Lonely In Here
by Emily Suzanne
Smiltneck
I don’t remember when I first learned that I was fat, or that it was
a bad thing that I was. I do know that in kindergarten, my
classmates were already dividing themselves into cliques, and that I
was the remainder. I didn’t fit into any of their close-knit little
groups. I don’t know how they decided who fit where, at five years
old, but the decision was unanimous: Emily shall stand alone.
It never bothered me much, then. I was content to spend
my days working hard to learn more than any of the other
kindergarteners, spend my free time hiding in a corner with a book,
spend my evenings lost in imagination or deep in discussion with my
parents. It wasn’t until midway through the first grade that I
realized I wasn’t part of any of the cliques that my classmates had
formed. I looked up from a book one day and realized that everyone
else was happily, noisily engaged in chatter while my eyes raced
over the pages of a book and my mind stretched to take in everything
the words could give me.
And that was when I realized I was fat. I only knew
that because, although I never asked why I was destined to be a
loner, my classmates felt the need to fill me in. “Don’t lean on
the wall like that, fatso. There’s no room for anyone else!” one
girl proclaimed. “Ew, get away,” one of the boys chimed in.
“Fatties smell.”
I understood immediately that being fat was somehow
bad. Up until that point, I knew only that my mother, my father,
and I were all comfortably padded. I knew that we were all bigger
than other people, but to me, it seemed that people were supposed to
come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors. I had been taught
that skin color was no reason to treat someone differently, that
short people and tall people both had their particular uses and
talents, that it was far more important to listen to the things a
person said than it was to listen to the way that they said them.
It didn’t hurt me to know that I was different. It hurt
me to realize that it was bad to be different, when all my life I
had been taught to value the differences among people. And it hurt
me to walk to school alone and stand on the playground with my nose
in a book, pretending to read while in reality I was watching all
the other children and trying to learn their secrets, the secrets to
being a real person, one who fit in.
In the second grade, I fell in love for the first time.
His name was Derek and he had the most beautiful, velvety brown eyes
I had ever seen. Every time I looked into his eyes, I got lost. My
first unrequited love. After months of daydreams that mainly
consisted of Derek merely talking to me, some of the “cool kids,”
Derek’s friends, asked me if I wanted to play Catch’n’Kiss with
them. I had no idea what Catch’n’Kiss was, or how to play, but
there were kids in school that were actually talking to me! I
couldn’t believe my luck, and I didn’t dare refuse their invitation.
The game consisted of the girls running around the
playground and the boys chasing them. Any boy who caught a girl got
to kiss her, as long as he did it quick enough that the teachers on
playground duty didn’t catch him. I was more interested in the
books I was reading than in running around the playground, but run I
did. Until I noticed that none of the boys were chasing me. I
wandered around the playground for a few minutes, waiting, just in
case I was wrong, just in case I really wasn’t an outcast and the
boys just hadn’t gotten to me yet. Slowly, I made my way back
toward the swings, pulling my book out of my pocket as I went. I
turned one more time, for one more long glance at the fun I was
missing out on. I heard a voice ask if I really thought anyone was
going to kiss me, and the rest of them laughed. And since the only
thing my classmates had ever ridiculed me for was being fat, the
equation became more strongly ingrained in my mind: fat equals bad.
I fancied myself in love with Derek all the way through
the summer after fourth grade, when he and a group of his friends
threw lit flares on the roof of my house and tried to burn it down.
After that, even with my lack of self esteem and my longing to be a
part of the “in-crowd,” I couldn’t like him anymore. His absence
from my preadolescent fantasies left a burning hole within me.
The hole started healing shortly after I started the
fifth grade, as soon as I saw Joe. His deep brown eyes were even
more velvety than Derek’s, and he wasn’t one of the “cool kids.” It
was easy to see from the clothes that he wore, the way that he
carried himself, the reduced-charge lunch tickets he used, that he
wasn’t one of the charmed inner circle of fifth graders who had
everything they needed and everything they wanted, too. I hoped
against all hope that there was a chance he might find it within
himself to like me.
He sat right in front of me and I would stare at his
golden brown curls all day long. It’s amazing that I managed to
learn anything that year. I had fantasy after fantasy about him.
In my daydreams, I was always sitting on the swings on the
playground, reading. Joe would walk up to me, sit down on the swing
next to me. “Hi,” he would say.
