Eat the Damn Cake

This is a guest post.  Sarah is a first-year graduate student, getting her PhD in philosophy. She and I have been writing back and forth for around a year now. When she talked with me about her hair, I begged her to write a guest post for me. Here it is (begging works). She is awesome: 

I am bald, I am 22, and I am female. Sometimes I think that this is an unfortunate combination of traits; but other times, I feel differently.

To make a very long and painful story rather shorter: I had just turned fourteen when my hair began to fall out. It was the beginning of eighth grade. It started innocently enough with a few extra strands left behind in my comb after I showered. At first, I thought nothing of it, but it quickly became very apparent that what was happening was something I needed to think seriously about. Because it was all gone before I turned fifteen.

The year my hair fell out was the worst year of my life. Maybe this is biased, but I contend that eighth graders are the cruelest creatures to inhabit that awkward chunk of life known as ‘adolescence’.  To be fair, it’s a tough time for everyone. We want people to acknowledge that we exist, but not as much as we want to blend inconspicuously into the background. To say that it is difficult for a rapidly balding female to go unnoticed in this environment is a laughable understatement. My middle school morphed into a freak-show and I was the main attraction. My classmates pointed and sneered and snickered and laughed; I tried my hardest to escape their piercing stares, but found myself trapped in a nightmare that had become my life.

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This is a guest post from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. Here are a few things about her that she’s comfortable with me sharing: she is 27, lives on the Jersey Shore, works in the mental health field, and recovered from an eating disorder (she’s co-authoring a book about it). Here’s what I want to say about her: she is really, really cool. We’ve been having an email correspondence for a while, and I asked her to write something for the blog. Here is what she wrote:

I recall a conversation that I overheard when I was six or seven years old.  My aunts, my dad’s sisters, were talking. They all would have been in their 30s or early 40s at the time.  They were are all relatively successful (and relatively thin).  So, I hope, at this point, that you are assuming that these women were discussing politics or their families or the meaning of life or anything other than what they WERE talking about: diets.

I did not hear the entire conversation, but I heard enough.  What I remember is that my favorite aunt (favorite because she lived next door and I saw her most often) described her food intake for a day, at least for a “good” day.  She said that she drank 16 ounces of skim milk for breakfast, ate a dressingless garden salad for lunch, and then allowed herself to have a “normal dinner” at night with her boyfriend.  I wish I did not remember these things.  I shouldn’t, I guess, considering that my memories of second grade are few and far between.  But I do.  And I also remember asking this aunt, who probably didn’t realize that I was listening to the conversation at all, “Aren’t you hungry?  I mean, eating like that?” And I remember her reply, just as clearly as I remember picking up batteries from a local pharmacy yesterday.  She said, looking sadder and more serious than I had ever seen her, “Yes, ALL the time.”

It’s hard to explain how I felt, hearing this as a little girl.

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Through the world of body image blogging/tumblring, I met a woman named Erin who just came out with a book called How Much Do You Weigh? The book features pictures of women, posing,  with their weight listed on their images. I thought the project sounded interesting. I asked its creator to talk about it with us here. This is Erin:

I know a lot of people.  I have quite a few close friends, and nearly all of my family lives close by.

I have no idea what any of them weigh.  Even my oldest and dearest friends, because this is just not something we’re supposed to talk about.

I only know what I weigh, because the experience of stepping on the scale is an isolated moment,and  my eyes are the only pair present.  And I never see anyone else’s scale during the moment that they step on it.

So I have no gauge.

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This made my day. And the day after that. And it will make tomorrow, too. So I wanted to share it with everyone. This is ETDC reader Laurie Skelton‘s response to my post about how the pretty princesses we’re exposed to growing up never seem to have big noses. Or flat chests and big butts. Or very much that reminds me of myself at all, actually. This princess, created by Laurie, clearly has her priorities straight:

Her blog is here. Her tumblr is here. She is fantastic and I love her forever for this.

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Unroast: Today I love the way I look in little strappy sandals. Or barefoot, vanquishing the dragons that try to keep me from my cupcakes.

A guest post. You remember her. She wrote about being pregnant and what the hell does “normal” look like anyway– here. And she’s back for more! And the more is amazing.

I am Anna, food-blogger at Icy Violet’s Kitchen, thinker-about-women’s-issues, and lover of Kate’s blog.  My first baby is due tomorrow.  How about that?

NEGATIVE BODY TALK:

I’m so fat!

You’re not!  I am.

You!  You look great!

Chuh.  Have you seen these thighs?

Look at these arms!

What about this double chin!

***

Had a very interesting experience the other day.

I was spending time with family.  Big family.  Family I don’t always see.  Specifically I was spending time with my female cousins.  We’re a large family with a propensity for daughters, and I have a lot (of cousins that is, not daughters…).

My female cousins are beautiful, beautiful women.  My mother’s side of the family just has those genes.  They are small, thin-boned, fine featured and unfailingly thin.

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And I am really, really excited about it.

Skinny is Diana Spechler’s second book, published by HarperCollins (how amazing is that? AMAZING). She is a big deal. And in Skinny, she writes about body image issues in such a complex, jarring, and deft way that I kept getting surprised, every time I turned a page.

Skinny is the story of a young woman named Gray who struggles with guilt after her obese father’s dramatic death. She begins to compulsively overeat, driven by an enormous hunger she can’t sate. She follows a clue from her father’s past to a weight-loss camp for kids, down south. At the camp, she tries, and fails, and tries some more to understand what it means to carry weight and love. There’s sex and difficult relationships and sweetness and triumph and somehow through all that there is nothing clichéd or easy about Gray’s relationship with her body or the bodies of the people around her. In fact, Spechler makes this story important by refusing to allow it to slip into a familiar niche. And she writes like it’s exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. Which it clearly is. And she clearly is. (For Diana’s site, click here.)

It is so cool that she is here on ETDC, talking with me about her book, which you guys should read. (You can look at it and then decide to buy it here.) Here is our conversation:

You know, that question I absolutely have to ask: What inspired this book?

It’s always a little embarrassing to admit that the answer to this question is “me.” I inspire myself so deeply, Kate. But seriously, I’ve struggled with body image and eating issues since I was thirteen. At some point in early adulthood, I realized that just about everyone else does, too. We all think we’re too fat or our breasts are too small or our thighs are too big or our feet are ugly. In my case, I have objectively ugly feet–really long toes and a bunion. I get pedicures, but I’m fooling myself; painting my toenails is like adorning a leper with precious gems. Anyway. I wanted to explore body image and eating disorders. So off I went to a weight-loss camp for a summer to do research.

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