I Do It with the Lights On Read online

  The next week at school, David’s two friends and I were talking during social studies class. They were making lewd comments about both of my girlfriends and my heart sank—I knew they had to be saying similar things about me behind my back. I sternly defended my friends and demanded to know how I was any different from them, as we’d all shared the experience together. (Wait, did I just describe a middle school–style orgy? Lord help me.) Whether or not this was my first group sexual encounter remains unclear, but it was another one of the first stirrings of feminism I felt. See—contrary to popular belief—unshaven armpits, bra-burning, man-hating, and lesbianism are not requirements for feminism; you just need to commit to sisterhood and to your own voice. (More on that in chapter 10.)

  As the end of eighth grade grew closer, I dedicated myself to becoming a better athlete in time for the summer—soccer camp was just around the corner. On days I didn’t have practice after school, I went outside with the ball and made myself practice drills until my dad came home. I craved his perpetual guidance. One night he suggested that I try to juggle the ball with my feet. After half an hour I had only managed to make contact with the ball two consecutive times. I went back into the house red-faced and disappointed. But the failure lit a fire inside me, and the next day I returned to my yard determined to be better. I stayed outside until my dad came home and that day I managed to juggle the ball four times, with my dad encouraging me the whole time, reminding me that I could do anything I put my mind to. Months later at soccer camp I won the campwide juggling contest, juggling the ball over a hundred times and beating out just as many girls for the prize.

  Instances like this bolstered my belief that maybe anything was possible, no achievement was out of reach, and that just because something didn’t come naturally didn’t mean I would never succeed at it. It simply took hard work, discipline, and willpower. This was the same logic I applied when I set out to change the natural structure of my body, and it frustrated me when I didn’t achieve the same results. What I know now that I didn’t then is that our bodies are tools we use to develop, strengthen, and hone certain skills, but our bodies themselves have boundaries. Having a certain type of body isn’t necessarily something you can acquire; it’s genetics.

  Frustrated with my inability to control my weight, I began seeking out other things that I could control. I became obsessed with picking at my skin and hair. Every day after school I would run to my mother’s bathroom upstairs and begin a squeezing and picking ritual on my face that left my skin blotchy, sometimes bleeding, and covered with fingernail indentations. Then I would pull hairs out of my head. There were specific ones that were darker and coarser than the rest, usually with a stiffer texture. I pulled these out one after the other until I couldn’t find any more. When they began to grow back in, I took the tweezers and plucked them out at the root. I got immense satisfaction from this, and soon had a bald spot in the center of my head, right where my bangs met the rest of my hair. My mother, worried about this new development, took me to a dermatologist. I played dumb, too embarrassed to admit I’d been pulling my own hair out. The dermatologist diagnosed me with stress-related hair loss. Well, that’s one way to look at it, I thought. I wouldn’t learn about trichotillomania, a disorder that causes people to pull out their hair, until high school. But once I got there, it would be the least of my worries.

  I was eager to start high school, because just like sixth grade, I thought it offered me an opportunity to start over and to be a different person, to present a shiny new version of myself. When I didn’t magically lose twenty pounds or gain the reputation of being one of the popular girls in school, I sought refuge in one of my teachers, a middle-aged overweight woman with a heart of gold. Sometimes we wrote notes back and forth and I told her about all the things that were bothering me, from teenage dramas to my budding bulimia. She urged me to go to the counseling department and confided in me that her sister had been fighting a lifelong battle with bulimia and binge eating. Part of me was shocked to think about an adult still being a slave to such problems, but I didn’t see myself becoming one of them. While I appreciated her concern, advice, and sense of kinship, I now wonder at what point an adult should intervene in a child’s life and contact her parents—and how my life might have turned out differently if she had.

