It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (23 page)

Those first three minutes after I’d made my decision felt intensely free. Because when I had made my mind up that I would lose the weight forever, I had also made my mind up that I would be happy first.

I thought that in losing, I was finally cutting ties with what I perceived to be a fatal, lifelong hindrance. My personal handicap. I wanted to be free of worrying about my size. I wanted to forget that I was uncomfortable in front of people and just let myself be, without feeling painfully aware of how big I was. In trying to find this freedom, I created another prison. I ran from weight, and then I ran from weight some more. I felt shackled by exercise just as I’d felt shackled by my weight. And when I realized what I’d done—when depression settled in as my default state—I said,
I’d rather be what I was than what I am now
.

And that shocked my eyes open.

When I felt the tears had been wrung out of my eyes like a thoroughly squeezed sponge, I started the car, reversed, and drove home.

The following day after work, I pondered what my future with exercise would be. Running or not, I wouldn’t give up on moving; I understood the importance of exercise as part of a healthy life. What I wanted was to find an activity that was gentler on my body and less daunting to my mind.

At the gym where I had a yearlong membership, I considered the elliptical machine, knowing that the smooth, gliding motion would be easy on my joints. The problem was that the few times I’d used it in the past, my toes had gone numb for some odd reason. I
decided to try the StairMaster, since all four of the machines were unoccupied. It took a brief four minutes for me to hop off winded, red faced, cursing, and never to return again.
So that’s why all the stair climbers had been available
, I thought to myself, panting. I turned to see the familiar treadmill, and a long walk crossed my mind. At the magazine rack, I grabbed the most recent issue of
O
and hopped onto an available machine. The belt slid backward, jostling me as I set the machine to four miles per hour and the incline at a moderate 2 percent. The fifteen-minute-mile pace was comfortable, considering it was the speed at which I’d warmed up my legs for all my runs. With the magazine placed over the display panel, it covered all mentions of time, calories burned, and distance. I didn’t want to concern myself with the numbers; I only wanted to gauge how much I liked what I was doing. With earbuds in place, I pressed Play on my iPod. I walked until I finished reading, cover to cover, and only then did I lift the magazine to see how far I’d traveled. Fifty minutes. Three and a quarter miles. I blinked a few times at the screen, incredulous. For two years, I’d run nearly that same mileage on the treadmill and hated every second of it, but now, while walking and reading, I’d enjoyed it. I was shocked at how easy it had felt, how quickly the time had passed without my agonizing over the clock. Content, I stepped off the machine to leave. I hadn’t even reached the end of the row of treadmills when the worry set in. I stopped, tuning in to the obsessive part of me—the one that urged me to question the calories I’d just burned.
Maybe I should walk a bit more
. I had barely broken a sweat.

But no.
No
.

Before I could even think a moment longer, I stuffed the magazine back into its slot on the rack and left the gym, determined to not undermine the progress I’d made.

The next day after work, I returned to the gym and read while walking on the treadmill. Again, it was pleasurable. Again, I had to convince myself it was enough.

Slowly, over the course of two months, I stopped questioning its validity as a calorie burner and instead started recognizing that movement, in any form, was beneficial. I even came to look forward to the time I spent on long walks. It was restorative, meditative, and not at all punishing and dreadful like the days when my joints ached on impact. I could do it anywhere, at any time, with anyone. Heading to the gym after work wasn’t a chore but a way to unwind. I had found a comfortable pace, podcasts to listen to that interested me, friends who wanted to walk with me on the weekends, beautiful trails by my house to explore, new magazines to subscribe to, and music that made me want to move.

