I've always known that someday I would publish my stories. I absolutely dig writing and it seems to come pretty easy to me. I also have been through some crazy-ass shit so that helps. Here's a recent piece I wrote for a Memoir Writing class that I'm in. You can read it...if you wanna.
You Have Such A Pretty Face
She has “the look” as she scans my face and body. She’s not scene me since I was 6 years old. And the process begins; each time I blink I want to just keep my eyes shut fall mysteriously into a coma. I’ve stopped breathing. My jaw is clenched and my fingernails are digging into my palm as I make tight fists. My ears start ringing. I start what is my customary internal dialogue in such circumstances: ‘please don’t say it, please don’t say it, please-oh-please don’t say it, please God don’t let her say it…’
She rubs the back of her cold, gray hand against my bloated hot pink cheek and begins to open her mouth as if to speak. I want to scream ‘NO!’ and ‘FUCK OFF!’ and run away, run forever. Every cell in my body is wailing like a fire alarm.
“Oh Paula, you have such a pretty face.”
She fucking said it.
“Uh…yeah….I get that a lot,” I mumble. I smile. I always smile. I turn away from her as fast as I can as my face gets even redder and hotter. I won’t let her or anyone see me cry. Am I disappointed? Angry? Maybe. Fat girls really don’t have feelings anyway.
At least I can breathe now. She fucking said it. Now if only I could wear a button that reads “AUNT LOIS ALREADY SAID I HAVE SUCH A PRETTY FACE” so as not to relive this moment. I have at least another hour of coming face-to-face with many other great-aunts and uncles. My mother said it would mean a lot to her if I came with her to Minnesota to a family reunion. It’s quite the revelry. At the very least, they know how to eat in the mid –West. I can respect any culture that considers two Jell-O packets mixed with canned mandarin oranges and a tub of Cool Whip a salad. My mom Carol is already the biggest perma-victim in the universe. She has a PhD in passive aggression. There’s no way I could have opted out. I’m the only child. So now all the relatives in this shit hole of a town in a shit hole of a state get to see that Carol has a fat 13-year-old daughter with such a pretty face.
I am glad to be missing some school. Eighth grade is supposed to be fun, we’re the oldest kids at the Junior High. But I am so nervous about next year. Is it even possible to enjoy one’s freshman year of high school? Even the normal skinny girls must be a little anxious. They say that everyone is made to run laps in P.E. in high school. I do not run. Fat girls don’t run. Just considering the P.E. component alone gives me panic attacks. School itsel, the studying and homework has always been a breeze. I learn fast, catch on quick to what’s expected of me. I’m addicted to pleasing everyone within a one mile radius and I’m a compulsive teacher’s pet. If you pay attention, most of us fat girls are.
Besides wanting to swallow my tongue when I contemplate physical education class, I’m constantly exhausted by having to be everyone’s fat happy friend in Junior High. How am I going to fend off the chubby comments when there are at least double the amount of kids around to please? No one has any clue how demanding it is. Every minute of every single day I’m on a crusade. I am battling everyone’s initial impulse to notice and point out my body’s considerable size. I must incessantly make everyone forget that I’m fat. That alone is my number 1 mission, my only motivation for absolutely everything I do. I have to delight them all. I must make them revere me, attach significant importance to me. I cannot rock even the tiniest of boats. I can’t let them detect how painfully unacceptable I actually am. It’s hard labor. It’s unremitting. Behind my smile and my uncanny ability to befriend every single student at East Avenue Junior High School, inside I’m begging them to disregard the obvious complete intolerability of my fat existence. It’s not for their benefit. I have come to trust, over my 13 years on the planet, that my corpulence makes me unworthy of most things normal people take for granted. Especially and most prominently companionship. Which is why I don’t really have friends as much as I have many, many girls who I keep entertained in order to prevent them from leaving me. I certainly refuse to be fat AND alone. They don’t know who I really am. But I don’t either anymore. Fat girls really don’t have feelings anyway.
Now I’m back to school. While I was in Minnesota with my estrange tactless family members, Spring developed into Summer here in the quiet Bay Area suburb of Livermore. It happens fast around here, it’s really desert on this side of the hills from San Francisco. Mid-April and we’ve stopped wearing socks a month ago. We will put every long sleeved shirt and full length pant away until next November.