  If my high school was the set of Clueless, I wasn’t as bumbling and homely as Tai, but I had no hope of being Cher, either. I’d mostly sworn off wearing shorts in order to hide my squishy legs. My wardrobe consisted of jeans and T-shirts. No heels, no skirts (certainly no miniskirts), no spaghetti-strap tank tops. I finally decided to grow out my fringe bangs but didn’t wear makeup or style my hair. Halfway through the school year, my mother took me to the spa at the local shopping center and I got my eyebrows waxed for the first time. I felt so chic.

  If that was my first rite of passage into womanhood, the second came one freezing January evening on the street outside my house. I sprinted the hundred-yard dash between orange cones my father and I had set up. I ran one after the other, then told my father I had to go to the bathroom. I hurried inside and, to my surprise, just shy of my fifteenth birthday, I got my period. I told my mother, changed my underwear, added a thick, horrible maxi pad, and returned outside to the biting winter air. Junior varsity soccer tryouts were just a month away.

  The day before tryouts, I woke up with a scratchy throat, and by late morning my throat hurt so badly that I was unable to talk. My father came to school to sign me out of class. The nurse asked me when my last menstrual cycle was, and I told her it had been four weeks ago. My dad took me home and later asked my mother why she hadn’t told him about my period—he felt as though he’d been left out of a significant moment. But at nearly fifteen, I was the only person I knew who’d not yet had her period, and it had long lost its appeal for me. The rest of the day my symptoms became dramatically worse—so much so that I could barely swallow and developed severe congestion in my chest. I was going to miss soccer tryouts and I was devastated. My father called the coach, who said there would be a makeup tryout the next week that I could attend. My illness got worse every day. I went to the doctor, who ruled out strep throat and the flu. I lay around the house, coughing up phlegm and drooling into a washcloth because my raw throat couldn’t handle swallowing my own saliva. One morning, I was coughing and hacking when I spit up a piece of black matter. I called my dad to look at it. He assured me it was nothing and that it happened to him “all the time.” When he tucked me back into his bed and went downstairs to leave for work, I heard him on the phone with the doctor.

  “Yes, it’s black. I’ve never seen anything like it. Is that normal?” We never did figure out what it was.

  On the fourth day or so of my sickness, I started bleeding again, right on schedule. But this period was different than the first. I was bleeding through a pad every hour, my stomach was cramping, my back was aching, and I could feel blood oozing out of me every time I coughed. It was not only the heaviest period I would ever have, but the last nonmedically induced one I would have for the next seven years. It finally ended a week later and I returned to school, looking almost gaunt, having lost ten pounds because I was unable to stomach anything during my illness.

  “Damn, where’d you go?” a guy friend of mine teased me after class. “Don’t go losing that butt now.” Even though a few days before I had worried that I was on my death bed, this comment made me flush with pride. Of course it’s seventeen kinds of fucked up that weight loss is celebrated even as a result of illness, but I didn’t understand that as I walked down the hallways of my high school with a new swing in my step.

  Soon after, I saw a flyer posted for the spring musical, Jesus Christ Superstar. Even though I couldn’t carry a tune, I noted there was a dance audition and thought I’d give it a shot. Showing up to that audition changed the course of my life. It was there that I met Amie again, the same woman whose dances I had imitated during Pippin rehearsals when I was five. She cast me as one
of six dancers and we launched into rehearsals. I immediately felt motivated, talented, and at home with dancing again. I’d taken three years off from dance classes, but now, after the first fifteen minutes of learning choreography, I felt more inspired than I had ever felt before. The whole process of Jesus Christ Superstar was rewarding, from rehearsals, to forging a relationship with a new dance teacher, to the teamwork involved, to the high of performing and the praise I received—it was all-consuming. I was, once again, hooked on dance.

  Since Amie also taught dance at Weaver Center, a special performing arts school in my town that offered advanced dance and theatre classes that public school students could take within their regular school day, I made it my goal to gain admission there. I had the passion, the drive, the natural talent, and the basic skills that I had acquired in childhood, but when it came to the more technical elements of leaps and turns, I was miles behind. I attended an audition at Weaver Center one spring night near the end of the school year. I had gone to the local dancewear store and purchased new leotards, dance pants, leg warmers, and shoes. But in the audition, even though I looked like a dancer, I failed to perform like one. The dance combination was more modern than anything I’d done before, and the instructor taught it without any counts. I was stuck in the back with a bad view, feeling—and looking—completely lost. I was mortified.

