My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

“Tell me what that’s like,” my therapist says when I tell her I’ve been experiencing a lot of body image ‘stuff’ lately. “Well, I’ve just – you know, not only did I not lose the weight I put on while teaching last year, but I seem to have actually gained weight?   Even though I’m not doing anything differently, except actually exercising more – it’s infuriating how little control I have, and I just…” and here tears spring unexpectedly to my eyes.   I swallow them back and continue, “Mostly I can’t believe I’m still susceptible to this shit!” She nods, then asks me again to explain what I mean by ‘this shit.’ “Okay, here’s a great example: I was sitting in your waiting room just now and I started a new book, and the opening scene is this woman in a hospital – she’s got some kind of undiagnosable bacterial infection or something, and she’s been on IV fluids for weeks – she can’t keep anything down.   And I thought, there needs to be a place where you can go a...

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...

--> 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...

I just had a little breakdown over my body, the kind that's bad enough to make me cry, but not bad enough to completely incapacitate me.  And when I got up, wiped off my face, and set about bustling to take my mind off my thunder thighs, I realized it had been a pretty long time since I'd cried over my size. I don't mean that I've been particularly happy with my body lately – on the contrary, I've been far too inactive, physically, and far too lax about snacking and such, and as a result I've been feeling a bit like a blob.  But I've been too busy to dwell on it, really.  I'm working a lot , and thinking about the book process, and trying to be more social and spend more time with my boyfriend (we had a period of not seeing each other much and it was hard on our relationship), and I just haven't had time to indulge my negative thoughts much.  I mean, I've had them, a lot of them, but then something else has come up and I've had to re-focus....

I had a total meltdown last night.  Some of it was triggered by the usual stress (I just got back from a wonderful trip to SF, and I'm homesick and worried about catching up with work, and I had a massively important writing deadline yesterday), but mostly it was about the doctor's appointment I have tomorrow.  And the weigh-in that awaits me there. I know I've ranted about doctors before.  And I've told you about this one , specifically.  The short story is that if my BMI goes up one more point I'll be cut off from using Nuvaring, which is the only form of hormonal birth control I've ever tried that hasn't made me feel crazy and disinterested in sex.  So I booked this appointment last month, making sure to make it for a day when I was unlikely to be PMSing and likely to be writing at home instead of in the office.  But I didn't factor in the vacation beforehand; suffice it to say, my weight is not low enough that I feel totally confident strutting i...

Tonight, I lost it. I was supposed to go to a friend's house for dinner (and eat some very comforting Jewish food), and half an hour before I was due at the Caltrain station I made the mistake of getting dressed. Now, it's really cold right now in SF, so I had to put on tights. This doesn't usually concern me too much, but when I put on my go-to pink dress (the one I'm wearing in that photo in the earlier post, about how confident I was), it was tight. And not good tight. I looked disgusting. All of a sudden, when I looked in the mirror, all I could see was fat, rolling and spilling like a lidless latte in an SUV. And so I lost it. I went back to a mentality I do my best to avoid; I was furious, disgusted, and, worse, hopeless. I wanted to break the mirror. I actually wanted to scream, or throw things, or punch a wall. Another part of me just wanted to crawl into bed and give up. Mostly I just cried. The worst part was that I had to cancel on my friends. This...