Chad asked me out to dinner the same day I would be going for my Zumba license. I would drive to Raleigh to complete my training and, if I was lucky, return home officially a Zumba instructor. I was shocked by how easily I learned and performed. There were women there who were older, some who were bigger. It definitely wasn’t the Barbie Fitness Pageant I’d expected it to be. And eight hours later I headed back to Greensboro with my Zumba license in hand. Dinner with Chad was nice, and he kissed me at the end of night. I could see potential with him. One night, he asked me to go out with his friends, and the next morning, when he asked me to be his girlfriend, I accepted with no hesitation.
Coincidentally, my dissatisfaction with Target was soon alleviated. One night while I was at Heather and Jared’s, Jared broached the idea of me joining the morning radio show he was part of, as they were looking for a new call screener who could not only execute the technical duties of the job but also be engaging on the air. Jared thought that I was funny and always had a crazy story to tell. A few days later, the host, Bob, called me in for an interview, and I started the next week. I scrambled, trying to learn my way around equipment and programs I’d never seen before, but I desperately wanted this job. Although it also paid me minimum wage, part-time (four-thirty to ten-thirty A.M.), it seemed way more fun and interesting than retrieving discarded candles and clothing from the pillow aisle at Target.
Bob explained to me that this would be a trial run and they’d call me “Intern Whitney,” even though legitimate interns had to be fulfilling a school or college credit and could not accept payment. He explained that calling me an intern gave him an out if he decided I wasn’t fit for the job. Since this job wasn’t a sure thing, I continued working at Target, closing the store at ten at night, only to wake up at four the following morning. Bob joked that I was either the hardest-working person or the most broke person he’d ever met. In reality, I was both. Meanwhile, I continued to chase my weight-loss goal and increased my exercise in a bid to get over the plateau I was experiencing. I started training with Will every day, in addition to my solo exercise, and juggled my new relationship with Chad.
October 14, 2011: 91 pounds lost. I felt panicky. In my fantasy, I’d wanted to lose 100 pounds in six months. Considering I’d lost fifty in three months, I legitimately thought this was feasible. When the six-month mark passed, I adjusted my goal to 100 pounds in ten months.
“Anything other than that just isn’t good enough!” I told Will. “I don’t want to be one of those people who took an entire YEAR to lose 100 pounds!” As much as I hate to admit it now, I held prejudices against fat people. While I never would have dreamed of outwardly criticizing a fat person, I’d always tried to separate myself from them, thinking I wasn’t one of them because I hadn’t always been fat. I wasn’t satisfied with being fat, I reasoned, because I’d been thin and I knew what life was like then. I knew what I was missing. Once I started to lose weight and saw how difficult it was for me to do so, I lost all sympathy for fat people who said they couldn’t lose weight, especially the ones who didn’t have a health condition that influenced it. I prided myself on being a different kind of fat person. The kind who had taken control of her life and who didn’t make excuses. Anything was possible, if you wanted it bad enough—and I thought that fat people should want it bad enough. I absolutely believed that every fat person would commit themselves to losing weight if they truly understood how much better their life would be after doing so. And, as for me, having come so far, I couldn’t understand what wasn’t working anymore. Will examined our routines and thought that maybe I was doing too much exercise and not eating enough. I was defeated. I stopped recording my weight after that, but by mid-November, I’d quit my job at Target and lost my 100 pounds.
The same week, I received an email from Pratt notifying me of my scheduled audition. I’d completely forgotten about it, and meant to write them and cancel it. I was only halfway to my weight-loss goal and knew there was no way I was ready to audition for the dance therapy program. I talked it over with my dad, who reminded me that I didn’t think I was ready to be a Zumba instructor, either, but look how that turned out. He admitted that I most likely shouldn’t expect to be accepted, but that there was nothing wrong with attending the audition to get a sense of what I could prepare for the next time around. Because my trial at the radio station had no finite end, I was constantly on edge, worrying each day if I would be let go. With the future so uncertain, I took my dad’s advice and booked both Chad and myself plane tickets to New York City for the last week in November.
While in New York, I enjoyed the bustling traffic, the diversity, and the heightened sense of being alive in the world, but I was a bundle of nerves as we took a taxi to Pratt. We located the building where the audition was to be held, and after slipping off my shoes and tightening my bun, I went to open the door to the dance studio.
“Don’t watch,” I told Chad, who could have peeked through a glass panel on the door. “I’m serious.”
Even though I’d gotten my Zumba license, I’d never danced in front of Chad and couldn’t imagine doing so. It felt way too vulnerable.
The audition went better than I expected. It was less intimidating and included more intuitive movement than I’d imagined. At the end, we gathered around to go over some common questions. Even though I felt decent about my audition, any fleeting thought of acceptance was erased by the admission statistics—that only a very small percentage of those who auditioned would make it into the program.
Afterward, we were each assigned a twenty-minute slot to visit the dean’s office for an interview. Chad and I wandered around, kicking the fall leaves and looking at the funky sculptures on campus, while I waited for mine.
When it was my turn, I took my seat in the dean’s small, cluttered office. She asked me an overarching question about my interest in the program and I answered, feeling like I was regurgitating the personal statements I’d sent with my application months earlier.
