Category: My effed up brain

I Fucking Hate My Body, and I’m Tired of Pretending I Don’t.

A few weeks ago I read an article called I F*cking Love My Body.   I tried to get into it, to understand the message, to feel the same pride in my inherited features, but I cannot pretend to be something I’m not. No matter how hard I try. So, this was born:

I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

I buy dresses, hike them up above the knee, feel the swoosh of them on the back of my thighs, but cannot forget the purple inky veins slinking across my skin. Blue, black, deep red, these lines remind me to pull it down, tug it over my ass, stay grounded, stay knee-length in all things.

I buy new bras, smaller across the back, skinnier straps for a slimmer body, yet the cups remain overflowing. My breasts hang heavy with past mistakes. The valleys in my shoulders remind me of their heft.

I buy panties with the most elastic, walk past the lace, past the high hip cuts, straight to the strongest, sturdiest pair. I buy black, hoping there is some sex appeal left in color.

I buy tools to quantify my being. My digital scale holds bad news. My FitBit says I haven’t done enough. My Fitness Pal says I’ve overeaten again.

I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

I can’t wear short shorts because of my veins.

I can’t wear tank tops because of my floppy biceps.

I can’t wear a bathing suit in public.

I can’t sit down without worrying about muffin top.

I can’t be naked in the daylight in front of my husband, ever.

I can’t fake it. I never could.

I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

But, I love the inside. The red, gushy throb of my love, the seemingly endless canals of hope, the equal parts sweet and snark.

I just wish I could turn myself inside out and meet you heart first.

 

Amye Archer is the author of Fat Girl, Skinny, a memoir about waiting, weight-ing, skinny jeans, fat girls, bad choices, and happy endings. You can buy it here.

Grief Part Deux

What Not to Do When Grieving Your Grandmother

  1. Listen to the Norah Jones channel on Pandora.
  2. Listen to voice-mails you’ve saved in which her voice becomes a blanket-warm and familiar.
  3. Drive past her house two times each day.
  4. Watch any movies, even the comedies, because you will cry whenever the interaction moves up the matriarchal chain, reminding you of the break in your own.
  5. Shop at her favorite store.
  6. Sleep

I’m working on the rest.

How Being an Adjunct is Like Dating an Asshole

One.

The initial attraction. The idea of being an adjunct is too attractive for an unemployed MFA candidate to ignore. The promise of teaching a course, of being a conduit for change, of belonging to a brilliant network of academics is worth the meager compensation. Just like Aaron’s blue eyes, in that first moment when he brushed up against my too tight skirt in a nameless bar one summer night. He ordered a Miller Light, and as the bartender handed him the sweaty bottle, Aaron grinned and breathed into my ear, “You want one?” I was young and newly divorced, and the promise of him and a few more Miller Lites was more than I could resist.

Two.

The self-loathing. Every semester, as I agree to two, three, four, seven courses at sometimes less than $2,000 a pop, I am ashamed. I should stand up for myself, I think. I feel the space between my ribs fill with righteous indignation. I should do something about this, start a revolution, and demand proper compensation and access to benefits. I am the downtrodden coalminer of my generation, a Triangle factory floor girl, a Selma marcher, I think to myself as I’m sipping my Venti Latte from Starbucks.

Aaron’s bed was a nest filled with down: pillows, comforter, and blankets. It was the cushion for my falling into him, night after night, even though I promised my very best friend that I wouldn’t. Every weekend I steeled myself for our inevitable run-in. I will stand up to him, I will resist the tug of my skirt, the pull of his pink lips and fair skin, the lure of the free beer and mediocre sex. But there I was again, my breath a cavern of last night’s poor judgment, my clothes wrinkled and lifeless on the floor, my self-respect nowhere to be found.

Three.

The grey area. One night, after we had been sleeping together for months, Aaron introduced me to a friend of his as his “colleague.” Colleague? I didn’t even know he had a job. He just seemed to appear at night, at the bar. The inner workings of his life: details like where he worked, his favorite color, his astrological sign, his last name, all of that was information that would reveal itself once we started officially dating. Once I become the girlfriend.

My presence is not required at faculty meetings, in fact, I’m not allowed inside the room where real decisions are made. I’m not invited to department lunches, asked for opinions about texts or curriculum, or even allowed to take a class to further my scholarship. I have to pay for parking, am not allowed to use the fitness facilities, and my name is seldom included on inter-department emails. I exist in a void

Four.

