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 ...

As Jennifer Lawrence cried perfect, beautiful tears of rage onscreen, her home in ash and rubble around her, my gaze settled lower down on something inside the theater: my legs.   Tessa and I were sitting in the prime seats in the front row of the back section at the AMC, our feet propped up on the bar in front of us, and for the first time I could remember I had a moment of positive revelation; my legs are normal-sized , I thought, with so much surprise that the moment was instantly notable. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt abnormally large.   For much of my life, reality was at least mostly in line with this self-assessment – I was larger than average, or at least larger than any person I knew.   Later, as I got smaller, I still felt massive.   It took me years to force myself to believe that my idea of my body was out of proportion to how ‘freakish’ I actually was.   And even then, reality was often on the side of my ne...

--> 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...

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...

It’s been a month.   A whole 31 days since I found out my fiancé had been having an affair and my world fell apart.   I really thought I’d feel better by this point, but I woke up yesterday with the same sharp pain in my chest that I had the night I found out – I spent the morning hours doubled over with the same kind of sobs I cried then, too. In some ways, things are getting easier: I’m no longer in London so I’m somewhat less reminded of our relationship every single second (it doesn’t help that we spent a lot of time in SF, where I’m currently living); I’ve finished all the packing and shipping and logistics of getting out of the flat where we lived together for four of our seven years; I’ve gotten rid of some of the wedding decorations that were haunting my closet.   In other ways, though, the pain is endless: I’ve hurriedly left behind the city and friends who made up the majority of my life for the past five years; my wedding dre...

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...

“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 ...