A Body of Contradictions

I know a lot of words.  Beautiful words, descriptive words, lyrical words: indigo, gubernatorial, pugnacious, nascent, plop, roan, slalom, egress, gelatinous, glib.

I also know a lot of really ugly words.  Words that cut and bruise and appall.  And one word in particular seems to have played an outsized role in my life so far.  No pun intended.

"Fat" is a very ugly word for me, as I imagine it is for a lot of people: a single, loaded, and surprisingly aggressive syllable, inflected and dripping with invisible emotional punctuation.  I don't so much say the word as spit it out, like a bullet or a challenge. 

When I was twelve, my family went on a ski vacation, and before we left, my mom gave me an old pair of her ski pants to try on to see if they fit.  They did, but barely.

It's worth noting that my mother is 5'11 and had worn those pants well into her thirties.  I was probably about 5'2 or 5'3 at that point and just tipping over the cusp into puberty.

I remember standing in my parents' bedroom in the house where I grew up and enjoying the way the unyielding, waterproof fabric seemed to squish me into a thinner form.  I don't remember exactly what my mother said, but I can take a pretty good guess, which is that she sighed, and said something like, "I used to be so skinny."

I don't know if my mom said “fat” in that instance, but she often did.  Whether explicit or implicit, self-reproach and self-loathing were mundane, painful, and ever present throughout most of my life.

There are a lot of things we never talked about in my family when I was growing up.  One of them was that for many years my mother was anorexic, and that diets and eating disorders have been part of our family's status quo for decades.  Anorexia was one of those things that happened in health books and to unhappy teenagers-- not to good families, who lived in subdivisions, were never divorced, and were chock-full of high achieving daughters. 

When I began to put together the pieces about my mother's eating disorders-- the history, the contradictions, the painful reality-- it was cathartic to actually put a name to it.  And make no mistake, it's hugely powerful to name something, especially with a name that should signal all sorts of trouble and some very serious ramifications.  Unsurprisingly, though, my planting of that flag in my own mind didn't really change anything in my family, nor did it change anything fundamental in my own fraught relationship with food.  Still, it was meaningful.  It made the problem real for me as a problem: this thing is real and it has a name, regardless of whether or not we use it.

The way I say “eating disorder” sounds more like throwing a gauntlet than a diagnosis.

In one memorable instance, I actively called out the inherent contradiction of my mother’s telling me that I was perfect as I was when she constantly fantasized about (and, I understand now, fetishized) her own past, anorexic body.  When I asked her how those two things could coexist, she didn't have an answer.

When I told my oldest sister, who is usually the most articulate and brutally honest of us, about this interaction, she was dumbfounded and impressed. 

"You actually said that?" she asked me, seeming to be almost as unnerved by my gumption as I was.  "Wow."

My sisters and I each have a thread in this narrative, and mine goes as far back as I do-- in fact, further.  My parents were desperate for another baby, and eventually my mother's doctor said to her pointblank that she could lose "those last ten pounds" from her already bare frame or she could have a baby.  Either/or.  So my very existence somehow both saved and ruined my mother's body, and I've been implicated in this whole system for the subsequent thirty years.

My goal here is not, by any stretch of the imagination, to make my mother into a villain.  The other thing we didn't really talk about, but that I had to put together for myself, was that my mother's father was an abusive shithead.  To him, my mother’s only worth was in being exceptionally beautiful, which she was and is.  My grandfather was a photographer, and from the moment my mom went, seemingly overnight, from awkward and gawky to screaming babe, she had a camera shoved in her face, right up until she married my dad.

For the record, my mom isn’t just gorgeous—she’s also exceptionally intelligent and one of the most loving people I have ever met.  She emits this frequency to which pretty much all mammals, and especially the small or wounded, gravitate.  The contradiction I called out hasn’t changed so much as I’ve learned to accept that something can be very real but make very little sense: that someone who has always loved me unconditionally also simultaneously, and unintentionally, taught me a very potent kind of self-loathing. 

As my middle sister told me once, our hating our bodies is because of her, but it's not her fault. 

