Gain & Loss: From “going out” to assembly line
Published first on my Medium blog, which I've decided to kill
A pair of dark blue skinnies with black leopard overlay and an elasticized waist band. I shimmy them up past my knees to my bellybutton, where they hug without spilling me over. They hold my bum and hips easily, and my rearview appears reduced, even heart-shaped (omg).
These are magic pants. They turn a big t-shirt into a night look — with enough elasticity for fence jumping or pole vaulting (I swear).
These are night moves. Less inseam, more ankle, and a pair of chunky pumps. I am twenty-something, and these bruised leopard skinnies are the pants I go out in.
But in summer 2019, I am 34 and sober for the first time ever. I step into my magic pants —
and it’s an ugly reunion.
I remember: University pals chatting about weight gain (too many croissants, or late night pizza binges with the stick-figure boyfriend); about “lifestyle changes” and weight loss (five days biking to and from work); about long hours sweating in the gym at night (where the Food Network sizzles on the gigantic flat screen, and a tabloid magazine drapes the Elliptical console, flaunting the latest close-up of a famous woman’s unaltered ass).
I have been, for most of my (adult) life, a “medium-sized” (and tall) person. I experienced little (if any) fluctuation in my weight or size. I knew (more or less) where to shop, and what sizes to buy.
And yet, like a tightrope walker on a knife’s edge, I always felt a step away from falling off or getting cut. Though I didn’t suffer fluctuations, I wasn’t spared the fear + dread. No woman is.
As a child and tween, I felt big. I was tallest in my class (a full head above most boys), broad-shouldered, long-waisted, and the first girl to get boobs.
My classmates were mostly petite — small hands, noses and heads; thin legs, sleek and fawn-like when crossed.
My leg cross appeared (to me) bloated and misshapen. And so I rarely, if ever, wore skirts or dresses. A-lines made me feel even bigger; ridiculous, and exposed. And body-cons rode up too fast, too high. By the time I reached my twenties, I had given them up entirely. I was a pants person, I decided.
Today, I am purging my closet and dresser drawers. And not because of the capsule closet trend, or a seasonal cleaning compulsion.
I purge, today, because I’ve outgrown my mediums.
From the long-sleeves choking my biceps, to t-shirts hugging too close, too tight. Flesh-pressed rips and tears, popping buttons. Winking wrinkles and rolls. And my fleshy bits begging for air: “We can’t breathe…”
Where was I when this happened? /
Where have I been?
Like many before me, I have engaged in periods of “disordered eating.” Like, cutting calorie density by eating water-rich foods (like grapes). Or logging my meals, snacks and drinks with a food tracker app. Or cutting out dairy products, because that’s what Courtney Love did.
I have used drugs to disrupt the reel in my head. The one about minding what I eat or risking falling down some dietland portal. Just imagine how grim and small my world could get if that was the only feature film in my head?
Or the reel looping a collision of images collected since childhood. My mind’s wallpaper: V-and-X-shaped bodies lined up like a swimsuit contest. Tiny and small women with sky-high legs — somehow small and tall at the same time (HOW).
A decades-old Barbie print, faded but still vivid. Small blonde heads with hair cascades — where eye size matches cup size.
A collage of ballerina figures, gliding down my runway, to an audience of pear and apple shapes with critical rectangle brows. And V-shaped alien femmes, riding up my walls in (matching) lycra tights and stick-on spandex briefs.
Bodies /
parts —
I blame the 80’s, okay? I was a 1985 baby.
Hip bones connected to rib bones. Ribs so proud they stand up and out. Skin so shy it crawls back and in. Collarbones like buttons. Fragility made sexy.
Women’s bodies reduced to parts that we’re taught to deconstruct. A whole is only as good as its individual parts. And each of us knows how we’d revise the whole. Just make this smaller, and that fuller. Take that from there, and this from here, and stitch it back together.
And put a filter on top.
Perfection is a Frankenstein’s monster.
— Whatever.
The bottom line in 2019: Nothing, short of shaving my hips down a size (or a few) will get my “going out pants” up past my thighs.
Residential (addiction) treatment, for those who don’t know, is like 90 days of sweatshirts, top-knots and pj bottoms. Like college, except the mature students are slubby too, and everyone sleeps on campus.
Rather than learn about the Socratic method or ethnography, we learn emotional self-regulation and non-violent communication. We learn that peanut butter & jam sammies are THE staple of the recovering person’s diet (why else would they be presented, in such abundance, at every snack time?). We learn about the dangers of “pairing.” We memorize each others’ DOC’s (“drugs-of-choice”). We find besties and enemies.