  After the audition was finished, I walked out to my mom’s car through the rain with my eyes turned downward on the puddles underneath my feet. When I explained to her that I’d never danced worse in my life, she didn’t try to convince me otherwise. My parents raised me to be self-aware, and while they showered me with positive reinforcement for a job well done, they never tried to convince me that I was better at something than I thought I was in an effort to spare my feelings. A few days later I learned that I was placed in the Honors Advanced Dance class after all. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised me so much. Amie likely paid less attention to my one-minute audition and more to the months I worked with her during Jesus Christ Superstar. Just recently, on one of my dance videos on Facebook, she commented:

  Who wouldn’t love a fifteen-year-old choreographer, dedicated performer, peer motivator, etc. You were easy to teach and love. Amazing then and now.

  Amie was the first of three women who shaped my dance career. I would meet the second just two months later, when I auditioned for a community theatre production of Carousel. I hadn’t had much luck as an actress, unlike my brother. He’d been cast in several community theatre productions as a child, and was a member of the prestigious theatre company at Weaver. Now he was performing at Appalachian State University where he was pursuing a degree in theatre performance. However, when I saw the flyer for Carousel, a dance-intensive summer musical, I thought I might have a chance. Since I’d loved Superstar so much, I decided to give it a shot. During the music portion of auditions I gritted my teeth and struggled through a few bars of a song and scales alongside the piano. Then I changed into shorts, a T-shirt, and my worn Adidas Gazelles for the dance portion of the audition. This is where I met my second dance master, Marie.

  Marie was a riveting, take-no-shit kind of woman and she captivated me. While she called out counts and demonstrated the movements, most of the other people auditioning—who were not dancers—exchanged terrified glances and nervous giggles as Marie quickly moved from one element to the next. The routine ended with us going down to the floor in a way that would have caused a nondancer to vomit, but it didn’t faze me.

  A few days later I made the familiar trek from the parking lot to the City Arts building, steeling myself against the probable rejection. When I got to the glass window where the cast list was posted, I could hardly believe it when I found my name listed under the ensemble dancers. Once rehearsals started, Marie immediately took a liking to me because I worked harder than anyone else. I memorized choreography after she taught it once. I rehearsed it on my own time. I made corrections the first time she pointed them out. One day in rehearsal she roared, “Is Whitney the only person who heard me when I told you to kick out your foot when you get to the end of the steps?”

  Marie intrigued me with her raspy voice, her T-shirts with the necks cut out that she wore with combat boots, and the way she stood smoking cigarettes. But mostly I admired her self-assuredness. She was tiny, with light blue eyes, curly dark blond hair, and a riotous laugh. She was thirty and so…cool. A graduate of UNCG—the University of North Carolina at Greensboro—she was now part of the Jan Van Dyke dance company, an avant-garde group that appealed to my thriving artistic senses. She taught classes in the cultural arts center during the day, charging seven dollars per person. It was in these classes that I truly became a dancer. Her choreography was way out of my reach, but I pushed and struggled through each class, dreaming about the studio from the time one class ended to the time the next one began. I will never forget the first time, during dance class, that Marie called out, “Good girl, Whitney!” It was an honor like none other.

  Before one of her classes, I’d been talking with a male fellow dancer about how I wanted to lose twenty pounds. I weighed 120 at that point, and I fervently subscribed to the belief that I was supposed to weigh 100 pounds at five feet, and an additional five pounds for each inch. At five-two, that meant I should weigh no more than 110 pounds. Naturally, I thought I’d overachieve and go for 100. My friend blurted out to Marie, “Whitney wants to lose twenty pounds. Isn’t she crazy?”

