Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life (26 page)

Once I started paying attention while eating, so many things were not fun anymore: fast food, soda, stale Halloween candy. No wonder I didn’t want to pay attention to the rest of my life. That was the sneaky magic of mindfulness, I realized. One plate at a time, it was dragging me, kicking and screaming, into adulthood.

L
ife as it was on the day I turned thirty could not have been more impressive to my twenty-something self.

Harry asked me to meet him on the corner of Ludlow and Broome Street on the Lower East Side. Walking from the subway, I turned off my musical theater mix and clicked on the next episode of the
Radiolab
podcast, trying to calm down. I was far too nervous-excited to take off my headphones. Tomorrow I would try again to be a grown-up, but not tonight. I spied Harry outside a deli, looking down at his phone.

“Where are we going?!” I rushed up to him with a quick kiss, bouncing around on the slushy sidewalk. He took my hand and shook his head, suppressing a pleased-as-punch grin.

For my birthday dinner, he had planned a mysterious restaurant hop around downtown Manhattan. It was one of the most romantic, thoughtful things anyone had ever done for me. But that was just dinner. My birthday
gift
was flat-out ridiculous.

Harry had always been the better gift giver in our relationship, plotting creative and personalized presents months in advance. For his thirtieth, I’d taken him out to a dinner that cost my rent and a half. Not so creative, perhaps, but he’d been trying to get reservations for months, so for once I thought I’d nailed it.

“How am I ever going to top this?” he’d asked at the end of the meal.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I replied, smug with the certainty that I’d won this round.

A few months before my own birthday, he asked if I could put in for some vacation time in the summer. I thought maybe we were going to the beach. Then he asked if my passport was up-to-date.

I’d taken him to a restaurant, and Harry was taking me on an international, three-city mystery trip tailored specifically to my tastes and interests. I mean,
okay
, show-off.

He’d been plotting the itinerary for months but refused to give me a single clue until my actual birthday. Each stop in tonight’s restaurant hop corresponded to one of the locations we would visit. As we turned the corner onto Orchard Street, my heart thudded with anticipation. Harry stopped us in front of the door to a small, woodsy restaurant called Café Katja.

“Austria?!” I cried out. He smiled and shrugged.

Harry spilled the beans over plates of braised cabbage and thin, crispy pork cutlets. Salzburg would be our first stop. He’d used my childhood obsessions as inspiration for the trip, and Salzburg represented two of them:
The Sound of Music
and Mozart. On one of our first dates, I’d trotted out the story about my memorizing scenes from
Amadeus
as a kid, and (as I intended) he thought it both precocious and adorable. Many months later, when he officially loved me, I’d persuaded him to host a
Sound of Music
viewing party at his apartment, with the understanding that I would be singing along from start to finish. This, he found less adorable, but it had given him the idea to put Salzburg on our itinerary. From there, he explained, we’d hop a train to Vienna, where Mozart had lived and died. In between, we would stop in a spa town to eat cake and float around in saltwater pools.

“I love salt!”

“I know you do, baby!”

I had the sensation of being in a dream, bouncing around the city with my boyfriend as he teased me with more details of the magical adventure he had planned. Harry was an amateur travel junkie, so I knew this trip was as much of a treat for him, but still—this was movie-level romance. This was like
Gone with the Wind
, but without slavery, rape, or dead children. I’d known Harry was thoughtful and generous, but it was as if he’d remembered every anecdote I’d ever told him, every book I’d ever liked, and all the strange childhood interests I’d mentioned in the year and a half we’d been together. One interest in particular, it seemed.

In retrospect, I should have seen it coming. But when Harry stopped us in front of the Polish bar, I was still imagining us swimming through saltwater pools at a mountainside spa in Austria.

“What?” I asked.

He hesitated in front of the door. His face turned nervous; it was the expression of someone who just realized they were about to make a mistake.

“I—I’m taking you to Auschwitz.”

I froze. “Oh.”

“I mean. I know you always wanted to visit the memorial. So…”

“Are you serious?”

He opened the door to the bar. “Yeah?”

I followed him inside, still stunned.

“Oh no,” he moaned, sliding up beside me in a booth. “Did I do the wrong thing?”

“I’m just surprised,” I answered, trying to smile.

“That would just be part of it. We’d get to see Krakow, too, and I know how much you love Polish history and movies and everything.”

He was right. He knew me well.

“But we don’t have to do the Auschwitz tour, okay? We don’t even have to go to Poland if you don’t want to. It’s just—you always said how important it was.”

“Just give me a second, okay?”

Harry’s face deflated. My heart crumpled. He got up to order the beers.

It was true; I had always talked about visiting Auschwitz. It did feel important. Come on, hadn’t I been the kid who dragged her dad to the Holocaust museum? Hadn’t I been the one who went to Amsterdam for the Anne Frank House rather than hookers and weed? And wasn’t it incredible that my boyfriend, who would rather spend his vacation days, oh,
anywhere
but a concentration camp memorial museum, had made this incredible gesture?

