Mean People, Well Meaning People, And A Body That Does Not Belong To Me

I remember the exact moment I started hating my body. I was 9 years old. My uncle asked what I wanted to be when I grow up and my answer of the moment was a ballerina. He said:

You aren't going to have the build for that. 

I had been taking dance classes since I was 5. It was the first time it occurred to me that I had to be built any certain way. I was not a chubby kid. I quit dance for the next 2 years. Ballet class, when I returned to it, became an exercise in cataloging my inadequacies.

Age 16: Some boys on the track team called me Popeye and teased me for my muscular legs. I could squat more than most of them and my legs were really muscular. I was 5'7" tall and the largest size I'd ever worn was a size 6. I thought I was a giant.

Age 20: I was on the dance team at my University. We danced at halftime at basketball games and in competitions and that sort of thing. I worked out hours every day. I ate breakfast in the morning and then at night I ate 3 breadsticks and a smoothie. I got a lot of positive attention for how I looked. I loved it. I thought I was the fattest person on my dance team. I wasn't. And not a single one of us was fat anyway. Not by a long shot.

Age 23: I started taking a form of birth control that is now illegal and had a pretty big lawsuit brought against the creator company. It messed up my hormones terribly. I gained 70 some odd pounds in a matter of a few months. Both a doctor and a nutritionist accused me of lying in my food journal and looked at me with disgust. I was not lying. I got really depressed and gained another 15 pounds or so. It would be several years before I would get off that birth control and take the drugs to correct the damage of those drugs. Then a few more before I recovered from depression enough to lose all that weight. I spent the last 2/3rds of my twenties fat and depressed and feeling crazy because no one believed me.

Age 30: I woke up. I began losing all the weight. I got back down to a "pretty" size. A number of female friends who had become my friends when I was fat started hating me. The husband of one of them told me that she told him he was no longer allowed to hang out with me because I might try to seduce him. I threw up in my mouth a little.

Age 31: Someone attacked my body because it pissed them off.

Age now: I've been married 10 months. I've gained 20 pounds. That's 2 pounds a month in case anyone is counting. It kind of creeps up on you. IT SUCKS. I'm not used to cooking three meals a day for a child. I'm not used to not having 3 hours a day to work out. Recently I was warned not to "let myself go" because it would destroy my marriage and my music career. So, I am, of course, trying frantically to lose weight. Because I want my jeans to fit - and that's all me. But also because I'm terrified of what my fat body might mean for other people.


I don't know how I feel about my body, because I've spent 2 of my 3 decades obsessing about how other people felt about my body. I don't know how to stop that. This isn't a blog post where I come to a conclusion. I haven't figured this all out. People tell me to love myself regardless, but people do not love me the same regardless, despite what they say. I've seen it in action.

This isn't the most important thing in my life. Please don't misunderstand. But it does affect me all the time. And that only makes me feel sad, because I want my life to be focused on only things that really matter. This shouldn't matter. Should it? Maybe it should. Because maybe it's less about vanity and more about being pissed off that my body is a matter of public debate. That my body does not belong to me, but instead belongs to the opinions of other bodies.

I want to own my own body.

MY BODY BELONGS TO ME.

I want to be a better feminist. I want to tell people to fuck off because I don't care what they think about how I look. Except I do care. Too much.

I really hated when those boys called me Popeye.

Know When To Hold Em

There are things we trade. There are people who will tell you never to compromise; you can have it all. That's bullshit. Everyone gives up something. The trick is knowing what to trade. What to hold. What to toss. When to go all in.

Once, I traded who I was for proving something. The first big trade. I'm not sure, still, what I was trying to prove, except that I had it all together and hadn't been stupid in the first place. Except I didn't. And I had. But I held on. I am a hanger on. Quitting was a cardinal sin in my family growing up. Quitters were vile. Hell, liars were better. So, I lied. I faked happiness. I faked a lot of things. And it worked on most people. Not that it took that much skill - I spent years living far away from anyone who really knew me or cared about me. Never staying anywhere too long makes it easy to cover the cracks. The funny thing is, anyone who knows me will tell you I'm a terrible liar. And they're right. Except I'm a decent actress, and despite what you might think, that isn't the same thing. Actresses don't lie - they play pretend. I'm a book nerd and a daydreamer. I can do pretend.

Until I couldn't anymore. What I had to trade stopped being worth it. Going to graduate school and getting my Masters of Fine Arts in Writing is where I started realizing that, mostly because I woke up.

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”  ― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

For me, the shock treatment was writing. And once I came out of hibernation, I wanted to stay awake. So, I traded. 

I traded security and hatefulness and misery and superiority and control issues for freedom and authenticity and joy and never having to play pretend again. I gave up a lot of exhausting misery and self-loathing, so that was good. People who had known me from before I made the first big trade said things like you seem like yourself again and I'm so glad you're back and we thought aliens had abducted you. People who only knew me in my pretend years were very, very confused. Unless they had really paid attention. I no longer lived with a bully (a story for another day), I no longer pretended to like things that bored me. I was awake and I was on the road and I was poor. 

All of that was before I met the man who is now my husband. I had traded a life of comfortable unhappiness for a life of financial insecurity (understatement), art, and authenticity. I had traded fake friends for real friends. (It's funny how you realize who your friends are when your happiness starts to piss them off - but that, too, is a story for another day.) I traded knowing what was in store for being glad I didn't.

My husband and I fell in love fast. When you know, you know is one of those things I used to think was a total lie that people tell - until it happened to me. We were married in a fever. A quiet, joyful, white hot fever. 

We are still poor. We honestly wouldn't make it if it weren't for a tiny handful of very specific people who believe in us and what we are doing. 

These are the things we trade: money, ease, routine, being understood, respect in some circles, certainty.

But the things we gain.

Oh, but the things we gain.