Always Too Much and Never Enough

by Jasmin Singer

  Timmy and I had broken up again earlier that year, after a failed wedding engagement and a brief attempt at living together. The previous years with him back in my life had been full of breakups and reconnections, and after the most recent period of remaining together—the longest one yet—we ultimately realized that it couldn’t work. We were, it became apparent, glued together by a senseless devotion that ran deep, and contained much love, but was ultimately rooted in fear and familiarity. As long as we had the mutual dependence of our love affair, we could each continue to ignore the pieces of ourselves that needed figuring out. We had become each other’s crutch, but no longer grew within our relationship—unless you counted the substantial growth of our respective waistlines as we filled the flaws in our affair with food.

  With Timmy gone, by the time I arrived in New Hampshire, I had no anchor—and no idea of the monsoon that was about to hit.

  —

  On the night I arrived, I lay in my tiny, creaky cot staring at the cobwebs on the ceiling of the cabin. All around me were other cots, full of my snoozing comrades—who had been little more than lukewarm upon my arrival. All these years after being the “new kid” in third grade, I was the new kid yet again, and the circumstances were not dissimilar. My coworkers didn’t know how to react to me—a chubby, intense New Yorker with weird clothes and a clear perfectionist streak. I didn’t fit in, and even on my second night at the camp, it was obvious to me that nobody else wanted me to. It was more interesting to have a person to pick on, kind of like another extracurricular activity—I was something to talk about on rainy days when the lake was closed for canoeing. More than once, the walkie-talkie radio I carried around with me—which my coworkers used to gossip on when the kids weren’t around—was the proof I needed that I was indeed the topic of too many mean-spirited conversations. I’m not sure if they were too dense to realize that I could hear the insults they muttered across campus on the walkie-talkie, or if they actually wanted me to know what they were saying.

  And what they were saying was low. The inexplicable to me, but hilarious to them, ongoing joke was that I was a “transsexual”—and that I had a penis. Aside from the disrespect that this gibe illustrates for the very maligned and still frequently misunderstood community of people who are actually transgender, there was no impetus whatsoever for this rumor—other than to have something provocative to focus on, something to create a divide between them and me. Many of the staff became obsessed with this notion, and Channel 4 of the walkie-talkie soon became the central spot to discuss it. The idea that there’s something wrong with being transgender infuriates and saddens me. This was just another level of upset that these rumors stirred up inside of me. It’s similar to when kids use “gay” as an insult, to mean “messed up.” When the reality of the summer that lay ahead truly sank in—when I realized that I would be ostracized in such a hauntingly familiar way, and that my inclination to defend the transgender community would somehow make it worse for me—devastation flattened me like a steamroller.

  —

  Shortly after I arrived at camp, when some of the others planned a trip to a nearby swimming hole on our day off, and I managed to tag along, my status on the bottom of their totem pole was crystalized for me. It was a brutally hot, sunny day, one of those days when the blinding brightness makes it difficult to see. We found a spot to settle on an enormous rock, and we stripped down to our bathing suits. Mine was black, obviously—a one-piece with a scooped-out back and a promise from the manufacturer to make me look ten pounds thinner (I often wondered why I couldn’t just put five of them on at once and—voila!—look fifty pounds more svelte).

  I looked down at my body—a bright white, fleshy target hung with the help of gravity and reminiscent of the geriatric crowd at my grandmother’s swimming pool club. The bathing suit indeed ironed out the two stomachs I always felt I had, hiding the deep horizontal crease across the center and instead giving me just one round surface—resembling the big rock we all sat on as we disrobed.

  There were six of us, total—four women (counting me) and two men. The other women—all bones and breasts and sun-kissed skin—were clad in tiny string bikinis. The guys, who were naturally focused on these three women, were eager to help them put suntan lotion all over their taut bodies, and the women returned the favor—laughing the whole time.

  I walked over to them, which was no easy feat, given the steep slant of the rock, which burned the bottom of my bare feet. Nobody looked up. I twisted my long hair into a knot on the top of my head and adjusted my big, round sunglasses. “Hey, guys?” I asked, as they laid out their towels. “Can someone do my back with the suntan lotion?”

  There was a palpable silence, and nobody looked at one another. Finally, one of the women responded—just loud enough for me and the others to hear. “Ew,” she said.

  I looked at her, and she looked at her friend—and then the two of them burst out laughing again, because it seemed completely hilarious to them in that moment to be spending their afternoon with a “fat tranny.” They would look, but they would not touch. They would laugh, but they would not feel.

  Leo, by far the nicest of the group (which is not saying much), finally stepped up—still not making eye contact with the girls, nor with me—and did a quick smear of the lotion on my paper-colored back, then promptly walked away. “Thanks,” I muttered as I returned to my towel, five feet away from the others.

  The group decided to take a dunk in the swimming hole, and asked if I would watch their stuff, and then I could go in afterward and they’d watch mine. What choice did I have? So I held the fort down while they splished and splashed beneath me, grateful to the novel I was reading for providing me a bit of company.