The resentment. When Aaron and I first started whatever it was we were doing, I would sometimes surprise him with a blow job late at night, after I’ve slept for an hour or two and woke up in a still-drunk haze. He appreciated this. But, months later, his calloused hands (maybe he’s a construction worker?) would push my head into his waist like he was planting me into the rich soil of his groin. Soon, there were no more surprises.

I’m walking past a well-decorated faculty office, the light from inside looks almost divine. The shadows of two tenured professors dance in the doorway. One complains about teaching four courses this semester. The other mentions the word overload. I make copies of my syllabus on the office copy machine. This year I will teach twelve classes at four different colleges, and make less than $30,000. One night, I spread my college ID badges out across a sticky wooden table at our bar, they were a patchwork quilt of inadequacy. Aaron laughed and slugged his beer. Inside of me there was a fire smouldering.

Five.

The messy ending. On a random Monday morning, Aaron stopped answering his phone. I called him three times a day for three weeks. I felt the burn of his phone number on my fingertips while I slept. I missed the nest. I missed his hands on the back of my skull in the darkness. I missed the promise of girlfriend.

Just like I miss the promise of faculty. I have the wrong three letters after my name. I don’t have enough publishing experience. I went to the wrong school, studied the wrong discipline, and made the wrong choices. I’m not good enough for a full-time slot. I’m not good enough for dental insurance. I’m not good enough for tenure. I’m not good enough for Aaron.

My students remember me, write me letters years later thanking me. You made me a writer, one letter says. These are the right letters, the letters that smell like honey, like Aaron on a warm summer night. This is what keeps me coming back.

South Franklin Street

I just finished watching the movie, Wild, based on the wonderful memoir by Cheryl Strayed.  And as I walked out of that theater, I couldn’t help but feel sad and more alone than I have felt in a long while.

I wrote a memoir about getting married and divorced.  I wrote a memoir about how lonely I was, about how it felt to have someone you love reject you, about how sometimes you need to start your life over again even if you lack the basic tools to do so.  An agent loved my book, took it on as hers, and I thought that was the beginning of something.  But publishers didn’t love it like we did.  They felt that nothing happened.  They like books like Wild, because in that book something happened.  So I had to make something happen.  Now it’s a different book.  I miss my memoir.

Crises are not always big.  Sometimes they are small and fall into the crevices of our hearts.  Hearts are not smooth, nor are they heart-shaped.

What if your crisis is that you eat too much?

What if your crisis is that you let your kids have too much sugar, or that you and your husband had exactly two therapy-worthy fights in front of them?

What if your crisis is that you told your father you hated him once, and have never forgiven yourself for it?

I walked myself to sanity once too.  It was not the Pacific Crest Trail, but it was South Franklin Street in Wilkes-Barre, and that path back to the one and only place I have ever lived on my own, was just as treacherous.

What if your crisis is that you don’t protect yourself from anything or anyone?

What if your crisis is that you don’t always know where to put a comma?

What if your crisis is that you loved someone that you shouldn’t have?

What if your crisis is that you don’t like playing board games with your kids?

What if your crisis is that you feel like no other person on the face of this earth understands you just as you are?

I don’t have one big crisis to sustain a book.  I have a million little ones that I carve into my chest day after day.

Seeds

“There are 206 bones in the adult human body.  Most of us can only name a few: the mandible or jaw bone, the cranium or skull, the ribs, the humerus or the “funny” bone, the leg bones: the femur and the fibula, and maybe, if you’ve really paid attention in anatomy class, the bones of the hand: the phalanges, the carpals, and the metacarpals.  These are the bones we can see, we can feel, we can break.  These were the bones I knew about… before.  Now, as Georgia curls into a fetal position to sleep and her blue hospital gown peels away from her back, I can see every hump, every curve, every peak and valley in her spine.  I can see every bone pressing against her skin like it’s a sheet.  It’s an image that will forever haunt me.  My best friend is a living, breathing, archaeological discovery.  Six months ago she was alive, full of color and shape.  Now, her body is white and gaunt.  She is a dandelion gone to seed.“

This is from a scene in my book-in-progress, Fat Girl, Skinny, in which the main character visits her best friend in the hospital and for the first time, realizes the gravity of the friend’s eating disorder.  This was hard for me to write.  Not because as a fat girl, I have been so tempted to take up an eating disorder that writing about one might just seal the deal.   No.  Writing about Anorexia was difficult for me because I honestly could not understand what it was like to think in terms of starvation.