Until this part of the evening, the trip had been a fantasy vacation. Now, it was all too real. Something about this announcement had yanked me back into reality.

I looked at Harry, waiting patiently for the bartender’s attention. It wasn’t just where we were going, but that we were going together. He was my real, live boyfriend. We were a grown-up couple going on a trip, with passports and everything. This wasn’t a frivolous, romantic getaway. At least, in part, it was going to be an experience neither of us would ever forget, and we were going to have it together. It was the most uniquely generous and personal gift I would ever receive. Holy
shit
, this guy loved me.

I felt unsettled and disoriented. The bar smelled rank and unfamiliar. I felt stuck to everything. Watching Harry order our beers, I started gaming out the possibilities. What if we get in a fight on the trip? Will he get pissed if I’m jet-lagged and cranky? What happens if I cry at Auschwitz and he doesn’t cry? Can you get mad at someone for not crying at Auschwitz? Would I have to break up with him if he didn’t?

I wanted to be home, in bed, playing Words with Friends and rewatching
The Office
. It would be perfect, so cozy and quiet and under my control. I could ignore my texts, pretend I was asleep, and just deal with it all in the morning, when everything would be better.

Stop. Please, stop this.

It wasn’t a thought, exactly. It was almost a voice. It sounded like the same internal voice that sat me down to eat at the table instead of on the floor in front of my television. I thought of it as the forty-year-old version of myself—the mythical me that was always just a few years down the line. Now, she came and sat beside me. She’d had it with this nonsense.

I had thought that when you hit bottom it was, like, the bottom. Meaning, your worst possible moment, definable and whole. I thought that if you did it right you didn’t have to do it again. And I’d done it exactly right. I’d crushed my bottom and turned it into a career.

But what happened in that bar—and again and again in the months to come—was another kind of bottoming out. Back in those woods, I’d finally stopped running, scrambling toward the next diet or the new fitness fad that would lead me to skinny nirvana. All fall and winter, I’d taught myself to be present with the food on my plate and the flesh on my body. Suddenly, though, it wasn’t just about the physical—the things I could taste and feel and see in a mirror. What did it matter if I was present in my body if I was so willfully absent from the world? I wanted to taste and feel and see all of that, too. Somehow, I had to quit running from my real life and give up on nirvana, period. It couldn’t wait until I was older or not so scared, because I’d just turned thirty and that meant I’d probably die someday.

With every story I escaped into and each commute I spent staring at my phone, I skipped out on seeing the people around me. Who knows? I might have passed by a celebrity! Those times that I nearly walked into traffic while performing a song in my head, I wasn’t just lost in the music, I was
walking into traffic
. All those movie plots I held up for comparison left my own precious life more lacking in my eyes. Every year I told myself that things would be better when I was older, when I got it together. Every year, it got harder to see that things were damn great just as they were.

My apartment would never be as nice as Sally’s, and my own Harry never raced to crash a New Year’s Eve party at midnight and deliver a dramatic monologue. I probably would have been kind of annoyed if he had. Instead, he was going to whisk me away on a trip around the world. He wanted to be with me for the fun and the hard parts. And, here I sat, pining for Netflix.

My existential crisis was winding down by the time Harry got back with the beer. I thanked him again for this evening, and for the astonishing gift he’d created for me. Life was ruthless and death was inevitable, but there were magic moments, and this was one of them. I wanted to feel it, through and through. We didn’t have a Zeffirelli score or Nora Ephron dialogue, only “Thank you” and “I love you,” and his hand squeezing mine back under the table. I had to pee and the music was loud. I was a little anxious and tired, and Harry kept blowing his nose. The bar was overheated, but when he scooted closer, I didn’t move away. Runny nose or not, you just don’t scoot away from the man who always squeezes your hand back. I took a breath in and let it out, tasting and feeling and seeing the moment, just as it was. I wanted, so badly, not to miss another.

A
ny good novelist would leave us there at the bar, holding hands and lesson learned. But that was just the decision to learn it. It was the first of many deep-breath moments, and one of the best. Mindfulness isn’t for wimps. When you decide to take off your headphones, relinquish future thinking, and let the real world flood your fantasy, there’s no telling what you’ll get. The only guarantee is that you get little say in any of it. That spring, as I learned to stand still for the first time in my life, eyes open and ears alert, I got a lot of good. I got lucky.

At first, I got quiet morning walks to the train, overhearing the funny little conversations of moms taking their first graders to the elementary school around the corner. I got long nights with Debbie and Chrissy, loafing on my cat-scratched sofa with no pizza, no wine, no movie to keep us company. What a wonder to realize we didn’t need dinner to hold our friendship together. All we needed was something to talk about, and there was always something to talk about. What a wonder, too, to spend Sunday mornings with Harry, having nothing much to say.

