Being Thin is a Mark of Empire

 For most of my life, I have been obsessed (either consciously, or subconsciously) with being as small as possible. My mother--daughter of a woman the size of a bird--paid particular attention to the bodies of her daughters. It's not that we were encouraged to be beautiful--that was a thing for other people, it seemed, not us--but we were encouraged to be small. I've read about mothers who were on all sorts of fad diets, but that wasn't my mom--our house was full of junk food: doritos and miracle whip and chips ahoy. In fact, if you ask her about healthy foods she'll say they are disgusting. Tofu? gross. Vegetables? not for her. But she says, even now well into her 70s, that she is never hungry. As a child i remember her breakfast being a Marlboro Light and a Pepsi. She chain smoked well into her 70s, after my dad was diagnosed with heart failure and he stopped drinking and smoking, after my dad died at 72, and after she was diagnosed with macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts. She stopped this year, has gone mostly blind.

I don't mean to be mean to my mom, at all. Her mother put her on diet pills when she was in fifth grade. I'm just trying to articulate why--despite (or many because of) my sisters' and my advanced degrees, successful careers, all four of us have struggled with eating disorders most, if not all, of our lives. 

I ate while I was married to my ex, though to see photographs of me--22, or 26, or even after the baby was born--I am a wisp of girl. Then after the divorce, I downloaded a calorie app on my phone, started running seriously. I tracked everything, tried to ensure that i never went above 1000 calories for the day, sometimes not over 700. When my son was home with me, I made dinner for both of us, normal dinners. When we were togther, I ate. 

There was a moment, maybe in 2007 or 2009, when I went to my annual physical and I weighed )(* pounds. I won't write it out here because I don't want someone else who is struggling to see those numbers. But Jesus, I knew those numbers. I knew my mother who told me that after I was born, she only weighed (&^ pounds, barely more than a 5th grader. I was almost there; in fact, I was two pounds less than I'd weighed in 6th grade. Then, two years later I went back to my physical and I'd gained two pounds and the doctor commented about the additional pounds. Understand: I was barely over 100 pounds. I was thrilled that I could see my ribs without gasping in, though the soft zig-zagged flesh of my belly that had carried my son still sagged. It still does, 20 years later.

My therapist asked me what I liked to eat. I had no idea. Literally, I didn't know what to buy for myself when it was just me, what to eat when I was alone. What was hunger? My therapist told me: people who struggle with anorexia identify more with bones, rather than the curve of flesh. She was right--everything that curves or is soft on me has always been an enemy.

Perhaps it is because that which was soft also marked me as sexual, which I wanted desperately to eschew. It wasn't socially acceptalbe sexuality--especially in 2007 or so, the era of Paris Hilton and skeletally thin women, low-rise jeans and thigh gaps. My large breasts and soft places were a trashy, dirty kind of sexual, or so I thought.

I knew enough then, thank God, to get therapy. I spent years in her care, doing EMDR, trying to process the disconnect between my intellectual feminism and the reality of my lived experience. Years came and went--I stopped tracking calories, I literally ran my scale over with my car. I haven't weighed myself since 2017 (do i know what I weighed then? Yes. Of course I do.) I gained and lost weight, I grew older and entered my forties and perimenopause and am now quickly approaching 50. I stopped punching myself in the face when I was having a panic attack and started just having panic attacks. I went on blood pressure medication. I burned through three therapists. Still; when I'm anxious I experience it first with intense body dysmorphia. And for a while in the 2020s, we entered an era of body positivity as a collective. There were think pieces about fatness and the patriarchal nature of body policing, the need for women to be small. We talked about taking up space. Like we were allowed to. 

AND. And.

A friend posted recently about Oprah's recent posts about Ozempic. Is she still concerned about being thin? My god, she's tried to lose that same 100 pounds for 30 years! he wrote. Read the room!

But also, I see it everywhere. Everybody is suddenly skeletal again. Hipbones and clavicles and deep shadows on every other celebrity. Suddenly, the female standard is back to an unattainable, unnatural stnadard: extensions and filler and Ozempic and breast implants. When Wicked did its press tour, the two stars, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, seemed like pencils sharpened beyond usability. Everyone has cheekbones again. Everyone has too many teeth. A local aquaintance, who is trying desperately to get into acting and commercial work, for a while posted daily about her Ozempic-driven weight loss: her weight over and over and over again, the numbers falling. Finally, a mutual posted: please don't do this. Please undestand how triggering it is for the rest of us. 

I remember a doctor I saw, when I was maybe 30, newly divorced, mother of a toddler, saying to me you look remarkable for a woman who's had a child.  Good work. I was wearing a purple corderoy babydoll dress, orange tights, silver platform wedges. The fact that I remember this, remember how proud he seemed of my weight (&^% lbs), and how disgusting I felt. The disgusting comes last. Proud came first--I'm disappearing! 

I reported him. I hope he was fired.

Now that I'm a year away from 50, I don't go on diets anymore, though every time I'm super anxious I plan them out in my head, the insane workout routine I'll do to fix things. Now that I'm almost 49, instead of a calorie app i just have sometimes catastrophic panic attacks. Sometimes my husband has to pull me out of bed, force me to walk around the house until I stop hyperventilating. I fixate on the places where my face sags. It is easier, perhaps, than thinking about how quickly we have fallen into authoritarianism. I watch Minneapolis, I scan our college parking lot every day for ICE vehicles, I ry to plan how I will get my son out of this country before he can be drafted to be a Nazi.

And I'm writing this--whatever this is--because living through an abusive marriage and an abusive co-parenting situation is a small scale version of living in an authoritarian patriarchal regime (and I suspect all authoritarian regimes are patriarchal) and I am terrified.  I am writing this because I am realizing that I am not okay--I have panic attacks regularly now. Maybe it's the cognitive dissonance of how we talk about the encroaching totalitarianism at work as if it isn't happening, maybe it's seeing my child struggle, maybe it's realizing whatever social capital I had as a semi-attractive young-ish woman is quickly waning and I too will join the multitudes of menopausal women and become invisible, maybe it's all of it. 

My god, friends, we have to fight back. Even if I'm a washed up hag of a withered cunt (in the vernacular of my ex, who is my stand in for this motherfucking regime). Especially if I'm a washed up hag and a withered cunt.

Especially.