More than that, I did not grow up in a bubble: the inclination for body-hatred was in no way alleviated by rampant and ridiculous expectations in popular culture, nor in the vicious sport of elementary and middle school mean girls.  All these causes are layered with, woven into, and enhanced by each other.  But in a way, causality and fault are sort of beside the point: I am the agent in my life, and as I close in on thirty, I want to start bloody acting like it.

What that meant for me is that I sought out a nutritionist, with the express if inarticulate goal of becoming "less screwed up about food."  I want to do it so that my darling boyfriend does not continue (as compassionately and kindly as he does) to experience whiplash from my dieting/indulging back and forth.  I want to do it because I want to have babies, and I want those babies not to learn anxiety, guilt, and self-loathing from me in any area, including food.  And, most importantly, I want to do it for myself, because all that anxiety, guilt, and self-loathing takes up an almost obscene amount of real estate in my mind.  Hell, if I manage to shrink that footprint, I could probably learn to knit or speak German again.  A worthy goal if ever I set one.

Of course, I speak only for myself, and I speak for myself as I am thinking about it right now.  As I admitted to my best friend, this may just be the glow of a new way of thinking about eating-- a lot of diets have that "new plan" smell too.  It's possible my enlightenment is more self-congratulatory than bone-deep.  But for the moment, it's working.

It’s not a straight line, and it’s not all forward progress.  It never is.  Nevertheless, if hating my body is something I learned, then I think it’s certainly worth the effort of unlearning it.  And if it’s more like a word or a language, maybe I can’t unlearn it so much as put it aside, not speak it, remove myself from unthinking immersion in that culture, and ultimately, forget it. 

It’s doubtful that I’ll ever forget the definition of the word “fat,” but maybe its meaning can change.  And maybe, someday, it can just be another word.

(Untitled)

Monet's Waterlilies

Robert Hayden

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

In my office, I have this poem printed out and hanging on my pinboard.  It was one of the first personal touches I added when I arrived in the stark little basement room to start my new job.  I wrote about this poem my senior year of college, focusing especially on the line that I am still convinced is one of the more beautiful ever crafted in the English language: “The eye like the eye of faith believes.”

Today, though, as I flipped over to the New York Times website to take a quick break from a project, that was not the line that came to me.  Today, it is the news from Boston that poisons the air like fallout, and I had a sudden need to “come again to see / the serene, great picture that I love.”

My serene great picture is a symbolist painting of an orchard.  I’m a Mannerist fan by preference and a Modernist student by trade (trade being a very, very loose term), but this particular painting is intensely important to me.  After I left my museum job for a graduate program, and realized graduate school sucks, I found myself on a regular basis trudging downstairs to the mental health services department at my university.  I had thought that the Boulder air would be like one of those Victorian spas—it would cure me of all ill-humors and palpitations.  When it didn’t turn out like that, I made my way back to therapy. 

In the lower level of the health services building, they had a small, low quality reproduction of that orchard painting.  I had liked it before I left the museum but hadn’t paid much attention to it.  It was actually kind of ubiquitous: we used it on some of the promotional materials in my department.  In grad school, far from the place I had belatedly realized was home, missing my job and my life in Boston, that painting came to stand for the things I missed.  I’ll admit: I would do some combination of pouting and/or sighing whenever I walked by that reproduction.  It became the shadow of my joy.

Through no small amount of luck, I actually ended up going back to the same museum to a different job after I graduated (though, admittedly, four months and a case of shingles occurred in the interim).  Now, when I’m having a rough day, or I just need a break, I go and visit that painting.  It’s not as huge as Monet’s painting at the MoMA, to which Hayden is referring, but it is serene, and it is great, and I love it.

And I needed it today.

What I found when I flipped over to the NYT website was that the Boston bomber had been given the death penalty.  When the bombs went off two years ago, I was in Boulder, but I felt my heart crack.  That Friday, when the city was on lockdown and the streets were eerily empty, I watched through the news at a distance.  I was so distracted that I came clean with the classes I taught that day: “My hometown is on lock down.  I’m no good to anybody right now.”

In the last several months as the trial has proceeded, I’ve heard about it almost every morning on NPR.  It’s odd to me to think that the trial has been a part of my morning routine since before the city was pounded by blizzard after blizzard—a succession of arctic Mondays—and now through to apple trees blooming and lilacs going gangbusters.  I don’t know why I thought the penalty verdict would take longer in coming, but I was taken aback when I saw the headline.  I didn’t bother finishing the article, but stood up, went upstairs to the galleries, and stood in front of my painting, shoulders hunched forward and trying to keep a straight face.