Most 13-year-olds begin thinking about getting out of school for summer break, buying cute new summer clothes, vacation plans. All I think about is that I can’t wear my trusty jean jacket for much longer without people commenting. “Aren’t you hot in that jacket?”, “Don’t you wanna take that thing off?” “It’s over 100 degrees out here!” Panic swells like incense smoke from the pit of my stomach to my throat when I contemplate removing it in public. I wear my jean jacket every single day. It’s light blue denim, the hems are frayed and the elbows almost translucent from deterioration. I have it on each day, all day, because it hides the middle of my body. My legs aren’t bad. I can pull off shorts. My legs below the knee could be anyone’s, I’m relieved to admit. This is good for a gal who lives where it’s over 100 degrees for 2 out of the 12 months in a year. But from about 4 inches above my knees to my shoulders is no man’s land. Appalling. Odious and distasteful and better off left unseen. I especially despise my back, which validates the beloved jean jacket. I often have fantastic day dreams of carving off the rolls of fat on each side of my back body from my shoulders to my waist. The sweat collects in these vile pockets of skin, like many mini-armpits flowering my bulk. And the worst, my most horrific defect, is where my lower back suddenly explodes into my dimpled, jelly-filled balloon of an ass. That transitional piece disgusts me, makes me physically ill to think about. So I wear the jacket, as I aspire towards the illusion of one smooth flat plain from my scapula to just below my butt. I doubt I am fooling anybody, but at least I’m giving them no evidence to the contrary.
I wonder what normal-sized people think about. What would float through my consciousness if not shameful thoughts, torturous self-inflicted criticism and constant berating? I have no idea where my energy would go, who I might become. For reasons beyond my explanation I know I won’t be like this forever. I have extremely important things to do in my life. And fat girls don’t get to do anything except please and pretend not to be hungry.
After being fat and miserable for 16 years, I really did believe that if I lost all the weight I would have no problems. It seems so silly from this side of it, but I truly assumed that if I looked like everyone else on the street, if I could buy clothes at The Gap, if I could saunter up to an all-you-can-eat buffet without any humiliation; nothing would ever go wrong in my life again. I thought the fat covering my body was the root of every difficulty I had ever come up against. What I discovered was that the pounds and pounds of adipose tissue on my body was a symptom of other problems and beliefs and deficiencies. And though it was hard to admit, the shame didn’t go away.
What I failed to realize was how much I needed that abhorrent fat. I was completely unprepared for the rollercoaster ride I unknowingly stepped onto when I lost 100 pounds my junior year of high school. Being an only child of a bi-polar mother and an emotionally absent alcoholic father, I had no idea how to take care of myself. All I knew was that when I ate, the tornado of anxiety in my chest and the static in my head stopped. Eating was how I cared for the scared little girl that didn’t understand why the grown-ups around me wouldn’t get close to me, wouldn’t hold me and dry my tears, why they all seemed so distant and lost in their own busy minds. Eating soothed me.
So when I decided to, finally, lose the weight, I had none of the tools one would need to simply install moderation and balance into my dysfunctional relationship. I never even considered simple healthy eating as an option. I knew the only way I could slow down my voracious appetite for comfort was to stop eating altogether. I had no word for it, but I knew on some level that I was an addict and that my addiction to food had to switch to an addiction to the glory of starvation. I chose anorexia. I was determined and I’ve been known to get whatever I put my mind to. It worked. It worked fast. And when the weight began to slide off, the accolades and attention I received made me starve more. I cut out more and more foods, I began to exercise and then exercise more.
It was all too much for me. Suddenly all the popular kids were willing to hang out with me. After I won the title of Homecoming Queen, it was like an automatic admission into the cool kid crowd. Not that I didn’t still love all my drama dorks and gay boys and band nerd friends, but isn’t that what I worked so hard to lose the weight for? Carol didn’t like my new friends. She didn’t like my newfound popularity and the attention I was getting. I did. I got a car and I was hanging with my new friends and out of the house as much as possible. I liked feeling like a part of something cool. Mostly, the less time I was around mom and dad the more I could get away with not eating.