“How cool is this?!” I’d shout from the other end of the sofa, making him jump.

“What?”

“Just…this!” waving my arms around in what used to be our cozy silence.

I decided to wean myself off constant narration and background noise. I made a project of it with tiny, bite-size goals. I could listen to whatever I wanted at the gym, but had to walk to work afterward headphone free. I set a timer and taught myself to read books on paper again, twenty minutes at a time. I would not turn on the television as soon as I walked in the door, even if it just meant standing around chewing my lip for one deliberate minute, and then turning it on. That was one more minute in the real world, and that was where I wanted to live, even if life on
Downton Abbey
was a lot more interesting than mine on a Tuesday night. Like, a
lot
more interesting.

That was the other side of living consciously, and the truth I’d been fudging with fiction all these years. My life was not what I’d imagined it would be by this point. True, I had imagined it as some hyperbolic wonderland based on all the best parts of every movie I’d ever seen. That was a ridiculous expectation—a fact that everyone else seemed to have figured out a long time ago. Where had I been? Playing Candy Crush?

Facing real life for the first time at thirty, I sometimes sounded impossibly naïve, asking myself things like
Wait, what if I don’t become famous?
or
If I don’t have sex with Harry on Valentine’s Day, does that mean I don’t really love him?
In the past, I’d patched over all these worries with a quick hit of distraction.
Don’t think about it!
30 Rock
’s on! You’ll be just like Tina Fey! Later!
Now, I’d turned off the television and ripped off the bandage to reveal a host of untended wounds and stark realities. Without an arsenal of cheeseburgers and musical theater to manage them, every underlying issue came to the surface and demanded my attention.

There was the day in April, when I could not stop crying over a story that came back from my editor bleeding with the red ink of her edits. I spent the entire morning fake-sneezing into a tissue, hoping to explain away my red face. By afternoon I realized no one was buying it and spent the rest of the day openly desk-weeping in silence. I was raw to every criticism and flinched when I received anything but gold stars for my work. Silver stars were a slap in the face.
Useless
, something whispered inside me.
Why do you even try? You’re only embarrassing yourself. It’s time to quit and move away to start over someplace where nobody knows how awful you are.

I left for the gym one podcast-free morning, observing with mild horror as I locked, opened, and relocked the door three times in perfect succession. I thought back to the night before when I’d checked the same lock three times before bed, then my bedroom lock, then the windows, and then the living room windows. I stood there in the hallway, suddenly flooded with the nagging worries and unspeakable thoughts that had kept me up every night that week, my mind scrambling to solve a puzzle but only finding more loose pieces.

It had been years since I’d thought about my knee-banging and prayer rituals. I had long ago outgrown the childhood demon that had kept me bruised and terrified for years. Or perhaps I had just quieted its waspish little voice. Maybe I’d learned to drown it out by singing at the top of my lungs, filling my brain with other stories, and stuffing my mouth with anything, anything to stop those desperate prayers. Now the voice was back, furious for all the years I’d hushed it, and finally free to scream me into submission. I let go of the doorknob and walked away from it.

Then there came the night in Salzburg on the second day of our trip, when the voice shrieked so long and loud that even Harry heard it. It had been a jet-lagged, rainy day. The quiet between us was no longer warm and comfortable as we trudged around the city, soaked and chilly. He wanted to wander aimlessly down alleyways, and I wanted to know exactly where we were going, how long it would take, and if there would be a bathroom nearby. He wanted to hit every conceivable café and castle, and I wanted to read
The Fault in Our Stars
and take a nap. But neither of us seemed capable of saying those things, let alone admitting our own grumpiness—not on the Perfect Birthday Trip. My feet got sore, his camera got wet, and the voice got louder and louder, filling our silence. That night as Harry fell asleep beside me in the luxurious bed of our vacation rental apartment, it reached full volume:

This is wrong.

You aren’t right together.

This vacation is a sign that you should break up right now and stop wasting both your lives. Do it, do it, do it, now.

A scalding flush of blood rushed up into my head as I careened into a full-blown panic attack, shaking Harry awake so he could have it with me. The voice was
my
voice now, and with it I pummeled him with all my enormous fears and worries and every reason that added up to the inevitable end of a relationship that had been the greatest blessing of my life.

“Aren’t you scared, too?” I demanded of him in a ragged gasp.

“Yes, this is really scary right now. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry. I had to say it out loud.”

“Are you breaking up with me?”

“No! I love you. I’m just worried.”

“Well, I’m worried now, too.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know, either.”

