Everybody (Else) Is Perfect

by Gabrielle Korn

  This was a particularly pivotal moment in my career. The digital department of Nylon under me had become so successful that my title was changed from digital director to digital editor in chief in a matter of months, which caused a lot of conflict with the print editors—there was now an editor in chief of the magazine, and me, a deeply uncomfortable situation that had us inherently pitted against each other instead of collaborating. Our boss was interested in pushing me forward as the face of the brand, which meant I was starting to speak at conferences, represent the magazine at important events, and I was on camera all the time. I was chosen to host our first-ever premium news show, which would air on Amazon Prime. I started to actually get photographed by street style photographers instead of ignored. I was also starving, and suffering for it, but because of my work environment it felt justified; the correlation between my weight and my professional value felt very real. Even in hindsight I am fairly certain this wasn’t just in my head, based on the biases of the person in charge of making my role so outward facing—a middle-aged straight white man—and the context of the industry.

  My coworkers were commenting on my body constantly. I started wearing loose clothing to avoid my weight being a topic of conversation. At one point I got the stomach flu and was literally wasting away; a woman from the marketing department said to me, “Can you just breathe on me so I can catch it?”

  Meanwhile, the Scorpio and I had started fighting all the time. We couldn’t really talk about what was happening, so she tried to joke about it: “Remember when you got fat?” she frequently said in a baby voice, which just about drove me insane. There were many other issues at play—we wanted different things from life and each other—but everything was compounded into our fights about my eating and working out. As supportive as she’d been, she had no patience for what she couldn’t fix or control. When she was annoyed, she became cruel.

  I no longer wanted to go out at night with her (or anyone), and so she’d go to bars without me and then come to my apartment when the sun was rising, smelling like cigarettes and cheap beer. She said it was mean that I asked her to shower before getting in my bed, but the smell made my eyes water. On one such night she’d run into her most recent ex-girlfriend and told me that this woman had wept on the barstool next to her about how sad it was that they were no longer in love; she then pulled the Scorpio by the arm into the bathroom. They spent hours reminiscing together, wasted. Hearing this story, I became hysterical, and in response she told me it wasn’t a big deal: girls were always pulling her into bathrooms, she said. She claimed to not understand how that made it even worse.

  There were a thousand fights like this: a million sharp words, an arsenal of misunderstandings and poorly handled confrontations, a running tab of hurt feelings that never felt resolved no matter how direct I tried to be with her. Instead they piled on top of one another, making every incident feel worse than it was, painful parts of a whole that was clearly unsustainable.

  When I finally told her I wanted to break up, it took weeks for her to hear me. She tried to tell me that my “mental illness” was making me push her away. She said the suddenness with which I wanted to end things was abusive. She said I didn’t know how to love. She said a lot of really awful things, actually, and to this day sometimes I’ll suddenly remember one of them and will feel angry and hurt all over again. Mostly I feel mad at myself for letting it drag on for so long. But that experience saved my life: she’d made me promise to tell my therapist that I was starving myself, and I agreed to it.

  We finally broke up for good one day in the beginning of March, and early the very next morning I had to go to Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest (SXSW). I made it there but was barely functioning, going to the bare minimum of events and hiding in my hotel room. Lying on the scratchy Hilton couch in a bathrobe at noon, I ended up Gchatting with Avery. It had been almost two years since we’d broken up. I said, “How much the Scorpio and I processed our breakup made me realize how little you and I did.”

  She said, “We didn’t at all. I talked to everyone but you about it.”

  I apologized for publishing “The Newly Single Girl’s Guide to Beauty.” I knew it had hurt her. She said, “You broke my heart, but I know I broke yours before that.”

  I told her how devastated I’d been that we stopped being physically intimate. She said, “Didn’t you realize that that was about my own depression, and not about you?” Of course, I hadn’t.

