I Do It with the Lights On Read online

  I’m glad that her comment incited disobedience in me rather than deference, but I have to wonder why we as women take such comments to heart in the first place. This woman made a thoughtless observation that should have had no impact on me, but here I am, still remembering it. How many random, thoughtful compliments had I refused to accept that hadn’t made it past my fortress of self-disgust? How many beautiful things have I forgotten or simply not had room to store?

  The best thing to come out of that summer was my friendship with Heather, which is as strong today, more than a decade later, as it was then. Driving home from rehearsal one day, she asked if I would stop at Wendy’s. I never bought fast food for myself, likely out of habit because I didn’t eat much fast food growing up. There was the occasional Sunday fast-food brunch after my brother and I attended church with my dad, and the extremely rare instance my mother picked up McDonald’s for dinner. So when Heather requested a cheeseburger, I obliged and even ordered something for myself, but as we pulled out onto the street going toward my house, I cut into a darkened auto parts store parking lot.

  “Do you mind if we eat here?” I asked, handing her the french fries.

  “No…why?” she asked.

  “I just don’t want to eat this in front of my parents,” I explained, and so we sat there in the empty parking lot, eating our Wendy’s meals in solidarity, away from anyone who could scold or judge me for doing so.

  A few days later Mom and I were prowling the aisles of Target, picking out a new bedspread and closet organizers, as college was closing in fast. I had decided to join my brother at Appalachian State. My dad worked tirelessly building me a bookshelf to place on top of my desk. (He procured the dorm room furniture measurements from the school and set out to build a bookcase that would include a shelf to accommodate my turtle Cappy’s aquarium—in case anyone is confused about how much this man loves me.) On the day of the move Shawn came over and helped my dad load everything into the car, and then followed us up the winding mountain roads to Boone. I rode in the packed car with my dad, and Shawn took my mom in his Jeep. As we rounded curves and our ears started popping, my dad cleared his throat and launched into one of his father-daughter talks, listing all my accomplishments and reasons why he was so proud of me (like the poster). Then he grabbed my hand in his.

  “There are a couple things I wish we’d had some more progress with before you went off to school,” he said. I raised my eyebrows to ask him what they were. “I wish I’d introduced you more to religion, and I wish you’d lost some more weight.” Then he flashed a comforting smile. “But there’s still plenty of time for those two things, so no big deal.”

  I wonder now, fourteen years later, if my dad could have imagined that I still wouldn’t have made the progress we wanted with weight loss, that it is a big deal, and that as a thirty-two-year-old woman, I’d be writing a book about why.

  5

  PCOS DIDN’T MAKE ME THIS FAT

  Moving into my college dorm was more hectic than back-to-school commercials ever led me to believe, and it was also more extraordinary. I dug my toes into my new pink, purple, and turquoise–patterned rug, feeling like I was standing on the precipice of the unknown rather than in a thirteen-by-seventeen-foot box with hideous tiled floor and radiator heating. In the moment it took Shawn and my parents to reach the stairwell, I witnessed both an amicable end to my first relationship and the advent of my independence.

  On the first day of classes, adrenaline stirred me awake before the sun, and I sprung out of bed and charged to the communal shower down the hall. I carefully straightened my hair and dressed in the outfit I’d chosen the night before. (The only time in my entire life, I think, that I’ve managed to do this.) My course load consisted of the usual freshman classes as well as an advanced dance class to which I’d gained special admission. I also attended auditions for the main stage theatre production, which freshman typically had zero chances of being cast in. The monologue I delivered went better than I’d hoped, and there were whispers going around about “Hunter’s little sister.” The director even invited me to callbacks just to tell me how impressed he was. My first week at App State was an indisputable success—with a fast-approaching expiration date.

  My first day of freshman year at App State (2002).

  No more than a few weeks into the semester, I had already fallen behind in all my classes. Most professors instituted a three-unexcused-absence policy, and I used up all my days right away. Contrary to the first day of school, when I had popped out of bed with ambition and ease, I often found it hard to get out of bed at all.

  Prior to college, my sweet father had woken me up every single school day of my life. And not just once—he would let me “hit snooze,” and he’d return to my room in ten-minute increments until I was up. Sometimes I was so exhausted that I turned on the shower, undressed, wrapped my hair in a towel, and lay down in the adjacent carpeted room with the sinks to sleep for seven more minutes while I faked a shower. Of course, my dad wasn’t in my dorm (and thank God for that, really) to wake me up each morning, and I found it nearly impossible to be roused by an alarm.

  Before everything went to shit (2002).

  Nothing could cajole me out of bed—not even the three separate alarm clocks I strategically placed at the other end of the room so I’d have to physically get up to shut them off. Sometimes my roommate, Margo, would come back from class midmorning bewildered to find me still in bed. She’d swear I’d gotten up in the morning to turn my alarm off and sometimes even had mumbled conversations with her as she was leaving. I did have a history of sleepwalking, but I never could figure out if I was actually waking up in the mornings or not. All I knew was I couldn’t remember any of it, I was oversleeping every day, and, consequently, my grades were plummeting.