If this had happened in real life, I would have glanced
up at him over the edge of my book suspiciously, then gone back to
reading, unable to risk responding because I would have known very
well that it was not a friendly overture, but a trap that would lead
to humiliation. In my daydreams, though, I always tucked my book
into my pocket and smiled at him. “Hi, there,” I’d respond.
Then he would say something like, “I know you’re not
like the other girls, but I don’t like them anyway. They’re too
snobby and they care too much about what they look like. You seem
like you’d be a lot more fun, and way smarter. And I think you’re
pretty, too.”
And instead of blushing horribly and being completely
tongue-tied, I would say to him, “Thank you. You have the greatest
eyes I’ve ever seen.” And our relationship would only get better
from there. Of course, at ten, my ideas of what might ensue were a
little vague, but the important part was that this boy with the
beautiful eyes actually liked me.
I was determined to hold onto those fantasies at any
cost. When I asked him if I could borrow a pencil one morning, he
turned around and said, “I don’t have any, Dog Face.” I was
momentarily crushed, but at lunchtime, when I joined my small group
of friends in the cafeteria, one of whom was Joe’s sister, and
related my tale of woe, they all tried to soothe me. Joe’s sister
was the most successful when she told me, “I’m sure he didn’t mean
anything bad by it. He really likes dogs.”
Any normal, self-respecting fifth grader would have
immediately understood the insult she had been handed, but I chose
to take Joe’s sister’s words to heart. If he liked dogs, he must
like their faces, right?
The real blow to my self esteem that year wasn’t the
“dog face” incident. It was actually the fact that I wasn’t
made fun of, for being a lesbian. Joe’s sister and another friend
of mine were the victims of vicious rumors after being caught
together in a bathroom stall. I never knew if the rumors were true
or not, or what they might have been doing in there for real, or
even what the rumors had them doing, specifically. All I knew was
that suddenly two of the three girls I hung out with were being
ridiculed for being lesbians. I had to guess at what that might
mean. I gathered that it had something to do with girls liking
other girls instead of boys, but I couldn’t really understand why it
was a bad thing. Just like I could never understand why being fat
was bad.
The rumors never reached me. I was the only one in our
little group who remained rumor-free. Every day at lunch, my
friends commiserated over their situation. I would look down at my
lunch tray, listening to them, only nodding once in a while when
they asked me a question. I was an outsider even among my friends
now. I never really wondered why; at ten years old, I had already
learned that boys weren’t supposed to be attracted to me, because I
was fat. I wouldn’t have been able to put that sentiment into
words, but I was well aware that it was true. I must have carried
that over into the understanding that girls weren’t supposed to like
me, either, at least not in any way less innocent than friendship.
One day in the girls’ bathroom, though, this knowledge
that I carried within me was given words. “It’s when girls kiss
girls instead of boys,” one girl was saying to another as they
walked into the bathroom. From the stall that hid me from them, I
hear another girl say, “Well, is Emily a lesbian, too, then? She
hangs out with them.” The first girl said back, “Oh, right.
No one wants to kiss that fatso!”
I was devastated. Part of me, the rebellious part,
wanted to march out of that bathroom stall and tear into those girls
like a wolf pack tears into a dying cow. I wanted to scream and
rage and yell and ask them why. Why was it that no one would
want to kiss me? What was it that was so terrible about me?
But another part of me, the part that accepted whatever
it was told as truth and had learned that it was easier to stay
silent and disappear into the shadows, took over, and I said
nothing. I waited quietly for the girls to leave the bathroom
before I flushed the toilet and stepped out of the safety of my
stall. And I carefully patted my eyes with a cold, wet paper towel
to hide my tears before I went back to class.
When I started middle school, I was more excited than I
had ever been. It was my chance to start over. I had always been
the quiet, shy kid who didn’t have many friends, who hid from all
the other kids when they tried to humiliate me. In middle school,
though, there would be other kids who didn’t know me yet. And
maybe, somehow, they hadn’t gotten the word that fat is bad, and
maybe they would accept me. This seemed entirely possible because
at home, I had never gotten the same messages I got at school. My
parents never said a word about my weight. They encouraged me to go
out and move around and eat healthy foods, and I did those things.