  Eventually the others emerged, and so I took my place in the cool and calming water, playing that game where you see how long you can hold your breath underwater. The swimming hole made me feel weightless and alive, and, for just a moment, I breathed in the sun and the day with all the oxygen in my lungs and hope in my heart.

  As I made my way back to the rock, I noticed everyone was getting dressed again and packing up their stuff. Upon spotting me, they informed me that they were tired of being in the sun and thought they might go check out some nearby shopping.

  “Okay, I’ll get my stuff together,” I said, sensing an odd chill in the air.

  They glanced at each other and took a beat. “The thing is,” said the skinniest woman—an Australian with messy, curly blond hair that I had the inexplicable desire to play with—“we are going to go without you. That way you can stay and read your book, which it looks like you’re really into anyway. And we’ll pick you up in an hour or two.”

  The wave of nausea that cascaded through my body when I heard I was being abandoned is irrelevant now. The way they didn’t even respond when I protested and said I’d like to go shopping, too, is neither here nor there. The fact that they started to walk toward the camp van, which we had borrowed for the day, leaving me standing on the rock and dripping wet, is—well—water under the bridge. In the grand scheme of things that went down that summer, I feel like the rest of the story doesn’t matter much now. I don’t think it matters anymore that I quickly grabbed my things and ran after them, promptly tripping and scraping my knee as I tried to catch up.

  As the van pulled out of the parking spot, I hobbled as quickly as I could, my scraped knee stinging, and planted myself just behind the car—not even remotely worried about being hit. The van screeched and stopped, and Leo opened the door for me, the slightest hint of regret flickering in his eyes, as the others roared with laughter.

  I got into the van, not saying a word. I was still wearing just my wet bathing suit, which one of the girls found even more hilarious. I continued to stare forward silently as the van sped down the street. I realized that I felt absolutely nothing (except the burn of my cut)—and I welcomed that numbness.

  Out of my periphery
, I knew that Leo was staring at me. “Hey,” he said, beneath the laughter. I didn’t answer. He kept looking at me. “Dude,” he said a moment later and a hair louder, still mostly drowned out by the rest of the group’s guffaws. “Sorry.”

  My feeling of nothingness shattered. Tears welled up in the corners of my eyes, but my sunglasses hid them, along with the rest of the feelings that I tried with all my might to push away. When we arrived at the mall, I waited in the van. I awkwardly put my clothes on over my suit and did my best to clean my cut with my towel and a bottle of water. I distracted myself from my sadness by digging myself into my book—this fictional world where everything was okay, and where I didn’t exist and never had. An hour or so later, they returned to the van more somber than before, and we all drove back to the camp in silence. The next day we went about our routines as if nothing had happened. As if I was not forever an afterthought—or at best a joke—in their minds.

  For days afterward, when I showered, my sunburn hurt—especially the streaks of angry, red skin on my back that had clearly never been protected by lotion. That stinging was a reminder to me of how very much of an outcast I was, and I was embarrassed for foolishly thinking I might fit in. Looking down at my naked body in the shower—the ripples and hills that formed their own scenery, their own horizon—I knew very well why I had been left behind. Once again, I had been too much; there had been too much of me.

  —

  The one person who treated me with respect, aside from many of the campers who I cast in West Side Story, who actually seemed to love me for taking them seriously and were committed to making the play spectacular, was the kind and quiet woman who cleaned the cabins. Her name was Nancy, and every day she wore a different, brightly colored bandana tied in the back around her long salt-and-pepper hair. Nancy was in her midfifties, and she made up for her missing teeth with a warm and genuine smile. When she looked at me, her light blue eyes with the wrinkly corners seemed to see into my soul. By the second week at the camp—which in sleepaway language is equivalent to years—I had formed a sweet bond with Nancy, which was refreshing for both of us, since nobody else there gave either of us a chance.

  If I wasn’t hanging out with Nancy—sitting behind the cabin with her as she secretly chain-smoked and I consciously tuned out the noise around me—I was traipsing across campus to my theater, where I was in the midst of staging the play, featuring a surprisingly moving rendition of Maria’s death scene. Maria was being played, of course, by a skinny, thirteen-year-old Jewish girl from Long Island, but she knew exactly how to sell it, and I was proud of the show I was directing—even if the rest of my summer was falling apart.

  Looking back, I am certain that one of the things that surely kept me removed from the other counselors, both physically and emotionally, was—once again—my size, pure and simple. But I know now it was more complicated than that. While there is absolute truth in the fact that they ostracized me, I was not without fault in my own remarkable ability to alienate myself. I was painfully insecure about my size and keenly aware of those times when I was the fattest person in the room—which was always, during that sordid summer I spent in New Hampshire. So I entered rooms with the certainty that I would be disliked when I got there. I didn’t always allow myself the chance I deserved—nor did I allow others the opportunity to get to know me. They were blinded by my fat because it was all I let them see of me.

  In the aftermath of the swimming hole incident, it occurred to me that I should have applied for a job at a weight loss camp instead—a “fat camp.” It seemed to me that when it came to changing your behavior, there was actually quite a strong benefit in being pulled entirely out of your normal setting—in my case, the hustle and bustle of New York City—and thrust into a wholly different environment. Perhaps if I had been working at a fat camp, I would have been able to seize the opportunity of being away for two months and challenge myself to radically change.

