I taught myself to read at four and, as a child, could often be found up a tree, Band-Aids on both knees, nose buried in a book. I spent hours roaming the Kansas prairies with Laura Ingalls and exploring Prince Edward Island with Anne Shirley. Reading made the world wide open for me. Within the pages of books I traveled to Italy and France, experienced van Gogh's Sunflowers and Monet's Waterlilies, watched as Estella tortured Pip, felt my heart race as Ahab battled the mighty whale, and break when Romeo drew his last breath.
Through books, I lived a million different lives, but somehow failed to live my own.
I had spent my entire adult life within the confines of a forty-mile radius, worked the same job as a pre-school teacher for more than twelve years, and stayed in an abusive marriage for twenty. My world grew smaller and smaller as my body grew larger and larger.
I ate my way up the scales, stopping just short of five-hundred pounds.
Fitting my size thirty-two body into a size ten world become near impossible.
Most movie theater seats were too small for me, so I rarely went to the movies. Car shopping became an embarrassing ordeal; squeezing behind the wheel of the average car was difficult. It's hard to say who was more embarrassed by my attempts to fit, me or the car salesmen who politely pretended not to notice.
Traveling became out of the question; plane seats were much too small. Ever conscious of how much space I occupied, I quit attending concerts in an attempt to avoid crowding those unfortunate enough to be seated next to me.
Eventually, I had to drop out of college because I no longer fit behind the desks and it became impossible to manage the distance between buildings.
I was mooed at in front of my husband and people would say rude, insulting things with total disregard for my children. Being pointed, stared, and laughed at in public places became a normal part of my daily life. When alone, I fought back, offering the offending parties a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view. Once home, I would bury my shame and outrage inside a bag of chips and a quart of ice cream.
Even navigating a McDonald's drive-thru became a landmine of humiliation. Teens would gather their co-workers to gape at me and share a laugh. The butt of their joke was not lost on me or my children.
Because of my frustration, and the belief that this behavior is never okay and should not be tolerated, I began to fight back with the only weapon I had. The truth.
Calmly, and with as much dignity as I could muster, I softly told them their actions were unkind. Denial and mock confusion always met my words, but their inability to meet my eyes confirmed I'd made them uncomfortable with their behavior. Small victory.
Eventually, my weight became too heavy a burden for my husband to carry. He told me how humiliated he was to have me for his wife. He said I no longer contributed anything to his life or the lives of our children. He told me I was someone no one could respect.
He left me.
Now alone, I needed a second job to support myself and my children. Physically, however, there was little I was capable of doing, and prospective employers were reluctant to hire me. Unable to make the high payments on our home, I lost it.
My children and I were forced to move to public housing where we lived for eighteen months. This was my darkest moment.
With every failure, I gained more weight, and every pound I gained cost me another part of myself. I had become the human equivalent of foreign currency in an American market. My value had not changed with the numbers on the scales. Unfortunately, the society I belong to refused to acknowledge my worth.
One by one, the parts of my life I loved most fell by the wayside, and I felt I had only myself to blame. I felt a rage towards myself that, at times, frightened me. I felt worthless and trapped inside a life and a body I hated.
I hid beneath my layers of fat and immersed myself in the imagined lives of the characters of my favorite authors. Books allowed me to escape the ugliness of my own life, but they also allowed me to evade one fundamental truth. It was not okay to be so overweight. It simply wasn't. This stark truth shook me from complacency to action.
The time had come to show up for the life I wanted, so I joined a gym. On my first visit I came wearing an attitude as big as my ass, determined that nothing as silly as fear or embarrassment would stop me from getting where I wanted to go.
The first week I could only walk on the treadmill for ten minutes, so I showed up four times each day to get the forty minutes needed. The second week I walked fifteen minutes, three times daily. The sixth week found me walking on the trails of my neighborhood park for a mile.
The weight came off quickly. Within two months I dropped almost eighty pounds and my clothes no longer fit.
One by one, I began to collect the parts of myself I had lost along the way.
I rediscovered a love for music. I fell in love with a young tenor’s voice and could hardly contain my excitement upon discovering he would be appearing at a venue in my hometown. For the first time in twenty-two years, I bought tickets for a concert and waited expectantly for the night to arrive.
Seated in front of the outdoor stage on that clear August evening, waiting for the show to begin, I found myself in tears. I cried for the time I had wasted. I cried for the depth of appreciation and emotion that were now mine because of that time. I knew for as long as I lived I would never take moments like this for granted.
As the lights went down and the tenor’s voice filled the night’s sky with beauty and richness I knew that moment, and all of its wealth, belonged to me because I had faced the truth and made the hard choices.
The concert made me more determined than ever to regain my life. I started walking two miles instead of one, began a free-weight regimen three times a week, and sought the advice of a personal trainer who suggested I reclaim activities I had enjoyed in my youth.
Swimming was the sport I loved best as a girl, so I changed my gym membership to one with a pool.
The walk of shame, from the dressing room to the water, almost did me in. Real or imagined, I felt every eye staring at me, mocking. I waded through the water until it reached my waist and I felt hidden and protected by its surrounding warmth.
Entering an open swim lane, I pushed off the side of the pool, and stretched my arms in a long-dormant windmill pattern. Water and joy swept over me. I was finally living bravely, this was me~~taking care of myself, doing the thing I loved most.
That swim turned out to be one of the most empowering moments of my life.
Eleven months into my new life, and after losing one-hundred-and-fifty pounds, I became discouraged. It seemed to me I had worked long and hard, but still found myself far from my goal.
I continued to run into small minds about big bodies, and though it was a toned-down version, it still took its toll. I wondered, just how small would I have to become before I would be fully accepted. What was the magic number?
My son noticed my melancholy mood and asked about it. I explained I felt too far from my goal and believed I had gotten nowhere. He brought me a picture taken at my heaviest, one of the few in existence, handed it to me, and asked if I still felt I had not changed. Surprise silenced my self-doubts as I compared this photograph with a recent one taken with my daughter. I was looking at two different people and could hardly believe the changes in my face as well as my body.
Armed with a better perspective, I decided to stop using my weight as a reason to avoid new challenges. In the beginning, it was terrifying.
I applied for a second job working part-time in a bookstore even though I felt unsure if I'd be able to work eight hours at the pre-school and then another six standing on my feet selling books. Refusing to use my weight as an excuse, I determined to try. Eighteen months have passed since I started to work at the bookstore and I still love it.
I re-enrolled in school. Where once my steps dragged across campus and I had to sit and rest several times along the way, resulting in my being late for class, now, with a bounce in my step I'm usually the first to arrive. Sitting in a classroom, discussing thoughts and theories I feel more fully alive than I've ever felt before.
In September, thirty-three months into my new life, I flew to visit my daughter in NYC. I will never forget the feeling of amazed joy as I sat in the plane seat and heard the safety-belt click shut across my lap. I laughed aloud.
The highlight of the entire trip was a rainy day spent at the MET, which houses both van Gogh and Monet. Standing in front of art I thought I would only ever see in a book took my breath away. It was an awe-filled moment to know my hand could reach out and touch the same canvas van Gogh's had. I saw, firsthand, the crisp lines left by his passionate brush strokes. I noticed details that were lost in photographs. The magnificence of his Sunflowers amazed me. Goodness overwhelmed me. The beauty of the art, and the knowledge that I was now living what once I had only read, moved me beyond anything I had felt before.
The birth of each of my children is the closest emotion I can relate to what I felt standing in front of the Sunflowers that day. In some ways I had given birth -- to myself. The me I had stopped believing I would ever become.
