Recently, my friend Jenn celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary, which is a nice thing and whatnot. It was a bit mindblowing to me because it seemed like it was about 200 years ago - seriously, after you hit a certain age, time whips by and everything winds up having happened 200 years ago. I mean, for God's sake, I just realized that it was 19 years ago this month that I had my 30 seconds of Z-list fame when I was an Audience of One on "Night After Night with Allan Havey" on Comedy Central.
NINETEEN. What the hell. And I'm going to be 40 in nine months. What the super-hell. ANYWAY. I'm drifting, as I am wont to do, and I kind of sort of have a point to this particular post.
Kind of. And we'll get there...together!
So five years ago, my life was rather different than it is now. I was a bit crabby because I'd moved back in with my parents after my finances ate gigantic shit and I couldn't afford to pay rent AND pay credit card bills AND buy groceries PLUS there was the whole thing with the fucking rats in my Wrigleyville apartment but that's a tale for another day. I was feeling kind of failure-y and having difficulty adjusting to going from living alone to living with two other people...that also happened to be my parents. And old. Ohhh, so old. But I was rapidly discovering that not having to pay almost a thousand dollars a month in rent meant I could get my finances in order and do fun things, like go to Vegas and see one of my best friends get married.
We had a friend in common, someone we both had been very close to for a while, but were starting to realize that perhaps she was not someone who was, ultimately, beneficial to our lives. More so me than her, and it had to do with weight. My weight, really. This person, who we will call Friend X, self-tormented by her weight, decided that a liquid diet was the trick to losing all that ugly fat that was preventing her from...I couldn't really tell you what, but it was. So, naturally, she dropped a shitton of weight because that's what happens when you don't eat solid foods, and like so many of us who have had weight loss of any sort of significance, became a Weight Loss Messiah. What made it more...weird and creepy to me, however, was that she wasn't being a Weight Loss Messiah to my face - instead, she was going through friends, telling them about how her hopiest of hopes was that I was going to get "my health together" (read: lose weight). And so much of her conversations became all about her weight loss and exercise regimen, things that even before my embracing of Fat Acceptance, bored the ever-living shit out of me. Before the trip to Vegas, I had been pulling away from Friend X since conversations began and ended with her and her weight and her pounds lost and liquid foods consumed, but after Vegas I knew it was time to start cleaning house and end this relationship because it wasn't doing me any good.
For the first time in my life, I was actively disconnecting myself (in that I was informing the other party of what was going on) from someone else. I was standing up for myself and outlining what I was no longer willing to tolerate and holy motherfucking SHIT, it was so gigantically liberating. For so many years, I clung desperately to pretty much anyone who entered my hemisphere because I was wrapped up in that notion that a) fat girl = unloved and b) quantity of friends is more important than quality. So you could treat me as shittily as you liked - as long as you showed me some modicum of affection at some point, I'd take your horseshit. I couldn't give you a specific example why this straw broke my camelly back and I decided to walk, but it was just TIME to stop being everyone's goddamned sidekick and supporting player in my own life and put my fat ass first.
Putting my fat ass first meant that I was also starting to feel the nascent vibes of loving and digging my fat ass as it was and not what I imagined it was supposed to be, which was also a synapse-snapper. Being free of a relationship that was nothing but negativity about bodies that resembled mine was astonishing. Time passed and I found things like Joy Nash's "Fat Rant" and Kate Harding's "The Fantasy of Being Thin" cementing what I suspected was right for me. I had done plenty of things fat and without obvious shame (performing on stage, traveling, going out in public), but the weight that my weight placed on my shoulders was always there and, well, weighing me down (to overwork the hell out of a metaphor). Bit by bit, blog by blog, article by article I was freeing myself, becoming happier, re-discovering the defiance that had fueled me in my younger days.
That disconnection is one of the few things I can point at as a signpost or signifier or what the hell ever in my getting to where I am today. I don't think the me that cringed her way through writing a letter that, in summation, said "yeah, I'm done because I'm no longer interested in all of *hand flutters about* this" could have imagined where I was going to end up. Of course, to get all Oprah Deepak Chicken Soup of the suck-it on your ass, the journey isn't over yet and there's much more to come yoga-pose or whatever. But when I try to conjure up where I might still be had I not summoned up the spine to be a villain (because oh, I was quite a villain in certain circles when all was said and done)...oh man, I'd do it again and again and again. Freedom is so worth it.
