My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

“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...

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...

--> 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...

Something weird has been happening… through the publicity process, through all the interview questions I’ve been answering and short-form pieces I’ve been writing and conversations I’ve been having with strangers who have read my book, I’ve come to understand myself a little better, and maybe cut myself some slack.   It’s been a long time since I’ve had a body meltdown – for the past six+ months my nerves have been too overloaded with book stuff and work to even consider making room for self-image – and I’ve even begun to realize that a lot of the things I talk about aiming for in the book are already beginning to happen, some in more pronounced ways than others.   Most notable: I think I’m starting to have a normal relationship with food. Now, of course, the first thing we have to do is define our terms, right?   By a ‘normal’ relationship with food, I mean that I’m not obsessed with it, and it doesn’t control me.   The GB has done its job ...

Writing all these chapters about my life and my body is kind of intense.  Last week, I wrote about a panic attack I had over my body three years ago, and I could feel my pulse racing as I wrote it; re-living the experience actually made me have another mini-attack.  It's amazing how much I seem to have blocked from memory.  The smell of surgery recovery, the pain, both emotional and physical, that I've continuously put myself through in the fruitless pursuit of bodily normalcy... but I've forgotten good things as well. Today I was writing about my recovery from plastic surgery, specifically abdominoplasty and brachioplasty (arms).  And I was remembering the horrible, excruciating pulling at my stomach, and the fear that if I made one wrong move my belly would split open and all my insides would tumble out.  But I was also surprised to remember how happy I was after those surgeries, and how confident. The accompanying lipo made me retain so much water, I wa...

The other night, the bf and I were watching this show called “Inside Nature’s Giants,” which we didn’t realize at first involves dissecting the big-ass animals of land and sea.  We chose to watch the episode about whales, because they’re frickin fascinating and also because I love tigers too much to watch one get cut up.  But I wish we had chosen the tigers, because the whole time they were slicing through the whale, and the fatty, slippery flesh was sliding all over the beach, and the scientists were covered in grease, I kept thinking about my body.  How that was probably what I looked like when the doctors were slicing me up and pulling off hunks of my blubber.  How that's still what my body feels like in places: loose, slippery, uncontained . My classmates are always saying I have a very ‘descriptive’ touch when it comes to talking about my body, and my friend N pointed out that I frequently use food metaphors/similes, which is kind of interesting.  But ...

For a couple of years now, I’ve been a big fan of the TV show What Not To Wear.  I find Clinton adorable and Stacy just mean enough, and I almost always agree with their style choices (I seriously spend half the show trying to figure out where Stacy gets her dresses and shoes!).  And I was hooked for life when I realized that they’re not at all sizeist; they don’t even take sizes into account, almost like they’re wearing blinders to the number on the tag (fabric and fit take precedence). I think the moment I realized that my affection for Stacy and Clinton wasn’t just about the dresses (but OH the dresses!) was during an old episode with a woman named Kandis, who was more than usually obsessed with her size.  Within the first few hours of their tutorial, Stacy lost her patience with Kandis’s self-deprecation, and she said something that I thought was so interesting, I actually wrote it down verbatim (really, thank god for Tivo): “You know what worries me? You are only...

I woke up this morning, nose running, lungs itchy and swollen, and generally just feeling like shit on a stick. I got out of bed, topless, and turned to put on my robe, and there was my boyfriend, staring at me appreciatively. I was not in the mood, but all he said was “you’ve lost a lot of weight.” Of course, being the bitchy, complicated female that I am, I replied: “I don’t know how to take that,” and walked off to the bathroom, covering up on my way. He meant it as a compliment to how I look now, rather than an insult to how I looked before, and in his defense he’s never once in 3 1/2 years said anything but kind words about my body. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hear the unkind ones he doesn’t say. Those are delightfully provided by my own fucked-up psyche. But the point here isn’t that I’m screwed up, because everybody already knows that. The point is, when he said that about my weight, I realized with a jolt that these past few days I’ve been so focused on hacking up my al...

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...