  My dance class was the only glimmer of light I had left, but even it wasn’t safe from my self-destruction. By the end of September, just a month into my collegiate career, I noticed I was putting on weight. My jeans were strangling my thighs and my stomach looked pudgier when I lifted up my shirts. I chalked it up to my change in lifestyle, as I wasn’t dancing every single day or playing soccer anymore. I had a prepaid meal card like most everyone on campus, so I didn’t always make the healthiest choices in the cafeteria. I’d started drinking at parties and I’d gone to the campus nurse to get birth control pills, too. The year before, when I’d secured birth control before having sex with Shawn, I’d opted for Depo-Provera, the birth control shot that’s super effective but notoriously causes weight gain. I didn’t need anything else that would impede weight loss, so I swapped the shot for pills. One night after I’d purged a late-night meal that I’d shared with a guy I was dating, I became paranoid that I’d thrown up my birth control pill as well. Although neither outcome was appealing, I knew I’d rather be fat than pregnant, so I stopped throwing up my food. On top of that, I no longer had easy access to Adderall. There was one girl on my hall who had sold me some, but after taking a pill in hopes of catching up on some schoolwork, I lay awake for hours in bed with heart palpitations that sent me into an anxiety attack and caused me to call my mother, who patiently stayed on the phone with me while I tried to articulate why I thought I was dying. I swore off Adderall after that, and to this day I’ve never taken it again.

  These seemingly minor changes amounted to major problems in dance class, when I was confronted twice a week with a mirrored image of myself that seemed to swell more every day. Sometimes when I looked at the class in the mirror, it took me a second too long to identify my reflection, and when I did, it startled me, almost as if I’d caught a glimpse of an intruder. I started to loathe the sight of myself so much that I fixed my attention on the wall just above the top of the mirrors, causing my professors to constantly correct my focus and tell me to bring my chin down. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t bear to attend my dance class at all. My body felt awkward and uneasy, like when you’re trying to sleep on a long car ride and you can’t get comfort
able, no matter how you twist and turn.

  I could feel the black cloud seeping back in, and I withdrew. I began discovering mysterious black and purple bruises on my body, covering my hips and the outsides of my thighs. I racked my brain to figure out why I was becoming so clumsy—I was regularly banging into doorways or hitting the back of my desk chair as I entered my room. I was losing my balance a lot, too, but I never felt dizzy. Then I had an epiphany: my body was ballooning so dramatically and so fast that I frequently misjudged my own size in relation to my surroundings. It wasn’t that I was accident-prone; it was that I had lost kinesthetic awareness of my body. The impact of that thought walloping me on the head hurt worse than any of the collisions with furniture. My body was physically careening out of control, and of course, each time the number on the scale went up, I slunk further down into depression.

  My first report card was a string of D’s, one C, and a glaring F in my dance class. These kinds of grades were unheard of for me and I tried to explain to my father that I was depressed, and I promised I would get better.

  The summer before college, my mother had confided in me that a year earlier she had attempted suicide by closing the garage door and turning on the car. She described being in the throes of a particularly grim period of depression and reasoned that she could just “go to sleep.” After several minutes passed, she looked down at the clock on the dashboard and saw that it was three-twenty. The realization that I would be home at three-thirty and find her dead, propelled her out of the car. She’d struggled with depression her entire life, and this was the incident that finally spurred her to seek help. She was prescribed Prozac, and while it didn’t cure her depression, it did make a marked difference. She told me she was divulging this information because she feared that I was depressed and she didn’t want me to suffer in silence for as long as she had. After learning this sobering news, my brother got the number 320 tattooed on his leg, and I got a prescription for antidepressants. I vowed to my dad that if I just took my medicine regularly, everything would work itself out. I had no logical explanation as to why taking my medicine seemed like an insurmountable task, but it’s something that I still deal with to this day.

  Fifty pounds heavier than the start of college, wearing a maternity dress (2003).

  I knew the letter notifying my parents that I was on academic probation would be coming to the house, and I convinced my mother to vigilantly watch the mailbox for it and to hide it when it came. I promised her after next semester I’d be off academic probation, so there was no need for Dad to know.

  A rare photo of me at the end of my freshman year—officially fat— with my parents at my brother’s graduation (2003).

  “You know how upset he’ll be,” I told her. “You know how heartbroken he’ll be.” The sigh on the other end of the phone let me know she agreed.

  By the time I went home for Christmas break, I had packed on more than three times the amount of weight that college freshmen are reasonably expected to gain. I met Shawn for dinner and tried to joke about how I’d gained the “Freshman Fifty” instead of the “Freshman Fifteen,” but I wasn’t kidding about the pounds; I had literally gained fifty. I needed new clothes badly and I hadn’t the slightest idea where to shop for them. I found myself at Target, fingering the maternity clothes with elastic waistbands and generous flowing fabric that could accommodate and conceal my growing circumference. When my mom saw the purchases hanging in my closet, she urged me to cut out the tags lest anyone else see them, and as if snipping out the evidence would make the problem go away.