I wasn’t a lazy kid that sat around eating junk food and watching
TV. I spent just about every daylight hour outside playing, took
three or four months to finish off the Halloween candy that most
kids finished in three or four days, and only ever sat still to do
my homework. It never occurred to my parents to worry about me, and
so it never occurred to me to worry about myself. As long as I
wasn’t in school, or missing out on something the other kids at
school were involved in because I hadn’t been invited to
participate, I was completely happy with myself. It was only when I
saw myself through their eyes that I found myself lacking. And
since that didn’t carry over to the world outside of school, I
thought it very possible that it was only the kids in my school,
specifically, who felt the way they did. Therefore, it was easy for
me to believe that once I was in a different school, my situation
would be different. That thought emboldened me.
For the first time in my life, I was part of a group. I
still had my one best friend. Not the same one I had in elementary
school, because we endured a nasty “break-up” when she discovered
that she was thin enough to be “cool” and I wasn’t, but a best
friend just the same, and one who found me just as cool as anyone
else. We complemented each other perfectly; I was good at school,
books, and thinking, and she was good at talking to people, making
friends. I helped her understand things clearly and she helped me
become part of the group she hung out with.
Still, I was an outsider. The crowd we ran with was
sort of a fast crowd. One of the girls got pregnant in the 8th
grade, then gave birth to a baby with severe birth defects because
of the drugs she did during her pregnancy. Things like that were
foreign to me, uncomfortable to me, but I watched quietly and
pretended to accept everything as normal, just to be a part of the
group. One part of me felt sorry for her, because she had been
given so much to deal with but had never been given the skills to
deal with it all. Another part of me was jealous of her, though,
and angry at what I perceived as great injustice. Here she was,
just fourteen, a couple years older than I was, not smart enough to
abstain from sex or even use birth control, not all that attractive,
and known for being the sort of girl who would give any boy anything
he wanted, and she had found someone to get her pregnant? I was
smart and quiet and not all that unattractive (not that I would have
admitted to anyone in the world that I felt that way) and kind and
mature, and I couldn’t even find a boy who would talk to me.
All the other girls in our group would talk about the
boys they went out with and all the things they did, and I just
smiled and nodded and never really answered any of their questions,
because I didn’t want to admit that their world was foreign to me.
The funny thing was, there was no lack of boys that talked to me.
And the ones that talked to me were not the ones who, at the ages of
twelve and thirteen and fourteen, were already looking for their
next sexual conquest. They were classier than the boys my friends
were hanging out with.
They all wanted to sit next to me in class and work on
projects with me. I was famous for being the smart kid. And I had
a good sense of humor and was always willing to laugh at myself,
too. I was everything they wanted. In class, anyway. Outside of
class, they spend their time with the cheerleaders, the jocks, the
skinny girls. Looking back, I’m not sure if they didn’t like me
because I was fat or if they didn’t like me because they didn’t
think they were supposed to like me because I was fat, but I
was always sure that was what the problem was. It was the only
thing that made me different from the other girls. Sure, I didn’t
have all the beautiful clothes they had, but that was because they
didn’t come in my size. And I wasn’t into sports like they were,
but I just couldn’t keep up with everyone else. The occasional boy
yelling “Earthquake!” and falling to the ground as I walked past
reassured me that things would have been different if I were thin.
The first dance that I ever went to, in the seventh
grade, was pure hell for me. Some of the guys from my history
class, where I had developed a few friendships with boys who wanted
to get answers from me on tests, asked me to dance over the course
of the night. I couldn’t say yes, though. There was a movie
running through my head constantly, taken, no doubt, from all the
after school specials I had seen on acceptance, in which a boy asked
me to dance, I said yes, and then the entire gymnasium full of kids
started laughing uproariously as the boy said something to the
effect of, “Like I would really dance with you!” And even if I had
somehow been able to turn off that movie, I would never have been
able to dance with anyone. In order to dance with me, they would
have to touch me, and that thought sent me into waves of panic.
My thought pattern was that if they had asked me to
dance, they obviously hadn’t noticed how fat I was. It wasn’t
beyond my preteen understanding to realize that men are not always
the most observant creatures in the world. If I danced with
someone, he would place his hands on my hips, just like the all the
other boys were doing to the other girls. And then, no matter how
unobservant he was, he was bound to notice that I was shaped much
differently than the other girls I had seen him dancing with. He
wouldn’t like the difference, either, of course, because that same
old equation I had learned in the first grade was still the foremost
thing in my mind: fat equals bad.
