So, Shiawassee was staying at my house for a few days, since she had a short gig in Rust City. I picked her up at the airport and took her back to the Gingerbread Cottage, and after hauling in her suitcase and doing our girly shrieking about how awesome it is that she's here, she looked at me sharply and said:
"You've lost weight. Did I tell you that when I saw you last month?"
Shiawassee met up with us for one night on our trip Down South last month. You know, when my jeans were slipping down and my bra was too big. I said, "No, you didn't tell me."
Still eyeballing me, she repeated, "You've lost weight."
Shiawassee is awesome, and really, with a name like Shiawassee, how couldn't she be? And one of the many, many awesome things about Shiawassee is that although she herself is both petite and slender, and she somehow manages to be both cute and stunning at the same time, she is never one to assume that "small" is that automatic equivalent of "attractive". And she is never one to assume that weight loss is inherently good.
Instead her "you've lost weight" was checking in with me. She was just stating what she saw as a way of recognizing, "Yes, I know the truth. I see you." And across the board, her frankness is really comforting because it's so nice to have the truth spoken. It's nice to really be seen.
Now, Shiawassee's visit happened to coincide with Valentine's Day. And I've never been one of those people with particularly strong feelings about it either way. I mean, yeah, Valentine's Day is a saint's feast day that has been turned into a scam for Hallmark, but the same could be said for St. Patrick's Day and beer companies. So I've never been terribly invested in it one way or the other.
Well, except that I've always been way excited by the visual culture of Valentine's Day. I love that everything is all red and pink and hearts and flowers and paper doilies and whatnot. That visually, all things Valentine are not only stereotypically feminine, but also so Old School stereotypically feminine. Also, I was always fascinated by the notion that one's commitment to all things Valentine is marked by the actual physical size of one's tokens. so like, you give a card to someone you like, but if you really like them, you make one with hearts upon hearts upon hearts and glitter and glued-on trimmings and cha-chas so that it ends up being like a poster, rather than a regular-size card. Or you bring a box of candy to your sweetheart if you love her, but if you really love her, you bring one of those giant, heart-shaped boxes with ribbons and lace trim and possibly even--as I remember seeing in one particular drug store during my childhood--a whole bouquet of fake flowers on top. That phenomenon has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, since it's the only place I've ever really seen it: you know, that one's love is determined by the most ostentatious display of size.
And clearly, this gets me thinking about my body, the ostentatious display of its size, and the love contained within.
I have always been big, from the moment I was born. There has never been a moment in my life at which I was of average size. And really, for most of my life I have not been a "big girl", as they euphemistically say, but indeed a Great Big Girl. And any attempts to make me something other than a Great Big Girl--whether self-imposed or family- or doctor-imposed or drug-induced--failed miserably. Even when I was first cursed with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which very quickly developed into Full-Blown, Major League PTSD Anorexia, I was never small.
Unlike your standard form of anorexia, I did not have a distorted body image. I did not want to lose weight. I did not consciously choose to stop eating. I couldn't eat because I could not stand the physical sensation of having food inside my body. I lost nearly 60 pounds in three months. And although the anorexia stuck around for a long time after that, and although I would eat only, say, a tablespoon of peanut butter and one cup of milk in a day, and I would work our for hours and go running in the middle of the night until I just couldn't go any further, I never lost more than those 60 pounds. (Eventually, I threw my scale away.) At my sickest, which was also my smallest, I wore a size 14 on top and a size 18 on bottom. I weighed 200 pounds. A significant amount of that was muscle, yes, from genetics and the working out, and muscle weighs more than fat, la, la, la, but there I was, sick as a dog, unable to get more than 400 calories in my body in a day, with my hair falling out from malnutrition, and I still couldn't walk into your average women's clothing store like Banana Republic or the Gap and fit into any of the clothing. The way my body steadfastly refused to give up even one more ounce of space was amazing. It was evolutionary. It was nature demanding that I have physical magnitude.
It was fierce.
And in some space in my brain, I keep thinking that this same evolutionary ferocity that kept my body from surrendering its size directly connects to the way that I feel emotions. For as long as I can remember, I've experienced emotions in a way that consumes my whole body. I grew up to continual assertions that I was "too sensitive" or that I "felt things too deeply" or that I regularly "overreacted", as if there were some way I could just turn off the faucet that is emotional experience. But from head to toe, I would physically experience millions of tickly little champagne bubbles of joy, or the electric hum of excitement that made all of my muscles vibrate, or disappointment strong as a punch in the gut that sent aftershocks of nausea shooting up my throat and out of my fingers.
