The Weight-loss Diaries (40 page)

Instead I walked up to another journalist standing by himself, and as we both stood there and tried to think of something to say, I made a joke about the awkwardness: who ever heard of a couple of reporters who draw complete blanks on something to say?

He just stared at me blankly. I felt like an idiot. But I’m still here. And anyway, someone else overheard—even laughed—and said something about how daunting he, too, found a roomful of journalists. (He also later told me that the first guy was usually about as fun to chat with as a piece of wood.) We talked about our jobs, and he said, matter-of-factly, that he has realized that as long as he works as a journalist, he’ll have massive mood swings. Some weeks he’s on a cool story and completely ecstatic about life. Other weeks he’s not.

I am not alone.

Mom’s birthday. For a moment she couldn’t remember how old she was.

Finally I asked her what year she was born, and she had to think about that, too.

The moment passed, and—as though it had never happened—she began

telling me what she was watching on TV. If you don’t really analyze what she’s saying—you don’t stop to consider that her words don’t quite make a sentence—you could almost not know there was anything wrong with her.

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Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Rubin. Click here for terms of use.

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That is what makes talking to her so difficult. Unless it’s a really bad day for her, there’s always a moment or two when I can be lulled into thinking she’s not getting worse. And usually just as quickly that feeling is snatched away. It feels worse than if I’d never gotten it at all.

I didn’t cry after I talked to her. Nor did I immediately look for something to distract myself, food or otherwise. Once upon a time I had two feelings: fat and angry. And fat is not a feeling. But tonight I sat with the anger and guilt and sadness and frustration and the whole range in between—

emotions I can now name and distinguish, like the subtler points of fine wines.

Eventually I got up and found a notebook and pen. There’s one thing Mom-related that upsets me and makes me feel guilty—and that I can actually do something about. That one thing is how little I know about her. So I started making a list of everything, no detail too small to be included. That she loves the color orange and pinball games and Italian food and hates coffee and peanut butter and cereal. The way, the night after she’d get her hair done, she would wrap toilet paper around her head when she slept so as not to ruin it. The way she would snap her fingers out of sync with the music as she drove. That she loved Picasso, though I couldn’t recall ever going to a museum with her—or ever asking her why. I wrote down what I could remember about every story I’ve ever heard about her or from her: Mom at summer camp, Mom traveling around Europe, Mom as a caseworker in the Bronx. It was such a small list, filled with such seemingly insignificant details. I looked at it and couldn’t help thinking that I know more about some people I’ve written articles about than I do about Mom. So I made a list of people I could ask for more stories about her.

I put the list in the drawer with the disposable razors and the butterfly barrette and the expired coupons she sent that I can’t throw away.

My friend Richard from college came to town from New York for the weekend and so was here for the Christmas party crunch. We don’t see each other often—until recently he was living in Tokyo and before that Madrid—but it never seems to matter. We always pick up where we left off.

People kept asking us this weekend how we knew each other, and he

would say: “We had a child together.” So deadpan. So unexpected. I love it.

Often I think Richard is the only person in the world I never put on a show for. He called me on my need always to be entertaining senior year of college, when we didn’t even know each other
that
well, and since then I’ve

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been convinced he had some sort of supernatural power to see through me.

Maybe it’s that he’s the child of two therapists.

Quite by accident at brunch Sunday, we ended up in this long conversation about how he makes me feel: comfortable with myself a lot of the time, but always with an undercurrent of pressure to maintain my slot on Richard’s roster of friends. It was the sort of conversation I couldn’t imagine having with anybody a year ago—just not a subject I would have dared broach. I would have wondered why I thought I had the right to bring this up and feared the consequences of doing so. I would have assumed it was all my problem or my fault. But today I thought:
I can’t stand this anymore. And I don’t have to. He’s
supposed to be one of my closest friends, and the way he makes me feel is making me not want to spend time with him
.

