Always Too Much and Never Enough

by Jasmin Singer

  I knelt down and picked up my hat, which was now bent. From the right, somewhere in the sea of kids, I heard it again—“Fatso! Fat-Ass!”—though this time there were hoots and hollers from the perpetrator’s friends.

  Everyone was dressed up, so I could hardly see anyone’s face. I looked in the direction of Batman and Freddy Krueger, but they scampered away—along with Homer Simpson and Ross Perot. “Jerks,” I whispered to myself as I tried to unbend my hat. I turned and faced my locker and, despite my best efforts, my eyes welled up with tears.

  My eyes welled up with tears. I had started the race. I gathered myself, then gathered my resolve. I needed to pace myself.

  I gathered my books, closed my locker door. My friends’ decorations stared back. Happy Birthday, Jazz! said the inside of the goblin-themed birthday card that was taped at eye level. It was signed by my group of girls: Patty, Kathryn, Sonia, Lindsay, Neha, and Kristin. They were the ones who sat beside me at lunch these days. We had all silently agreed to ignore the taunts directed my way, intended to fracture me. Perhaps it was true that I still had just as many enemies as before, but even on my saddest days, I could not deny that I had friends, too.

  Despite still feeling shaken by what had just happened, I decided to try again at making this a good day. I blinked a few times—a trick I had learned that got rid of swelling tears—and I turned around, making my way to homeroom.

  I made my way to the halfway point of my race—just over six and a half miles. The sun had come up, and the initial exuberance of starting a race had died down. In my earbuds, A Chorus Line blasted. I glanced at the scars on my palms. In the past three months of training, I had fallen and cut my knees and hands so many times that I began to wonder if I should buy stock in Band-Aids.

  But even with my minor injuries, I had found that I looked forward to my morning runs with the ardor of a poet. After my initial solo run one year prior, maintaining my resolve to keep running was always a bit of a struggle, and I often whined and kvetched until I was about a mile into my jog, which was usually when I would begin to find my groove. Running grew on me. For one thing, it was the only time I truly had to myself—time I’d sometimes spend ruminating about those, humans and animals, who would never know the freedom I had right at that moment, as I leapt and zigzagged through my new path.

  Beyond that, running also brought me something deeply personal: It grounded me within my new body in a way that I wasn’t sure would have been possible had I not ever laced up my sneakers—thanks to Mariann’s suggestion. Losing weight created a messy divorce from my body as I knew it—and I’m not even sure I had known it all that well before anyway. I had been completely separated from my physical self, and running—much like my tattoos—started the process of putting back together my fragmented pieces.

  In homeroom, my teacher—Ms. Corey—gave me an extra-warm smile. So often, it was the calm reassurance of my teachers that got me through the day.

  And it was that very calm reassurance that I grabbed on to a few minutes later when the bell rang for first period, and I once again walked past my locker on my way to class, only to find that my birthday decorations had been ripped apart and my locker vandalized.

  With my hands wrapped around my books and disbelief wrapped around my heart, I stood motionless in the middle of rushing students—and at the same moment that my teacher’s smile from just moments before began to fade in my mind’s eye, the mysterious masked kids started up again. Not even bothering to turn around this time to figure out the source of the taunting, I focused instead on the birthday card my friends had all signed. With a red pen, somebody had crossed out their names and their birthday wishes, replacing it with the word “fat,” written in bold print over and over again: FATFATFATFATFATFATFAT.

  From behind, the voices jeered me.

  Up ahead, my friends cheered me. Michelle, Debbie, and Beth were standing at the finish line, which was just a few feet in front of me now—and where they had been waiting for hours, Debbie and Beth with open arms, and Michelle with a celebratory pumpkin soy latte, special for today since it was, after all, October. I lifted my arms Rocky-style as I half leapt and half limped across the finish line—the final step that ensured I could now proudly display the “13.1” sticker I had foolishly bought a few days prior, immediately convinced that putting it up before the race would be a jinx.

