Five days before my thirtieth birthday, I’m holed up in a coffee shop in Maple Falls, Washington, the only place in a ten mile radius of my current campsite with reliable WiFi. Yesterday, I drove out of the wilderness after my first backpacking trip ever, guzzling water out of a plastic gallon jug and devouring all the food I could possibly get my hands on.
I can’t believe how different my life has become in a single year.
Last year around this time, I was still settling into my decision to move to Santa Fe, feeling more and more homesick by the minute. The one close-ish friend I’d made was out of town, so I spent my birthday taking myself to a museum — and, because I woke up with a killer toothache, the dentist.
The following three months were a roller coaster. I met a man I thought I’d fallen for pretty seriously and enjoyed the first genuine, hopeful romantic butterflies I’d had since I left my abuser. Then he flew out to my childhood home for the holidays… and when we were both back in Santa Fe just a week later, disappeared completely.
It was also during this period that I’d started to realize I could no longer keep up with the insane contortions I had to go through to keep living in my body the way it was — which is to say, the smallest it’s ever been in my adult life. No matter how determined I was, I couldn’t stop myself from binging, from waking up in the middle of the night and fueling myself on autopilot.
It makes sense that my body was over it. I’d been doing an hour of strength and an hour of cardio every single day of the week, not even breaking for illness or injury, while attempting to consumer fewer than 2,000 calories per day. I congratulated myself when I stayed under my too-low limit, compensated for my binges with day-long fasts, and wouldn’t touch any simple carbohydrates whatsoever, including fruit. On top of that, I’d begun to take up hiking in earnest, hoofing it up the toughest, highest peaks I could wherever my travels took me. I found it enjoyable, yes — but it was also a kind of punishment, another way to whittle my body down to its barest essentials.
I was very good at this whittling, and had been for almost a decade. But something was slipping. I told myself it was winter. I told myself it was my period — which I’d had to wrench from my body with a course of progesterone, as I’d done every few months over the last three years. As I’ve discovered now that I’m eating, my amenorrhea wasn’t due to PCOS or a hormonal imbalance. My ovaries had shut down production because of my frantic course of overexercise and insufficient nutrition, a well-known medical phenomenon… but since I never looked like I had an eating disorder, my doctors didn’t ask questions. (And meanwhile, I pushed off taking the progesterone for as long as possible, afraid of its resultant appetite spike, even while I knew my absent periods put me at a higher cancer risk.)
Then, while I was home for Christmas, I stole a box of Ghirardelli chocolates from my parents’ back room, where they kept three such boxes they’d been preserving in case they needed unexpected gifts. I nabbed one and snuck it into my room along with a roll of paper towels and a bevvy of plastic grocery bags, snapped off its golden ribbon, and proceded to chew up each and every piece of candy — only to spit it out, carefully wiping the sugar and fat from my tongue.
And then I went back for the second. And the third.
In January of 2019, I finally capitulated and went to therapy — which I’d honestly known I’d needed for months. I’d written this article for the Huffington Post in September 2018 (though it wasn’t published until January), and I knew that my relationship with food had become an iron box, caging in every single aspect of my life.
By late February, I’d thrown out my calorie tracker (which, it helpfully informed me, I’d used every day for over 900 days, religiously logging everything I ate down to single sticks of gum). On March 1st, I published this blog post with its backwards before-and-after photo, conceding to having gained some weight, but still terrified, terrified, to gain more.
Reader: I have gained more.
I remember the first time I loaded up a (now favorite) podcast, Sophia Carter-Kahn and April K. Quioh’s “She’s All Fat.” I was listening, of all places, at the gym. I was so fatphobic, so afraid of going back to my “old” body, that on some level I feared even hearing fat voices. I’d bent my whole life around becoming someone else.
Flash forward six months, and I’m unrecognizable — if not physically, then certainly philosophically. I’ve gained an untold amount of weight, landing squarely back in the land of double-digit sizing, and I’ve become the type of person who writes “riots not diets” on the walls of graffiti-filled bathrooms. I’ve honestly said to food service professionals that I don’t give a shit about calories, and I’ve even written an entire book about this whole mess that’s literally titled Letting Myself Go. (P.S. this blog post definitely doesn’t count as procrastinating on editing the manuscript or writing the proposal. Definitely not.)
It’s still not perfect, of course. There are still days when what I see in the mirror makes me feel like I’m losing myself and my mind, days when I mourn the pretty, skinny girl who — my brain always interjects this — everybody was always so nice to.
But in many important and potent ways, I’m so much happier and more confident than I ever was, even at my thinnest.
For instance, this camping trip I’ve just come home from. I found myself in one of the most beautiful places on earth, just shy of the Canadian border, sitting in the woods with a group of smart and kind and sensitive human beings who laughed and sung bad hip hop and didn’t make fun of me for the nightmare I had about getting eaten by a mountain lion. While a lot of that acceptance is due to their awesomeness, some of it is also because I allowed it to happen — because I wasn’t so caught up in fretting about and policing my body. I could just be myself with these people and not have my body even be part of it, except as the vehicle by which I enjoyed that experience. There was no pretense, no posing, no mirrors; my body was not something I was offering as collateral, as I had been for so long with the men I’d paraded myself in front of, thirsty for any form of acceptance.
And make no mistake about it, that acceptance was, in many cases, 100% contingent on the body I’d made myself sick to inhabit. I’ve already noticed the dwindling of smiles and held-open doors, but you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take the words of a boy I dated in early 2017, Robert, which he uttered upon seeing a “before” photo: Well, I sure am glad I met you now.
It’s funny, but these days, looking at “after” photos is actually more disturbing. I see the girl I was a year ago and she looks shockingly thin, though you never could have told her that, despite her bones and muscles on proud display. I see a girl who’s dead set on an achievement that’s only perpetuating her misery — a girl who needs help. Bad.
A photo I took at the gym in November 2019, frustrated with the “belly” that wouldn’t go away.
And at the same time, the new “after” photos — or more accurately, the work-in-progress photos I’ve taken over the course of the past few months, as my body figures out where it wants to be — have become less and less of a gut punch. The double chins and visible belly outline I’d so long reviled simply are. My body is not some kind of currency. It’s merely me.
Or at least, it is on the good days.
I can’t believe how afraid I’d been to take up space — the way that fear still reverberates in me on the days I can’t believe what my body’s become. For so long, I’ve been working around this internalized message I’d received all my life about my place, my purpose: to be looked at, to be wanted. To be small.
So when my abusive ex dismissed my complaints about my lifelong battle against my body almost a decade ago, saying I simply wasn’t trying hard enough, it was easy to internalize that, too. It was my fault — and so I could take control of the “problem” and “fix” it. I bent my whole will, my whole life, around carving myself down to an acceptable size, both physically and metaphorically. And I always wondered why, even after I was “beautiful,” I couldn’t find the true acceptance, the intimacy I craved.
Of course I had to actually gain weight to gain real confidence and the ability to connect. Of course I did. Because the influx of “acceptance” I’d received in my socially-compliant body wasn’t true acceptance. It was acceptance of this false and fleeting version of myself I’d manufactured at the cost of great personal pain.
Two of my new friends on the way up to camp
But sitting on the ground, legs crossed, in camp, with these people who took me exactly how I was: that was it. That was what I’d been after, all that time. And here I was, enjoying it full bore, even with more fat on my body than I’ve had since college.
I had nothing to prove. I’d been good enough, worth enough — enough — the whole time.
And now, I finally know it.
Happy birthday to me.