Can you imagine learning anything comprehensively in only three months? Much less the kind of learning required to supplant an entire coping system with an updated/healthier one you will then execute — perfectly — upon graduation?) That’s like, one semester of college.
(Perfect abstinence=perfect trust.)
I see now I was betrayed by those sweatpants, deceptive in their comfort. Elastic waistbands, again, seductive in their throwback elegance:
Just pull me on and tie me up (or not!). Wear me to the mall with red Keds or platform slides. Pair me with a cropped blazer and statement earrings. Because I am versatile.
Disbelief. A fizzy feeling, like a head full of hot air, about to float away, detached from my body, the string.
Thissssssssssss /
is not mine.
this / my body / this
is not / my body /not this—
Denial/panic. My head splits, and I’m falling nose-first into the abyss, one flapping hand feeling around for an emergency break. Denial is instinctual, a trigger reaction to a real or perceived threat. Panic is close behind, yanking it (denial) back and slinging it out like a boomarang that comes back around to slice me in half.
They shrunk / they must have. Stupid /
coin-operated washers.
So I try another pair (“walking jeans”). And another (“school slacks”). And when they’re all rejected, strewn around the room and stuck to the ceiling, I’m stuck with black tights.
Leggings: the lazy basic in black, by Edie Sedgewick, or Jean Seberg in a French film. The uniform staple for people determined to wear them as if they were pants — and not as if they forgot to wear pants. For people who hate their legs (like me). Guaranteed to not trip the alarm on your weight gain (much). Black leggings are the new magic pants.
Rage + blame. This is all YOUR fault. Leggings, mauled & split open, slit from tail to crotch (here to ether). Scraps of cotton-polyester-stretch (with the A-lines and sweats and too-tight pits), stuffed into a circus cannon with a one-way ticket and blasted into space, or somewhere far.
But NO ONE WILL TAKE THEM, so they come back at me, fast. BOOMARANGGGGG. Forever reminding me that on this planet, Earth, we prefer our women sick and/or thin.
My psychiatrist hadn’t realized I had body beef, otherwise he would have put me on different meds.
“We sometimes recommend Prozac to patients in the eating disorder clinics.” Then he explains how Prozac can be energizing for some, and has been correlated with weight loss (or at least, the opposite of gain which, hopefully for me at least, means maintenance).
Oh, I know all about Prozac, I tell him. I read the book. And he smiles.
I like him. We talk about “optimization through pharmacology.” And the idea of practicing really good self-care. He takes Fridays off, he says, despite what his overworked colleagues think.
Some people don’t like it when we prioritize care of self. Some of us read the self-help books, and watch Oprah/learn to meditate, preaching the merits of fearlessly uncompromising self-love. Bucketloads of it. Some of us slather it on, bathe in it, eat it with every meal (like avocado or kale).
But back on earth, Self-care sits in the back seat (no matter the op-eds), while we drop off kids/drive to work/water the lawn/and make dinner for four. Self-care, still trying to slough off the remnants, the sticky bits, of its evil twin sister, Selfish-care. People still think I’m her, she cries.
What does it take, I wonder, to put care of self before all other things?
Weight gain is a trigger. Because I’m attached to the body of the person I once was. But you didn’t even treat me that good, she says. I catch traces of her drifting around the room, dogging me on the sidewalk, monopolizing my (Facebook) memories…
She’s right. I didn’t. But now I get you, I say, trying to fix her with my eyes. When I see photos of you, at 27/28/29 — even just last year! — I think, she was beautiful. More so than I remember…
Because you didn’t think I was, she says, an apparition in ratty checkered blazer and squeaky-clean (hair) cut.
Sure I did.
You never had anything good to say. Whenever you looked at me, you picked me apart. (Picked my body parts.)
I saw good things, I think. And she hovers above me, a vision of her, but distorted somehow. Glitchy and unfocussed.
You should have told me, she says, falling to pieces and busting apart. A broken glass. Now it’s too late.
— And I’m alone with the going out pants in my hands. They feel strange to me now. Like a body part I was once used to holding, now foreign, like it was never mine.
Grief.
— Except I don’t know what to do with it / I don’t know how to hold it. Never did/never would.
I was born an Aquarius moon, and I know how to intellectualize my grief. I know that the problem with weight gain isn’t so much (the fear of) the loss of sexual attention or desire. In fact, weight (or body size) has very little to do with sexiness. I know this, I see this, I feel this.
The horror of it has more to do with a different kind of attention. Used as leverage by that sneaky voice that slips into my head (early morning, late evening, mid-day…) that says, People won’t see if you if you’re fat. The bigger you get, the more invisible you become. And the women will judge you.
If you think you struggle to feel heard in THIS body, or smaller, just imagine how much harder it’s going to be.