  My friends didn’t let up; they acted as though I were the first person in Portland—a running town, if ever there were such a thing—to finish 13.1 miles and live to tell the tale. They were insanely proud of me, and their outlandish excitement made me cry with laughter—though it was possible that my tears were also due to the muscle spasms that had worked their way around my left hamstring.

  A teenage volunteer gingerly put a blanket around me that looked like it was made of aluminum foil. She chirped, “Congratulations,” like she meant it, and someone else placed my plastic medal around my neck. I sipped my pumpkin latte and then laughed some more.

  I could practically smell the pancakes I’d make when I got home.

  When I got home later that day, my TM held me as I cried. She whispered, “Shhhh,” and promised that the next day, my bat mitzvah, would be wonderful. All my girlfriends would be there to help me celebrate as I followed the Jewish rite of passage and became a “woman.”

  “You’re an awesome woman,” my friend Beth said to me as she drove me home. “Look at all you’ve accomplished.”

  “You have so much ahead of you that you will accomplish,” said my mother. “You’re practically an adult.”

  “The great thing about being an adult,” I told Mariann a few hours later, “is that you can do things like drink beer with your pancakes.”

  “I want pancakes for dinner,” I told my mother, through my unrelenting sobs.

  An unmistakable look of disapproval flashed across her face, but I pretended not to notice. “Okay,” she said, though from just a little bit further away.

  I ate my pancakes and I drank my beer. My friends and my partner were beside me, and even the spasm in my leg was a welcome addition to our celebration. It reminded me that I was alive. It reminded me that I could get past the finish line if I wanted to—even if I had a few extra scars to prove that I did it.

  IV

  what i found

  EIGHTEEN

  no, really, after you . . .

  The man next to me at the mailboxes in the lobby of my building smiled at me. I secretly held my breath, convinced that I was about to get mugged. He lingered as I grabbed the eclectic mix of lamp catalogs, tax documents, and Chinese restaurant menus from inside my tin box.

  It took a minute to recognize him as my downstairs neighbor, a harmless-looking guy who had never said three words to me in the five years since I’d moved in. I used to try to strike up a conversation with him, and with the other people who lived there, but to no avail. So I gave up trying, saving my energy for more important things like chewing.

  Admittedly, it had seemed odd to me not to offer the common, universal courtesy of “hi,” or at least a head nod. After all, my neighbors and I knew extremely intimate details of each other’s lives: I could smell what they were cooking for dinner; I could hear when they were arguing on the phone; I could easily catch accidental glimpses of them in the hallway unloading their groceries from their “granny carts,” or unloading their problems onto their partners—and, I’m sure, they knew the same things about me. So why they never said hello when we passed in the hallways always baffled me. (And why I eventually took their lead and ignored them right back perhaps baffled me even more.) But I got over it—figuring it was a New York City thing. Folks here were too cool for hellos, too busy for small talk. You came here to be famous, not affable.

  My neighbor was still standing there. I shut and locked my mailbox and then faced him, smiled just a tiny bit, lifted my eyebrows. I was guarded, but I was present. If you want
to talk, talk.

  “You just . . . you look great,” he started, shaking his head left and right a tad maniacally. “I mean . . . I hope it’s okay for me to say that, but—gosh, do I even know your name? I’m Christian.”

  I let a second go by, realizing what was happening here.

  “I’m Jasmin,” I responded, still somewhat guarded—perhaps more so, actually. “And thank you,” I added. “That’s very nice.”

  “It’s astonishing! I mean . . . Wow!” Christian was the one looking down now, acting somewhat embarrassed, one hand in his jeans pocket and the other cupping the back of his neck. He was still shaking his head. “How much weight did you lose? Can I ask?”

  I laughed nervously. My laugh was far away. I rubbed my thumb on the lamp catalog, wondering if they had any lampshades that weren’t made of silk.

  “Thank you,” I said again, ignoring his question. “That’s really nice of you.”