  When I returned to school in the spring, I chopped my hair off and pierced my nose, in what seems like, in hindsight, a feeble attempt to regain some control over my appearance. When my parents visited App State to see a one-act play I’d been cast in (to this day, they’ve never missed a performance), my dad scoffed at my new nose ring, saying that maybe my facial piercing would be easier to handle if I’d lose some weight.

  I wanted to lose weight more than anything I’d ever wanted, but I didn’t know how I could lose weight while I was still actively gaining it with every passing second. I was so ashamed when I went to get a new student ID card after losing mine and the ladies at the desk spent minutes comparing me to the image on their computer screens taken just four months prior. They were not able to grasp that I was, in fact, that same person. Finally, I referenced that I’d gained a lot of weight and I wasn’t trying to trick them.

  The two women, out of pity, pretended to be shocked. “Oh, no, honey, it’s not that. It just that…your hair is so much shorter now!”

  I missed more classes than I attended. I always declined when my friends invited me to a drive on the parkway or to hang around outside on a pretty day. I watched from my bed as they rushed sororities and I slept and drank myself into oblivion every weekend. Each time I woke up, my affliction was still there, like a throbbing, full-body hangover. I ached and oozed self-hatred from every stretched pore. And it wasn’t even just my weight anymore—the rest of my physical appearance was deteriorating, too. My hair started thinning out, and just running my fingers through my scalp would produce a handful of tangled strands. Coarse black hairs started poking through the surface of my neck and chin, and distinct, horizontal grooves showed up on my nails.

  I spent the summer after freshman year at home. The issue of my weight gain was not explicitly discussed by my parents or by friends; it was too touchy and taboo an issue, so everyone tiptoed around it. I was the 200-pound elephant in everyone’s room. At my request, my dad purchased me a membership for the remodeled YMCA complete with a sauna and swimming pool. He even bought an additional membership so that I could bring someone with me whenever I wanted. My dad may not have always said the right thing to me, but I could always count on him to show up when I needed him. Even though I swam regularly that summer, when I moved back up to school—this time to my own apartment—I clocked in at 230 pounds. I was absolutely horrified to be 100 pounds over my goal weight.

  My new room had no windows, so I quite literally spent much of my time in darkness. If I’d found it hard to function while living on campus, living in my own apartment made it damn near impossible. I still couldn’t wake up for class, but I started having lucid dreams each morning. In them, I was on campus living life, and fulfilling responsibilities, but then I’d wake up huddled under my covers in blackness and half the day would be gone.

  Exacerbating my hopelessness was the fact that I’d never learned to cook or care for myself. I ordered pizza a lot, not because I couldn’t resist it, but because it saved me from having to claw myself out of my depression and go into the world. Cooking is a learned skill, but for me, self-care was, too. I’d never realized it until I was on my own, but waking up and feeding myself and taking a shower even if I wasn’t going anywhere was not instinctual for me. Forget swallowing pills or doing anything other than the bare minimum. If it required more than brushing my teeth, you can bet it felt overwhelming. I found myself always asking, “What’s the point?” Nothing held significance anymore.

  After my first semester, I was so depressed and doing so poorly in my classes that I couldn’t fathom the thought of continuing my education. I could transfer to UNCG and live at home, I thought. I needed unconditional love. I needed help. I needed my parents.

  I looked up transfer information on the UNCG website only to find that my GPA wasn’t high enough to transfer. Who was I? A year earlier I graduated with honors and awards and distinctions, and now I couldn’t even transfer schools? I called my dad and confessed to him that I was nonfunctional. What he said to me was incredibly surprising. He said I could come home if I wanted to and take a break from school. He said—and this was the biggest shocker: “You don’t ever have to go back to school if you don’t want to. But promise me you’ll give this semester a shot. Just do your best on your exams. And we’ll figure it out after.” Hearing my dad say this was such an immense comfort. I reckon now that he was remembering my mother si
tting by herself in a running car in the garage, and he thought that tough love wasn’t the best approach to take with me. So I gave school another shot just to appease my dad. Two years later I had raised my GPA enough to earn a spot on the dean’s list. I was in no way living up to my potential, but I had become more accepting of my identity—the introverted, nondancer who people ignored.

  In the fall of my first year in college, I went to a theatre party and ended up talking to a shy, handsome guy I’d never seen before. Afterward, it became evident he had a knack for turning up everywhere I happened to be. I finally learned that his name was Eric, and we began spending all our time together. He met my parents and I met his. I fell in love with him swiftly and without reservation. Soon after our relationship began, I was using his computer when I saw a minimized conversation on the screen between Eric and a friend. I maximized the conversation without really thinking and saw that Eric was chatting with his friend about me and had sent him some photos, but I didn’t recognize the person in them. The girl in the photos was younger and thinner. In one photo, she stood poised holding a gray cat, wearing jeans that couldn’t have been bigger than a size 10. In another she gave a toothy grin to the camera with her auburn-ish hair spilling over her face that had no hint of a double chin. In the last one, taken during a dance performance, she was pictured mid-arabesque, a black-and-white cinched-waist silhouette with lean, elegantly positioned arms. Eric had ripped these photos of a sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old me from my private photo website and passed them off as his current girlfriend.