Raggedy Anne

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 Francisco (just in time; if I’d stayed long enough to be aware of my cookie-cutter surroundings I would have drowned myself in the ocean before an audience of slackjawed bikinied blonde volleyballers), and I went headfirst into what should have been chubby pre-pubescent-girl hell: Katherine Delmar Burke School for Girls.
Once again, due to either my extremely strong powers of deflection via self-deprecation or my stubborn refusal to ever show weakness (of heart, chin, or especially muscle), I avoided torment. At least, I avoided drama directed at me, personally. There were certainly some comments made behind my back, and there were a couple of random occurrences of Danielle Steele’s lovely daughters asserting their dominance, but in general I was well-liked. Of course, with the mortifying exception of Midweeklies ballroom dancing class in seventh grade (that’s a whole different essay), my exposure to and interaction with boys was limited to my older brother’s friends, and I was definitely not willowy enough to compete with the girls at their school.
Somewhere between eighth grade and my first year of high school, I got fat. Like, really fat. Maybe it’s the uniform, which my mother altered so surprisingly lovingly, but when I look at photos from eighth grade I don’t think I look that fat. But pictures from freshman year of high school still shock me. Who is that heavyset girl? That…fat girl? Nonetheless, I was exceedingly popular for about five minutes, changing my hair color to a different shade of red every three weeks and scouring Lane Bryant for young-people clothes until I had a sufficiently cute style for a fat girl. I altered what I could, accessorized my fat with all things one-size-fits-all, and managed to hide behind jewelry and hair dye for a short while at least, until I decided I hated this new bubbly me and retreated far from that person, backing rapidly into the metaphoric caves of the high school Gollums. My nerd friends stuck by me, never once agreeing with my laments about my body, and I wish I could say I stuck by them, but when I bounced back onto middle ground I left all but one behind.
When I was sixteen, at the end of my sophomore year, I read an article in The New Yorker about Gastric Bypass surgery. I won’t gross you out with a description. If you really need details, or if you’re an aspiring Bariatric surgeon, look it up. Google it. All you need to know is that it makes people thin(ner) and it’s controversial. Oh, and Carnie Wilson. My dad, from whom I may or may not have inherited my heft, depending on which doctor or research scientist you consult (although I certainly got his mom’s hips and slanted femurs; thanks, Eenie!), but who was certainly heavy, had the exact (and classic for my dad) reaction I was looking for. He glanced at the title, skimmed the article, said “sign me up!” and proceeded to avoid mentioning it again until he’d already talked to my mom and had his secretary find an info session for us. He even spent the next few months gaining weight so he’d qualify for the surgery (I was already an ideal patient), a rare show of emotional support, albeit a fun and tasty one for him. Really, the whole thing was handled surprisingly well by my family (although my sister did cry at me for an hour the night before my surgery for not telling her earlier). No insurance worries, no pressure to keep trying (I’d tried, and my life had more recently been reduced to a string of fat camps and breakfast shakes, but a lot of people have tried a lot harder and succeeded. Or failed), they just forked over the cash and the following December my pops and I got into our open-backed dresses and counted backwards from ten.
Recovery sucked. A lot. Again, you don’t need to know the details. All you need to know is this: two weeks of chicken broth and Jell-O and then a month of hunched walking, regular puking, and lies to friends (with the exception of those closest to me, whom I’d already told, and one of whom, who’d attended Burke’s with me, apparently shouted the news to the world a few months later). But the results are the important part. Thirty pounds in two weeks. A hundred by the end of the summer. An Extreme-Makeover-esque ‘reveal’ in the fall. A slightly uncomfortably very social (although still completely asexual as far as anyone else knew) senior year. I got everything I wanted. I was happy. er.
You don’t lose a hundred pounds without some leftover grossness, even if you’re seventeen and have fantastic elasticity. Hey, you should see my fifty-something dad in a swimsuit. And again, parental support and funds to the rescue. Also to the rescue: Dr James Romano, one of the best surgeons in the US and sculptor of human flesh. Found by dumb luck online and within walking distance of my house in San Francisco. With the exception of the luck that started all this, I was basically a walking rabbit’s foot. The summer after my sophomore year in college (and after much personal growth of course, and even a first relationship, if you could call it that. Bastard.), I went under the knife again. This time the results increased my happiness exponentially. Whereas I’d never really accepted that I was fat before, and never really felt thin after the first surgery, now (once the swelling went down a little) I actually felt really good. About the two parts of my body I’d had cut and sewn. But I wasn’t done hating myself. I’m not done.