I’m one of the thousands—probably millions—of people on the outskirts of the Boston bombing.  I’ve written about how extremely lucky I was that all of my people were safe, and that I was able to get a hold of them immediately.  I make no claims to the caliber of loss that so many people have had to endure.  Still, as someone who loves Boston—and goddamn, I love this city—the bombing touched my life, and now, so has this verdict.

I don’t support the death penalty.  That’s such a broad statement to make, but it’s true.  In addition to the irrefutable fact that the justice system is not infallible, and is in fact in many cases deeply broken, I really just don’t believe that there is any justice in taking a life as the punishment for taking a life, or lives.  It’s a gross tautology.  And as the parents of one victim pointed out, the death penalty appeals and ongoing coverage will keep him in the news and those wounds open so much longer than if they had locked him up and thrown away the key. 

So often, it feels like the air is poisoned, that we are surrounded by such senseless, systemic violence.  Or worse, that the “sense” people use to rationalize violence is horribly perverted, that they think the system is somehow adequately self-justifying.  I try to think of what it feels like—“the aura of that world each of us has lost”—and sometimes it’s really hard to come up with.

I don’t have any articulate conclusions.  I haven’t really learned anything among my ruminations on Robert Hayden, paintings of orchards, and death penalty verdicts.  It’s a fucking mess.  

The eye of faith may believe, but sometimes the heart has a really hard time reconciling it all.

It's the Same Old Song: Revised (or, Reading on a Rollercoaster)

The first essay I ever wrote purposefully for this blog was entitled "It's the Same Old Song," and it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, about my oldest sister.

What might be surprising, though, is that in the almost six years since I've written it, the desperate, open wound of my desire for her to like me has somehow-- miraculously-- healed.  Or, I suppose, if not healed, then certainly scabbed over.  Sometimes in conversation with her I will experience a kind of ghost sensation, a memory of my desperation for her to see me, acknowledge me, like me.  It's a very old, very familiar feeling, but it's very much fainter than it was in the past.  It feels as though it belongs to someone else, and in a way, it does: it belongs to who I was, not who I am.  And to be fair, both of us are making every effort to have our relationship exist between who we are now, not who we've been.  We're entering new territory, which is slow-going and difficult, but ultimately worth the effort to break out of our well-worn paths.

The funny thing about familial relationships is that, at least in my experience, they are often repetitive: the arguments and the hurts are more often than not patterned after arguments and hurts long past.  Two quotations come to mind, from wildly different sources.  From Albert Einstein, physicist, we know that insanity is the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  And Frank Turner, post-punk part-time-folk general bad-ass musician, aptly sings: "We slip back into grooves that we cut in ourselves long ago."

Same old insanity, same old grooves: it's the same old song.

I have a very vivid memory from when I was in college, home for a break, when after an argument with my sister, I felt as though I was coming over an emotional rise and could see the entire and entirely familiar roller coaster of emotions coming at me.  I believe my response was something like, "Aw crap, here we go again."  In spite of being able to see my reaction coming, the complete and predictable succession of emotions I always seem to have after fights with any one member of my family, at that time I could not avoid them.  

It was like adding insult to injury: not only was I experiencing less than pleasant emotions, I was also suffused with a kind of irritation at their tedium, because I had experienced them all before, in the same order, from the same cues, many, many times.  And I just couldn't quite figure out how to stop it: lap bar firmly clamped over my legs, and away we go.  Oy.

When we talk colloquially about growing up, I think we're most often referring to childhood and adolescence, which strikes me as kind of misleading.  "Growing up" as an idea is actually kind of teleological: it seems to imply a kind of end point after which you will be "grown up," as if you'll ever be done "becoming" (I do beg your pardon, sometimes my inner grad student claws her way to the surface).  For my part, I was surprised when my therapist pointed out that some of the progress I've made in the last couple of years has actually been my growing up. 

I feel that progress most acutely in those moments when I feel the flicker of my old reactions: faint, peripheral, and seemingly on fast forward.  

