CW: cancer, eating disorders, pregnancy loss, dysmorphia

The radiation treatment was located near a mall, where a jeweler could take a link out of Jon's watch to keep it from sliding on his wrist so much. It was 2019, and he had rapidly lost 30 lbs before we even knew it was cancer. After the appointment, we headed over to the jeweler, making what seemed to be a normal request, and then the reaction came after the answer to "What brings you in?"

"I need a link removed because I've lost some weight..."

"Congratulations!"

---

When my first pregnancy ended in stillbirth, I was beyond shattered. I had spent years losing weight to try to boost my fertility. I had left a job that had wrecked my soul and the only thing I felt I had left was to try to morph myself into the default duty of my flesh, and in the end, I couldn't even get that right. The betrayal was acute. I had never had a good relationship with my body, and so after I started to physically heal I started to run away from my problems. I dieted, counting every bite, I ran 3-4 times a week. I trained for a half-marathon. I ran in shoes with no cushioning, Vibram Fivefingers. Movement was the only solace I had to the feelings I had when I sat still. I called it "spontaneous combustion." Sitting still made me feel like I was going to burn up from the inside out.

You get a lot of praise when you lose more than 30 pounds. Even more when it's over 70. And then people who would never talk to you start looking at you, striking up conversation. You're no longer invisible. Friends start talking about your fat self as if it was a different person, letting their mask down, letting you know all the things they thought but never felt comfortable telling your fat self. You see yourself in the mirror, and here's the dysmorphia, you look at the same thin models in the magazines and they start looking less thin. The dysmorphia is not just in the mirror, you see.

Two live kids, chronic pain, and being a caregiver for a spouse with cancer, and I'm back to being the weight I've been a majority of my post-puberty life. Part of it is eating disorder, most of it is dissociation and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

A year ago, by profound tenacity and years of not having the right treatment for my depression and anxiety, I got on an SSRI, and the OCD that had run so much of my life, and contributed so much of my food and body issues started to ebb, but not fully recede.

Since December, I've lost about 7 lbs, and the scale keeps going down. I am trying really hard to not diet, as in, not do that mental calculus of how much I've eaten and expended. I have removed my Apple watch, so I don't have so many alerts, and so I don't have that way to obsess over every body metric. I'm going to a barre class 3 times a week, mostly for benefits of mobility, core strength, and chronic pain treatment. I do yoga once a week to settle my head. I eat when I'm hungry - they call this "intuitive eating" and I have never in my life, until recently, had a sense of what my body needed.

Don't congratulate me.

Above all, I am desperately trying to hold on to why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's scary, honestly. In 2009-2010, my post-pregnancy loss shrinking was a cry for help when I felt abandoned. The therapists I found were mostly shitty, and it was a time again in my life where I felt the only person that could get me out was me. I don't want to go there again.

This time feels different... maybe because the OCD isn't driving me to torture myself in penance for a betrayal that wasn't under my control.

Maybe I've forgiven myself. Maybe in the six years I fought like hell, I didn't cure Jon's cancer, but I gave him the best end-of-life a person could get, and I have my kids, still give my kids the best I can. Maybe that's good enough.

And maybe now it's back to me and just trying to figure out how to be deliberate and kind to this vessel in as long as it cooperates with my mind.

And that has to be enough.