The Mayans said the world would end

A year has passed since I reached that elusive BMI of 25.  A whole twelve months filled with shock and terror and failure and determination and sadness.  It’s amazing how just the days flipping over one by one can drag you inexorably in to a state of despair, no matter how many nights you lay there, eyes painfully, itchily open at 3am, thinking, ‘Right, tomorrow things will be different.’

2012 was a mind shattering screw up of a year.  The plans of the early months juddered, halted then cracked beyond repair.  The church and reception and a 100 invites to a vow renewal were cancelled and retracted, embarrassed apologies whispered through tears, elbowing both concern and nosiness away.  I said goodbye to one love and hello a while later to a distraction, a comfort, a bad idea when all was said and done.  I danced my way through summer, thinking I owned the world because finally, finally, I was slim.  I could wear the clothes, do the running, sit with shades on drinking spritzers outside snazzy bistros and feel I belonged.  Yet I went home and cried myself to sleep most nights. I was dappling the surface of my life with sunshine, but underneath was darkness and weeds entwining round my feet and dragging me further and further under, splashing panic attacks and fear at me whilst I struggled to gain purchase on a steadying rock.  But of course, I’d screwed up and the rock was gone.

Being slim had been a goal for over 15 years. It was the pot at the end of the rainbow and the flag atop a mountain.  If I got there, things would piece together nicely and I would live my life out in a Disneyfied wonderland. 

The things they don’t tell you about being slim:

• You lose over 10 stone, go to a modelling photo-shoot as a Size 12 and are referred to as ‘the plus size girl’;
• You are scared of every single piece of fricking food that is ever laid in front of you;
• Coast can shag off with their sizing.  A Size 12/14 EVERYWHERE ELSE is not 18/20 with you, you confidence wreckers;
• Other slim girls will call you fat.  When I was fatfatfat there was much more of a sisterhood.  I throw compliments about like confetti, mainly because I like to make others feel good but also because I don’t have an ‘edit’ feature in my brain (essentially why my writing is so haphazardly jumbled too.) I was in a bar in Hoxton and a girl sneered at me and called me a chubby bitch as I applied some lip-gloss in the ladies loo;
• You look around rooms to see if you’re the fattest person there and once you realise you are you go home and think ‘What was the point in all that then?’ and eat until you feel you will pop with self-disgust;
• Shop assistants schmooze you, oiling around you like eels instead of trying to subconsciously steer you to the handbag and shoe department;
• There is always someone skinnier, prettier, more successful than you and they are all worrying about people being skinnier, prettier and more successful than them;
• You still want to eat;
• Slim may equal more confidence, but for this chubster, it certainly didn’t make me any happier;
• Your Mum will still hate you.

I’d lost half of me physically and a good portion of me mentally.  My outlook on the world was shaped by my shape.  I didn’t know how to be in my own skin.  Sitting down on the ground became hugely awkward as I didn’t know where my arms and legs should go but ultimately my thoughts didn’t know where to go either.

I went for a job interview at a designer clothing website doodab place.  Their offices were sublime, mirror reflection reception desks, black and white furnishings, plasma screens and ivory avalanche roses in square glass vases.  I watched as designers and models and funky young hipsters passed by in their ludicrous get up, half of them unable to walk more than pigeon steps due to tippy toe stilettos, the other half tripping over too long trouser cuffs or flipping too long fringes out of their eyes.  I wanted to be one of them so badly but at the same time, I utterly despised them because I knew that they would never have let me through the door at my old size.  I’d had a first interview at their distribution centre in Charlton, it was almost like pre-screening to see if I had the ‘look’. Only after you had been stamped for approval were you allowed up to Westfield to mix with the beautiful people.

