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Being too big was a vulnerability for me, a liability, something that made me an outsider. And being too big certainly did not help my dating life. There was the fateful phrase I’ve heard a thousand times: You’re just like a sister. Or slightly better, I guess: You’re not the kind of girl you date- you’re the kind of girl you marry. Which, now that I am married, is a compliment, but when you’re fifteen and all you want to do is get asked to homecoming, being marriage material is as cool as having a good personality. Who wants a good personality when you could have a cute butt?

It didn’t occur to me that there was a way to live in my body, my too-big body, without shame and abuse. It seemed like it was my responsibility to punish it, and that if I had been kind to it, that would have been permitting or sanctioning its disobedience. I believed, literally and figuratively, that if I released my hold on it, released the hatred and the pressure by an inch, it would expand, I would expand, like rising dough, like cupcake batter puffing up and spilling over onto the pan.

I was a spirit and a mind unfortunately trapped in rather bad packaging, like a bad ad campaign for a genuinely good product. I felt strongly misrepresented by my body, like when you put a silver ring in a toaster-oven box and wrap it, and then the person thinks they’re getting an appliance, but they’re really getting a ring. I felt like my body was inaccurate in its representation of me, and that made me furious with it.

After two decades of frustration and shame, these days, owing to several small and large miracles, for the first time in my life, I am less than hateful toward my body, and in shining moments, even quite kind to it. Month by month, I work hard to see it less and less as this other thing, this distant distinct shell, and more like a nice person that I might like to be friends with. The last few years have felt like traveling back to a cosmic distance to rejoin these two entirely separate entities, my spirit and my body.

I thought a lot of things would get easier instantly. And some have. But many haven’t. What I found, though, is that if you’re not chasing one fantasy, you’re chasing another. If it’s not your body, it’s your bank account, and if it’s not your bank account, it’s your résumé or your nose or your boobs or your car or the perfect child. For two decades, I believed that if I could just get this one thing under control, then the whole of my life would magically bloom like a perfect, lush flower. But to my great dismay, I realized that my life was still my life and I was still myself, just in smaller pants.

I carry with me the very heavy shame of being ten and too big, and fifteen and too big, and twenty and too big, and twenty-five and too big. And it’s a lot to carry, but I can’t leave it behind. I don’t want to. In some ways, everything has changed, and at the same time, when I look into my own eyes in the mirror, we both know that only so much has, and that we all carry our own weight in very different ways.

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