Maybe I don’t wanna be heard. Maybe talk is cheap. Silence is golden. And there’s nothing worse than a crower who assumes their every thought deserves a clap.
Seen and not heard? Well, yes.
Sometimes / that’s right.
Well, you’ve got to be really fucking special to be seen in THAT bod(y).
I am special. But that kind of challenge isn’t motivating. That is exactly the kind of challenge that pushes me into my shell, where it’s cozy, where there are no mirrors, only beds and blankets and pillows and soft cats and kittens. Where numbing agents are abundant, and a distant TV plays all my favourite shows and movies, on repeat — .
This is the same voice that stops me from writing, btw. The same voice reminds me, every year, that I’m not getting younger. Or thinner.
I take my grief and stuff it into a garbage bag. Along with the clothes that don’t fit: like that mesh crop top and tiny sweater vest. I decide to include the clothes that don’t suit me anymore: turtle necks that choke, polyester blends that sweat. The ones I never wore: all those itchy sweaters, and jackets with linebacker shoulder pads.
I swallow my grief, every morning. Prozac and Vyvanse to optimize my output. I take less naps. More walks. I practice plies at home, a one-bedroom, rent controlled apartment in Vancouver, downtown — Eastside. The memories of residential treatment, two years ago, now faded (stuffed into a box of their own). I follow YouTube tutorials, like how to do the splits in 30 days (although I dislike/don’t agree with linear goals).
I buy a new pair of pants. The “Mom jeans.” Stiff washed denim, the kind that doesn’t stretch. And because they don’t stretch, I have to size up even more. But that’s (kinda) okay, because it’s the fit that really matters. The right fit in a stiff pair of jeans is an investment in the new me (I tell myself).
I wear big t-shirts. 100% cotton. The big tee/Mom jeans look hides my natural shape. But that’s okay (kinda). I try to familiarize myself with the new me, which I catch glimpses of in store windows and other reflective surfaces. I don’t fully recognize her (will I ever?). And I long to befriend her, this round-looking/spherical person with a head and two feet. If I can beckon her closer, I might develop a fondness for her. (Anything’s possible.)
Fondness. A comfortable/curious/contemplative energy between two (or more) beings. A loving boldness, where the more you know her, the more you want to know. The more she consents to you knowing — and looking — at her. And you notice little things you missed at first (or second, or third, sixth) sight. The stuff you’d never get if you didn’t hang around past the point of comfort. Down the rapids without a life vest.
If we can only push past the first brush (or clang or clatter/whatever).
Fondness is proof that love at first sight doesn’t exist. “Love at first” is the lazy (fearful) person’s brand. To reach fondness is to glimpse Love’s (true) horizons. Love is God, and now we feel the first drizzle of faith.
Love is a marathon. Oh.
At home, I avoid the mirror. The lightbulbs are wrong (doesn’t Home Depot sell anything softer/kinder, like a filter or Gaussian blur?). And I delete Instagram, where the “It” girls are all (still) thin. And things improve, they do. The image noise, everywhere/in my head, turned down for a bit/for now.
Self-love isn’t born; it’s nurtured. Like a fire, rooted somewhere deep down inside. Nestled beneath the ribs/arteries/tissue/muscle. Behind the smile and the eyes and the magazine covers. And the self-talk running on a loop, unchecked/dampening my fire/a virus reproducing itself. Self-talk, unchallenged, begets weeds that clog my pipes and disrupt my channel.
Too much acid rain on my fire snuffs it out. Instead, it’s an assault that holds me, suspended.
Taking something away leaves a void. How many times has a careless person advocated removal of (in their view) a dagger. Only to remove it and see the whole form collapse, gumming up the wheels like just another sticky victim. And no matter how hard he tries to pressure wash the road — even with bleach! — the remnants of his negligence make a stain. And all the soap in the world only smears it around more.
When the drugs dry up, what then? Eating disordered/self-hating brains don’t just surrender. Not after three months immersed in a treatment program. And that’s what I think we’re really (clumsily) trying to heal.
When the program ends, then what? Who is holding me? Not this patchwork system of disconnected/headless/heartless healthcare services. The machine that ate my brain, and gave me prescription drugs to bandage it, will never give me the keys to Bluebeard’s basement. Not even when it (finally) gives me keys to my own house. The basement they’ve designed is meant to stay locked up forever (invisible power).
Headless bodies in my sleep. Headless women waking/walking/working in my wake. Each one yoked by the same voice/similar fears. Each one burning a secret torch under a beating chest, like a collective of stars blinking in the mist. It’s how I know they’re out there, lighting a path for me — lighting my way through this.
I am a much older woman than you and though my experiences are different; they are the same. I found this incredibly cathartic. Thank you for sharing you.