So, I turned down at least four different boys who asked
me to dance, sure that dancing could only lead to humiliation, and
then I went and locked myself in a bathroom stall and cried. When
some of my friends came to ask me what was wrong, I told them to
leave me alone. When they pushed for an answer, I told them my
truth: no one wanted to dance with me and it was depressing watching
everyone else dance. They left the bathroom confused, I am sure.
I have often wondered how that one incident affected my
life. If I had done things differently, conquered my fear, I may
have been a whole different person, able to believe that someday
someone could really care about me, fat and all. If I had agreed to
dance with even one of the boys who asked me to, maybe I would have
gained an ounce of confidence and my whole life could have been
different, richer, more full. Or maybe I would have been humiliated
and ended up in the bathroom crying. In retrospect, I know that no
matter what, I would have survived.
By the time I was in high school, I was beyond letting
anyone know that I cared about anything. It was a matter of self
preservation. If I didn’t care what anyone said about me or did to
me, they couldn’t hurt me. The closest I ever came to showing
interest in a guy or flirting was when I would ask the editor of the
school paper to show me how to do something, anything, on the
computer as we were laying out the paper, so I could smell his
cologne and feel his arms against my shoulders as he reached around
me from behind to type on the keyboard of the computer I was sitting
at.
I was involved in as many things as I could be at
school, and determined to get top grades, so I kept myself busy. I
went to school every day, had meetings after school until five or
six every night, then went with my mother to help her do what she
needed to do around town and went home to do my homework. It kept
me from awkward social moments when a group of people would start
discussing their plans with their boyfriends and girlfriends and
then halfway through realize that I must not be having any fun at
all listening to them and trail off into a different subject. It
allowed me to tell myself I was so busy that even if someone did ask
me out, I would never be able to accept. It let me feel normal all
day long and ignore the kids who were holding hands in the hallway
and the teachers who asked me if I was going to the Halloween dance
and the flowers that were delivered to other girls in class on
Valentine’s Day.
But it didn’t keep me from lying in bed at night
imagining what it must be like to go out on a date, hold someone’s
hand. In my fantasies, I always imagined myself laughing gloriously
with some good-looking boy as we walked through the halls together
at school, craning my neck to kiss his cheek as he left me to go to
his own class, glowing in class as I planned all the things we would
do together over the weekend. And in my fantasies, I was always
thin. I tried, sometimes, to imagine being me, just the way I was,
doing all of those things, but I couldn’t stretch my imagination
that far. It seemed much more realistic to me to imagine my doctor
finding some horrible thing that was wrong with me and giving me a
magic pill that made it all right so that I lost a hundred pounds
over night and turned into a beautiful, thin young woman.
And that part of my dream did come true. Although I had
gone from being a chubby little girl to being a chunky preteen to
being just plain fat, I had always been healthy and active. During
high school, that started to change. I gained even more weight,
lost all the energy I had ever had, grew so depressed it was hard to
even get up in the morning. I started blacking out when I climbed
the stairs at school to get to my first hour chemistry class on the
third floor. I managed to put up a good front, so that no one ever
knew how tired and despondent I was feeling, but it almost killed me
to do it. Eventually, I started thinking something might be wrong
with me, but I couldn’t tell anyone that. If I had told my mother,
she would have made me go to the doctor, and if I went to the
doctor, she would tell me that my only problem was that I was fat
and lazy and needed to eat less and move more, and then every bad
thing the kids at school had ever said about me would be true. I
couldn’t risk that.
Finally, during the summer after my junior year of high
school, when I could hardly walk from one end of the house to the
other anymore and I was sleeping until noon or later every day, my
mother dragged me to the doctor. The doctor did some blood tests
and found out that my thyroid gland was almost completely
non-functioning. She gave me medication and it was like I went from
hell to heaven in a matter of days. Two weeks later, I had lost
fifty pounds. Better, I had my energy back. I couldn’t wait until
the first day of school to show myself off to everyone, to be the
kind of perky, fun, popular girl I had always wanted to be, to climb
the stairs without losing consciousness! For the first time in my
life, I felt thin.
The illusion didn’t last long, though. Although I had
lost a lot of weight, I wasn’t exactly tiny. There still wasn’t a
store in town where I could buy jeans in my size and I was still the
fat girl. In fact, no one even noticed that I had changed. I
forgot my hopes of a new, improved real life and went back to my
fantasies of being thin and beautiful and loved.