I once had a friend who used to quip, “I wish I could develop an eating disorder, it would be the answer to all of my problems.”  I used to look at her like she was insane.  The answer???  How could anything so horrible and self-deprecating be an answer?

The truth is that for most of my life I thought I was too healthy to develop an eating disorder.  My parents loved me, my family was “normal”, I had no parasite eating my insides.   But, through the process of writing this book, most of which is autobiographical, I made a  startling discovery.  I do have an eating disorder.  Unlike traditional disorders, however, mine is marked by lack of control rather than a compulsion to control.  Eating has destroyed me more than once in my lifetime.  Eating has become a thief in the night taking with it my self-worth, my self-esteem, and any integrity I thought I had.  Yet, it keeps happening.  I suffer from overeating just as an anorexic suffers from under-eating.  And as with Anorexia or Bulimia, there is an underlying psychosis that goes along with sabotaging your own life.

I’m not here to compare the severity of eating disorders.  I’m here to say that whether you allow yourself to whither away, or you abuse yourself, stuff yourself, and blow up your own life, we all suffer together.  Once I found that level ground in my brain, I was able to write about my character’s anorexia with deeper authenticity.  I guess I just can’t stop writing memoir.

Three Things to Keep me From Jumping off a Cliff

This week, no, this year, I have been met with more disappointment in my professional life than I know what to do with.  Jobs I was certain I had -slipped through my fingers, publishers I was sure would offer-passed, everything I thought would happen, the plan I had dreamed in my mind for myself, is gone.  Each week there are rejection slips in my inbox, each month there’s another person/publisher/editor/chairperson telling me I’m not good enough, my writing isn’t good enough, my credentials aren’t good enough.  This is the life of so many of us who write and teach or teach and write.  It’s what you sign on for when you decide to become a writer.  It’s not just my experience, this trampling of ego echoes through the masses, I know that, it’s just so, so, so…. humbling.  And before you send me hate mail, or call me a whiner, yes, I know there are writers who are way more talented than myself who have been plugging away for twenty-some odd years without catching a break.  This is not a competition.  This is just me, telling you, how I plan to deal with this influx of negative energy.

girl_cryingI’ve been here before.  After my divorce it was the same feeling only the destruction and utter disappointment was happening in my personal life.  I had broken up with my ex to search for a better life, a better mate, a better fit, and I was finding…well, not that.  So I slowly began to work on the things I could control.  I began to exercise, lose weight, read more, focus on my job, and in the end, I was better for it.   More importantly, I took the risk of leaving a bad yet comfortable relationship in hopes of finding something more, and in the (very) long run, it paid off.

Four years ago, I took another risk.  I promised my husband that if he supported my decision to go back to school, it would pay off someday.  I told my kids as I dropped them off at daycare every morning so that I could finish my MFA, that this would all be worth it someday.  Now, that someday seems to be fading further and further into the distance.  I know it will come, the risk will pay off, but it’s getting harder and harder to keep looking up.  But these are things I have no control over.  I can’t control the fact that publishers and editors don’t think a book about a fat girl is going to sell right now.  I can’t control the fact that the job market is in the toilet.  The only thing I can control is me, and what I do with my life and my family, my writing.

In honor of this, I have decided that I’m going to do what I have done in the past at every lull in life.  I have reinvented myself more than once, and I’m ready to do it again.  I’m going to commit to doing three things everyday.  If I can do this for a month, I will add another.  So, just in time for April, I’m asking you, too, to make a list of three things you can do everyday to nourish your mind, body, and spirit.  Here are mine:

Mind:  I’m going to read for thirty minutes a day (at least.)  My life right now is full of “too busy to read.”  That needs to change.

Body:  I’m going to drink 100 ounces of water each day.

Spirit:  I’m going to spend an hour a day doing something my kids love.  Playing Candyland, reading Pinkalicious, building with Legos.  Whatever they want, one hour.  That’s the deal.

These three small things will help me to feel better about myself, connect me with my children, help hydrate my body after a long, cold winter, and help my writing by reading great stories every day.

These are my three things.  I will do them every day in April.  This may not solve my problem, but it helps to exercise control over something.  By the end of April, I will have read, played, and hydrated myself to a better frame of mind.  Hopefully.