And there was nothing to do. It wasn’t until we got home weeks later that the panic fully receded enough for me to see what needed to be done. By then, the voice was tired out, having run its big, fat mouth every day of our trip. I didn’t have another panic attack on our vacation, but I lay awake each night, waiting for one. The voice whispered meanness into my ear, even on our most fun and beautiful days, of which we had many. All I could do was squeeze my sweet man’s hand, a real and tangible thing that pulled me back into the moment, if only briefly. Why he still wanted to hold my hand after that awful night, I really don’t know.

There is a terrible selfishness to anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. The voice could distract me from the world more powerfully than food or fiction ever could. It berated me as we wandered through Hapsburg palaces and bullied me into silence on Krakow’s bustling city squares. Even on our visit to Auschwitz—a place where one can hardly think at all, so blunting and unspeakable is the experience of standing on that ground—the voice was with me. The catastrophic shame I felt, unable to escape my own mind on that day, was what made me realize how much help I really needed. At last, I saw how deep a hole I’d dug, filling it with all the things I had not wanted to deal with just yet. I thought that I’d hit bottom? Ha! I didn’t have a clue where the real bottom was.

“Fuck this,” I said to myself, aloud and clear, one Wednesday morning in my bedroom. It wasn’t directed at anything in particular; some mornings I just woke up with a mouthful of expletives. Maybe it was wet and dreary outside, or perhaps I was anxious and occupied with the looming to-do list burning a hole in my day. On those mornings, all I wanted to do was turn on a funny movie while I got dressed, and then plug into my headphones for a five-minute sing-along while walking to the subway.

“Fuck this bullshit, I wanna sing show tunes,” I whined to the cat, watching him blink back at me.

Loud swearing was a habit I picked up shortly after starting cognitive behavioral therapy. I’d made the appointment just days after we landed back in New York, both of us frazzled from my Perfect Birthday Trip Freak-Out. Soon, I was elbow-deep in the process of learning to live with my unquiet mind, without the dulling filter of distraction. Without a constant stream of Oreos and noise, the voice in my head would have plenty of room to make a racket, and I’d just have to let it. And, some mornings, I let it out loud.

“Fuuuuuck this mindful, shrinky, bullshiiiiiiit,” I sang, wrestling myself into a sports bra.

It helped to make the voice my own. Though, really, it had always been mine. It was my voice in the bar, urging me to slow down and enjoy the life I had, rather than escape it through every possible hatch. And, it was my voice, my anxiety, my obsessive, whirring brain that turned on me when I took away those hatches. Both times, it was my voice that eventually led me in the right direction. There’s a lot we can learn from the worst sides of ourselves.

Even if your boyfriend orchestrates a perfect birthday evening and gives you the perfect gift, there’s a good chance you might ruin it. Even on your dream trip, there’s no avoiding jet lag. The bad news is there is no avoiding any of the ugliness in life. The even worse news is that whether you’re standing in an imperial palace or a Holocaust memorial site, you cannot escape the ugliness in yourself.

Here’s the only slightly better news: When you quit trying to escape your ugly truth, it’s not so hard to live with. Same goes for the ugly truths about your body, your relationships, and your stupid, small apartment. Some things are fixable and others are just there. But if you hang around waiting for it all to turn perfect, you’re going to miss out on all the fun parts. You’ll still get in on all the
not
-fun parts, though!

“Sometimes food is disappointing,” Theresa once told me. I’d written it down in giant block letters, utterly astounded by the revelation. Even when you order exactly what you want, there’s no guarantee it will satisfy you perfectly. Sometimes the cupcake is stale or the apple is mealy. Sometimes it rains in Salzburg, and yet the world keeps spinning.

I didn’t have to break up with Harry just because we had a seriously imperfect day. I needed to accept that we would have bad days. What would have happened if I’d just stopped in the middle of that rainy street and said, “Well, this sucks, huh?” Maybe he would have laughed or maybe he would have been pissed, but at least I wouldn’t have walked around stewing while the molehill became Mount Everest.

I had to get comfortable with uncomfortable thoughts, worry, and doubt. To expect uncompromised happiness was as unreasonable as looking for solutions at the bottom of a bowl of ice cream.

And I didn’t. That’s one part I can be perfectly proud of, amid everything I’d rather forget about those rocky months. Not once did I find myself standing in front of the fridge, halfway through a mixing bowl of leftover pasta, nauseated and numb. Even on the days when I was jittery with sleeplessness or tangled up in the gnarled forest of my own anxiety, I would not dampen it with food. It was the first promise I made myself that I never even tried to break.

I thought about it, though, remembering my slightly younger self. On bad days back then, it was an icky thrill to cancel plans, buy a bottle of wine, and bake sweet potato fries. I’d eat them on my bedroom floor and watch
The Great Gatsby
with a roll of paper towels beside me to wipe my greasy fingers. Finally, I’d fall asleep with a stomachache so acute that I could think of nothing else.