  Alone in my hotel room, I cried and cried. It was like I had to leave New York in order to fully feel everything I’d been avoiding. I grieved every breakup I’d ever been through at once, mourning the losses of all the women who had moved in and out of my life, none of whom turned out to be the partners I needed but whom I’d cared for deeply anyway. I grieved for the years of my life I’d spent not speaking up for myself, years I’d never get the chance to do over.

  The Scorpio and I talked on the phone a few days later, and I told her what the doctor had told me about my blood levels. She said, “I’m so angry at you for not dealing with this sooner.” We didn’t speak again.

  That spring, even though I’d started treatment, I was about to hit my lowest weight ever: around one hundred pounds. In April I posted a photo on Instagram of myself at Coachella in a red floral dress, looking like I was about to drop dead; all the comments were compliments.

  Mimi pointed out to me that the last time you play out a pattern is the worst time. And true to form after I stopped speaking to the Scorpio, I found myself in yet another intense romantic situation. This time it was like all the issues I’d had in other relationships—poor communication and toxic behavior all around—were put into an Instant Pot and pressure-cooked into one explosive rebound. Having learned at least a little lesson, I got myself out of that one within a few months. But I did it sloppily, once again starting to see someone new before the dust had fully settled. This newest person was Wallace, and I hated that she had to start dating me under those circumstances.

  Wallace was so kind and well-adjusted, and there I was, a total mess in the wake of yet another breakup from an ill-advised relationship. I was filled with shame but also with self-awareness: it was like I was watching myself from above, going through the motions of the same old story that had held me hostage for years. I wanted out. But I also wanted Wallace, and I wanted to keep her.

  She was my neighbor. From the moment I’d met her two years prior, at the coffee shop between our apartments right after I moved to Brooklyn, I thought she was just about the cutest thing I’d ever seen: long, curly brown ringlets framing an angular face, with huge green eyes and an easy grin, and long, slender limbs that were golden from the sun. She always wore ripped black jeans and soft band T-shirts and had full sleeve tattoos on both arms that featured both Sade and a scene from Jaws. She was a dog walker and a musician and an artist, bursting with contagious creative energy. She grew up in North Carolina, and words became softer in her mouth, stretched out luxuriously: “Orange” became arnge. “Chocolate” became chahk-lit. “Avocado” was ah-vuh-cah-duh. “Did you eat?” was rolled into one: Didjaeat? Or sometimes just, Jeet? She always smelled good, thanks to what I’d later learn was an extensive collection of designer fragrances.

  We had mutual close friends, so we’d occasionally hung out in groups but had never been alone together. For years I had made sure that our friends knew about my crush, hoping that someday it might get back to her. I’d say little things when we were all together and she was out of earshot, like, “Imagine being Wallace’s girlfriend.”

  It was early summer. She’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship and had started messaging me daily on social media. Eventually she gave me her number in an Instagram DM, and I texted her that I liked her before we even went on a date. She already knew, though—my plan had worked. She had told a mutual friend that she had a crush on me, and that friend grinned and said, “Gab has a crush on you, too.” There was something very middle school dance about t
he whole thing. If I could have passed her a note in class saying, “Do you like me? Circle YES/NO,” I would have.

  She took me to see an indie musician I’d loved in high school, and sitting next to each other in the ornate concert hall, our elbows gingerly touched. On the subway back to Brooklyn, she blushed while she told me her birth chart. A week later, walking home from a bar on a night so foggy the air felt like soup, I wrapped my arms around her neck, and we kissed. By August she was my girlfriend.

  This time was different, though. I was totally crazy about her, and at the same time it was the least crazy I’d ever felt. I knew that if I was going to be a good partner to her, long-term, I had a lot of work to do, and for the first time in my life I had the inner resources to actually do the work. For my entire twenties, I had been in back-to-back relationships without ever taking a minute to think about what I really needed. I desperately wanted to break my habit of one relationship bleeding into the next, of not saying what I needed, of leaning on weight loss as a distraction. It was too destructive, to me and to anyone who made the mistake of getting involved with me.

