Center of Gravity

Authors note: This is a personal essay written in a single-sentence style. It reflects experiences and thoughts about weight, food, and control. There are references to disordered eating, compulsive behaviors, and self-critique. It’s not fiction; it’s also not a cry for help. It’s just something I had to write. Please take care while reading, and feel free to sit this one out if it’s not for you right now.

Recently I’ve been losing weight in my crusade to Fix Myself, an effort borne from the fear that, like so many grains on a scale, the oversights of my mid to late twenties will one day (soon) accumulate past the event horizon where the inevitability of my aging body will damn me from ever even remembering the feeling of weightlessness, the feathery bounce of a runner’s high, the diminutive radius of my waist I pull a large t-shirt over my head, like a drape across a window, and settle into a bed that swallows me whole,

to be light is a feeling at once diaphanous and visceral condensed in and condemned by an interminable list of foods made treasures through the pressure of my restraint: burgers, potato chips, cheese, anything fried, and an infinity of desserts and sweets ranging from candies to chocolates, cookies to donuts, cupcakes and lava cakes and cheesecakes and bundt cakes ad nauseam or ad infinitum (take your pick), this endless buffet a whetstone upon which I sharpen the hunger that marks every morning when, after a workout, a long run, and hours of fasting, I finally open a small glass container of oats, the gravitational pull of which is so great that the first, chalky bite is in my mouth before I even register that I’ve lifted my spoon, a ritual questioned by anyone who’s seen me in this primal state: doesn’t that make you sad? to which I reply, in my head but not out loud, absolutely not, because, when you’re starving, the first bite of anything tastes so, so good,

my tenuous relationship to weight can be mapped to a precise coordinate: the arena of bleach and singlets and headgear where we rolled out the rubber mats and wrestled each other into exhaustion, where water breaks were an earned commodity, the first of which never took place earlier than when the sun had long past set: a train of boys would stretch down the dark concrete halls, steam billowing from our backs, the gym windows dripping with condensation and shining light on our shaking forms as we shuffled towards the fountain and count out loud as we drank; more than 10 seconds and you got a smack to the head, an exchange that, in a broader sense, reflected a causal dynamic so consistent you couldn’t call it merciful or cruel, it just was: crawling meant laps, bad form meant push-ups, and (pray it never happened to you) failure to Make Weight meant disqualification; there was truly nothing worse than that feeling when, stepping onto the scale before a match, you’d see the line quivering a single digit above where you were supposed to be—too much and therefore not enough—and you’d feel judgement descend upon you like a shadow; they wouldn’t say it but you’d know what they were thinking, that you were a pussy, a bitch, a coward that lacked the restraint to achieve a task which, in contrast to the herculean regimen of daily training, was simple, to just hit a number, and you’d never forget how your coach would refuse to so much as look at you as you walked to the bleachers to “spectate”, and, somewhere in the crowd towards the back, you’d hear someone say that the boys across town squeezed the sweat from their shirts into a bowl and drank it to make sure it never happened to them,

I told people the reason I quit wrestling was because I was bulimic—that I threw up to make weight—which was severely damaging to my mental health and body image blah blah blah, but the truth is? I wasn’t bulimic, at least not really: I only tried throwing up once, and, to my credit it almost happened, but it didn’t, and that doesn’t count, does it? Doesn’t count even if I remember so vividly the lurching vertigo as I jammed a finger down my throat, impulsively, as if to beat myself to the punch, the gaseous waft of sewage as I hunched over the dingy ceramic, the bile rising like hatred in my throat, tinny and sharp, the thin line of drool connecting me to the septic water that, in a sudden reflex, snapped my head back like elastic out the stall and into the gym where I never told a soul; that was the one and only time and it didn’t even actually happen so it wasn’t an eating disorder, not really, just the absent shape of one (which, let me remind you, does not count), so I resolved that, if I ever wanted to lose weight, instead of throwing up I’d simply Not Eat, and that seemed like a fair trade to me (no reason to throw it up if there’s nothing inside); anyways there were plenty of opportunities to make up for the lie when, a couple years later in college, I’d regularly stuff my face before drinking until I blacked out, which, conveniently, makes for a really great excuse to throw up, because hey it’s not a party if you end the night early,

