Accept It All

In the last week, Michael and I have been planning a trip for later this summer. We never really took a honeymoon–a whirlwind trip to East Tennessee in 2019, while beautiful, was so packed with things to do that it wasn’t the rest we’d hoped for. So this year we will road trip to Georgia to wander among old cemeteries and eat all the seafood and lay by the ocean and remember that nothing matters as much as “the love that let us share a name”.

And I am so looking forward to every minute. To the road trip books I’ll read as Michael drives–he prefers the role of chauffeur, and who am I to deny him? To the podcasts we’ll listen to intermittently, to the New Wave station on Sirius XM, to the shades of green that shift and stir across the states as we wing east. I’m looking forward to the heat and the sun and the space to breathe, but I’m dreading how my body will look in any photo taken along the way.

Is it embarrassing to admit that dread? To share that in recent years–since a 40 pound weight gain due to an IUD and the irrevocable march of age began to track it’s clunky bootprints across my skin–I think about it more than I’d like?

The day after my 20th birthday, I moved to Florida with four suitcases and $400 and a body I believed was imperfect. Convinced by magazines and MTV and a million insecurities, I was certain there was a better, thinner self I was supposed to be. To combat those debilitating thoughts, and to pay my share of the bills which I split with my then boyfriend, I worked two jobs and failed spectacularly at trying to go to classes at Hillsborough Community College. When I moved home in 1998, I was fifteen pounds heavier and convinced love was something other people got to have. I entered a phase of eating and drinking too much, numbing myself to the terror of being alone forever, that lasted 12 years.

Somewhere around 2010, as I was approaching divorce, I threw myself into a new phase: fitness and calorie counting. I dropped forty pounds by living at the gym instead of at home where my marriage was falling apart, and I watched every bite I ate as though a single slip could mean disaster.

Neither phase was healthy.

Then, the weight crept back up with new birth control–Mirena, thy name is poison–and now I’m at my highest weight, a solid 100 pounds more than I am in this photo. I am planning a dream vacation with the love of my life, and all I can think about is how terrible I’ll look in every photo, how much I hate the extra weight in my upper arms–bat wings, bingo wings, babysitter arm (choose your preferred euphemism)–how sweaty and plain old fat I’ll feel when I should be loving every second of my trip. It’s pre-anxiety–the kind that comes before the thing you know you’re going to be anxious about–and it is as annoying as it is real.

Growing up, I was never the biggest girl in class, but I had the biggest reaction when bullied about my weight. I didn’t cry: I got angry. Walking home from grade school, two boys in our neighborhood pestered me relentlessly until I hit my breaking point and hit them with the insult I’d just learned from Pretty in Pink. Channeling Andrew McCarthy, I told them “I think you’re shit, and deep down you know I’m right.” Later, when a group of boys bounced on their metal bleacher seats to insinuate I’d made the earth move after jumping during a cheer (yes, America, I was a seventh grade cheerleader), I raised my arm and cocked it, ready to pop the littlest Jeremy (there were five in my class) in his smug, little shit-ass face. I didn’t let anyone who spoke ill of me get away with it.

But now those bullying voices and terrible taunts are my own. I’m the one whispering mean asides about my body; it’s my voice labeling all the things that are wrong. Disgusting. Flabby. So funking fat.

I wouldn’t let anyone speak to someone I love the way I speak to myself, but some days it is hard to add myself to the list, especially when culturally there is the assumption that an overweight person is a bad one–lazy, irresponsible, unworthy. I can know these labels aren’t true and still feel them deep in my x-ray confirmed oversized heart.

This post isn’t meant to elicit sympathy or to solicit compliments or to raise a red flag–it’s a public declaration that I have work to do. It is my attempt to acknowledge that I am smart and kind and giving and hard working and that a lower weight would make me healthier and happier and that, occasionally I live in the dank and dark corners of self-consciousness and insecurity that make trying to lose weight a struggle it’s hard to explain.

The trick, of course, is to not live in the darkness too long. To plan the vacation, to pack the bikini, to believe in your right to take up space and be exactly as you are at any given moment. To know that pretending the darkness doesn’t exist only dims the light by association. So, I’m trying to accept it all.

Including myself.