  I was texting my nutritionist pictures of my meals and seeing my therapist twice a week. I told Wallace about it, and she reacted with kindness and support, but she followed my lead, not bringing it up unless I did. I wanted her to know everything about me, but I didn’t want her to ever have to experience the darker parts. It’s hard to be radically honest about things that you’re ashamed of. I felt like it sounded whiny and superficial. But she never once judged me or got mad at me.

  In September 2017, when we’d been dating for just a couple of months, right in the middle of New York Fashion Week, Nylon’s print magazine shut down. Suddenly I was editor in chief of an all-digital media company. This was the first NYFW that I wasn’t starving myself for, and I was walking a tightrope to prevent myself from descending into self-loathing as I tried to squeeze into borrowed samples and posed nervously for street style photographers. When you start eating regularly after a period of starvation, usually your stomach is the first to show it since your ab muscles have broken down, and I was so self-conscious about my new little belly. Looking back at pictures now, it’s not visible, but I wouldn’t have believed that at the time.

  When news of the magazine folding and the layoffs hit the press, there was extra attention on me, attention I wasn’t prepared for. Nylon print had been a beloved magazine with fashion editors who knew everyone in the industry, and even though I had nothing to do with the decision to go all digital, there was a certain level of blame I absorbed since I was taking over as EIC (rather than, I don’t know, quitting in protest? I’m not sure how I was expected to handle the situation. I loved my job. I also needed it). There were awkward conversations with PR people, sidelong glances directed at me in the front row at fashion shows, and a barrage of social media outrage to navigate. I felt horrible for my colleagues who were laid off and at the same time felt extremely lucky to still have a regular paycheck in such a tumultuous media landscape, a survivor’s guilt that I didn’t know what to do with. Any other year it would have been a great excuse to stop eating altogether. It was terrible timing psychologically, but I made it through, making a point to eat lunch every single day, to carry snacks in my bag. I felt awful for focusing on what felt like such a vapid thing while people had lost their jobs, but I also was finally understanding that my disordered eating was about so much more than how I looked.

  Toward the end of the week, I brought Wallace with me to a Tiffany’s fragrance party where St. Vincent performed on a small stage in a skintight red leather frock and piles of diamonds draped on her pale skin. I wore a long, silvery silk Tibi dress with a black lace turtleneck underneath. It was tighter than I expected, clinging to the new shape of my body. On my way there an older woman stopped me on the street and said, “Honey, you look amazing.” She was a total stranger who had no reason to be nice to me. I wanted to hug her.

  * * *

  One morning in October we were lying quietly on my bed; Wallace was spooning me, the warmth of her torso pressing into my back, early golden light from outside illuminating the soft arm hairs on her forearms, which were still tan from the summer. She said, “You know I love you, right?”

  “You know I love you, too,” I replied, not a question.

  We had Thanksgiving with her mom, and I ate ham biscuits for the first time. After Christmas I went with her to her hometown in North Carolina. We spent winter bundled in blankets. In the spring, for my twenty-ninth birthday, we went to Paris, and then Amsterdam. And in the fall, a year and a half after our first date, she moved in. We obsessed over hanging her art alongside mine, delighting in the commingling of our belongings. And then, eventually, it became abundantly clear that my little Bed-Stuy apartment—which had been perfect for me—wasn’t big enough for the life we were making together, and we found a new one.

  I hit the target weight set for me by my doctor. When my tiny clothes stopped fitting, I got rid of them. I’ve never tried to change my body to be more lovable for her; and, maybe more importantly, I’ve never pretended to not need things from her. It’s not perfect: Sometimes it takes me days to articulate a feeling. Some days every meal feels like a choice I have to make. Sometimes I can’t help but complain about how different my body feels from when we first started dating. She says, “But you were a tiny twig,” and covers me in kisses.