One of the longest running insecurities I have harbored in my immediate family is that my life is less important than my sisters': because they are so much older than I am, by the time I reach their milestones, they are already on to the next.  When I was graduating high school, they were getting graduate degrees.  When I got my graduate degree, they were having babies.  The things I do in my own real-time seem to pale in comparison.  The babies thing is particularly stinging, as I also have the sensation that there is a serious premium in our family placed on procreation.  Unsurprisingly, when one of these insecurities is alerted-- either by something as faint as a potential resonating frequency or something as direct as a button firmly pushed-- I have a familiar set of reactions.  Thankfully, though, the intensity of my reactions is changing.

Recently, I kind of got the short end of the stick, because I don't have kids.  For the record, I really do understand that having small children is very, very difficult, and sometimes you just need help.  However, other people's needing something can become a pattern of their needs being more important than mine: from visits truncated to bedrooms confiscated to schedules up-ended, it just kind of happens.  And in spite of the apparent necessity of these situations, it kind of ends up sucking for me.  The truncated visit was a recent one, and the other night I told my mom I understood (and I did, and do) that the kiddos are the priority.

"But you're my priority too!" she protested.  I could practically hear her hand-wringing.  She's not unaware of the uneven distribution of resources, though that seldom changes the reality.

"Well," I said reasonably, chopping an onion in my kitchen, "okay, kind of.  But by definition, a priority is a priority.  Somebody has to win.  And that's not me.  And I get it."

The weird thing was, in that moment, I really did get it: I wasn't acting or being passive aggressive.  I was being as reasonable as I actually felt, which is exceptionally novel when dealing with my family (I've found a home-field advantage is extremely helpful in these situations).  Faintly, as if at a great distance, I saw my hurt go through its motions.  Did it still hurt?  Sure, but mundanely, not acutely. 

The funny thing was, after I got off the phone, I knew that if I dwelt too long in my self-congratulation for having become so mature, I'd probably accidentally back myself over a cliff into the hissy fit I thought I'd avoided.  So I put in my headphones, and "Rollercoaster" came on.  I suddenly had a strange image of myself as an adult on a roller coaster from my childhood (specifically Six Flag's "Raging Bull," if memory serves).  I imagined myself reading a book: eyes downcast and attention focused on the page as the world whips around me; hurdling through space, aware of it, but not particularly phased.

A very strange image, but a very comforting one too.  So yeah, maybe it is the same old song, but with a different meaning after so long...

The Question of Collectives

Collective nouns tend to be one of those weird niches of language that is consistently entertaining, whether alliteratively ("a bellow of bullfinches," "a lounge of lizards"), in joke form ("What do you call two crows on a branch?  Attempted murder"), or in personal improvisation ("a stump of corgis").  I was thinking about this the other day in terms of something of the two-legged variety: what is the collective noun for ex-boyfriends?

I ask because it got a little crowded the other morning.

I was sleeping over at my boyfriend's house.  At 6'4, he's a remarkably considerate sleeper: he lays down on his back and conks out completely.  Towards the morning, he might roll over once, but that's it.  Unlike me, he does not magnetically gravitate towards the dead center of the bed and then rotate myself regularly throughout the night like a roast on a spit.  This weekend, in the early morning when he had rolled over onto his side, I found myself staring at his back.

 And then there were three of us in bed, because I was remembering what turned out to be the last morning with the last person I was really in love with.  He had rolled over as well, and I hesitated to curl up against him.  Whatever we had been, which had never been terribly clear, was over, and I was just realizing it.  It had probably been over for a while, but that was the instant that it really hit, and I was crushed.

Back in the present and later in the morning, when my honey and I managed to haul ourselves out of bed towards the goal of making French toast, he tossed me a pair of his pajama pants to wear downstairs.  I had slept in his Moby Dick shirt and added a hoodie for good measure.  At 5'6 (on a good day), I was swimming in everything except the slippers, because I had brought those myself. 

And then there were four, because my most recent ex, whom in retrospect I have come to loathe, always wanted me to look just so-- he professed hatred for my beloved and beat to hell Dartmouth sweats and would whine when I looked anything less than his version of presentable (if you're wondering how I ever came to date this guy, believe me, I'm still asking myself the same question).  Standing in a bedroom two years later, I hoped that I looked kind of adorable in ridiculously outsized PJs, but the stupid ex still popped up to rankle.