I completely gave up hope. I knew, deep within myself,
that no one would ever be able to love me the way that I was, and I
knew just as surely that I could not change. Up to that point in my
life, there had only ever been one boy who even pretended to like
me; in the seventh grade, for a few months, I dated a
fifteen-year-old seventh grader who was mentally impaired,
aggressive, and wet the bed every night although he showered only
once a week. That left me with few doubts as to the sort of guy who
might be interested in me. And even he dumped me.
I slipped into a pattern, over the years after I
finished high school, of purposely and carefully ignoring the
existence of the opposite sex. If I didn’t allow myself to be
attracted to anyone, then it wouldn’t bother me when they weren’t
attracted to me. Most of the time, it was easy to pretend.
Then I saw a talk show or read a magazine article or saw
something in the newspaper. I don’t remember in exactly which form
the ray of light first came into my life. The ray of light was an
excerpt from Camryn Manheim’s book, Wake Up, I’m Fat. The
article or interview or whatever it was featured Camryn talking
about the incident her book was named for, when her mother took her
into an expensive, fancy store in New York, the kind of store I
could only dream about entering. Her mother insisted on bringing
dress after dress into the fitting room when Camryn just wanted to
go pick one and leave. Shopping was a horrendous experience for her
because her mother always got after her about her weight when they
were shopping together. I could understand her viewpoint
perfectly. I didn’t have the problems with my mother, but I had
left thousands of fitting rooms in tears when none of the clothes I
wanted to wear came in sizes that I could squeeze my body into.
What really struck me, though, was her guts. While she
was in the dressing room, she asked her mother to bring her one of
the dresses in a larger size. Her mother, feigning innocence,
brought her the dress in a smaller size instead, presumably to
humiliate her into the desire to be thin. If my mother had done any
such thing, I would have been reduced to tears in the dressing room,
maybe even refused to come out until the store closed. Not Camryn,
though. She marched right out of the dressing room in her
underwear, fat and all, threw the dress at her mother, and screamed,
“Wake up! I’m fat!” The story went something like that, anyway.
It was the first time it ever occurred to me that I
could stand up for myself. It was the first time I ever considered
the fact that I had other options besides quietly taking all the
insults that were thrown at me I stride. It was the first time I
realized that I had the same rights any other person had, that my
fat did not make me any less of a person.
I bought the book and read the entire thing in one
sitting. It was the first time I had ever heard the terms big
beautiful woman (I had always assumed there was no such thing) or
fat admirer (I had always thought that any man who was involved with
a fat woman was just a really nice guy who could get past her
appearance). It was the first time I ever felt empowered or
valuable. And it was the first time since I was ten years old that
I dared to wear a tank top in public and bare my flabby arms for all
the world to see.
I started searching the Internet for the terms I had
found in her book. I discovered dating services just for fat men
and women and those who like them. I found out that there were
actual dance clubs and events for plus-sized people. I was
twenty-three years old and for the first time in my life, I
discovered the possibility that someone, more specifically a man,
could actually like me.
My life changed in a lot of ways. Did I suddenly become
irresistible to the opposite sex? Not at all. Did I get over my
shyness? Not totally. But I did start to notice the men in the
world around me again, and although I had no idea what to do about
it, I started being attracted to them again. And I started
fantasizing again, this time without the need to picture myself
thin.
Slowly, over time, I started getting to know men through
the plus-sized Internet dating services I had discovered. After
three or four years, I met a few of them in person. For the first
time in my life, halfway through my twenties, I knew what it was
like to have a man’s hands on my body and feel his lips pressed
against mine. I never let things go to far, though. I was afraid
of everything. Every time a man touched me, I was afraid he would
pull away in disgust. Every time a man kissed me, I was unable to
enjoy it for my fear that I wasn’t kissing back quite right. I was
too old to be so inexperienced. And if a man tried to move beyond
mere kissing, I panicked and pulled away. I couldn’t stand for
anyone to know how little I knew about the opposite sex, and I felt
like my inexperience was too much for any man to deal with when I
had so many things, my body and my insecurities and my lack of
sophistication, working against me already.
And finally, I met someone who seemed different. He was
an older man, and we talked a lot before we ever met. We talked
about all kinds of things: our jobs, books, the places we lived in,
our lives, and yes, we talked about sex, too. He knew more of my
secrets than almost anyone, and he still wanted to meet me. But
then we lost touch.
