A similar thing happens when you’re overweight. It seeps into every part of your life, into all your daily interactions; you have to be on constant alert in order to mitigate your fatness for others. People watch you eat, people watch you sit down, people watch you stand up, people watch you walk, run, shop, bike, drive. There is no escaping being overweight, and as the overweight party you’re often asked to manage the situation: fill in the words that other people should call you, check to make sure the activity can accommodate fat people, make sure you’ll fit in the seat, make sure you won’t break the bench, make sure you won’t slow the group down. You have to be fourteen steps ahead of the game, and should you for any reason encounter a situation where you being fat makes anyone else feel uncomfortable, you’ve also got to smooth things over and soothe everyone until they feel okay again. Despite all of that vigilance, all the responsibility foisted on fat people to make others feel comfortable, fat people are constantly infantilized. I can’t tell you how many doctors tried to tell me that I was overeating because of my parents’ divorce. Or how many adults felt certain that if they just informed me about healthy choices and calorie counting, I would figure out how to be thin. Strangers would comment when I got Diet Coke from a soda fountain at the movies. (No one even asks you if you actually want to be thin, by the way; they want you to be thin because it would be easier on them.) At the same time as I was making dinner for my siblings, no one trusted me to make dinner for myself.
I had much less control over watching my siblings than I did over my weight. If anyone wanted to take the reins on something in my life, I wish it would have been childcare rather than my diet. When Lena and I cared for our younger siblings, we weren’t really asked. Not in a way that we could actually opt out of. If someone needed us to watch the kids, we watched the kids. It’s not like you could say, “I don’t feel like this, I’d rather stay up in my room playing Sims: Livin’ Large, making my Sims fuck and die.” That wasn’t an option. If you got out of childcare it was due to something else taking precedent, like the SAT on a Saturday morning.
* * *
I often wonder what would have happened if Lena and I were boys. I know my brother goes into the basement to play video games for hours on end and is left mostly alone; we were so rarely left alone to do things for pure fun. I think that had Lena and I been male we would have been left with almost no caretaking duties. I think we would have been asked to do other things—lawn care, pool care, moving furniture, cleaning out the attic. But I don’t think responsibility becomes a core tenet of your personality when you’re asked to mow a lawn. There’s a difference between making sure the grass looks good and keeping a human baby alive. Childcare and general care for others overwhelmingly falls on women; that isn’t a secret. The gap in chores and household tasks starts early and continues into adulthood. Even in straight couples where the wife makes more money than the husband, mothers tend to do more work while men have more leisure time. The world expects women to clean up other peoples’ messes, help other people process their emotions, know when everyone’s birthday is, plan the vacations, look into care homes for aging parents, actually care for said aging parents, sign permission slips, take off work to bring a kid to the hospital to get a cast, find a physical therapist to help the kid after the cast comes off, call the vet to see if the dog has worms, notice when an adult sibling seems to be depressed, check in on the neighbor who just got divorced. And you’re supposed to be socially adroit while handling all of this. That kind of care for and ease with other people is expected—not asked—of women in ways it will never be expected or asked of men.
Gender differences in the brain have been vastly overstated and reported on, so I’m not trying to sell you on the idea that Lady Brains somehow are better at caring or planning than men are. I’m saying this stuff is taught implicitly and explicitly from birth and it comes from seeing thousands of representations of women as caretakers and social virtuosos from a very young age. It’s cyclical. The more you see women carrying conversations, holding babies, going to doctor’s appointments, the more messaging women get that this is the norm, and the more they’re required to be good at it.
One time in college, one of my guy friends got sick. Not like go-to-the-hospital sick or anything, just like a run-of-the-mill flu kind of sick. His mother drove three hours up to Los Angeles from San Diego to take care of him. I almost lost my mind. All my guy friends thought I was being rude, that clearly his mother wanted to do this, wanted to go to the store and buy Gatorade for her son (who lived a block away from said grocery store). Which is probably true. She probably did want to help her son out, but how on earth do you raise a child who asks their mom to come up from another city hours away when you have a cold? All the guys—all of them—thought this was reasonable and normal. None of the women I knew did.
Of course it was his mother coming up to take care of him. There’s a reason it’s rare for someone to have their father as an emergency contact. Men aren’t trained to be caregivers, women are. And it’s fucking exhausting. When I was younger, I used to say that I’d have kids if I got to be a dad. I was mostly being trite, but there’s a veneer of truth to it as well. The amount of work women have to do—most of it unpaid—in the service of others, and the expectation that they simply will play along with no questions asked, is infuriating.