  And, on some level, it was.

  After that day, when he would see me, Christian would go out of his way to hold the front door when I was carrying too many bags, to comment on the weather when we were again at the mailbox, and even—every now and then—to remind me that I looked great.

  My name is thin. And I am the queen of this prom called life.

  —

  There were many aspects of losing nearly one hundred pounds that I expected or anticipated (as soon as I realized that this was something that could and would happen). Though I certainly did not understand the intricacies that would be involved, I knew that I would feel much different if I ever became thin, because “fat” was such a huge part of what had shaped my personality and how I related to the world. I think I expected that I would find it easier to maneuver myself in the world—both physically and mentally—which proved to be accurate, in a lot of ways.

  But what I did not expect—and what floored me, really—was how radically differently the world would treat me when I went from the taboo state of being fat to the socially acceptable opposite: thin. I knew that I was often mistreated as a fat person, for the sole reason that I was a fat person. I was bullied as a kid and overlooked as an adult. So it would therefore seem normal to assume that the opposite would be true—that the world would be easier on me once I was thin.

  But until it happened, and until I experienced firsthand the enormity of difference in the way people behaved around me and the attention they paid to me once I lost the weight—demonstrated by men holding doors for me where before they often hurried in front of me; women complimenting my blazer where before they blazed past me—I had no idea what was about to hit me. It wasn’t until I was thin that I realized just how badly I was being treated when I was fat, and just how overlooked I was by a society that arbitrarily celebrates thinness and—in ways so deeply indoctrinated into our behavior—tut-tuts fatness. Fat equals lazy and lacking and less than. Thin equals “no, really, after you.”

  —

  Rush hour in the New York City subway can be grueling. Everyone is in a huge hurry to get to work or transition into their evening, and so they pile by the hundreds of thousands into a maze of subway cars, often squished into a space that is way too small, surrounded by the other residents of this veritable clown car.

  On one particular cold wintry day when I was in my early twenties, I found myself in the unfortunate situation of boarding the subway at Grand Central Station at the very hectic eight A.M. hour—the dreaded morning commute. Thousands of people wearing wet snow boots and hooded coats rushed out of the turnstiles, making it impossible for me, headed in the opposite direction, to scan my MetroCard and enter—the oncoming foot traffic was just too relentless. The only possible way to get through was to assert my space, to just swipe the card and start barreling through.

  This is standard behavior for New Yorkers, who wouldn’t get anywhere if all they did was let others pass by in front of them. You can’t succeed that way, let alone board a crowded train or enter a subway station at the precise moment when everyone else is leaving and there’s no room for you to get through. In short, you can’t get anywhere unless you push and shove your way to where you want to be.

  So I gathered the gumption to take ownership of one of the several turnstiles, forcing the people on the other side to wait approximately three seconds for me to get my turn. Apparently, those three seconds were vitally important to one particular businessman, who found it completely unacceptable for a fat twenty-something to interrupt the line in order to get through.

  “You fucking fat bitch,” he said—not quietly—as I quickly swiped my card, causing him a very brief delay.

  It took me a second to register what was happening, and when I got to the other side of the turnstile, inside the subway station now and face-to-face with this man, I stopped in my tracks. “What?” I asked him, without actually registering that I was speaking.

  He stood a few inches from me now and the foot traffic split around us, like we were two rocks caught in an angry stream.

  “I said,” the man repeated, overemphasizing each syllable, “you’re a fat, fucking bitch.”

  With that, the man sarcastically smiled and pushed his way to exit the subway terminal and entered Grand Central Station, where the bustling crowd quickly swallowed him and his words swallowed me.

  —

  A decade gained and a hundred pounds lost later, I found myself at the similarly busy Penn Station—just a few avenues away—where that same burdened and busy crowd paraded through the station all around me. I stopped in my tracks, finding an odd fascination in the world moving around me.

  “Miss, can I help you find something?” said a man in a business suit who saw me standing there.