When he made a reference to yet another friend he’d cut out of his life because the friend wasn’t up to par—a process Richard seems to manage with almost clinical ease—I finally said, in a voice I hoped was gentle: “You have incredibly high standards.”

He asked what I meant.

“I love it when you’re here or when I talk to you, but I worry about disappointing you,” I said. “You seem to so suddenly decide certain people aren’t worth your time, and it makes me wonder if I’m next.”

“You’ve basically just summed up why my last relationship ended,” he said. “We have to talk about this. You have to tell me where you get this feeling from.”

We talked for more than two hours, and as we did, I could feel tension slowly draining out of my body. I felt this whole world of possibility opening up for myself—that I didn’t have to take things as they came. That I didn’t have to hide. I could tell people how I felt. Not all the time, but sometimes.

And maybe some people would run, but some of them wouldn’t. And the results had nothing to do with how much I weighed.

Later I realized that during that conversation I wasn’t straining to play a role—funny, smart, sympathetic, whatever. I was just there in the moment, sometimes feeling uncomfortable, but feeling.

It felt good.

Holiday parties and cookie platters and that end-of-the-year urge to surrender to the madness—to get swept up in the current, holding on to the idea of January. In January I will do everything right. In January I will get everything in order. In January I will be perfect.

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But this year I know I won’t. Not because I have any less willpower or organization or whatever than I have had in any previous year. But because I know that I’ll probably never have everything in my life in order. It’s just not possible.

Without really discussing it, Diana and I have reached another of our uneasy truces. We’re speaking, or at least exchanging e-mails and voice mails. But we’re not discussing. It will have to do for now. Yet another thing I can’t think (or eat) my way through. Just fumble.

Today I had a long lunch with a recently married friend. I asked Karen if it scared her at all that she’d met Jim when she was nineteen and—if all goes well—she’ll be with him until she’s ninety. She said that during the ten months she was planning the wedding, occasionally she thought about how she loved Jim but that she wished she’d met him five years later. It felt good to have that part of her life sorted, but scary at the same time—all these options now closed off.

She didn’t sound sad about that—just matter-of-fact. We talked about the other options that had opened up to her now (she had found the person she wanted to sail around the world with and could plot to do it), and I didn’t feel envious or even wistful. Instead I thought about my own options and reveled in the sense of possibility again—that rush I’d felt talking to Richard.

The sense that anything could happen and just might.

Christmas, and what a very merry one it has been. In New York with Elizabeth, who’s in town for a month. We saw two movies, had an hours-long chat over eggnog, went for a seafood dinner in Chinatown, then stayed up until 3:00 a.m. talking some more.

I looked at the levels in the two glasses of eggnog Elizabeth had poured, trying to nab the one that had more in it. That nagging feeling: what if there’s not enough? What if I want more? It occurs to me—just briefly—that chances are Elizabeth wouldn’t care.

Elizabeth’s life seems like something you read about: living in London, boyfriend in Paris, popping back and forth among various countries and continents, always seeming to know what to say and wear and do. In the one suitcase she’s brought to New York, she has a hair clip bought in Prague, bed linens from India, a hat from Ireland, a handbag from a Paris flea market—

this tangible sense of having been places and done things.

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I told her all of this, and she laughed.

“You’ve done other things,” she said.

Elizabeth and I hit the Bloomingdale’s after-Christmas sale. Through the din I heard endless talk about food: “I ate like a pig yesterday.” “I shouldn’t have eaten so much.” And the old standby: “Do I look fat in this?”

I braved a full-length mirror—but only to wrap scarves around my neck.

My body has shrunk and expanded and shrunk and expanded so much that I’m still never sure what I’m going to see.

I thought about the day after Christmas two years ago, when I started the
Shape
project—how hopeful I was, but oh, how naive.

I never did become the “after” picture.

The
Shape
project officially ended today, and I’ve still got plenty of pounds to go.