  Driving back from her family’s Christmas in 2018, a ten-to-twelve-hour drive, we listened to Michelle Obama’s beautiful memoir, Becoming. I was struck by the depth and nuance with which she described her marriage, the kind of understanding that comes after decades of emotional labor. I don’t claim to have that sort of insight into what makes our love work—not yet. I know we still have so much to discover about each other. But the foundation we’ve laid since our first kiss in the summer of 2017 is stronger than anything I’ve experienced. It’s more honest, and it’s gentler, and it’s built on compassion rather than expectation.

  Looking back at the patterns of my relationships in my twenties, the association between my weight and my happiness is embarrassingly obvious: I’m heaviest when I’m happy. This is true for most women I know. Happy weight happens when you’re in love and you stop worrying so much about how good you look because you’re so distracted by how good you feel. Objectively it’s wonderful. And yet it has terrible connotations. It signifies that you’ve let yourself go. God forbid.

  I think the key for me has been not necessarily “letting myself go” but letting go of the things that are holding me back—like the idea that if you pretend to not have needs, the needs will go away. They don’t, of course; needs that you put on hold just show up disguised as other needs. Staying in relationships that weren’t making me happy wasn’t serving me, nor was trying to control my weight. I’m my best self right now, several sizes up from what I used to consider my best-looking self.

  Again and again, so many of us make the mistake of thinking that how thin we are is indicative of how deserving of love we are. Thinness—because of the way it’s still sexualized and glorified in pop culture—becomes synonymous with desirability, even if we know objectively that it’s oppressive. Even if we would never stand for someone talking to our best friend the way we talk to ourselves.

  In reality, the kind of thinness we’re used to seeing usually comes with a price. For me, that price was my health and my relationships. I learned the hard way that it’s happy weight, and everything that comes with it, that’s aspirational. It’s built in to the phrase itself. I just didn’t know it until I got here.

  7 Fashion Weak

  I set the fire alarm off at my first New York Fashion Week. It was 2013 and I was backstage at one of the bigger shows. I was, in fact, doing solely backstage beauty reporting at the time and had waited about two hours in what appeared to be a dimly lit airplane hangar while PR people clad in all black clutched clipboards and murmured anxiously into headsets. All the beauty editors had received one-she
ets (a page-long overview of the hair, makeup, and nails for the show) so we knew that, like many shows that season, it would be “no-makeup makeup” and simple, middle-parted hair. In short, for beauty reporting, it was a big to-do for nothing. We all waited around, though, because the lead hairstylist and makeup artist were well-known names, and a quote from them could become an entire story.

  I had several more backstages to run to, and so when two hours had passed and neither the models nor the glam teams had emerged, I decided to call it. But when I tried to leave, the main door was being blocked by security. Just over the security guard’s shoulders I could see the models doing a run-through in the hallway. So I retreated backstage and noticed that at the back of the hangar, all the way in the dark, there was the glowing outline of another exit. I snuck over to it and pushed the door open. It opened to nothing—there was a three-foot drop and then the river.

  That’s when the alarm sounded, blaring throughout the backstage area. Immediately, two very butch female security guards appeared, and—I’m not proud of this—I burst into tears. “I’m just trying to leave,” I said. They responded with some barely concealed sighs and offered to help me to the front exit. They walked on either side of me, slightly behind, and we pushed past the line of models until I got to the exit. When I took a step outside and the door immediately closed behind me, I realized that I hadn’t really been helped out—I’d been kicked out.

  I quickly learned that just about everybody has a first NYFW horror story. One of my editors comforted me with a story about the time she’d accidentally leaned on a button that opened a garage door, which happened to be serving as the backdrop for the runway, and instead of playing it cool, she ducked out of the space as the door rose. Those without horror stories had, at the very least, warnings: Don’t take anything personally. Don’t compare yourself to the models. Don’t wear new shoes. Don’t cry until you get home.