It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (27 page)

The independence I’d cultivated in Seattle made me strong. Empowered. It made me believe that I could, indeed, do anything. The parts of my life that didn’t bring me happiness anymore, just as a career in film hadn’t two years earlier and my weight hadn’t years before that—they were changeable. I had the right to find a new, authentic joy.

After a year and a half of living in Seattle and six months of
arguing, I told Daniel everything I felt. Of all the good in our union, communication was always our strongest suit. We respected complete and utter honesty; we demanded it. And though he listened, I wasn’t sure he could hear me. “Let’s try to work on this,” he said. I died, hearing the way his voice hitched. The honesty I shared with him during our hours-long conversations that summer of 2011 was painful, gut-wrenching. I cried, telling him things I’d fought to say aloud. Even if my falling out of love with him was true, I didn’t always want it to be. I recognized how easy it could be if I could only just let us be as we’d always been. If we moved on to marriage, as we’d once discussed. If we continued in the comfortable routine we’d established. But that frightened me.

He tried harder. I tried harder. But nothing ever changed.
How do you leave your best friend?
I’d ask myself over and over.

Late that August, I attended one of the International Food Blogger Conferences I’d planned for Foodista in New Orleans. I spent a week in the Big Easy working, eating fried shrimp po’boys, and drinking hurricanes. Not once did I call Daniel while I was away, which was unusual. We always kept in touch when one of us was away. Just a year earlier, I wouldn’t have thought twice about calling him every night before I went to sleep. But I didn’t want to talk. Instead, I resorted to texting him quick, cold messages like
Really busy. Be home soon
. Later, on the plane ride back to Seattle, exhausted and thoroughly stuffed, a sense of dread settled over me. If I had a choice, home wasn’t the place I’d go. Part of it was the natural comedown from the adrenaline rush I always experienced during a conference, but a larger part was knowing I hadn’t missed Daniel. I didn’t want to return to him, to us.

My taxi from the airport chugged up Queen Anne Avenue, the
streets shimmering with a slick of rain. As we turned right onto my street, the headlights lit my building in the distance. And I saw him. Standing on our front steps, he must have been waiting there for quite a while, since I’d only texted him a quick
I’m home
when I landed and not when I finally left the airport nearly forty-five minutes later. He smiled, there on our stoop. Behind the tinted glass of the taxi’s window, my lips parted and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t stifle an emerging sob. Here was a man who loved me endlessly. And here I was, not able to love him back. I knew then.

I broke up with him.

The days that followed were insufferable. Daniel uttered few words. He was icy, ghostly in the way he went about living normally. What little joy we might have had before was now entirely stripped away. I thought briefly to take it back, desperate to relieve us from the hellish existence I’d created. But then I thought of the relief that washed over me when I’d done it, when I’d finally said the words I’d been putting together in my head for half a year.

By late fall, Daniel had left our apartment and Seattle. The grieving, the unbearable weight of guilt, the emptiness—they brought me to my knees. And yet I knew it was right. This whole time of life humbled me. It made me see I didn’t have it all figured out. Not with love, not with life, not with food. There were times, in the wake of our separation, when I turned back to food for comfort. When I overate the sweets I baked to fill the void of Daniel. And I was reminded, for the hundredth time in my life, as my belly ached and my heart raced from sugar, that food couldn’t heal me.

It took a long time to feel normal again, to feel the familiar ease I’d developed with food and my body. In grieving the end of our relationship, I’d gained fifteen pounds. And, slowly, as I felt
the balance restored, I accepted them as part of me. Maybe I’d lose them; maybe I wouldn’t; either way, I had to be kind to myself.

What I discovered in that year—and perhaps in all of my life—was that I am always growing, always learning. And whenever I think I’ve figured it all out, I’ve really only just begun.

I will always miss some aspects of life when I was big … 135 pounds ago
.

I’ll miss the reckless abandon
.

I’ll miss the volume of food, the horizon of eats that lay before me on a table, knowing full well that the only thing stopping me from consuming it all was my fist-size stomach. And even then there was always stretch
.

I’ll miss the way the fourth slice of pizza tastes. The fifth even more
.

I’ll miss bricks of brownie + ice cream + caramel + whipped cream + crumbles of a Reese’s twosome. For a snack after lunch
.

I’ll miss when menus at restaurants were just lists of delicious dinners. And nothing more nutritionally threatening
.

I’ll miss not thinking before deciding that, why, yes, I’d absolutely adore three doughnuts for breakfast
.

I’ll miss plunging my forearm into a bucket of twice-buttered popcorn at the movie theater. Shoveling handfuls of salted and soggy kernels into my gullet. Then Sno-Caps. Then Sprite
.

