shapeshifting
Almost exactly three years ago now, I started taking Lexapro for what had become an endless, unmanageable episode of anxiety and depression. Therapists had recommended medication for me before, and I'd always shrugged them off. I wasn't sick enough, I said; I didn't want to be one of those people, I said. What I did not say, but knew in my bones: I was not ready to take the risk of gaining any weight, a common side effect of most SSRIs.
My time in the trenches of disordered eating was, relatively speaking, brief and mild; when I was in my late teens, I started running and doing yoga and skipping meals. People noticed. They liked it. Boys would appear out of nowhere to tell me so in the halls at school. (I swear to god I am not making this up, even though it sounds, even to myself, like something you would have to make up, because it's so on the fucking nose.)
Gradually, I phased out the meal-skipping, and eventually the running, too, but most of the weight that had come off in that initial push stayed off, and I stayed thin through my binge-drinking, frites-and-pizza eating college years, and then the ones that followed. Through my mid- and even into my late twenties, I could still wear dresses I'd bought in high school; my body was docile, yeilding quietly to my demand that it stay girlish, stay slight, stay exactly the same.
At the apex of the anxiety, right around when I turned 30, I couldn't eat. I don't mean I didn't want to; I mean that I physically could not do it. My throat wouldn't swallow. I lost more weight. I was probably the thinnest I've ever been when I took my first dose of Lexapro, standing on the street in front of the pharmacy because I couldn't even wait to get home, I was so graspingly desperate to start feeling even the littlest bit better.
What can I tell you? I got better. And I got bigger. It's not the Lexapro, at least not entirely; around the same time I started taking it, I also I started boxing and lifting weights, which added bulk. And I started eating again, and not only eating, but eating more than I ever had in my life. (Even when the anxiety wasn't catastrophic, it was always, I've realized in the years since I started treating it effectively, fucking up my appetite.) Plus for which, I just got older. To some extent, this is just my body doing what bodies do.
But it's been difficult to deal with all the same. For years, I was a walking billboard for my own self-discipline: you could see exactly how hard I was working in the trim of my waist. I believed with my whole young dumb heart that if I could just stay a size [redacted, doesn't matter], I could-- I don't even know what, but it seemed really important, like my life depended on it. I needed to make sure everyone knew I wasn't messy, wasn't changeable-- wasn't subject to any law but my own iron will.
My mind got away from me; I got my mind back, and my body shifted. I made the trade between the two gladly. (It helps, of course, to still be small enough to avoid discrimination of any kind.) Now when I think about trying to lose weight, I can't help balking. I've never gotten thinner because I was happy, or stable, or sane. But I still think about it. I still-- anyway. You know how those stupid, shitty, uselessly self-defeating thoughts go.
The point of this, really, is that there is a big-ass picture of me in a bikini on the internet today, accompanying an essay I wrote about going to Mexico and travel photography and "living in the moment," whatever that means. It's not actually a big deal, the picture; it's a photo of straight-sized white girl in a location so beautiful that her body is hardly the point. But it feels-- it feels like a lot of things.
I would say I'm highly ambivalent about it, equal parts proud and ashamed, and then ashamed of the shame, because all of my politics and all of my values know that size is a stupid measurement of self. And yet my feelings, as usual, don't know shit.
Mostly, I wanted to write this because I wanted say the words I gained weight, and be allowed to present that as a neutral fact. My body changed. My mind is struggling to catch up. It's just where I'm at right now. I'd rather be here than any of the places I've been before, so that's good, I think. And I am making progress. On the best days, I think of these pounds-- the muscle and the fat-- as something like my tattoos: nothing more or less than evidence that there's someone in here, living as best she can in this fragile and unpredictable skin.
Phewwwww, feels weird to follow up that whole thing with, like, links and shit! But for real, please do read the essay. And if you're new to this Tinyletter (a lot of you are this week, I don't know where you came from but hi), juuuuust FYI you can now pre-order my book from your local independent bookstore via Indiebound. Here is a thread on why that, specifically, is one of the best thing you can do to support an author.
Also, on a non-literary note: perhaps you were also gleefully watching Tuesday's election returns! There is perhaps nothing in the world that I like more than watching a Republican lose his job. I particularly like it when I know I've had some small hand in making that happen, which is why I will encourage you to (if you're not already) get involved with some kind of activist group, especially now that we're within a year of the 2020 election. I've been volunteering with Sister District, which focuses on state-level races, for two years now, and it's one of the only ways I've stayed (semi)sane throughout.
On that note, a couple of pieces from the archives: one on various types of activism from last November, and another about how, weirdly, it turns out, I love to canvass.