  “No, thanks,” I said with an embarrassed smile, feeling a little foolish (and rude) for simply stopping in the middle of such hectic foot traffic.

  I continued on to the New Jersey Transit area. I was on my way to visit my beloved grandmother, whose health and thus spirits were failing her. I found my way to the ticket line and arrived at just the same moment as somebody else, so I motioned for him to go ahead of me.

  “No, after you,” said the man, and I thanked him and took my place in line, letting it truly sink in exactly what my place was and how it had changed.

  —

  These are very small moments. But they are two examples of moments I began to experience dozens of times a week. Once I became thin, cashiers eagerly asked me how my day was. Cabdrivers made conversation with me more readily. And, much to my surprise, friends were quicker to make plans, eager to tell me how amazing I looked. Of course, they wanted to celebrate my “accomplishments” alongside me, and admittedly, a part of me truly basked in that. I began to anticipate and even expect it.

  “You look amazing, Jazz,” my friend Kelli said after not having seen me in a number of months—not since I began my weight loss journey. I was aware of Kelli’s open mouth, her wide eyes, and the obvious fact that she kept looking me up and down. “Wow, I can hardly believe it. What’d you do with the rest of you?”

  “What’d you do with the rest of you?” was a question I was commonly asked, a joke that resulted in me meekly smiling and awkwardly looking down. Though I did find it flattering—after all, I had worked very hard for very long to achieve my weight loss—there was a point when the exuberance and downright shock exhibited by some in my social circle became so exaggerated that I began to wonder how I had looked to them before. I existed in a dichotomous and insatiable state between craving my friends’ reaction to my new body and, admittedly, resenting it.

  That dichotomy spilled over into the rest of my life, too. Being thin has its perks—there is no doubt. And even though I was beginning to recognize the vast injustice of going from a fat girl who was either ignored or bullied my entire life to a thin person who was celebrated by a society that favors bones over bulk, I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit th
at I sometimes enjoyed my new privileges, too—and I’d perhaps be masochistic if I didn’t experience these privileges as positive, despite my unrelenting inner conflict.

  Here’s the thing: I found it easier to be thin. I left the house in the morning unafraid that I would be called a “fucking fat bitch.” My guard was down; I was simply me. Unlike before, I knew that I would not need to keep my head down when I walked down the street. I knew that I did not have a big target on my back, or on my fat. I knew that now, I wasn’t being judged simply because of my size.

  Or was I?

  Was it, in fact, possible that now that I was thin, people were drawing just as many conclusions about me as they had when I was fat, but on the opposite end of the spectrum? I was, in many regards, the same person I had been before—same obsession with eyeliner and with Patti LuPone, same propensity toward obsessing about people and polka dots, same unrelenting drive to change the world for animals. So wasn’t it true that I was being just as judged now that I was thin as I had been when I wasn’t? Isn’t it just the opposite side of the same rusty coin? My head spun.

  I realize that we all draw conclusions about people at first glance—it is simply human nature. But it was truly staggering to be treated so vastly different as a thin person than as a fat one, and this massive change in how society reacted to me—even though it was now for the better—made me second-guess everything. Even though I was thin now, my psyche was still the same as it had been before—so why was I suddenly being validated? The reality that the world seemingly had decided I was now acceptable and accepted—whereas before, I wasn’t—made that validation that I had long sought taste absolutely bittersweet.

  —

  Or maybe the difference I was experiencing in the way the world treated me had nothing to do with my size after all. Maybe it was simply that as a thin person, I was more confident. Maybe my perceived change in the world’s view of me could more easily be attributed to the fact that, when I was fat, I was ashamed—which one might argue had nothing to do with my fatness, but simply with my self-confidence—and now that I was thin, I put out a friendlier, more approachable affect to the world. I simply thought better of myself, so the world picked up on that and naturally thought better of me. Perhaps the problem was never that the world around me was being prejudiced due to the round me, but rather, they were picking up on my shame and latching on to that.