Always Too Much and Never Enough

by Jasmin Singer

  The school was, ironically, my mother’s alma mater—back when it had been Philadelphia College of Art—and the theater program there was selective, small, and well established. So even though I was disappointed by New York City being off the table, I was sufficiently wooed by the respectable theater education I’d get and flattered by my scholarship. Plus, I craved living in a big city with every ounce of longing I had—anything to get me out of Edison!—and I saw the move as a huge step in the right direction, even if that right direction was taking me in the opposite one from the city I dreamed of, the city shimmering with Broadway lights, the city where I’d eventually land.

  Finally, a fresh start! I could leave my bullied days behind me, trade in my despair for hope and my burger for a cheesesteak.

  —

  Plus, hell had apparently frozen over, because I had a boyfriend. A real-life, blond-haired and blue-eyed, crazy-about-me boyfriend. Timmy was twenty-five to my seventeen; worldly to my still-sheltered; rough-around-the-edges to my pseudo-sophisticated; a daredevil to my play-by-the-rules. And yet we went together as perfectly as a Boston cream donut goes with a Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolatta (my drink of choice, which Timmy always picked up for me on his way to our outings). We met in summer stock (that’s a repertory company that performs plays only in June, July, and August) during the summer after high school and fell madly, unabashedly in love. He was tasked with the nightly duty of helping me with a quick costume change, and then he’d bring my worn jeans back to the dressing room. Little did I know then that he was pretty much having a relationship with those jeans, and plotting how to move on past denim and make his first move with me. Timmy could have been a star on a soap opera. He was stereotypically gorgeous in a “surfer dude” kind of way, and the two of us made an odd-looking, but deeply devoted pair.

  Despite his good looks, Timmy didn’t have much more dating experience than I did, and so we both threw ourselves into our relationship with urgency, each of us trying to make up for lost time by loving harder. Though Timmy was stunning, he, too, had felt like an outcast his whole life. His mother had been unwell and severely mentally imbalanced, and he had diverted his attention away from his problems at home by diving into the world of motocross racing. For his whole life, the worlds of motocross and grunge had defined him, leaving his love life on the sidelines—until I came around and, for the first time, he opened his heart.

  The summer in between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college—the Summer of Timmy—was the most magical of my life, full of self-expression and adventure, realized lust, deeply felt emotion, and awkward but sweet lovemaking. All this was the exact opposite of what my school days had been like, and I basked in my newfound freedom with a profound and almost jarring ecstasy.

  Seeing myself through the eyes of a doting boyfriend who wanted to worship my body—the same body that had been the target of ridicule by my loathsome classmates mere weeks prior—I began to wonder if my dark days were behind me. I had sincere hope that my new life in Philadelphia would bring with it a redefinition that I desperately craved—one that Timmy jump-started when he looked at me and called me beautiful.

  Timmy moved me into my Center City apartment at the end of August, following my final performance as an oddly cast Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which costarred Welcome Back, Kotter’s Ron Palillo—a B-level celebrity with whom I was enamored and starstruck. Surely my close proximity to this level of fame—He knew John Travolta! The boy in the bubble!—meant that I, myself, would soon be discovered. Timmy and I drove over the Delaware River quietly singing Tori Amos’s version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and I gawked with hesitant but exhilarating excitement as the skyline of my brand-new city got bigger. Hours later, I kissed Timmy good-bye for twenty minutes, wanting him to stay but needing him to go. It was time for me to start again.

  —

  I entered my first Acting Studio class in college wearing fluorescent green satin overalls. “Be brave,” I had whispered to myself that morning, as I stared in the mirror at my reflection, pleased that I was beginning to strongly resemble a young, if larger, Liza Minnelli—a resemblance that I did my best to enhance with my short, jet-black hair and heavy, dramatic bangs, as well as the requisite black eyeliner that extended out onto my temples. I was as gung ho on making an impression as I was on making a name for myself, and that kind of prominence—I was sure—began with an eclectic wardrobe. So my choice to wear green satin overalls was indeed premeditated. You couldn’t ignore a girl in green overalls if you tried.

