sometimes I get overlap.