Each week when I weighed myself, I prepared for a gain. With all of the peace I’d gained from walking, I could accept five pounds. It was worth that much. So when the scale never changed, week after week, I was surprised. Logically, I knew that the miles I covered—whether jogged or strolled—were roughly the same, but it took the proof of my stable weight for me to really believe it. The only explanation that seemed to make sense to me was that by lightening up on movement—no longer engaging in excessive cardio—I wasn’t constantly ravenous, which meant that I didn’t feel as if I were always fighting against hunger. With a less intense form of exercise, it was easier to eat three healthy meals a day and two snacks and feel satisfied. I also wasn’t drained all the time, which gave me the energy to actually want to move my body. I recognized the positive cycle I’d begun: move moderately, eat moderately, repeat.

After
Shutter Island
wrapped, I spent the next six months living like a Generation Y cliché. My new contacts in the film industry didn’t have any work immediately available, so I lived at home with Mom and Paul. Kate was also unemployed, so we spent our time aimlessly hanging out in the same way we did during summers home from college, trying to avoid the plunge into the real world. I halfheartedly looked for work in local television production once again.

During that period of professional limbo, I began to slowly reconcile my relationship with Daniel. I called him often. We met for dinners. I was awestruck by the life he’d made while we were apart. He had moved to Cambridge, where he made a living as a professional poker player. Hearing him describe it, I thought back to the day he began playing poker, during our first week of freshman year at UMass. He sat in a circle in the lounge, Justin to his right, a few of our friends occupying the seats to his left, chips and cards littered about the wooden table. They all began playing nonstop. It was the year that Texas Hold’em blew up. It was everywhere—on TV, on every floor of my dorm. Soon the live games moved online to sites like PokerStars, and one by one, our friends started making serious money. Daniel was always good at the game. And while I had been working on
Shutter Island
, he’d won a handful of tournaments that led him to play in major events all around the world.

I loved that he’d gained such independence and found success while pursuing an alternative career. It excited and inspired me. Spending time with him—watching movies, strolling the narrow streets of his Cambridge neighborhood, laughing the way we used to—was fulfilling. I was quickly reminded of that familiar, deeply contented feeling Daniel gave me.

“I love you,” I blurted out, as we stood at the door to his
apartment after dinner one night in July. Nearly dropping his keys, he turned to face me, revealing eyes that were at once stunned and happy. He grabbed my waist with both hands and drew me in for a kiss.

“I love you, too,” he said, his lips barely parting with mine.

“Daniel, I—I’m so sorry. For everything.”

He tensed, pulling back slightly, and looked down, pausing a moment before nodding. “I know.” Suddenly, he was more timid, and I knew that my apology had reminded him of when I’d shattered his heart. He entwined his fingers with mine. “I just missed you.”

After a week of talking things through, we’d decided to get back together. Our reunion left me feeling restored. It was as if a part of me had been missing and was suddenly returned, and all I wanted to do was to ensure that I’d never lose it again.

At the start of August, Daniel traveled to Europe with his two best friends. The Saturday he left, I’d just returned from a long walk and was moments from stepping into a cool shower when I caught sight of my naked body in the bathroom mirror. I stopped and stared at my reflection. My frame was lithe, thin. Until my waist, the reflection I saw of me was one I liked. But as my eyes moved lower to my belly and beyond, I winced. Circling my belly was an inner tube of sagging flesh. Twenty years with an overbearing middle, a belly so protruding and bossy, my skin hadn’t taken kindly to the dramatic loss. The fat that once filled the two cascading rolls was gone, and what stayed behind was a double sash of deflated skin. It had no more elasticity. Loose and wrinkled, the skin sagged in the way it would on the body of someone nearing ninety. I could pinch the
hanging flaps and find my fingers almost touching between the thin sheets of skin.

My gaze moved farther downward in the mirror, and I saw the same sagging sacks between my legs. My inner thighs looked as deflated, as dimpled with wear and age, as my midsection. I shook my body and watched as the pounds of sagging skin flapped up, down, up, down. Each bounce of empty flesh weighed heavy on the downswing.