  My new peers didn’t ignore me, but they didn’t care all that much, either. That was the first thing I noticed about the students who made up my conservatory theater program—being offbeat was not the thing that got you noticed, it was the thing that got you in the door. My theater program was, in essence, a collection of wildly talented small-town weirdos, suburban outcasts, and redheaded stepchildren. We were the ones who just didn’t fit: the driven ones, the fat ones, the gay ones, the activist ones, and, yes, the bullied ones. And, finally, we were able to celebrate ourselves and each other—beginning with the common denominator of not fitting into the suburban hells most of us had come from. My freshman year of college was like a slightly glorified, older, gayer version of Fame. We might as well have danced on cars, because we were absolutely going to live forever. Each and every one of us was going to be a star—that we knew. We had the talent and ambition to make it happen.

  But first, we had to regulate our antidepressants.

  Put a bunch of talented rejects in a room, and you can bet your Broadway bootleg that the vast majority are keeping the pharmaceutical industry very comfortable by consuming their fair share of mood stabilizers. That was true in spades with my Acting Studio class, a tiny and passionate group of young actors who took our craft as seriously as we took our black eyeliner. (It wasn’t just me who loaded it on. Others, apparently, were also under the impression that the more eyeliner you wore, the less you needed to explain yourself. I still think there’s some truth in that.) In fact, if you were depressed—or, even better, bipolar!—you were given an extra level of respect and secretly expected to perform better monologues.

  It will perhaps not come as a surprise at this point that depression had been no stranger to me throughout my teen years. It frequently enveloped me, especially when all the taunting made it seem like too much for me to get through my high school classes. I would use my hair as a curtain and my sleeves as a tissue. My obsession with Sylvia Plath certainly didn’t help matters much. It seemed I was a classic teenage sucker for angst and misery.

  But then, after my sleeve was sufficiently soggy and my eyeliner effectively smeared, I would spiral down further into the depths of despair—traveling far beyond a momentary and justified upset. Things I normally enjoyed—like listening to music, reading novels, and writing poetry—had no meaning for me. The only thing that mattered during those times was food—my one constant, reliable source of satisfaction. Depression was no match against a row of Oreos or a box of Cheez-Its.

  When I was fourteen, my TM had insisted on getting me into therapy—my intense moods and darkness were frightening to her. I would write morbid poetry on a daily basis, mostly about broken romances that I’d never experienced except in my head. No doubt tragic lost love seemed like a more noble and exciting excuse for my broken heart than being ostracized by everyone at school. When my therapist suggested I consider going on Prozac—a relatively new drug that still carried with it a social stigma (almost as much as wearing plus-size clothing)—Mom adamantly refused. What would it mean to have a young daughter who needed a pill to get happy? What kind of failure would that make her?

  So, during my freshman year of college, when it became clear that I was the lone kid in my Acting Studio class who wasn’t on the happy pill, I began to wonder if I should be.

  Still, being a person of somewhat dramatic emotional range, I�
�ve never found misery incompatible with ecstasy, and I was indeed euphoric to be away at college. During those first few months, I drank Philadelphia up until it was dry. My eager classmates and I would spend our evenings on South Street getting plastered at one of the many bars that didn’t check IDs (and I’d spend the next morning swearing that I’d never drink again—until that night or the following, when I would do it all over again). And there was theater in my life, even if, for the moment, it was only tangentially. I got a job selling programs for a production of The Phantom of the Opera, and I became fast friends with the offbeat, bohemian crew. My wardrobe became funkier and my eyeliner heavier. I dove into my new grown-up life with a fanaticism that fulfilled and petrified me.

  Not surprisingly to either of us, weeks into the semester I broke Timmy’s heart by telling him that I needed to focus on my life in Philly now. “I think we should break up,” I said calmly, impressed by my own detachment as he wept copiously onto my pink faux fur jacket.

