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What I Realized the Day I Finally Got “Skinny Enough”

I loved to dance when I was little, but at a certain point I stopped taking lessons because I was so tired of always being the biggest one, needing the biggest costume or uniform, holding my breath and sucking in my stomach, hoping there would be one that fit me.

I wanted to look like my mother and her mother—small, dark-haired, fine-boned, like blackbirds or Russian princesses. Instead, I looked like I belonged in a Breughel painting, a Dutch peasant in a field. I look like I could be cast in “Beef: it’s what’s for dinner” commercials, and all I wanted to be was a fine black-winged bird.

Some of my most horrifying memories involve trying to find something to wear to an event my parents were taking me to, when I was chubby and adolescent and somehow chronically between sizes. I always ended up in some cobbled together, safety-pinned thing, feeling like an impostor. Getting dressed was always a blistering, painful affair, exacerbated by the fact that the primary person helping me through this ordeal was my size-two mother, who had a knack for saying things like, “Hmmm … is that a little tight?” Is it a little tight, Mom? Yes. Yes, it’s a little tight. Everything I’ve ever tried on has been a little tight. My whole life feels a little tight.

Being too big was a vulnerability for me, a liability, something that made me an outsider. And being too big certainly did not help my dating life. There was the fateful phrase I’ve heard a thousand times: You’re just like a sister. Or slightly better, I guess: You’re not the kind of girl you date—you’re the kind of girl you marry. Which, now that I am married, is a compliment, but when you’re fifteen and all you want to do is get asked to homecoming, being marriage material is as cool as having a good personality. Who wants a good personality when you could have a cute butt?

Birthdays have always been especially hard for me because I’ve always believed that by this one, okay, now by this one, I’ll be my new self, and I never am, and there is a moment when I’m alone at my own party, in the ladies room or in the kitchen, where I am blinded by a flash of sadness for what I will drag into the next year, poisoning it and weighing it down. And then I dredge up the hope again and tell myself that this is the year, this one. By my next birthday, it will be different. That’s what I say every year, and every year I believe it, and every year it is a lie.

I spent lots of time shopping and planning so that I would always have the right things to hide behind. I watched my friends shop for fun, and it was as foreign as breathing underwater. I shopped as defense. I had pages and pages torn out of the J.Crew catalog of the clothes I would buy once I was thin. And as I shopped, I planned and dreamed for what I thought my life would be like when I was thin. I knew that it would be better, easier. But that life never came.

In high school, I tried to control myself like the anorexics I knew, but I always gave in. After a day or two days or a week of being good, of being precise and measured and powerful, I always lost control and ate cake that I had to put in the freezer so that I wouldn’t eat it, or pounds and pounds of peanut butter cups, until I was numb and hysterical and angry at my body all over again.

I knew the magic of bulimia was that you could eat and eat and then just throw up to get rid of it. instead of getting up at five in the morning to stairmaster for an hour, which was getting harder and harder for me. For a while, there was a little voice inside me that said making myself throw up was really over the line, and that a little dieting was one thing, but bulimia was another. At that point, I had already put myself on an entirely liquid diet and had been living on broth, black coffee, and sugar-free lime Jell-O. I’m not sure why throwing up seemed all that extreme.

The summer I was fifteen, I was at our cottage alone one day and had an idea. Summer was always particularly hard for me because of all the time at the beach and at camp, and because I always felt the expectation, the ticking clock, that soon I would go back to school and this would be the year that I would finally be skinny, and that I would finally be happy.

I learned in health class that if you drink poison, you should drink Syrup of Ipecac to get the poison out of your stomach. So I rode my bike to the drugstore in town and bought a tiny bottle of it and a gallon of ice cream. I figured for my first time, I wanted to throw up something soft and melty, like ice cream, instead of, for example, steak or Chex Mix. I ate a whole bunch of the ice cream, and then I took a bit of the syrup, the recommended dosage. I waited ten minutes or so, and was worried that maybe I took the infant amount, so I swallowed another little bit. And within another ten minutes, something totally beyond description happened in that cottage and in my body. Throwing up is horrible, but if regular throwing up is like putting a car into reverse, this was like putting a car into reverse and hitting a hundred miles an hour backward. It was otherworldly and scary.

Shauna Niequist
Shauna Niequisthttp://www.shaunaniequist.com
Shauna Niequist is the New York Times best-selling author of Cold Tangerines, Bittersweet, Bread & Wine, Savor, and Present Over Perfect. She is married to Aaron, and they live in Chicago with their sons, Henry & Mac. Shauna is a bookworm, a beachbum, and a passionate gatherer of people, especially around the table. See more from Shauna on her website.

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