With three surgical procedures under my belt (literally, the scar that runs from one broad hip to the other) and one final operation scheduled for July, my body changes more frequently and more drastically than the average college-aged female. Even the really disciplined ones. Thus, along with procrastination and watching every episode of Sex and the City available on DVD over eight times, one of the habits college has cemented in me is staring at myself, critiquing my own work and my doctor’s. At first it was nothing all too different from the usual girlish insecurities about a not-so-girlish (but much too womanly) figure; I’d sit in lectures and look surreptitiously around at all the girls in my sight, evaluating their stomach rolls and the firmness of their upper arms and then comparing my own sucked-in abdomen and sleeve-draped limbs. However, as the months passed and my body shifted its shape via exercise, surgery-altered intake, and eventually cosmetic operations, my subtle observations and comparisons morphed too, into something shameful enough to be hidden from even my closest friends.
There’s an episode of Sex and the City that relates pretty directly to my life right now (not that they don’t all relate to my life, to every young female life, in some way or another). Carrie (boys, that’s the main character, she’s a little annoying) is about to move in with Aidan (hot wonderful boyfriend whom she destroys twice), and she’s freaking out to her girlfriends (they do this every episode) about having to give up her ‘Secret Single Behavior.’ For Carrie, this means stacking saltine crackers with grape jelly on them, and eating them standing up in the kitchen, reading fashion magazines. For Miranda (the smart, less attractive one), it means putting on conditioning gloves and watching infomercials.
For me, this Secret Single Behavior has come to mean taking my self-inspection to a whole new, drastically inappropriate level. I’ll thank you not to imagine this: I sit in my room, clothed or not, it doesn’t make a difference, and stare at myself in a mirror from all angles, in different everyday positions, practicing sitting and standing in the most slimming poses. From that beginning, the behavior has only narrowed; soon I was ignoring the mirror and looking directly at my flesh, poking and prodding, pinching and pulling, trying to see what I could change and what I could live with, what was too disgusting to be borne and what was an achievement of willpower and scalpels.
Since the cosmetic surgeries my attitude has gotten better; there are at least as many body parts that I love as hate. But I haven’t stopped poking and critiquing. I still touch my body more than is entirely appropriate, my fingers lingering longer over the few truly hard parts. I cherish the bones that appeared that summer when I was seventeen (it was a very good year): my collarbone, my wrist and ankle bones, my hipbones if I lie on my back just so and push down hard with an index finger. Today, my forehead itched, and I found myself rubbing it with a little too much zeal, relishing the way the skin moved over the bone, so little fat in between. I’m supposed to move in with my boyfriend in August, and even though I know I should be glad that the new living situation will either cut down drastically on this obsession or even end it all together, I’m terrified. There are a million things I know I’ll eventually be able to do in front of him, like pick at my face or pumice my feet or pluck my eyebrows, but I’ll never be allowed to poke. Of course, if he did allow me to do so, I’d have to dump him immediately. I at least have that much self-respect. I think.
And the secrets don’t stop there. Another secret behavior I have is perhaps more shameful, given my liberal peers: I pray. Yes, I know, there is no God and if there were He or She wouldn’t give two shits about my problems, but I do it anyway. I’ve described my relationship with God to friends as a ‘loose acquaintanceship.’ We don’t spend much time together, and we’re not all that close, but if there’s no one else to hang out with He’s always there, and if I ever want to talk about something but I don’t really feel like having a conversation, if I just want to hear myself speak and work something out for myself without the complication of outside advice, His enormous, omniscient ear is always tilted my way. Or so I like to pretend. I don’t tell many people that I pray; it’s more of a habit than a religious thing, and I don’t like the associations that I feel come with such a ritual.
But even this secret pastime has been infiltrated by past and present insecurities. For years I’ve used a sort of stencil for prayers. I start with the traditional: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray thee lord my soul to take.” After that important bit, my requests went in order of importance: first, protect me and everyone I love, next, help keep me safe and healthy. In third place, both before and after my surgery, was always my weight. I believe the request was for aid in losing ‘major weight.’ (Actually, I’m lying. I know that was the wording; I used it for years, always exactly the same.) Minor weight was useless at that point. Once I reached a point where minor was all I needed to shed, I figured I could do it on my own or suck it up and deal; God didn’t need to be involved. Divine intervention is too much to ask when it comes to your garden-variety muffin top. I switched to prayers for sanity and social adeptness and started going to the gym more regularly. I started dating someone worthwhile, and traveled by myself through Italy, and slowly began to understand that I’m not as revolting as I’d like myself to think. But last week I slipped. I was tired, I was just going through the motions, and there it was: “please help me lose major–” I started awake at the realization that even now, it’s a constant and conscious battle to like myself.