anyways,

things are good now, which is to say things are close-to-good, which I know isn’t actually-good, but it’s more than I’ve been able to say since maybe forever and that’s enough for now; I have a “healthy” target weight and a “healthy” weight-loss plan and I tell myself that whenever it hurts it’s just a sign that it’s working, and, in any case, the repeated demands of what’s your secret (just don’t eat, I repeat, dead serious) are, in a pinch, a sufficiently validating replacement for the excess I’m otherwise denying myself, and if I just take a step back it’s plain to see that the sooner I get to that number, the sooner I can stop being so dramatic and the sooner I can stop doing the math and the sooner that feeling will go away: the white-hot bloom of resentment whenever I hear someone say it’s “hard to lose weight” because if you just ignore resources, knowledge, and, privilege necessary to do what I’m doing, then actually, no, you fat fuck, it’s stupidly easy,

except we all know it’s not easy (it’s never easy), that every pound lost feels like two pounds gained and every muscle made visible in sharp relief is a cold night, a harsh bone, a headache, a cramp, a yell of frustration vindicated only by the you-make-it-look-easy’s and the you-have-so-much-discipline’s and even then it’s only a matter of time before those stop coming, before my progress becomes their expectation, or, worse, before it becomes mine, and the looming feeling of have-i-done-enough starts moving the finish line further away one bite at a time, beyond which is the answer to the tantalizing question: am I losing weight or identity? an impossible riddle that takes form in every upcoming dinner or birthday party or company lunch, joys I forbid myself because otherwise I’ll be fat or I’ll die or both, and I can’t tell which is worse, so I just choose not to risk it, better to play it safe,

and here’s the thing right is I struggle to share this, not because it’s some kind of dark secret, but because even just talking about it makes the problem so much bigger than it really is; one type of person will read this and worry and another type will read this and get really pissed off; honestly it’s all the same because the battle I wage on my body is made trivial by its constancy; I regard it with the kind of passing concern reserved for missing socks or hangnails, problems in their own right but only if you think about them, only if you give them the emotional energy, and even then, so easily solved, eg: just find the sock or just cut the hangnail or, in this case, just make weight, and I’m doing that aren’t I? haven’t I already gotten so far? there’s really no point in complaining, especially when I can wake up and rush to the mirror, morning-skinny and wide-eyed, to examine every inch of my naked body, to touch the parts of myself that—having been buried beneath my negligence—I haven’t seen in years, a ritual that charms the intertwined snakes of beauty and health (I don’t try to untangle them, I’m not stupid, they probably bite),

and in seeing myself in that mirror I remember the event horizon, I recognize that one day I will become decrepit and weak and disgusting, that my organs will fail and my skin will loosen and tear, that my eyes will glaze milk-white with cataracts such that I can’t even see the miserable heap I’m sure to become, that none of this matters because none of it lasts, that “the right person” won’t care what I look like and will love me for who I “truly am”; I know all these things are true, yes, certainly true in the mind, but definitely not in the body; and with that, I slip my shirt on and I prepare my oats and I drive to the gym and I run in the streets and I breathe and I breathe and I breathe (90% of weight lost is through breath, did you know?) and I wait for the day that I go too far because only then will I know it’s safe to pull back; I’ll find the middle ground by finding the extremes and taking the average, isn’t that brave? how many people can say they’ve done that? can say they fucking tried? and I know that it’ll all be worth it when I hit that number, when I come out the other side and see for myself what it’s like to float again, to be seen again, to feel beautiful again, it’s been so long, but I know I can do it,

yes; once I make weight, I know that everything will be ok.