The Anti-Cool Girl (17 page)

I officially knew my weight had gotten out of control when I realised I could no longer wipe my own arse.

I was so big that my arm was not physically long enough to reach under my belly and wipe the area behind my vagina otherwise known as the butt hole. For a while, I had solved the problem by hoisting one foot up on the toilet seat – that gave me a little wiggle room to reach down. But, eventually, even that wasn't enough. I had actually reached the stage where if I needed to poo, I would have to take a shower afterwards.

And I'd never had a more healthy sense of self-worth in my entire life. I couldn't wipe my own arse, and I loved myself more than I ever had.

After strutting out of the mental institution with my head held high, I had a minor setback and spent a week crying on my mum's couch. Then I had another minor setback, and barely left
my bedroom for three years. My bad. I somehow, miraculously, managed to finish university and walk away with a degree in creative writing, then I got a job in a call centre so I would never have to see anyone, and that became my life.

Go to work, answer phones (and by ‘answer phones', I mean read the paper and hang up on people as soon as the call gets too difficult), go home, eat myself into oblivion, throw up, watch TV, go to sleep. That was all I did for three years after that mental ward gave me ‘a new lease on life'.

Don't get me wrong, I had learned a lot about myself during the time I spent self-reflecting there (sighing and staring wistfully out of windows can actually be helpful). I'd also continued with weekly therapy, working really fucking hard to understand my fear of abandonment and PTSD symptoms. Mentally, I had reached a profound place. My panic attacks had mostly subsided, my anxiety was at an all-time low, and I wasn't particularly depressed (unless, of course, the internet was out and I couldn't download
30 Rock
). I spent those three years learning how to be my own saviour, how to feel comfortable being single and how to be mentally healthy. But I was terrified to put any of these lessons into action.

I felt like my life until that point had been one giant clusterfuck after another, and if I could just stay in my room and not rock the boat, then nothing could go wrong. I completely took myself out of the game, because you can't lose if you don't play.

The weight gain began pretty much straight after leaving hospital. My disordered eating and messed-up attitude towards food had started back with that ‘I'm pretending to be worried about nutrition, but really you're just getting fat' talk in drama school in 2006. It was now 2013, and I'd been on a cycle of binging and purging and starving that entire time. I'd spend three days eating only apples, then I'd be so starving that I'd stuff myself to the point of exploding and vomit everywhere. Whenever I was depressed, I'd buy ice-cream with Ice Magic, and I wouldn't mess around – I'd eat an entire litre of vanilla with three bottles of topping. Then I'd spew in the empty container and hide it under my bed. There were times when I had vomit hidden in secret places all over my room. Eventually, I'd screwed around with my body so badly that I developed hypothyroidism and completely fucked up my metabolism, which meant weight was easy to put on and very difficult to take off. The kilos starting piling on at a scary rate. Even with the purging, which had kept me in the ‘chubby but still kind of attractive' safe zone in the past, I was just getting bigger and bigger.

Before I knew it, I had gained ninety kilos, and that was the perfect excuse to never leave my room again. I kept promising myself that I would start living my life the way I had planned three years earlier just as soon as I ‘got my old body back'. Being fat was my new shield against the world.

And trust me, when you're fat, you need a shield. I was shocked by how differently I was treated as an obese person. People treat you as if you're subhuman. Particularly if you're a woman, since a woman's entire worth is almost always primarily based on her appearance. My very presence on earth seemed to offend people, particularly men. That I had the audacity to venture out in public as a fat woman really infuriated them. I was yelled at as I walked down the street (‘fat bitch' being the most common). I was abused for taking up too much space on the bus. I was laughed at whenever I ate in public. Romantic attention was a thing of the past.

I felt so stupid that I had never realised my looks played such a huge role in what people valued about me, and once they were gone, I began to seriously question whether I had anything to offer.

Then I read a crappy article on the internet. I can't even remember what it was about to be honest, probably ‘27 reasons why brunette Gen Y's should get married in winter' or some bullshit. And it made a bell go off in my brain. I read it over and over, finding it so hard to believe that it had ever been published. Then I just thought, ‘You know what, I can write a million times better than that. How come I'm not published on the internet?' Then I remembered, ‘Oh, that's right, because your life revolves around waiting to stream your favourite TV shows and what take-out you're going to have for dinner.'

So, on a whim that afternoon, I wrote a piece for the internet. I made it purposefully provocative so that it had a chance of being published. I created a basic WordPress blog, registered the domain name ‘rosiewaterland.com' and posted it. Then I sent the link to Australia's top women's website, Mamamia, and asked if they'd be interested in publishing it. I had no idea if you could just email editors like that, since I had studied creative writing at uni and not journalism, which basically meant I had no vocational skills whatsoever. I'd once handed in an assignment that listed fifty synonyms for the word vagina, said it was about minimalism and feminism, and got a high distinction. That's what my entire uni course was like – laughing my head off the night before an assignment was due, drinking half a box of wine, scribbling something onto the page and thinking, ‘How the fuck am I getting a degree out of this?' Then I'd just shrug my shoulders and finish the rest of the wine. So, unlike the journalism graduates, I had very little clue about what approaching editors or publications entailed, or even how to write a proper column. I just went with my gut.

That afternoon, I got an email reply from Mamamia's then managing editor, Jamila Rizvi. They loved my piece and wanted to publish it. I started to cry. I couldn't believe that I had barely dipped my toe in the water of life, and already something positive had happened. This is the very first piece of mine that was ever professionally published:

I once had a boyfriend who told me he thought I'd be less of a woman if I didn't want to give birth ‘naturally'.

Of course, this was the same boyfriend who literally threw up a little the one time in our two-year relationship I dared to fart in his presence, so in hindsight he had some serious issues when it came to his ideas about women.