  Which was precisely when the radical notion occurred to me that I could change anyway, even if this camp was not specifically designed for weight loss. Why not make it my own kind of self-directed fat camp, and radically change all by myself?

  I tend to be a black-or-white person. There is rarely any gray. For me, there is no such thing as doing something half-assed, and I didn’t see why this new resolution should be an exception. If I was going to change, then it was going to be big. If I was going to lose weight, then I would stop at absolutely nothing. In New York, my acting career was floundering. I had nothing to lose except pounds.

  Of course, the one exception to my relentless drive had always been my weight loss attempts in the past—they were never anything more than half measures. In pretty much every other aspect of my life, when I put my mind to something, I was all in. But when this revelation came upon me at this camp in New Hampshire, that I could lose weight in a vacuum—in a controlled environment where I would live and breathe for the rest of the summer and have nothing to distract me except rich teenagers—a firm resolve came over me, and I knew it was there to stay. No more half measures. My coworkers might have tried to leave me stranded, but I was not lost. I’d show them who was in control.

  Whenever the subject of anorexia comes up, I instantly think back to this summer. I am not sure if just one sole summer of not eating any food (and I’m really not exaggerating—I stopped eating entirely) constitutes anorexia, since anorexia is a disease that frequently affects people for long periods of time and my bout was relatively temporary (even if my overall disordered eating and disordered eating mentality was a lifelong struggle). But that summer, after it became crystal clear how dispensable I was, I made the bold decision to test my body’s limits and to see if I could finally nip this problem in the bud. “There are solutions,” I remember the Nutrisystem woman telling me, years before. Perhaps all I needed was a kick-start. No more food, no more problems. I was cutting myself off.

  I did not wean myself off food—I just stopped cold. I still showed up for mealtimes—because if I or any other staff member didn’t, one of the camp administrators hunted us down. So my routine was to get a cup of coffee with cream (my sole caloric intake, aside from the occasional lettuce with canned pineapple) and sit with some of my cabinmates (none of whom had been present at the swimming hole), all the while singing “Officer Krupke” over and over in my head as they chatted with one another. I was disappearing further and further into myself, and my self was disappearing, too.

  The hunger pangs were the worst all through the first week. They were sharp and intrusive, like a baseball being thrown full-force at me. In the middle of rehearsing with my campers, I would feel the sting in my side, which spread to my back and then traveled up to my head, dizzying me. I would drink up to ten cups of coffee a day, and so I existed in this mix between buzzed and fatigued, starving and drugged. By the second week of my secret hunger strike, I could barely walk from my cabin to the theater—and so I began to allow extra time to get there, knowing I’d need to stop on the way and sit on the ground in order to regain my strength and overcome my dizziness.

  Hunger is a fascinating thing. It can obviously kill you (staggeringly, it kills twenty-one thousand people every day worldwide), but in the process, something about experiencing hunger so voraciously can remind you you’re alive. Aside from the physical hunger pains that I got used to—and even welcomed, to some extent, as if they were a familiar friend—the mental and emotional manifestations of hunger came over me like a bittersweet revelation. It’s shocking, actually, how quickly my hunger became a part of my identity, separating me from them, but also drawing a distinct line between the old me and the me I was now—the hungry me, the thirsty me. The me that needed sustenance, but decided to find it in my own resolve, rather than in cheese.

  Somewhat miraculously, while my hunger did its job, I managed to do mine, and the play was coming along swimmingly. My campers respected the professionalism I brought to the show, and they foun
d it contagious. So as I myself was wilting away—physically and emotionally—the buzz about West Side Story was taking over the camp. I encouraged a safe and supportive company with the actors and would not tolerate anything less. The campers inspired me—as soon as they walked through the theater doors, they transformed from dorky pubescent kids to artists, and they began to take everything about the show seriously. I ran a tight ship—lines were learned, characters developed, choreography mastered, scenery perfected, and a damn good show was imminent.

  My two obsessions that summer became not eating, and making West Side Story soar. Zeroing in on those two goals gave me the focus I needed to drown out my coworkers, many of whom continued to make fun of me while I was in earshot, or over the walkie-talkie when they knew I was listening. For the first time in my life, I was able to stop caring what they said, because I had much more important things to concentrate on—some of which were literally life or death. That was another thing that hunger did for me—it gave me something to focus on that was mine and mine alone. As long as my hunger was there, I had something way more important to think about than the current gibe directed at me.

  I was becoming very sick and had to start to make serious efforts to hide how my body was breaking down. Two things in particular made it increasingly challenging. One was my constant need to run to the bathroom, where I would sit for a half hour at a time, absolutely writhing in horrendous stomach pain, having unending diarrhea that seemed to come from nowhere. And the second issue, which frequently appeared at the same time, was blackouts. It wasn’t that I was fainting per se, but rather, I started to see large black splotches appear, and I knew that if I didn’t quickly find a private place to sit with my head between my knees, I would indeed pass out.