Tales of a Capsizing Mommy

I finished my book just in time to miss the best years of my twin daughter’s lives.  My MFA, two chapbooks of poetry, and an unsold memoir had consumed me for the better part of five years.  I guess I half-expected that they would wait for me, that the milestones: the walking, the rolling over, the talking, the first night sleeping all the way through, would be there for me on the other side, ready to repeat themselves and allow me to linger and actually pay attention this time.

Instead, when I finally lifted my head through the skin of the water, I found a pair of little girls, almost six, ready to cross that invisible threshold into “not a baby anymore” land.  Suddenly there were too-tight shoes, missing training wheels, a pint-sized boyfriend, and sight words that rolled off their pink shiny tongues like water rolling downhill.

Don’t get me wrong, I did what I could.  I kept copious notes in a black journal with embossed flowers on the cover.  Triumphs and achievements stretched out across each page like webs catching every date and every age.  But I had never really slowed down to experience them, to inhale their importance, and when I pulled that journal out weeks ago, after the dust had settled and my writing was dormant, it was as if I was a stranger glancing through a history book full of events I had never witnessed.

So, when Penelope, the baby (by one whole minute), came to me three months ago with a pain in her tooth and it was discovered that said tooth was loose, I reveled in the emotion of the moment.

tooth“Your tooth is loose!  Your tooth is loose!”  I cried as if she had just informed me of a full scholarship to Harvard Law School.  The afternoon sun lit up the kitchen and I danced her around the bare floor draped in the warm rays.  I called all of her grandparents, and acted as if this loose tooth would be it: the one event, the one benchmark of her childhood  I would remember forever.   I imagined she would call me up twenty-seven years from now and I would relive the loose tooth with as much vigor and detail as I had remembered her birth.  Still, just in case, later that night through weary eyes, I pulled out the journal and wrote: Loose tooth, October, 2012.

Now, three months have passed and already that moment is gone from my mind.  I remember the date, obviously, but I can’t remember the sequence, the order in which anything happened.  Did she wake up with the tooth pain?  Had she pointed it out earlier and I blew it off?  Did I know to look for the wiggle of the tooth or did she mention it first?

This is what has happened to my brain since I decided to live the writing life.  I used to remember moments effortlessly.  In my early twenties, I could have told you every single detail of every relationship I’d ever had:  How the leather back seat felt under my bare skin the first time I went parking with a boy, the smell of Jeff’s cologne, and how my stomach flipped every time I heard Mike’s voice.    I was able to recite the phone numbers of my very first girl friends, my employee badge number from SEARS, the first nine numbers of Pi.  Now, I cannot recall the simple historic moments of my own children’s lives.  The events most mothers have living on the tips of their tongues.

Sinking-shipIt’s easy to make excuses.  I’m teaching six classes this semester, that’s 120 students give or take.  That’s a lot of papers, a lot of deadlines, and a lot of emails to answer.  I’m also involved with a few literary magazines, host of a reading series, and mentor to some budding writers.  I’m overwhelmed, clearly, but that’s not all. What’s taking up so much precious real estate in my mind is my next book, play, poem, short story, essay, and haiku.  On any given day, there is a whole host of images and characters just floating around my head, taking up space.  I do everything I can to hold onto the important things, to tether Penelope’s loose tooth to something that will help me remember.  Penelope’s first tooth wiggled one week before Halloween.  I was teaching Creative Nonfiction, it was right after I finished the book.  I secure the rope tightly, but deep down I know it’s in vain.  A little loose tooth is no match for the high tide of unwritten stories.  The memory of my daughter and me in the kitchen, spinning on the balls of my feet while she laughs and beams with big-girl pride will be lost someday soon, the magic of the moment relegated to four words in a handwritten journal.   This is the life of mother, a writer, a captain of uncharted waters just trying to stay afloat.

The Movie Flight: Allow me to Ruin it For You.

(SPOILER ALERT)  I recently saw the movie, Flight, with Denzel Washington, and it stunned me.  Not because of its quality, which is okay but not great, but because of the storyline.  If ever there was a crystal clear example of addiction, this was it.  Denzel’s character, Whip, was grasping at life, trying to beat the addiction that threatened to engulf him.  And all I could see on that screen was…me.  I have suspected for years that I was a food addict, but never had it been made so obvious to me as this weekend as I watched Whip’s behavior which was so eerily similar.  Three key behaviors resonated with me.

1.  Purge.  No, not the kind where you’re bent over a toilet, but the kind of purge you perform often on Monday mornings where you think to yourself- This is it.  I’m done.  This diet starts today.  You then proceed to throw everything you deem as “junk food” into the garbage can, bag it up, and drag it out to the curb. Whip did the same thing with his booze, several times.  And each time he ended up at the liquor store within a few days time.