On the couch downstairs, we were cuddled up with French toast and "The Soup" on DVR, and the topic somehow came around to gay marriage.  The man in whose arms I was wrapped (and whose French toast I was happily consuming) expressed his frustration at states' dragging their feet over gay marriage.  He told me he just didn't understand how people could continue to be so bigoted.  I expressed my profound agreement but was wise enough to keep mum about the fact that my last long term boyfriend-- who had turned out to be a bit of a bigot himself, which is why I broke up with him-- had just appeared on the recliner next to us.

"Intrusion" as a collective noun is already assigned to cockroaches (insert obvious joke as needed).  Maybe we go with a "haunting" of exes?  Something to think about...

There are those who have said to me in the past that I have terrible taste in men.  I'm willing to admit that there is potentially some truth in that statement on the face of it, but when you go a little deeper, it gets a little more complicated.  Because if I have terrible taste in men, I will always choose terrible men.  Following that strain of logic, is anyone to whom I am remotely attracted ultimately destined to be a shmuck, a bigot, or an idiot? 

God what an awful thought.

For the sake of argument, let's just look at my love life as it is at this very moment: I am dating a man who is very goofy, kind, affectionate, thoughtful, hilarious, and (as I mentioned) tall. He has given me absolutely no reason to doubt him in any way.  We are making plans in the short and medium term.  Things are good-- hell, things are great.

So then why is it so crowded?  Why the haunting?

It makes me a little sad that my boyfriend can make me so exceptionally happy, but that there are times when I still find myself amidst an invisible haunting of ex-boyfriends.  Because I'm not dating them-- with good reason I might add-- I'm dating him.  And I am bat-shit, "Mitzi Gaynor tap-dancing on an overturned rowboat" crazy about him.  Still, most of us bear some degree of scars or skittishness from previous experience.  Sometimes it's very hard to negotiate the warp and weft of a happy present and a less than happy past.  Suffice to say, it can get a little bumpy.

Having spent so much of my life living in my head, I find that one of the scariest and most obvious things about a relationship is that it is with another person.  You can't know what's going on in someone's head all the time-- I mean, really, I don't know what's going on in my own head half the time.  What that means is you can't know the moment when something changes, why it did, or necessarily how to fix it.  You also can't necessarily depend on the things you've learned in the past from other people to be accurate or helpful in the next scenario.

And that is terrifying in a way I think that only falling in love can be terrifying: loving someone's insides (and boy howdy, his outsides too) but being unable to control or even really predict them.  It's ironic, because in a way, I figure that's what love should be: that dumbstruck fascination with someone who is really his or her own person entire.  Not to state the obvious, but love is then, by definition, just bloody terrifying.  But, of course, y'know, in the best way...

My relationship experiences have not been stellar.  That doesn't mean they've all been completely awful either, but I still find myself on the twitchy side, which makes my impression of a normal, balanced human being even more hard to maintain sometimes.  The most terrifying part of all, though, is that he seems to like my crazy parts, that my impersonation of normalcy is totally unnecessary.  I am aware, though, that there is a line between occasionally, adorably twitchy and persistent, paranoid basket-case.  Let's just say I'm working on finding that balance.

Maybe what it ultimately comes down to is the fact that I have a hard time trusting that this wonderful human being would be genuinely crazy about me too, because often I have felt as if there is something about me that's-- quite frankly-- romantically off-putting.  And the only thing I can do to combat that feeling is trust this man, be honest with him, and be as good to him as I know how to be.  There's even the possibility that there are some ghosts of girlfriends past that are visible only to him.  I figure the best way to exorcise them-- and my own ghosts-- is to do one of the hardest and best things I can think of:

To be terrified, yes, but more importantly, to love.  Crazily, un-self-consciously, weirdly, intensely, and in all directions at once, such that the sheer volume of it will simply shove all those ex-boyfriends-- and maybe some of that terror-- collectively straight out the window.

And then it'll be a perfect collective of two.  Not to be too precious about it, but how about a "smitten"?

Again, something to think about.