  As is typical for so many floundering eighteen-year-olds (and I was no exception), my breakup was not only self-centered, but seriously overstated. But while I may have drawn the curtain on act 1, Timmy’s and my future together was still waiting in the wings, ready to be resuscitated and rediscovered. Our lives and hearts would be intertwined for years. In fact, even when it really was over many years later, the role that he played as my first love—the one who loved me back, even when I felt entirely unlovable—would shape me forever and would heal so many of the wounds that were still left from high school.

  —

  But I didn’t have time to think about that then. The months that passed between graduating from high school and settling into my new college life had been fierce and frenetic. Between summer stock and my summer of love, moving to a new city and meeting all new peers, I could barely come up for air. I maniacally, but somewhat unconsciously, moved through my days, charged by the dazzling (and sometimes blinding) lights around me.

  When my life in Philly began to settle down, I became abundantly aware that lying beneath all that constant activity was, still, depression. It became an unwanted but unshakable companion, in the same way my stomach was. The awareness of my significant size and my equally significant depression followed me around my room, my town, my life—never letting me forget they were there, that they were running the show.

  Once the initial adrenaline of my new life had worn off, I realized that the dark shadow had been there all along, lurking nearby, waiting for a moment of silence to make itself known. My depression dwelled in the corner of my small apartment along with the life-sized James Dean cardboard cutout that I propped up near the window to trick robbers into thinking I wasn’t home alone.

  And my round stomach with pink stretch marks came with me to voice class, where it bounced up and down, out and in, left and right, as I learned how to properly inhale and exhale, the actor way. (Apparently, actors breathe differently than other mortals.)

  My depression sat quietly while I’d eat a cheeseburger at Johnny Rockets with my friends, only feeling safe enough to fully emerge when I got home a few hours later.

  During that same outing to Johnny Rockets, my stomach would spread out on my lap like a small child, giddy because I was feeding it.

  Then, late at night when I’d sit cross-legged on my living room floor wearing my favorite flannel pajamas with red kissy lips all over them, my depression would encase me like thick molasses and I would barely be able to move. So I’d go in slow motion, always aware of the extreme effort it took to get from my bed to my bathroom, my bathroom to my living room, my living room to my life. The syrup would seep its way into my ears, and when people spoke to me, they sounded distant.

  I finally gathered enough gumption to seek out a new therapist. One of my motivations came from my peers, who convinced me that digging deep was key to unleashing the burgeoning Tony winner inside me. And so I gathered weeks’ worth of fantasies about how much deeper an actor I’d be once I found a good shrink to help me parse out my lingering sadness. Even more importantly, I was tired of constantly being miserable.

  Even among the outcast theater kids—the ones who, like me, traded in any chance of making money for the infinitely small possibility of making it as an actor—I was still a bit of a loner. I was a particular brand of “weird” that didn’t sit well even among the weirdos.

  The problem was, I began to realize, that my status as an outcast wasn’t rooted only in the fact that I was fat. It was becoming apparent that I was simply too much. I was too needy, too clingy, too desperate. I was too quick to want to perform my monologue first in front of the class, too exuberant when asked to provide feedback for the other kids, too demanding of my teachers’ time. It seemed I took up too much space wherever I went, not just physically, and that naturally put the others off. At the end of the day, in the quiet solitude of my tiny apartment in Center City, I felt the flip side of that “too much”—the screaming silence that ate away at me until I ate away at my feelings; the lingering loneliness that lessened only when I found a friend in food.

  Even though college gave me the independence I craved in spades, I still floated through my days with an overarching feeling of isolation, the manifestation of which was my ever-expanding body.

  I needed a shrink.