I also wonder what would have happened if I’d been a fat guy. There is a lot of stigma for anyone overweight, so I’m not trying to take away or diminish anyone’s pain. I do, however, think that the emphasis that society puts on women’s bodies is overwhelming for even the most conventionally attractive women, and to not fit the standard—for whatever reason, not just being overweight—is painful. I think we allow men, and especially white men, a lot more grace for perceived flaws. We let overweight men be funny and rich and powerful, or at least a friendly guy. We let them have narratives that aren’t just “Here is a fat man.” We rarely let overweight women do that. Being an overweight girl is a transgression. The agreement when you’re a young woman is that you’ll be consumable, attractive, enticing. It’s a sick, bad system. But being overweight and unwanted in that system is excruciating. The area your value supposedly lies in—the body—is said to be worthless, less than worthless: actively bad. Now, none of that is true. And of course, there are plenty of people who are attracted to people who happen to be fat. But that is not the story you get told when you’re young and fat. And that’s especially not the story you get told if you’re a young fat woman.
To put it simply, I think I would have gotten more youth if I had been born male. I think I would have had both beds and excuses made for me by the women around me. I think I would have learned to do laundry later (or never). I think I wouldn’t have gotten a big talk about how my grades were slipping when I got a few Bs on a progress report, because people would have assumed I was doing my best. I don’t wish by any means that I had been born male; I think I wouldn’t have had the emotional support to deal with certain parts of my childhood if I were male. I think I would have been angrier and less likely to reach out for help. I think my emotional and mental health would have suffered. But there’s one thing I believe very deeply: I think I would have gotten more youth.
Instead, I feel deeply the lacunae of my childhood. I think most people do. I think that when you don’t get the adolescence you think you were owed—not that any of us is actually owed anything—you start to chafe when you reach adulthood. The shameful stamp of being a late bloomer lingers. It’s what so often leads people to abandon good things for fun things, like cheating on a partner or leaving a family or quitting a salaried job to open a jungle-themed bar in Amarillo. If you didn’t get the youth you feel you deserved, you often spend your life chasing it, looking for chances to make harmful, irresponsible decisions or basing your actions around people who find you attractive.
But you can’t go back. You can’t re-create true youth, where someone will care for you and clean up your messes, wh
ere people will come to your birthday, where a hot stranger will beg you to have sex in the bar bathroom.V I mean sometimes some of those things happen for a moment, but they aren’t promised, and they usually don’t come around often. You can spend your life chasing youth if you want. I know some adults like that. Frankly, to lay myself perfectly bare to you—the point of this book, some would say—I am like that. I have spent a surprisingVI amount of time and energy longing for, trying to re-create, raging against my lost youth. But I don’t think it really works. The adults I know who are like this—those who are convinced their better years are not just behind them but never happened—well, they’re lost. The best tactic I’ve found, and maybe I’m wrong—I’m wrong about a lot of things—is to mourn. Allow yourself to get really, deeply, unimaginably sad about the fact that you had to work two jobs in high school or that you didn’t go to prom or that your parents were too busy to teach you how to drive or that you didn’t have money for a car or that no one kissed you until you were twenty-seven. All of those things are sad and fucked! They aren’t the worst thing in the world, but you don’t get to mourn only one sad thing in your life. You get an unlimited amount of mourning.
Of course, mourning isn’t just about sadness, and it’s certainly not just about death. At least not the literal death of another human being. Mourning is about loss and ritual. It’s about relearning how you relate to the world. It’s about finding small moments where you accept what happened, even if that thing is sad and fucked. It’s about learning how to sometimes embrace that you’re an adult now and that you’ve kissed only two people and you’re never going to be a world-traveling slut like you expected. I’m not saying you’re not going to be bitter that you never got to study abroad or go to your dream school. I’m not saying you should move on and let go and ignore the loss. I’m saying you should confront it. Confront it head-on before you let your lost youth shape too much of your adulthood. If you’re not careful, everything in life becomes about how you didn’t get sucked off in a movie theater when you were fourteen, and that’s not the way to spend your one wild and precious life.
What I get now—not that I always accept it—is that I’m never going to stop being responsible. And while I’ve lost some weight, I still have parts of my youth that I missed out on because of my size. I’m not painting over anything, or pretending like everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. I’m just trying to remember that no one got exactly the youth they wanted, that almost everyone was lost and in pain and felt unpopular and unloved and weird. Almost everyone would have done it differently if they were in charge. I didn’t get to be wild and free, but I also possibly didn’t get hurt as much, or at least not in the same ways. I became funny and smart and I read a lot and I got good grades and I got into a college I might not have if I had more to do on the weekends. And after years of childcare, I’m totally unfazed by people throwing up on me. So it wasn’t all bad. But I still often wish I’d gotten to study abroad or sneak out of the house or make out in someone’s parents’ basement on a beanbag.