Not telling the truth was nothing new to me. I rarely was anywhere near honest. I had always lied about what I was feeling, how I was doing, what was really going on inside of me. It’s what we do in my family. But I began my career as a professional liar when I stopped eating. “How did you lose the weight Paula?” I’d smile and modestly explain my commitment to the good ole’ equation of a healthy diet and moderate exercise. I always failed to mention the starving and puking, the compulsive exercising and the unvarying mental obsession. And then I would have to lie about not being hungry, having already eaten dinner, being a vegetarian, being allergic to wheat products, etc. It took a great deal of story-telling and forethought.
When I graduated high school and went away to college I was so excited to be left alone, finally, and to be able to really focus on getting as thin as possible. That is all that mattered to me. Nothing else. How ironic that I got thin so I would be more accepted by more people, and now I wanted to be just left alone. The disease of anorexia had completely taken over my mind and my life. I knew that. But I also knew that it was a small price to pay compared to being the fat girl again. Never. Again.
We are driving down “The 5” as we call it in California. It’s a boring long and ugly stretch of road that connects Northern and Southern California. This is the longest I’ve spent alone with my parents in years.
They are driving me, in our family van, down to San Diego to enter a treatment center today. We are not talking about it. That’s not what we do in our family.
I am 21 years old. The last three to four years are a blur. I’m sitting in the back seat alone, nervous, obsessing, drinking my daily gallon of Crystal Light. Loaded silence. My body is so thin I can’t sit or lay down on any surface without it feeling like I’m being stabbed. My bones feel like they are puncturing through my thin skin. I’m cold, my teeth chatter constantly. It’s August in California and I’m wearing four layers of clothing. In the last year it’s gotten really bad and I can’t stop. I can’t make it stop. I never had control, whether I was binging or starving, it was always more powerful than I was. I haven’t eaten a bite of solid food in over a year. I simply must run for at least 2 hours every morning and then I can barely walk for the rest of the day. My body is eating away at my own muscle tissue in order to survive. I almost fell asleep driving through San Francisco the other day. My brain chemistry is so distorted and the doctor says it’s due to lack of nutrients. I have crying spells and panic attacks. The doctor said my body is beginning to shut down. On some level, I know I am dying. But I can’t make myself eat.
In the past year I’ve had to cut myself off completely from most everyone in order to continue with my behavior. I can’t be bothered by people who may care enough to intervene. Also, the panic attacks come without warning and I don’t want anyone to see me like that. I can’t let on that there’s a problem. When the anxiety hits me I feel like I’m dying. My world gets dark and my head spins so fast and I cannot imagine ever, ever getting out of it. I can’t let anyone know I’m not OK.
Yesterday I told my best friend and roommate that I was going to treatment. Neil and I have a great arrangement. We’ve been best friends since 6th grade. We both are completely frightened of people, of intimacy, and of having to be authentic. Therefore we are a refuge for each other, never discussing the obvious, loving each other deeply because we’ve silently agreed that we will never challenge the other; much like my family and his. Yesterday I told Neil I was going away to get better, assuming I’d have to explain that I’d been suffering from anorexia for the past 5 years. I didn’t even finish my sentence and Neil fell to my feet and sobbed. I’ve never seen Neil show any emotion. I only hear how much he loves me when he’s extremely high or drunk. His outpour shocked me. And relieved me. He really cared. I didn’t even think he ever noticed. That’s how delusional I was. As I deteriorated in front of his eyes, as I slid farther and farther down the scale to a deadly 80 pounds, I assumed it wasn’t that conspicuous.
I’m scared to go to treatment and relieved to go. Petrified of going and petrified of not going. I always thought I could handle it. I thought I’d fix it when it got really out of control. I got myself into this mess and I thought I had to get myself out. I didn’t know how to ask for help and I didn’t know asking for help was an option. That’s not what we do in my family. I don’t want to live like this anymore. But I only know two ways of being me: ashamed, lonely fat and fake or ashamed, lonely skinny and possessed. There has got to be more options than those.
Recent Comments