I Do It with the Lights On Read online

  My room was a common place for a bunch of the girls on the hall to gather, and we gossiped about boys and told one another about our lives at home. One night, a girl pointed to the stack of VHS tapes next to the TV and asked what they were. When I told her they were videos of my old dance performances, several of the girls coaxed me to pop one in the VCR, so I did. The videos weren’t great quality, and one of the girls burst into laughter as she watched the grainy moving images on the screen.

  “Who’s that fat one?” she demanded to know, gesturing toward the TV. “She sucks.” She was talking about me.

  The group stayed up late and eventually the topic of conversation turned to weight loss. One girl was a gymnast and her eyes lit up as she recounted how she lost weight.

  “I eat anything I want in the morning. Seriously. Bagels, doughnuts, bacon, whatever. But then I don’t eat the rest of the day, and I just started dropping weight.” It was an approach I had never considered, and I wrote it down in one of my notebooks so I could try it out later.

  Another night, we were all hungry, so we ordered a pizza and walked to the nearest shopping center to load up on ice cream and junk food. Even though our room had a minifridge, mine was always empty, because unlike many of the other girls, my parents hadn’t stocked it with snacks. Once, on the phone with my dad, I complained about this, most likely in a bratty way, and he retorted, “You don’t need to be eating anything extra!”

  We all binged that night, stuffing our faces until we couldn’t manage another bite. We took a silly photo, holding up our boxes of ice cream while we linked arms and brought the spoons to our lips. Afterward we each purged in the hall bathroom, one after another with the door open, congratulating one another on a job well done. This particular memory disturbs me more than almost any other, not necessarily because of the bingeing and purging, but because of the collective nature of it. Sure, it was something we’d all done—but privately, away from the eyes and judgments of others. It was a secret we all scrambled to keep. Why did we think it was something so benign, so common, so normal, that we were willing to do it together with the same ease with which we went shopping or painted our nails?

  I soon got hit with the biggest bout of depression I’ve ever experienced in my life. I’ve spent many years in varying states of depression since, but I’ve never endured anything so bleak. To this day, sixteen years later, when I recall how despondent and how hopeless I felt, it terrifies me. And any time I feel the black cloud descending again, I’m paralyzed with the fear that it will consume me like it did then.

  The source of my depression was, I’m certain now, clinical. It would be an awful injustice to chalk it up to simply not feeling like I fit in with my peers. In my philosophy class, we spent entire periods tackling existential questions, the kind that made your mind spin and didn’t have answers at all. Not having answers bothered me, and those abstract, answerless questions plagued me and made me incredibly anxious. While my classmates raced toward the cafeteria or horsed around outside, I spent a lot of time curled up in a ball on my bed, listening to Tori Amos on my Walkman, burrowing deeper into depression. I wondered what would happen when I died, and what would happen after that. I didn’t want to exist forever, in heaven, or in the cosmos, or anywhere, for that matter. I had an overwhelming appetite for nothingness, where I wouldn’t have to feel any pain. On top of that, I felt like the work we were doing in theatre class was phony. We were doing a performance based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which I loved, but the performance itself seemed like nothing more than artificial performance art. While my classmates cried and waxed poetic about how meaningful it was, I thought it was contrived. And I thought they were stupid.

  One evening I was sitting alone by a fountain when a boy named Derek struck up a conversation with me. He had dark auburn hair, subtle freckles, a killer smile, and was chubby in the way dudes are allowed to be. Like most students there, he was a year older than me, and as it turned out, he lived in Greensboro, too, but attended a different high school than I did. We hung out for a couple hours, laughing and flirting. When the sky started to look like cotton candy, he leaned over to kiss me. He asked me to go to a dance with him a couple nights later and I enthusiastically agreed. I was smitten.

  I was puzzled when Derek was a no-show on the night of the dance. I walked around the gymnasium at least three times, cutting through clusters of sweaty bodies to look for him. Hours later I finally spotted him passing me on the quad with several other guys. He didn’t even look my way. He was drunk.

  “What the hell?” I said, intercepting him. “I waited for you.”

  “Whitney, I like you,” he slurred inches away from me, his stale-beer breath on my face. “But when I told my friends I was going to the dance with you, they asked me why I would hang out with you when there are so many hot girls here.”

  By the time his asshole friends had quit snickering and I was able to formulate a reply, Derek was already walking away. I stood there with my entire body prickling as if it were on fire, watching his silhouette shrink smaller and smaller in the distance. I bolted across campus—running away from where Derek’s words had pierced me, away from the unbearable truth that I was irreparably damaged, and as far away as I could from other people who could hurt me. When I let myself in my dorm room, I was keyed up and restless and I began pacing the floor back and forth. I felt like insanity was tugging at the edges of my brain. I wanted to get out of this place and I wanted to get out of my body. But that was exactly the problem: I didn’t have one defective limb that I could just chop off and be done with it; the problem was my entire body and I had no feasible way to amputate the pain. When I finally calmed down, I lay in bed and thought about ways I could kill myself, but I kept colliding with the realization that even death wasn’t the end. It didn’t matter what I did, where I went, or who I met. The common denominator was me, and I couldn’t figure out how to disconnect from my own being. I was doomed to be with myself forever.