I’ll miss brunching with sausage, egg, and cheese on greased and griddled everything bagels in the dining hall at college. With hash browns and a mind on lunch
.

I’ll miss all ten inches of that buffalo chicken pizza I called for when the party music stopped playing
.

I’ll miss not caring when or how my next meal came, only that it came. And stayed. And never left
.

I’ll miss the way Cap’n Crunch-ed so loudly, I couldn’t hear my dad hollering
.

I’ll miss that feeling I had when every fiber of my anatomy believed food to be the kindest, most loving friend a girl could have
.

And yet
.

I won’t miss the way heat felt suffocating. The way temperatures teasing seventy threatened me. And my hair
.

I won’t miss the Lucky Charms and the Corn Pops and the Honeycombs that helped me with my homework. They never helped me with my math equations when I’d begged them to
.

I won’t miss wondering if invisibility would be a more comfortable state. There are no places to live there
.

I won’t miss the way my legs chafed, the way shorts rode up until I discreetly tugged them down
.

I won’t miss the way my legs instantly fell asleep if I dared sit cross-legged on the floor
.

I won’t miss being a wallflower
.

I won’t miss watching people move, and act, and sing, and dance and wishing, oh, wishing, I felt that free
.

I won’t miss thinking, “Someday they’ll see. I’m prettier than they know. One day …”

I won’t miss my stomach calling my brain to tell her I’d eaten enough and I just couldn’t (couldn’t!) eat another bite. She never answered
.

I won’t miss the staring
.

I won’t miss the names—“fat” and “pig” and “whale”—and my ignored cries for mercy
.

I won’t miss the excuses and the regrets and feeling I’d wasted precious years
.

I won’t miss the tears
.

I won’t miss dreading, oh, dreading, any occasion with dresses, or dressing up, or dressing at all, really. Not the girdles. Not the high heels that made my feet appear four sizes smaller than my body. The panty hose
.

I won’t miss thinking that size sixteen, eighteen, and twenty would fit differently, more acceptingly, in different stores
.

I won’t miss waiting
.

And waiting. And waiting. Then waiting some more. For life to begin
.

When you’re big for twenty years, the only twenty you’ve ever known, you’ll kindly not frown upon two decades. You’ll know that who you are was formed in there, and that’s beautiful.

Quite simply, beautiful.

I read and hear accounts of others who’ve lost a tremendous amount of weight, like me. And most often, they speak about their former selves—the bigger ones—in a very detached way, as if the here and now is infinitely better and more lovely than the past. In many ways, perhaps it is.

But here’s the truth I’ve come to know: fat or thin, it was me all along.

I don’t think back on my past and want to redo it. I don’t flip pages of my baby book and think,
Dear, what cankles you had!
I don’t see my adolescent self, my teenage self, and wish those pictures, scrapbooked and framed, would disappear.
Mom, really, with the Glamour Shots?

My life, big, was always all I knew. And that is perfect in its own right.

Yes, I know now that with 135 extra pounds, something more was wrong than just my weight. The scales I tipped should have tipped me off to emotional suffering. But not all of it was sad.

Some of the weight was happy and as well rounded as it came across.

Some of it meant that I developed a personality first. A sense of humor before a sense of entitlement. Empathy before ego. Some of the weight meant that I didn’t care about myself. But in turn, maybe I cared deeply about a number of meaningful external parts of life. I poured my heart into relationships, molded it to fit friends and circumstances. A big ball, I rolled with the changes.

I found spirit.

I cared deeply about the way people perceived me. But maybe that made me more in tune and intuitive. Maybe because I was acutely aware of my size, I cultivated an awareness of all of life. Maybe I feel deeper, more purely and intensely. Maybe because my heart has ripped, and has lost pieces, and still has visible stretch marks and sewn seams, my character will be ultimately more resilient.

The thing is—it’s easy to find the bad. I’m cynical at times. Pessimistic and realistic. I can, and do, look at situations in pros and cons. But what I’ve come to know as true, in the last twenty-eight years, is that I am everything I’ve ever been.

I will always know fat. And love who she was. And know that fat, in itself, is not a bad word. I’ll own it and respect those twenty years. They were hard, but they were sweet, too. I grew up in that body, in that time, in that big, beautiful mind.

I will always know thin. And love who she is. And know that even when she feels heavier mentally, she’s freer now. She’s effervescent. Small but tough.

I will always know that the grass, though it seems emerald and glowing in that field on the other side—it isn’t. Flowers grow here. They grow over there. Weeds do, too.

But both are wide, and they’re open. And I can lie and cry in one and move and spin in the other, all while knowing this: they’re the same field.

And they’re both mine.

MAKES ONE 9-INCH LAYER CAKE, OR ABOUT 24 CUPCAKES