I was telling him one day about my sister's experience with childbirth. She went through such excruciating pain during her labour that she still maintains with all seriousness that if someone hadn't been in the room with her the entire time she would have jumped out the third-storey window.

I then went on to tell him that when I eventually get pregnant, I have a genius c-section/tummy-tuck plan that involves waking up with a gunk-free baby in a fluffy blanket sleeping peacefully next to me. Brilliant, no? I waited for him to applaud my practical approach to childbirth. He would never want the woman he loves to be in so much physical pain that she would jump out a third-storey window. Right?

Unfortunately, the applause never came. Instead, there was some nervous laughter, followed by something along the lines of, ‘but obviously you want to go through it, right? I mean, jokes aside Rosie, it's important for a woman to experience birth the proper way . . .'

He laughed, thinking I was kidding. I laughed, thinking he was kidding. Then as it slowly dawned on each of us that the other was dead serious, we managed to say an awkward ‘wait . . . what?' in unison before a very tense silence took hold of the room.

Needless to say, we're no longer together. But it did plant a nagging seed in my mind that I still find difficult to get rid of. Am I the only one? The only woman with no qualms about planning a c-section in order to avoid pain and keep my lady parts intact.

Is anyone else just not interested in pushing a baby out of their vagina?

My ex-boyfriend isn't alone; I've had both male and female friends react strongly when I've told them my future c-section plan. To me (well, for me), it's an absolute no-brainer. We no longer expect some poor chump to bite down on a leather strap and be brave while we amputate one of his limbs – so why do we still expect a woman to go through even worse agony to have a child? The hyperbolic rants I go on when I knock my elbow should be some indication of how I handle pain. Not well, evidently. I can't imagine myself in the throes of baby delivering.

I think my birthing anxiety stems back to a book my mum left on the bottom shelf when I was in kindergarten. It was for expectant mothers and had lots of extremely graphic
pictures of women with '80s haircuts and twisted faces pushing out babies. And did I mention graphic?

All I knew was this thing I currently identified as a ‘wee-wee' was eventually going to be ripped apart while I lay with my legs in the air on some bed of excruciating pain.

I'm guessing that's the reason I've never associated childbirth as some kind of romantic female rite of passage. But don't get me wrong; I absolutely respect the women who do want to give birth the old-fashioned way. In fact, I think any woman who gives it a go deserves some kind of prize (I know the baby should be prize enough and blah blah blah, but I'm thinking more an ASOS voucher).

In fact, any woman who gives birth in any kind of way deserves a prize (let's not forget the residual pain of a c-section that many women love to remind me about); even those lottery-winning ladies of legend who orgasm during childbirth had to carry the thing around for nine months.

I guess the trick lies in finding a partner who has the same push values as you do. Because no matter what way a woman decides to remove an entire person from her body, that decision should be accepted with the utmost respect and enthusiasm (and absolutely no comment on your perceived notion of her level of ‘womanhood').

I may not get the appeal of pushing; you may not get the appeal of having a massive gash healing across one's stomach
for months just to avoid labour. Does it matter? Everyone has a thousand sleepless nights and nappies to look forward to, so what's the difference really?

I cringe a little reading it now, but all I really wanted was to make people laugh. Actually, because it was the internet and the internet is a cesspool of bored hatred trolls, it ended up making most people really angry, all of whom decided to send me an email. Which I fucking loved.

After that article, I sent Mamamia another, and another, and another. I was publishing on my blog quite frequently, and it was starting to build up a little following of its own. (No doubt helped by my friend Tonz tweeting things like ‘@JustinBieber and @SelenaGomez BABY? This source says so . . .' followed by a link to my blog. I may have got a lot of clicks from disappointed tweens, but at least they were clicks.)

I loved being published. Every time I made people laugh, it was like fuel for my soul. I started to feel a little more confident, like maybe I could very cautiously think about putting myself back in the game, so I asked Jamila if I could come to Mamamia and do an internship.

I was nervous about my weight, but I wanted to write and Mamamia was giving me a chance, so when Jamila agreed, I put on my most stylish black muu-muu and went for it.

The only thing I remember about my first day is meeting Mia Freedman, the founder and publisher of Mamamia. She edited
Dolly
when I was reading
Dolly,
and then
Cosmo
when I was reading
Cosmo.
I had been looking at her face in magazines since I was a kid. And when she walked into the office and saw me, she knew my damn name. ‘Rosie!' she exclaimed, arms opened wide for a hug. ‘I'm such a huge fan! I'm so glad you're here interning!' I was a little taken aback. Not only was Mia Freedman saying words to me that sounded a lot like my name, she had just given me a freaking hug.

We clicked straight away. She would single me out in editorial meetings, giving me way more to write than the other interns. We had inside jokes within about thirty seconds of knowing each other. After two weeks, I was offered a job as an editorial assistant. A few months later, I was promoted to editor of an entire section of the website.

I had taken a minor chance, and it had paid off in a major way. I went from hiding in my room, working in a call centre and watching TV, to being an editor at the biggest women's website in the country. I went from Jamila literally having to drag me to drinks after work, to organising entire office social functions myself. I was starting to feel more like myself than I had in years. I was laughing again, and I was making other people laugh, which I loved more than anything.

But still, the weight. I couldn't get the weight out of my mind. I was achieving so much, and I still felt worthless because of my damn weight. So, one night I wrote an article saying how depressed I was about how I looked. I admitted that I was fat, and included photos. I know the word ‘admitted' sounds strange, because everybody who sees you obviously knows that you are. But I honestly thought that if I saw as few people as possible (and covered up around the ones I couldn't avoid), nobody would ever have to know. Everybody would still think of me as ‘the old Rosie', ‘the thin Rosie', and in the meantime, I would lose the weight and they would be none the wiser.