I refuse to blame society for my own body image issues. Well, maybe just a little. I mean, it can’t help that when I told my trainer at Bally’s that I didn’t want to lose weight he cocked his head like a parrot mimicking understanding, but furrowed his brow like my mother used to when I would eat chocolate in her presence. Really? No weight loss goal? You sure? I just want to get in shape, I tried to explain. Not a smaller or more angular shape. I wanted to walk up the huge flight of stairs to campus without panting. Outrun my brother up the hill at our house in Napa. Eat ice cream and swim laps in the summer. Well, he said, in order to tone up you’re going to have to lose some weight too. I’m always going to have to lose some weight, until I learn to stop caring what trainers and tiny Jappy girls and big frat boys and my family and strangers and Gisele Bundchen and Kirstie Alley and my ex-boyfriend and my ex-crush and my high-school friends and my brother and that guy on the corner and more importantly what I think. I gave in, nodded wearily.
It also doesn’t help that I’m not alone in my body woes. You’d think it would. Misery loves company, right? At least you have your friends, and all that. Crock of shit. Seeing other people hate their bodies (and noting that their hated hips and bellies are significantly smaller than mine) makes me feel less supported and understood than shamed for slacking in my own self-hatred. On vacation in Budapest with two friends named Rachel, one a small curvy former anorexic and one tall and slender with a ninety-pound Japanese mother and a weight complex, I discovered the shallow depths of my insecurities. Or at least of my willpower. I always skip breakfast, and around these friends I’d usually have a salad for lunch, but somehow it didn’t seem like I was doing enough to hate myself. Little Rachel’s exclamation of “Good job!” (completely genuine) whenever tall Rachel or I missed a meal made me shrivel inside at the mere thought of the calories in a Hungarian brew. I made it through that vacation, and it actually made me sadder for them than for me (although it also made me sad for me, of course), because at least I was right about myself. I was still too fat. Am. But they’re both way too thin to think like they do.
I try to like myself. My writing, my social abilities, my body. Too often I have setbacks, and sometimes I overcome them easily, although more frequently they affect me for days and rear their ugly heads again long after I think I’ve gotten past them. Last week at the gym a man called me ‘thick.’ He posed it as a question: you gettin’ thick, aintcha? I was shocked. To the point that all I could do was agree, then proceed to kick myself for it all night, as his words burrowed deeper under my skin. They fester still. The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure he meant it as a compliment. Bastard.
The bottom line is that it’s my job to fix this stuff. I’m lucky to have had the opportunities to employ others’ help in changing the way I look, but if I can’t actually see the difference and apply it to the way I see myself, then what’s it all for? Why waste my parents’ money? Why waste my own time? Why go through the pain of recovery if I’m just going to tell myself I’m fat when I’m healed? All important questions, which of course I expect you to answer for me. Hey, I’ve tried. This is the quiz at the end of the essay. It’s your turn. Come on, don’t you want to help me? Bastards.
I know I’m the only one that can do it. Other people loving me can only ease the effect of my self-hatred. It can’t change it or erase it, as much as they want it to. In fact, it seems the only thing that can affect my own criticism of myself is someone else’s criticism of me. You know how you can say your brother’s an asshole, because he is, but if a friend says it you get all defensive? It’s like that, I guess. I can think I’m fat, but if anyone else so much as suggests it, even presents a comment to act as a blank canvas for my self-loathing projections, I’ll defend my fat ass to the death (with the embarrassing exception of that guy at the gym). I may hate me, but I’m family.
When I decided to have the cosmetic surgeries, I didn’t really worry about the scars. I still don’t, really. But they are noticeable. I notice. Other people notice. Some even enquire. They usually don’t bother me; my surgeon did an amazing job sewing me up, attaching me to myself. But every now and again, when I try to piece myself together in some kind of sensible way, combining my insecurities and my small confidences, my understandings and curiosities, my shyness and my gregariousness, I feel uneven. Sometimes I picture myself as the doll from The Nightmare Before Christmas, sort of a creepily attractive amalgamation of limbs and stitches. Sometimes the seams feel all but undetectable. But usually I fall back on my could-be namesake. Until I grow up enough to stop thinking of myself as a collection of parts and begin to understand that I can be whole if I just believe it, I’ll always be that weird, slightly scary but soft and comfy rag doll. Complete with fake red hair.