The same goes for love.
I think about my chosen family,you know, and it's like the love I hold for them is a separate entity inside of me that continually threatens to burst through my skin. Like I love them so much that the love is its own being, separate from me, and with much less impulse control than I have. Like when Clark and I were working together every night for months, just the two of us, we got so close that we'd pretty much brutalize each other...because being good to each other didn't reflect the magnitude of the love. So instead, one of us would randomly decide to flying tackle the other, hold them down, and bite them hard over and over until the bitten one either retaliated or escaped. Because saying, "I love you so much it feels like we're blood" wasn't sufficient. It didn't accurately reflect the size or the intensity of the emotion.
And say, while Trudie and I say "I love you" every time we talk to each other, it started to shift into "I love you, you little fucker," because there's a point at which positive words aren't big enough, so I have to start using the negative ones. And pretty much now our "I love you"s are littered with so much profanity that I really couldn't write an example out here, what with standards of public decency and all. But there is really no "I love you" big enough to reflect all that I feel for Trudie--the strangest, most wonderful, biggest-hearted partner-in-crime a girl could ever, ever, ever have.
And I feel that love in my whole body. All the time. People always talk about their loved ones feeling "like a part of them", but they're speaking figuratively. I mean it literally. An actual part of my physical body, and not just centered in my heart. I feel them in my nervous system, in my muscles, in my blood. All the time. They're just as much a part of me as my vital organs, as my veins. So when I see them in person, it's like my DNA recognizes them. So for example, when a friend gets wronged or something, I get hit with a tidal wave of ferocious protectiveness and righteous anger so strong that sometimes I believe it may transform me into a grizzly bear guarding her cubs. Not just metaphorically, but it might actually, physically transform me. The love is that all-consuming.
And it is fierce.
And as for love-love (or it's little sister, like-like)...yeah, it's pretty much the same. It doesn't just stay in my head or my heart, but the feelings spread out to take over exactly as much space as my physical body occupies. Which is a lot. The awkward excitement of being near a new love doesn't just make me tongue-tied, but it will make me clumsy and unable to manipulate objects and prone to falling down. A sensitive compliment or a well-timed kindness will not just send a flush to my face, but to all of my skin. At any given moment, that love will occupy a minimum of 20% of my thoughts, but often he occupies upwards of 70%. And not on purpose--not because I'm daydreaming or procrastinating or obsessing, but because he's in. And there's no ignoring that or distracting from that feeling once it happens because it's everywhere, right under the surface and rising up from my skin like stream. All the time. All. The. Time. It's gorgeous and overwhelming. And so, so intense.
And it makes me think about the continuous refrains I got from my family growing up about being too sensitive and feeling too deeply and la, la, la, and refrains that I still get today from more moderate and sensible friends who are close enough to me to witness the extent to which I feel emotions in general but love in particular. I get warnings about "falling too hard", as if there is a moderate way to fall for someone, and I get advice to compartmentalize--you know, to put the feelings away while I am at work and return to the feelings when I get home. Like there's a way to contain them. Like it's possible to keep emotions neatly folded away in the appropriate chamber of the heart so that there's no chance of it spreading out and taking over the body. Like there's a way to do that, and I'm just the only one in the world who doesn't know how. Because I don't know how. And apparently other people do.
And I start to wonder if maybe it has something to do with size. You know, if the love I feel is so overwhelming because there's just so much space for it to take up. That maybe there's just so much room for love in my body that of course one human being could not sensibly handle the sheer volume of it. That if I were small, or even just average, then I would be able to feel moderately, reasonably, manageably. That my love would not be so fierce because there would be a socially appropriate amount of it. Could it be that simple?
And if that were true, what would the consequences of that be? Especially in light of the way I'm slowly shrinking right now. Not consciously, not on purpose, but slowly shrinking nevertheless. The evolutionary force that fought so hard to keep me from dwindling down to average when I was so, so sick now seems to be releasing parts of my body with abandon. Is it a new survival strategy--reducing the physical space that my emotions can occupy?
Is it trying to make less room for love?
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