  4

  “FAT” GIRLS HAVE EATING DISORDERS, TOO

  I was eager to leave Governor’s School, a place that I could associate only with trite theatrical performances, suffocating existentialism, and painful reminders of my own inferiority. When I returned home I finally got my driver’s license, which proved to be a redeeming distraction for a confused and pensive sixteen-year-old girl.

  Marie was holding a dance camp at a local university, and I drove to it religiously, seeking refuge inside the dance studio with its mirror that reflected a familiar and comforting image of a dancer who was both talented and respected, even if she was bigger than all the rest.

  Each morning, I arrived hungry (literally and figuratively), ready for the hours of challenges and achievements that learning new choreography would bring. It was inside these four walls that I first met Todd, who I quickly appointed my Eternal Dance Partner. He would add Honorary Fat Girl to that title thirteen years later when he joined me in the Fat Girl Dancing video that would eventually amass more than 8.5 million views on YouTube. But at that time, on the heels of such a disappointing summer, I never could have guessed what our future held.

  At my high school heaviest, the day I got my license—my dad made me wear tennis shoes for the test (2000).

  When Marie announced at the end of dance camp that she would be moving to Los Angeles, I was crushed. Her inevitable absence in my life threatened to extinguish the only fire I had left burning. Marie recruited a bunch of us to help her pack up her things, and I showed up at her house half miserable because she was leaving and half intrigued at being allowed in her personal space. She divvied up tasks among us, assigning me to her bathroom. I examined each cosmetic, hair tie, and bottle of over-the-counter medication closely, handling each one with the utmost care, as if they were mysterious and precious artifacts. I wiped them all clean with a damp cloth and divided them into like items, organizing them into labeled Ziploc bags. At the last minute, I pulled a tube of lipstick out and leaned over the si
nk into the mirror. Glancing at the open door, I painted my lips quickly with it and dropped the tube back in the bag. When I was done, Marie stood next to me investigating my work. I began explaining the specifics of my packing system, but she interrupted me.

  “Thank you. I knew you’d do it perfectly.”

  Before we left, a classmate of mine implored me to eat a slice of the pizza Marie had bought us as a thank-you, but I declined. Catching the conversation from the porch, Marie barked at him.

  “Leave her alone,” she said. “If she doesn’t want it, she doesn’t want it.”

  When I drove away from her house that day, I ran my tongue over my lips so I could taste Marie’s lipstick, thinking about what my life would be like without her. A few weeks later when my junior year of high school began, I was the heaviest I’d ever been, weighing more than 150 pounds. My dad, who was well aware of my dissatisfaction with my weight, suggested I see a nutritionist. I was in complete agreement and was hopeful that this would be the thing to finally help me shed some pounds and gain everything I lacked. My dad found a nutritionist and gave me directions to her office, just a few minutes from our house. When I parked, a tingle of excitement shot up my spine, and I started up the steep, carpeted staircase to her office.

  The nutritionist’s name was Beverly. She was middle-aged and elegant, with a dark gray bob and a kind voice. During the initial consultation she asked me about my eating habits. I explained to her that I didn’t eat breakfast and sometimes skipped lunch, but usually ate dinner. I never ate fast food, but I enjoyed smoothies and carbs; sandwiches and pasta were my favorite things to order in restaurants. I tentatively told her about my past with purging, not even sure whether I had a full-blown eating disorder. She asked me why I wanted to lose weight, and I told her that I wanted to be a better dancer and athlete, and that I felt pressure from both my father and, well, the world, to be thinner. At the mention of my father, Beverly lowered her eyes and said, “When he called me…he said something. And I told him never to repeat it in front of you again.” To this day I have no idea what she was so ominously referring to, but I can only guess it was the kind of careless remark that my dad considered to be well-meaning but Beverly recognized as damaging, like his admonishment of “you don’t need to be eating anything extra!” just a couple months before.

  After she’d assessed my habits and motivation for weight loss, she went over the basics with me: a sensible portion of anything should be no bigger than my fist, eight glasses of water a day was a necessity, and high protein was key. She spread out a collection of labels she’d removed from store-bought food and flat boxes empty of their previous contents. She showed me how to read the nutritional information and pointed out the serving sizes. She compared different brands of protein bars and championed beans, vegetables, and plain whole-grain cereals, while warning me about the sugar content in the smoothies I liked so much. Then she pulled out a premade calendar and a handful of pens and highlighters, and we began meal planning. We decided on easy breakfasts, like a hard-boiled egg, lunches of turkey sandwiches and a piece of fruit, and dinners of grilled chicken and broccoli.

