Here's my third installment in my writing project: writing one piece a month to send out for the Sun Magazine's Reader's Write section. Let me know what you think!
I’m trying to make the bowl of warm quinoa topped with veggies and a spicy, aromatic marinara sauce in front of me last. I’m trying to hear my body say, “That’s enough, you’ve eaten all you need.” I’m trying to ignore the voice saying, “Eat it quick! It’s getting cold! It tastes so good, you know you want it. It will calm you down. Eat it!” I’m trying to make this brand new, fragile hope last: that I can actually lose the eighteen pounds I’ve regained of the seventy I lost three years ago.
When I had lost forty pounds, I realized that I might actually be successful at reaching my natural weight, and this freaked me out. I remember having nightmares that I’d woken up, walked into the bathroom, and seen my old fatter self reflected in the mirror. I was afraid of gaining back all the weight I’d lost. Not because I hated being fat, but because I feared being a failure.
I was so frustrated one night that I got out of bed and put all of my too-big clothes in boxes and drove them to the Goodwill drop-off at three in the morning in the middle of a downpour. I tucked them as best I could under an awning, and thought: Without these clothes, I can’t gain back the weight. I won’t. A year and a half after I’d kept the seventy pounds off, I got a long, wide arching tattoo on my torso in honor of the woman I was before I lost weight, because she’d taught me a lot about strength and beauty and because she wasn’t ever going to exist in flesh again.
But, I have not kept it all off. Six months ago, I let food catch me as I spiraled after a romantic disappointment and the ensuing single-girl anxiety. Consistently comforting, consistently satisfying, consistently sweet, consistently consistent, my relationship with food has always been the one to last.
But after months of frustration and confusion at my choice to regularly eat when I am not hungry, I’ve asked the question, “Do I really want this new body, and the life that came with it, to last?” Do I want to feel lithe and airy when I am running? Do I want to radiate with the confidence that comes from doing what I’d believed for so long was impossible? Do I want to be free from obsessing about my next meal?
Yes. A small, hopeful yes that’s lit a fire under the possibility that I can find my way back to my real body, that I can find my way back to myself. That I can make it last.