We didn’t have an argument or find some topic on which
we disagreed. We just sent e-mails to each other less frequently
over time until there were no more. And I didn’t think of him again
until I was visiting Chicago, where he lived. Of course, when I
thought of him, it wasn’t in terms of contacting him. As far as I
had come, I hadn’t come that far. I was in no way brave
enough to contact him when I wasn’t sure if he had any interest in
me anymore. On the last day of my trip, though, I found a message
from him when I checked my e-mail. “Was just thinking of you for
some reason and I thought I’d see what you’ve been up to. Planning
to come to Chicago any time soon?”
My heart leapt into my throat. He still wanted to meet
me! Reality settled in, though, and I sent a message back to him,
telling him that I actually was currently in Chicago, but headed
home that day.
We began talking more frequently again, and when I had a
chance to go to Chicago again a few months later, I nervously told
him. We made plans to get together. He invited me to stay at his
apartment for a night, which sent me into a whirlwind of panic.
When I didn’t answer him right away, he told me he understood if I
didn’t feel comfortable with that. He also asked me what my
boundaries were, if I would be comfortable kissing or cuddling or
even maybe going beyond that. I thanked him for understanding, half
expecting him to just give up one me when I didn’t respond to any of
his other questions. He didn’t. He asked me again, told me
whatever I said was fine with him, that he just wanted to meet me.
We met in a Dunkin’ Donuts and spent two hours there
talking nonstop. When he bought me a drink, it made me feel the way
I imagined it must make most women feel when they see a man naked
for the first time. No one had ever done things like that for me
before. Tingles raced up and down my spine. When it was time for
me to catch a train back to the suburb I was staying in, he walked
me to the platform and hugged me goodbye. It meant more to me than
he could possibly have known, sent me into a tailspin of shock,
drowned me with emotion. This feeling of having someone care about
me, really care, enough to touch me and sit next to me and be seen
with me, was totally new. I got on the train and slipped into a
haze of dreamy thoughts.
Slowly, as I rode, my old insecurities came creeping
back. I wanted to send him a text message (calling seemed too
forward) to tell him I had had a really great time, enjoyed meeting
him, wanted to see him again. I couldn’t make myself do it, though,
because I was stuck between wanting him to know I liked him and not
wanting to seem like a crazed stalker who was moving in way too
fast. I had no idea what other women did after first dates and no
idea what was appropriate. I needn’t have worried, though. By the
time I got off the train, he had sent me a text message to say he
had enjoyed meeting me, and that he was physically attracted
to me! I couldn’t breathe right for a week.
On my next trip to Chicago, I saw him again. That time,
I did stay with him; I got into town around nine at night and had to
leave by seven the next morning, but we got to spend some time alone
together. I feared it as much as I looked forward to it. He was
the first man I had ever met, though, who cared enough to make me
feel comfortable. He rested a hand on my shoulder and when I
flinched and pulled away, sure he was going to be the one to pull
away out of sheer disgust, he smiled at me, pushed my hair away from
my face, and kissed me. I was so shocked that I forgot to be afraid
and, for the first time in my entire life, enjoyed a kiss.
I was emboldened by my reaction and when he asked me if
I wanted to get more comfortable, I actually took him up on the
offer. In the darkness of his bedroom, with a sheet wrapped tightly
around me, I was naked with a man for the first time in my life. I
still had a constant soundtrack of questions playing in my mind
though, which made it difficult to concentrate. When he kissed me
urgently, I wondered if I responded passionately enough. When he
caressed my breasts, I wondered if I was supposed to make noise, and
what kind of noise I was supposed to make. Every time he touched
me, I wondered if he was going to find some part of me that turned
him off completely. I survived the night, though.
I hardly slept at all. Instead, I listened to the sound
of his gentle snoring and reveled in the sensation of his arm across
my belly as I lay awake through most of the night. I drifted off
occasionally, but the fear that I would move in my sleep and wake
him kept me from total sleep. It was the first night I had ever
spent with a man.
At the same time that I was relieved that he hadn’t
pressured me for more than I was ready to give him, I was
disappointed, too. My insecurities attacked me full force as I
wondered if he just let me stay there because he was a nice guy, or
if I had done something wrong to stop him from wanting me. After we
parted, I swung from a feeling of glazed over ecstasy to one of
utter worthlessness and back again repeatedly.