Instead of believing that I was owed a certain amount of irresponsible fun and sluttiness, instead of trying to go out and chase those things in reckless and potentially unhealthy or harmful ways, I just try to be aware. I try to remember why I’m sad, I try to mourn it. I try to find things in my life that feel exciting and fulfilling and carefree that aren’t about being wild. I’ve worked hard to try to find the value of being steady, of doing the right thing again and again, of behaving. In a lot of ways, I was ready for adulthood before it came. While everyone else was giving hand jobs in Jettas, I was calling doctors’ offices and arranging college admissions interviews and fishhooking choking hazards out of kids’ mouths. So I’m ready now. I’m less fun than a lot of people my age, but I’m pretty good at taking care of things and people. I’m good at showing up. I’ve been doing this shit for a while.
Things I Want My Little Sisters to Know, Which I Will Write Here Since They Aren’t Texting Me Back Right Now
If the person you’re sleeping with always makes you come over to their house and never wants to come to yours, that’s a red flag. It means they don’t want to put in effort, and as a woman, you will almost always naturally put in more effort than the situation requires, so find someone who also puts in more than the bare minimum.
Deodorant also works great under your boobs.
You’re going to make a ton of bad choices just because you have a crush on someone. Embrace it. The two most luxurious things in the world are having your bed made for you when you stay at a hotel and doing stupid shit for the sake of a crush. Nothing in the world feels as youthful or carefree as making a medium-size dumb choice for a hot person.
Speaking of which, the only thing worse than having a crush on someone is not having a crush on anyone. Always maintain a crush. It’s a motivator. Horniness will get you to an 8 a.m. class better than coffee.
Don’t buy the books for your college classes until at least the second week, if at all. You can usually fake having read them.
For the love of God, pay more to get a gel manicure. There’s no point in getting a regular manicure. You’ve just paid fifteen dollars to smudge your nail polish within seconds of leaving the salon.
Spend as little time as possible in your Chill Girl phase. It’s like driving through Kansas; you might have to do it to get to your destination, but don’t linger.
Keep deodorant in the car, but the spray-on kind. The regular sticks melt. I would also recommend keeping a set of tweezers in the car. We’re Italian; they only get more useful as we age.
Always wake up early enough to get free breakfast at the hotel. Even if you need to scuttle downstairs and grab a waffle and bring it back up to your room and fall asleep. Life presents so few opportunities like that, you have to take advantage of those rare ones.
Detail clean your car before you even consider selling it. It will make you feel like you have a new car for about $100.
Sweaters and jackets are some of the easiest things to buy secondhand because the sizing is somewhat imprecise. You almost never need to buy a new sweater.
If you roast almost any vegetable with salt and pepper and olive oil, people are going to think you’re a real adult. If it’s squash or sweet potatoes, add a pinch of brown sugar.
Don’t worry about fighting aging; you’re going to get old. Accept it.
Learn to be good at lying to people whenever you need to. Especially if it’s to creepy men trying to get you to sleep with them. Everyone lies.
At some point, you will realize how UnFun you are, perhaps when you skip a party to get in bed by 10 p.m. because you have to finish an essay and twenty pages of reading tomorrow. This is a realization most women in our family face. It will sting, but eventually you will embrace it. Being unfun is ultimately freeing.
Remember that you do not need to be friends with your roommates. You need to be roommates with them. The two are distinct! It’s not always better to live with a friend. Sometimes at the end of a long day you just want to come home to tacit silence.
You can find ways to be okay with just about any partner. I know that’s not what other people tell you, but it’s true. Pick someone you like being around. A lot.
Take thirty minutes out of your life and go buy good bobby pins (the kind that are rounded instead of flat). Just buy a metric ass-ton of bobby pins. Put them everywhere in your house. Think you have enough? Buy more.
Adulthood often means choosing between two really shitty options. Or two really good but mutually exclusive options. Remember, if there were one really good choice and one really bad one, you would have already made your decision. Imagine yourself at eighty years old (if climate change doesn’t kill us by then) looking back on your life. What will future you have wanted current you to do?
Do work first. Take care of what you have to do first and then relax later. Work as hard as you can without hurting your mental health when you’re young.
Send every
single scary text.
The secret to finding a good partner is to look for someone else who also did all the work in group projects.
Every time you have a problem with your partner or with your boss or with your friend, you are probably being much more reasonable than you think. You’re probably underreacting. Hold the line; do not move your boundaries.
Write things down about your parents so that you have those memories. Take videos. Take notes. Make voice recordings. Our parents are old as shit, sorry.
Learn how to make three signature dishes. A side, a dessert, and a showstopper that really impresses. My three go-tos are (1) Papa’s arugula salad, which is always a banger, (2) gooey butter cake because it’s easy and no one outside of St. Louis knows what it is, so it kills, and (3) bagna càuda, because again, no one knows what the fuck it is, so you virtually can’t mess it up and everyone likes butter and garlic. Plus, because it involves cooking, it seems like you’re really doing something.
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