I cursed it.
Why has the fat left, but you—you won’t go away?
It embarrassed me in a way my full belly never could have. This was the new body I’d worked so hard to have. This was the body I was working so hard to
love
. The skin that hung behind after I’d lost all the weight felt mocking, humiliating. I feared anyone ever touching it, couldn’t bear the thought of them noticing it as they grabbed me in a hug. Even being naked in front of Daniel made me feel unnervingly vulnerable. “I know it’s ugly!” I wanted to shout apologetically at him as I squeezed my eyes shut when we began kissing, so wishing the lights were out.

With clothes on, the skin masked itself well. Shirts hung loosely at my middle. Jeans with some measure of stretch could snugly hold the skin on my thighs taut. But when I moved, I felt the excess bounce. It would slap against my body in a punishing way.

You did this to yourself, you know
. I chastised myself silently. Part of me felt I deserved it, but mostly I wondered of its finality.
Must I walk around with this, my cross to bear, for the rest of my life?
It felt odd to have worked so diligently to carve this body out of the mass it once was for it now to look so unattractive to me. Different, yes, but distressing all the same. Stretch marks swam up my front, my back, like silvery white fish. I was sympathetic toward
the skin that bore them, having stretched so far beyond its limits that red veins emerged where it simply could not bear to stretch farther. The markings, now faded, I could live with. But the excess skin plagued me. During the first year the weight was off, I felt a nagging sense that I had more weight to lose whenever I’d see the sagging. It drove me mad that it never tightened, never rebounded, no matter how much I exercised. No amount of squats, lunges, crunches, or planks helped it to recoil. I learned, perhaps much too late to prevent the excessive exercise, that this excess that hung low on my belly and thighs was not the same as flab. There wasn’t any fat left inside the pockets to blast away. I’d done all of that.

Mom saw how self-conscious I’d become about it. She’d pull my shoulders back when she caught me hunching, folding inwardly on myself to cover it. She watched as I stared into dressing room mirrors, unclothed and unhappy. We had talked about how deeply bothered I was by it.

And when she felt it weighing equally as heavy on my mind as it did on my body, we made an appointment with a plastic surgeon.

At the consultation, he proposed an abdominoplasty. Horrified at the graphic discussion, I looked away as he explained to Mom what would occur during the procedure. Essentially, he would slice a bowed line widthwise across my abdomen that would be curved in the same upturn as a smile. After releasing my belly button so the skin could effectively rise in a clean, single sheet above my abdomen, he would then pull that sheet downward. When the skin was pulled sufficiently taut to meet the bottom curved incision, he would cut off the remaining skin. He’d then take the skin from my upper abdomen and stitch it to lower portion of skin above my pubic bone. It made sense and disgusted me all at once. Squeamish,
I could barely listen as he discussed how he could rectify the hanging skin on each inner thigh.

Leaving the appointment that day, Mom and I spent the car ride in serious discussion. It was a lot to consider. The surgery would require me to be put under general anesthesia for nearly three hours. It would also mean one night’s stay in the hospital. I’d be fairly immobile for the days following surgery, laid up with two small bottle drains inserted into my midsection to drain the fluids that naturally accumulate postsurgery. Tubes the size of drinking straws would connect the drains from outside my pelvis to inside my abdomen and be sewn in place on my skin. I’d have to empty these drains twice daily, noting the amount of fluid on a chart. They’d be removed after one week, and the holes left from the tubes would close and seal over time. In all, recovery would last about three weeks. And what was more, my insurance would not cover the cost of surgery, which neared $15,000 for the abdominoplasty and thigh-skin removal combined. Since the skin was not technically causing any rashes or some other serious health condition, it was deemed medically unnecessary—an elective surgery. Despite several appeal attempts and my surgeon’s writing a letter to the insurance company to note that I was living with five pounds of excess skin hanging from my body, the company would not reconsider. It was difficult to hear the insurance rejection over and over.
If they deem it elective, is this all just superficial of me? Am I considering the equivalent of a face-lift?