Once again, he put me at ease. By the end of the day,
he had asked me when I was coming back, and if I wanted more than he
had given me. It took me several hours of doubt and reworded
messages and anxiety and even straight-out fear, but I was finally
able to respond with a single word: yes.
And a month later, I had the chance to make good on my
promise. I hardly slept during the week before I went to see him
again. I was afraid of every little thing I could think of to be
afraid of. I was afraid I wouldn’t move the right way or get the
right rhythm or respond the way I should. I was afraid I would make
too much noise or not enough noise or just lay on his bed, frozen in
fear, when I should be moving. I was afraid I wouldn’t turn him on
or I would be too fat to do the things he wanted to do or wouldn’t
know quite how to make them happen. I was afraid of him, and of
myself.
I would like to be able to say that once we were
together, my fears all dissolved. I would like to say that we made
passionate love for hours and then fell asleep in complete bliss. I
would like to say that everything went perfectly, the way it does in
movies.
But that would be a lie.
To be honest, I hardly remember what actually happened.
I can only hope that the deer-in-the-headlights look that I am sure
was on my face could be interpreted as breath-taking pleasure. I
don’t remember if there was pleasure or not, because all I could
feel was fear. Every time his hand touched some new part of my
body, I shuddered with the expectation that he would pull away from
me and roll to the far side of the bed. Every time his lips touched
me, I held my breath, waiting for him to sit up and turn away, hurt
that I had not responded the right way. Every time I drew a breath,
I braced myself and held my stomach immobile, afraid that he would
notice its tremendous size as it expanded with air, and deprive me
of his touch. And when he placed his body on top of mine, I almost
screamed out in panic and pushed him away. I was completely unable
to move, afraid that any movement I made would be the wrong one and
he would stop to ask me just exactly what I thought I was doing. I
didn’t, though. I bit my tongue and closed my eyes and tried to
smile.
And when he entered me, I was completely numb. I wanted
to make it easy for him, move my legs the right way and get the
right rhythm, but I could not move. Millions of ideas of what I
should do next raced through my mind and I vetoed each in turn
because I couldn’t imagine what his reaction might be. I counted my
blessings that I was with someone who seemed to understand, at least
a little, without requiring explanations from me. He moved my body
the way he needed it to be and caressed me as though I were the most
beautiful woman in the world.
At the same time that I wanted him to never stop, I
wished that he would be finished immediately, so I could get through
the awkwardness of the moments after and re-enter my comfort zone.
I knew with great certainty that it was a horrible experience for
him and that he would never speak to me again.
The next moment in which I was fully aware of myself was
when I heard him saying to me that it was too bad we didn’t live
closer to each other. My immediate reaction was that he was just
being nice to me, trying to fill an awkward silence. I tried to
talk myself out of it, though. Why wouldn’t he like me? We had a
great time together, out of bed if not in. And it wasn’t all
terrible. I hadn’t been afraid even to kiss him this time, and when
he had started to undress me before the lights were out, I hadn’t
made him stop so I could drown us in darkness. And it occurred to
me that even if I was naked with this man, completely exposed, I was
still myself. I was still a person that I could like, even if he
didn’t. I have that right.
And I have the right to let myself trust people. Not
everyone in the world is a kindergartener telling me I must stink
because I’m fat. Not everyone is a middle school boy pretending my
very footsteps cause an earthquake and falling to the ground in a
fit of laughter. Not everyone is Camryn Manheim’s mother,
struggling to humiliate her fat daughter into thinness. Some people
can accept me for who I am, even like me because of who I am
and not in spite of it. And maybe this man is one of those people.
Maybe next time, if I am lucky enough for there to be a next time,
if I didn’t drive him away with my insecurities, I can enjoy him
fully and be my total self with him.
I strive to step outside of my fat. Not physically; I don’t want to
lose my fat, get rid of it. I’m happy with who I am. I am healthy
and strong and full of energy and even, dare I say it, beautiful.
My eyes sparkle, my hair shines, and there is music in my step.
There is no reason in the world for me to change. Except for the
world itself, of course. I need to escape the “fat girl” role that
the world has created for me, that I have created for myself. I
need to step outside of my fat and demand that the world accept me
as I am. Sometimes it’s lonely in here.