2.  Lie.  One of the cornerstones of the movie is Whip’s ability to lie about his addiction.  In fact, in one of my favorite lines of the film is when he tells his lawyer, “Don’t tell me how to lie about my drinking, I’ve been doing it my whole life.”  I lied about my eating, all the time.  To myself, to my family, to perfect strangers.

3. Regret.  Like a drunk, I began many a days with a food hangover.  Knowing I gorged myself the night before, knowing I destroyed my diet and broke my resolve, I would feel AWFUL the next day.  Like I robbed someone of something intangible.  Like I blew something up inside of me.

I have made many excuses about my reluctance to face my food addiction.  I have made the argument that food addiction is very difficult to overcome since we must continue to eat, while alcoholics can completely avoid their substance of choice, we cannot.  But this is bullshit.  I am not addicted to all food, I am addicted to high sugar, high calorie, high fat foods.  I can eat things that do not contain these ingredients.  Just like alcoholics can drink iced tea, lemonade, soda, etc.

I have made many excuses, but when I saw that movie, I realized what my world looks like.  I realized what I’m doing.  I’m still doing, even though I’ve gained remarkable control over my eating, I’m still a long way from where I need to be.  I’m not sure how to get back, how to find solace.  But I think it’s time I face what I am.

I am a food addict.

Much more on this to come.

 

 

Dr Oz and The Magical Melting Belly

Somehow I think Dr. Oz will fix me.  I’m not sure where or how this idea originated, I just know it exists   I don’t watch his show, or any daytime talk for that matter.  I don’t own any book he’s ever written, yet I feel a strange kinship with the good doctor, as his marketing team intended, I’m sure.  So even though I know what I need to do to feel better about myself, and even though I’ve started embracing my life and who I am without letting my inner critic destroy me, I still compulsively reach for the magazine.  You know the one…. the thin, glossy monthly that promises Dr. Oz’s miracle diet will peel 80 pounds from your belly in just two months.

The truth is, I know what I need to do.  I know enough about nutrition and processed foods and all of the bad stuff,  that I can and do make good food decisions now.  Yet, it never fails, I never empty my grocery bags without seeing Dr. Oz’s face, or the promise of a quick fix, staring up at me.  What am I expecting to find anyway?  I guess, if I’m being honest, I expect to find help of some kind.  An answer.  A solution.  I expect to find some sort of unraveling to the riddle that has engulfed me for the better part of my life.  OOhhhhh, it’s food X that’s the problem.  That’s it, food X!  I can eat cake and pizza and anything else I want all the time and drop weight like rain.  Only, the answer is not there.  Yes, Theresa from California lost 68 pounds in thirteen weeks, and Martha from St. Louis has her sex drive back, but I am not Theresa or Martha.  I am me.  And the answer to my problems is not on the cover of a weekly periodical with Dr. Oz’s white teeth shining out at me.  The answer is within me.

Scale Update:  Still no weigh in.  I went to the doctors last week and was terrified he was going to fight me on this.  Instead, I ended up in a pow wow with three nurses who loved the idea of giving up the scale.  On another note, I discovered yet another benefit.  Without my scale and it’s lack of motion, I can make smaller, long term changes and stick with them.  For example, I recently gave up sweets.  No more candy, no more baked goods, nothing of the sort.  Before the Scale Diet, I would have given up if my scale had not shown immediate results… oh screw it, why am I depriving myself?  It’s clearly not working...  But now, I feel good and I feel proud of myself that I’m making these changes and the numbers on a scale are not derailing that progress.

So I’m Writing a Book

So I’m writing a book about being overweight, about being diagnosed with PCOS, about thinking and believing that I would never have a baby.  I’m writing about how, ironically, I was the only woman in my family who ever wanted a baby, yet the only one who could not produce one.  And when I write these sentences and the narrative begins to take shape, the pain and misery of those years almost takes my breath away.  It’s as if writing this story has me standing on the edge of something and I’m ready to fall.  I remember those days when seeing my friends with their babies would make me want to barricade myself indoors for months.  I remember being divorced and feeling like I was nothing, less than a woman, less than a human even, because I was barren and fat.  And what did I have to offer anyone?

My story may not be extraordinary   My story may not matter to most. But I have to go forward and believe that it will matter to someone, even if that someone is just me.