  Marie turned toward us abruptly and snapped, “Whitney, if you lose twenty pounds, I won’t let you take my class.” And with that the discussion was over. Obviously, Marie didn’t understand my need to lose weight, probably because she was thin herself, I reasoned. I disregarded her admonishment and narrowed my eyes at my friend.

  As it turns out, Marie understood more about the perceived need to lose weight and its effects on young girls’—specifically dancers’—self-esteem than almost anyone. I spoke with her in the beginning of 2016 (for the first time in over a decade), after she’d seen a YouTube video I posted and she sent me this message:

  I just gotta say…guurrlll…you are one bad-ass bitch (and I mean bitch in the best way possible, it’s a compliment coming from me—I, after all, am one, so I don’t throw that term around lightly—it’s a title that has to be earned…). Negative body image is a real thing and one that as a dance teacher I deal with all day every day. What you are doing with your show and your social media posts is invaluable, and at the risk of coming across as patronizing, I am so proud of you and so proud to be able to count you as one of my former students. Keep up the good work, lady…

  My sophomore year was filled with firsts, and most of them weren’t positive. I got my first C, in geometry, and I smoked my first cigarette. I was plagued by moodiness and I started fighting a lot with my mom. But finally in the spring, for the first time that year, I began to feel excited about my future again. I had been cast as Cha-Cha in Grease, my parents were going to Europe for two weeks, and my brother Hunter (who would already be finished with his college courses) would be staying with me. Plus, I would be studying drama at Governor’s School, an elite summer program held on a college campus, which I’d been admitted to after auditioning. Even though my morose nature was beginning to transition into depression, I clung to this timeline of events, willing myself to be content with it, but my constant battle with my bulimia, body image, and self-esteem lingered, in no small part due to feedback from my peers.

  There was a boy named Nick in my humanities class who often flirted with me. One day in class he tapped me on the shoulder, announcing an observation that people seemed all too happy to share with me.

  “My brother says you’re fat.”

  Grease went off without a hitch, and when my parents left for Europe, my twenty-year-old brother gave me one rule: go to school. But I didn’t always abide by it. I once skipped an entire day with an older girlfriend, listening to music and smoking weed for the first time, in some guy’s filthy ap
artment. My brother decided to have a party on the same night as the prom, and, aside from being literally the only party I ever went to in high school, it was the biggest party of the year. A couple hours before anyone got to our house, I drank my first beers and got high with my friends. By the time my-brother-says-you’re-fat Nick showed up, I was drunk and completely unaffected by his presence.

  The next morning Nick shyly handed me a folded-up piece of paper. In it was a desperate plea for me to forgive him for calling me fat. He was headed to college in the fall and wrote that he couldn’t bear to leave without knowing where things could go with me. I still have that folded-up piece of paper because I’m overly sentimental, but I called Nick and told him any mutual liking we had for each other was over. Not only had his declaration of his brother’s opinion of me hurt me deeply, but in order to get past it, we’d have to discuss it, and that meant talking about me being fat, which was more demoralizing at the time than anything I could imagine.

  I arrived at Governor’s School a few weeks later, about an hour and a half away from my home. The first thing I noticed about my roommate was the way her clavicle protruded like a built-in necklace of bone beneath her white halter top. She had tanned skin and thick, straight hair. The feelings of inferiority that I’d hoped to leave at home were still following me like a faithful friend.

  Governor’s School was structured a lot like college: while most of your time was spent in a specialized area, we had other classes with all kinds of students. During the first break on our first day, some girls were lined up on the quad, lying out in bikini tops and microscopic, cutoff jean shorts. I lay there, too, on my stomach at the far end of the line. I didn’t even own a bikini and certainly would never have worn it in a public setting like that, so I just lounged in my overalls and T-shirt. I watched as a group of guys approached us. Starting at the end opposite me, they chatted or made a joke with each bikini-clad girl. When they got to me, they just walked right on past without acknowledging my existence at all. The obvious snub was another wake-up call: this summer would not go as planned. In fact, it would be the backdrop to my darkest days.