  —

  When I walked in the door of my new therapist’s office on Second Street just off South, and came face-to-face with Dr. Smith, I suddenly felt queasy—and it was not the aftereffect of the ice cream cone and candy bar I had anxiously devoured on the way there. The last thing I expected, and the last thing I wanted in my psychiatrist, was for her to be obese. And yet, that was exactly what she was.

  Does admitting that make me a bad person? I’m not sure. But I do know that it had been a near lifetime of body and weight issues that had brought me to her in the first place, and just as an alcoholic seeking treatment would not want to smell brandy on his therapist’s breath, I immediately felt I could not possibly confide in a therapist who was 150 pounds overweight.

  Yet there I was, and I felt I had to see it through. I would stick it out, though I would never trust her. Even though I feel ashamed to admit this, I would always judge her, even more harshly than I judged myself.

  My new shrink put out her hand. “I’m Dr. Smith,” she said, with a smile in her eyes. I stared at her for a beat. She had silky, dark brown hair pulled back into a bun and wore a khaki-colored dress that stopped at midcalf. On her shoulders, she had draped a bright shawl. I wondered if Dr. Smith shopped at Lane Bryant. I wondered if she was ashamed of it.

  Finally I shook her hand back. “Hi,” was all she got out of me.

  “Let’s sit down,” she said, and we did.

  —

  I continued to be bullied, no longer by classmates, but instead by strangers—mainly men—whose behavior ranged from staring at my still very substantial rack and whispering, “God bless you,” all the way to calling me names like “Fat Fuck.”

  When I wasn’t busy with classes or gallivanting to South Street with my friends (somehow it never occurred to me or anyone else that all that drinking could have been contributing to my depression), I would take the New Jersey Transit train two hours north to New York. Though I had learned to appreciate the quaint, cobblestone pathways in Philadelphia, the rebellious spirit and raciness of South Street, and the subversive theater and dance scene there, it was still the Big Apple that I dreamed of. And so on weekends I would travel there and simply walk around aimlessly, for hours on end—or perhaps I’d hang out in the busy and bright theater district and sneak into the second half of a Broadway play during intermission—before turning around and heading back to Philadelphia, where my life and my dessert were waiting.

  During one such sojourn in New York, I was crossing Fourteenth Street, humming “At the Ballet” from A Chorus Line and snacking on peanut M&M’s, when I caught a glimpse of a m
an walking toward me, eyes squinting, just staring. I suspected what was about to happen—I was used to it. I quickly stuffed the M&M’s in my coat pocket and made a mental note of where I was in the song so that I could pick it up again later. The man put his hands in his pockets. I looked down, kept walking. He stopped directly in front of me. There were people everywhere, but they didn’t take note. I was on my own. “Fat slob,” he said, an inch from my face. “Fat whore,” he continued as I passed him. I walked faster.

  When I was a kid, my mother had told me to ignore them. I ignored him, grasping my M&M’s for dear life—they were what was normal. He was what was evil.

  I was away from him finally. But he hollered back after me. “Fat fuck!” he yelled, loud enough this time for others to hear. They had to hear him. But they still didn’t look up.

  —

  It took three weeks for Dr. Smith to prescribe Prozac for me. I had stuck with seeing her, mainly because I didn’t have the energy to look elsewhere, and I didn’t want to explain to my TM why I wanted to change therapists. Anyway, finally I had an antidepressant prescription, so perhaps my otherwise wasted time with her—during which I remained guarded and told her only what I felt I absolutely had to—had been worth it after all.

  One day after class, I told the kids in my Acting Studio class about my Prozac and they nodded with sincere empathy and approval. The nine of us sat around in a circle on the floor, our legs or fingers interlaced with one another’s—practically singing “Kumbaya” and having an orgy. Many of us softly cried as we each confessed why we were full of such deep despair. The stories my peers shared were harrowing. Julie’s father molested her for fifteen years. Michaela was addicted to sex. Derek’s father committed suicide when he was ten. It was deep shit, and hearing others’ tragic real-life problems made me feel like a poseur.