Still, now my weight is—I hope—not the first thing people notice when they meet me, although I know friends would insist that even at my heaviest, it never was.

I don’t believe them. I wonder if I ever will.

These past two years I’ve learned a lot about carbs and cardio, weight lifting, and planning. But mostly I’ve learned how little of being overweight is really about food. It’s about priorities and boundaries and fear and avoidance of anything you don’t want to feel. It’s about demands that are too high and resources that are too low.

I learned that I’m not alone in feeling alone.

I learned that if I sneak my food, it won’t ruin the facade I’ve created, but it will rot me on the inside.

I learned a thousand other little things, some of which sound as cheerful and pat and homily-like as the fortunes in the cookies Elizabeth and I had yesterday.
The best exercise for you is the one you will do regularly. Stop thinking “I am not enough and there is not enough.” You can’t compare your inside to
other people’s outsides.

Keeping a public journal about food and weight and body image has

meant that I could never stop thinking about these things for very long. Now I’m hoping to work on letting go—letting food and weight fade to the background, where they belong, and filling that space in my life with other things.

I’m looking forward to it.

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Epilogue

Christmas 2002 (Two Years Later)

IN MARRAKESH, MOROCCO

I’m traveling in Marrakesh over Christmas with Craig, a guy who, as of five days ago, I’m no longer dating. (Don’t ask—this could be a book in itself.) I feel like the couple that calls off the wedding but goes on the honeymoon anyway because it’s already paid for.

Traveling has always been difficult for me—the whole idea of anyone seeing what and how much I eat, meal after meal, day after day.

On this trip there’s the added stress of whether we can really travel together for a week without either killing each other or ending up back in a relationship that’s not going anywhere. Marrakesh is an incredibly romantic city—orange-pink sunsets that explode across the sky, candlelit restaurants with tiled waterfalls and half-hidden tables perfect for stolen kisses—and we’ve gone ahead with this trip for some awfully unromantic reasons. We’ve already paid for it, for one. We want to demonstrate that we are and can be friends. We both want to get out of gray and rainy London. And neither of us has anywhere better to be.

I met Craig in September, on my third night living in London. Nearly four years after I first planned to move, I finally took the leap.

I had been hearing about Craig for a couple of years. Not because anybody imagined we would necessarily hit it off but because he was a good friend of one of the only people I knew in London. Somehow I’d never managed to be in London when he was around.

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Copyright © 2004 by Courtney Rubin. Click here for terms of use.

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Epilogue

We sat next to each other at a dinner. I wasn’t feeling “on”—I’d gained some weight over the summer, and I was tired from running around dealing with a move to another continent. But halfway through dinner we ended up holding hands. I was still staying with Craig’s friend until I could move into my flat, and we took the long way home. We walked around Notting Hill until 3:00 in the morning. He was leaving on vacation for a week the next day but said he’d call when he got back, and he did.

Dating him was a lot more of a cross-cultural experience than I’d expected. Usually we’d joke about misunderstandings. “I don’t speak English very well,” I’d say.

“I don’t speak American very well,” he’d answer. We’d laugh.

I had dated someone in the spring for five months, but that relationship had had the emotional weight of a handshake. Dan and I never discussed much, so it didn’t occur to me to say anything to him about food. But with Craig it was different. I found myself wanting to say something. I wanted him to know why it mattered to me whether we’d eat dinner before or after the cinema—and why it sometimes made me cranky when his lateness meant we’d be forced into the latter—or why I cared more than another person might about the fact that he never had anything in his refrigerator besides butter.

I remember one particularly tense morning when I panicked because I had to borrow a shirt from him. He’s thin—very thin—and I knew as he casually handed me the shirt that he couldn’t possibly have any idea how
not
casual this was for me. My mind was racing. What excuse could I make up if the shirt didn’t fit? Could I say I had just realized I had to be somewhere, grab my coat, and race off ? (Luckily, the shirt fit.)