  When I left her office that day and returned home, I was determined to follow the plan perfectly, and I did. I forced myself to eat breakfast, even though I much preferred feeling concave until midafternoon. I ran home for lunch to scarf down a quick sandwich my mother had prepared. I chugged liters of diet, fruit-flavored water all day, which caused me to urinate incessantly. At the end of my first week following Beverly’s diet plan, I returned to her office and hopped on the scale, salivating in anticipation of what it would show. I had lost seven entire pounds and I felt amazing, even a little smug, about my progress. At home, my parents met me with high-fives and spirited congratulations, but my success came to a quick stop not even one week later. During week two I followed the plan exactly the way I had the week before, with purposefulness and precision, but when I weighed in at Beverly’s office, the scale said I had gained three pounds, making a liar and a fool out of me. How is this possible? I wondered silently, my cheeks burning with the embarrassment of failure.

  Beverly had found my gain curious, but urged me not to let it derail the process. Too late. In just fourteen days I had become completely disenchanted with dieting “the right way.” I wanted weight loss to be a simple equation. If I ate x and y, and knew the value of each, I should be able to figure out the answer, every single time. But it was obvious that losing weight would not be so easy, and right then and there I decided to abandon Beverly’s highlighted meal plans full of chicken and beans and take control of the situation myself. Even though I kept seeing Beverly, I filled out her meal plans with lies, jotting down a hard-boiled egg here or a protein bar there that never touched my lips.

  Despite my ongoing weight loss frustrations, I was determined to be more optimistic about this school year than I had been in years past. For starters, I was one of four juniors who had been accepted into the Ensemble Theatre Company at Weaver Center, so now I had dance class there in the morning, a few periods at my regular high school, followed by a return to Weaver for my two-hour theatre class. It was in my early morning dance class that I first met Leslie, the third woman who would shape my dance career. Leslie had just joined the team at Weaver, and after she observed my class one morning, she approached me and asked if I took dance anywhere else locally. I told her I had not danced in an extracurricular setting since I left Miss Cindy’s after fifth grade, and she invited me to her studio that afternoon to take a class with her senior competition company, which was composed of her most talented dancers. I was thrilled at the invitation and apprehensive about what it would entail.

  When I entered Greensboro Dance Theatre later that day, I was greeted with the familiar sound of tap shoes clacking as younger students filed out of the studio in front of me. The black marley felt smooth underneath my bare feet as I tossed my bag in the corner, and, as usual, when we lined up at the barre to begin a ballet warm-up, I was noticeably heavier than the rest of the girls in the class. I was sandwiched in between two tall, long-necked, slender dancers, and we started in first position and began moving our feet in time to the predictable sound of classical piano. Even on my best days I had never been adept in ballet, and as we moved on to tendus, dégagés, and battements, I struggled to keep up with the pace. By the time we began our floor work, crossing the room from corner to corner in a combination of tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, and jeté, I felt completely out of my element.

  The atmosphere of Leslie’s studio was different from the musical theatre rehearsals and classes I’d been attending at Weaver. There, the emphasis had been on choreography, expression, and performance; at Greensboro Dance Theatre, the emphasis was on technique. Leslie had a dress code (a specific leotard and tights), which left me feeling exposed and fatter than ever, not to mention that her dancers took instruction much more seriously, which made it painfully obvious I hadn’t danced in a class setting like this for the last five years. Still, even though my thick thighs and lack of technique threatened to shake my identity as a dancer, I took it on as another challenge, and in a few months I was dancing on pointe (albeit wobbly and poorly) and teaching a hip-hop class for children and adults.

  Teaching this class was my first paid job, and I took my title of Dance Teacher seriously. Most of the students who signed up for my hip-hop classes had never danced a day in their lives, and I delighted in introducing them to the concept of moving their bodies for pleasure. Because they were less experienced, they were simultaneously more uneasy and more fearless than some of my own classmates. They approached instruction with trepidation initially, but once they built their confidence even the slightest bit, they were enthusiastic and insatiable learners. I was amazed by their wide-eyed trust in me and eagerness to accomplish more than they ever thought possible. The earnestness of my students was inspiring. I quickly realized that I not only loved teaching, but I also had a knack for it.

  Conventional w
isdom would tell you that with the addition of Leslie’s twice-weekly, two-hour dance classes and teaching the hip-hop classes on top of everything I was doing physically (one hour of dance at Weaver daily, twice-weekly ninety-minute soccer practice, and weekends full of soccer games and dance competitions and conventions), I would have been able to drop a few pounds without even trying, but this was not the case. I still weighed myself daily, as some kind of torture, and my dad always asked for the result. One day in particular, as I was rushing out of the house for school, I told him I hadn’t lost any weight the previous day.

  “Well, what did you eat yesterday?”

  “A sandwich,” I told him.

  “Well, tomorrow,” he suggested, “don’t eat the sandwich.”

  I know now how awful this sounds, but my dad was—and sometimes still is—incredibly misguided about weight loss, like so many of us are. He is remarkable and result-driven in all areas of his life. In his mind, he was proposing a way to get the results I wanted and nothing more. He wasn’t thinking about the fragile self-esteem or distorted body image of a teenage girl. After all, it was the same way he had approached his own weight loss over the years. I can’t count how many times he has told me about severely restricting his food intake for a few days in order to shrink his stomach to make consuming less food easier.