I surprised myself with my abhorrence of what I was seeing.  I was finally close to being part of the ‘in crowd’, the Shoreditch restaurants and bars, the guest lists, the designer clothes that finally fit.  I just sat there, perched on the edge of the sofa feeling self –conscious and nauseous and thinking ‘Really? 800 quid for a wisp of silk that will last 4 months until you’re told a different colour wisp of silk is the right thing to be wearing?’  My ennui with the constant media portrayals of what I ‘should’ look like, the incessant consumerism of ‘buy this to make you look better’ and the fear that should I put on a lb. of weight should I have commenced work there would end with some sort of written warning and a boot up the arse through the curlicued door back into Shepherd’s Bush had me literally shaking. 

I gave the interviewer a bag of lip and told them toodlepip.

No job, no husband, no hope. Each day was awash with guilt and hope and feeling like a clockwork robot winding down, one arm reached out towards the next step but the rest of me unable to work up the motivation to follow it.  I’d stay in bed for days at a time, fearful to face the big scary world, taking comfort only when the door handle turned when he returned home in the evening.  Safety.

We lived together almost throughout the separation.  There were still feet in laps, affection, cuddles and kisses.  An awareness of each other that had gone towards the end, before the difficult decision.  There were bickers, snaps, and rolls of eyes of course. Nine years of buying your husbands’ wardrobe for him, complaining that he never made any decisions, never wanted to spend money on things and then seeing him spend over two grand on a bike and some clothes a month after you were no longer there to do it grated horrifically, as I’m sure me going out and calling, or receiving flowers from a different man more than grated on him.

I told him to ask out the receptionist at the gym, not because I wanted him to be happy, necessarily, but because I wanted my guilt to be reduced, to be able to move on without feeling like ‘the bad guy’ anymore.  That wasn’t me. I’d always put others first, especially him.  I stopped recognising myself not only in mirrors but in my behaviour too.  I got lots of attention during that summer. As soon as the news got out there were predators, literally hours afterwards. Old friends I hadn’t heard from in ages suddenly wanted to meet for coffee, which I discovered, was a euphemism for ‘pour on the flattery and hope I get laid.’  I began to feel threatened and scared, exactly as I had when I was at my biggest.  I was fearful of people’s intentions, resentful when they said nice things, resentful when they didn’t.   A crushing sense of inevitability became more apparent.  I had thought being slim would equal happiness.  I had slipped a disc during some exercise in July and by September, a stone and a half had crashed back on due to an inability to walk further than 100 metres without crying and turning to comfort through food yet again. 

Being in pain and having a jumbled mind led me to become elusive and exclusive. I turned down invitations, hid away in the house, told myself I wanted to be a freelancer because of the freedom but it was really so I could work from the sofa under a blanket, hidden from the world.  I was now nothing and everything and all in-between.  Not fat, not skinny, ostensibly what The Sun and most of its readers would describe as curvy, what I would say ‘comfortable’ in size. Mentally I was anything but.  Every ounce you put on after losing that much you feel is being scrutinised by everyone.  You see scorn or pity in people’s eyes, even if it isn’t there.  Your ‘selfies’ are hidden by pets because of the hint of double chin that has returned. (Even at my skinniest I always had a face like a demented hamster with a sponge stored in each cheek) I lived my life through a website, living vicariously through others, watching them have lives, run, socialise, work, all the while sitting in my cocoon and waiting for an operation that would magic my life back to life.

I awoke during a night in October with the enormous clarity that I was being a, and I don’t use these words lightly, silly fucking selfish bitch.  We took tentative steps at first, because we had changed in that short time we were apart.  He had new confidence from looking after himself. I was more tolerant, more aware of how demanding of perfection I was.  It took until Christmas to realise that this was right again; all the clichés about working at a marriage were true. We work better together.

And so here it is, a year later, 2 and a bit stone heavier, incredibly self-conscious, feeling a failure and wanting to lie in bed eating cheese on toast and hope that I will wake up tomorrow and I will have found that elusive pot of gold and I will be happy. The one magnificent thing I have realised is that without him, I’m not me and me, underneath it all, is pretty bloody awesome, even with some chub.