I threw up for hours, and it was like my body was a fire hose, and the force of what was coming out tossed me around like a doll. It was gross and painful, and I had to clean up the cottage for hours, because I kept thinking I was finally finished, and then without notice, would throw up some more. When it was finally over, I laid on the ground, my throat raw and totally exhausted.
And I did it again. You would think that I learned my lesson, that the horror of it put me off, and I saw the error in the sickness of my ways. No. I did it a few more times, with similar superhuman results, and each time I did it, it felt like some sort of cosmic battle, like I might vomit out my soul, but I also felt powerful and in control, which is something I never felt about my body. After a few times, though, I started to get scared and went back to tamer ways of abusing my body, like only eating at night, or only eating fat-free Cool Whip and mandarin orange Diet Rite.
It didn’t occur to me then that there was a way to live in my body, my too-big body, without shame and abuse. It seemed like it was my responsibility to punish it, and that if I had been kind to it, that would have been permitting or sanctioning its disobedience. I believed, literally and figuratively, that if I released my hold on it, released the hatred and the pressure by an inch, it would expand, I would expand, like rising dough, like cupcake batter puffing up and spilling over the pan.
What I wanted more than anything was to not have a body. This body that I dragged around had been my enemy for so long and had betrayed me so deeply, over and over, by having the audacity to be fat. I hated, the particular and venomous way you hate someone you used to love, someone who was supposed to be on your side and wasn’t, and who was in fact, fighting against you.
I was a spirit and a mind unfortunately trapped in rather bad packaging, like a bad ad campaign for a genuinely good product. I felt strongly misrepresented by my body, like when you put a silver ring in a toaster-oven box and wrap it, and then the person thinks they’re getting an appliance, but they’re really getting a ring. I felt like my body was inaccurate in its representation of me, and that made me furious with it.
After two decades of frustration and shame, these days, owing to several small and large miracles, for the fist time in my life, I am less than hateful toward my body, and in shining moments, even quite kind to it. Month by month, I work hard to see it less and less as this other thing, this distant distinct shell, and more like a nice person that I might like to be friends with. The last few years have felt like traveling back a cosmic distance to rejoin these two entirely separate entities, my spirit and my body.
I don’t know if it was the sum of several things coming together, or if it was my age, or God’s graciousness and that all my prayers over two decades finally landed in the right inbox, or that I lost my baby fat later than all the other babies, but at a certain point, I lost weight. After a year of hard work and gradual, incremental change, all of a sudden, there I was, there at the place I had imagined all my life. I shopped for fun and even started assuming things would fit. I shared clothes with my girlfriends and my mom, and felt like I finally joined a sorority I’d been barred from. I stopped having panic attacks in dressing rooms. I ordered things online, and they fit, with no alterations. In the course of a year or so, I became a person who can get dressed without a boatload of self talk.