“Well,” she cut in, when I paused to collect my thoughts, “I can already tell you that you’re accepted into the program.”
“What?” I squeaked, as the tears streamed down my face.
When I walked down the hallway toward where Chad was waiting, his expression was sympathetic.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, enveloping me in his arms.
“I got in,” I whispered through my tears.
“What? What? Yes!”
Having heard me sniffling through the walls, he naturally assumed the interview hadn’t gone well. It didn’t cross his mind (or mine) that I could be accepted on the spot.
The phone call to my dad afterward was one of my favorites.
“Ha!” he woofed. “Is there anything you can’t do, girl?”
As we flew back home, I thought about my dad’s question. I had to admit, there were things happening in my life that I would’ve dismissed as impossible, as a 229-pound woman. I’d acquired a fitness certification, graduate school admission, and a boyfriend. I knew there was something to be gleaned from all this (the inspirational quote “If not now, when?” comes to mind), but as much as I should have given myself credit for being a bad-ass, I was much more inclined to thank my lucky stars, attributing my success to outside circumstances rather than giving myself any credit. I decided against enrolling at Pratt and racking up a ton of student loans in favor of seeing where my radio job and my relationship with Chad would take me. The dean promised me that I could enroll any time I wanted, so I kept it in my back pocket. For the time being I would focus my energy on bulldozing through life until I reached my 199-pound weight loss goal, making me a nice, neat 130 pounds. But I never did achieve my 199-pound goal, nor did I ever take the dean up on her graduate school offer.
Within a few months my schedule became completely unmanageable. Due to my four-thirty start time at the radio station, working out in the morning was an impossibility. As soon as I got home around noon, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t
stand the thought of working out. I’d go back to sleep instead, and by the time I woke up, it was dinnertime and then the cycle repeated. Are these excuses? Yes. Sure, my life and schedule had changed dramatically, but we can always make time for what’s important. And what was important to me now was my independence. Against my dad’s better judgment, I took my savings from Korea and moved into a cheap two-bedroom apartment with Ashley.
I worked my ass off at the radio station. I loved my relationship with Chad. I loved having someone to share meals and conversations with. What I wanted was freedom from restriction—from calorie counting and unforgiving exercise routines. I felt like I was among the living again, cultivating a social life and enjoying my romantic one. I hung out with Chad’s friends a lot and enjoyed their company. I even met a girl named Donna who I particularly liked. Needless to say, even though I didn’t completely abandon working out or clean eating, I phased it out during the next year and the weight I’d lost started to come back. When my birthday rolled around that April, I’d gained thirty pounds, but I thought I could keep it under control.
My six-month lease would be up soon, and Chad and I had filled out all the paperwork to sign a lease of our own. On my twenty-eighth birthday I woke up to an I love you! message written on my mirror from Chad. He gave me a book I’d mentioned, a certificate for a massage, and a stuffed beaver (my favorite animal). That night two of Chad’s girlfriends, whom I adored, threw me a little party. They brought me gifts and musical cat cards with sweet messages. As we played beer pong in the driveway, I announced to everyone that I was having a wonderful time. I felt special.
At some point a girl named Lisa pulled me to the side and said she’d heard I was moving in with Chad. I wasn’t aware that he’d told his friends yet, but I confirmed the news. “Well,” she began in a hushed voice, “I just want you to know that Chad said he wasn’t sure about y’all.” I thanked her for telling me but said I was sure it was some kind of misunderstanding. Her comment seemed so out of left field that I wasn’t particularly worried about it. When Chad and I got in my car to leave, I brought it up, in a nonaccusatory tone. I hadn’t been worried, but Chad’s reaction made me so. He was overly defensive and denied ever saying anything like that, and he was angry at me for giving it any credence. The night ended poorly, in an argument, with both of us going our separate ways afterward, with me dramatically moaning about having to deal with this shit “on my birthday!”
Even though there had been a few red flags with Chad before, I still loved him. No one is perfect, I rationalized, and it wasn’t like I didn’t have my faults. I could be needy and overly sarcastic. Overall, Chad had been a loyal, supportive boyfriend, so when he swore to me that he’d never said he was unsure about us, I believed him. But I demanded that he confront Lisa because I couldn’t understand why she would make up something like that for no reason. I sat upright between his legs in my bedroom while we watched a movie. The mood was still tense, and when Chad’s phone vibrated, the text message to Lisa open, I looked down.
You should be thankful, she had written. I could have told her what you really said…that you aren’t attracted to her.
Those words hit me like a ton of bricks. I jumped up and ran out of the sliding glass doors to the apartment balcony, and Chad followed.
“If that’s how you feel,” I said calmly, while trembling inside, “then I need you to leave.” Chad backpedaled, assuring me that the only times he’d said that he wasn’t attracted to me was right after I got back from the gym or when muscle soreness had me hobbling in pain. I was working myself to the bone, mostly to be attractive for Chad, and that had made me look unattractive to him. The irony wasn’t lost on me. It was a complete slap in the face, just like the time I’d finished a grueling workout and walked outside the gym only to be called a fat-ass by a guy in a passing car.
“Then why do you want to have sex all the time?” I shouted back.
“It’s not that big a deal! No one is attracted to someone a hundred percent of the time!”
“No. You do not talk about someone you love that way, behind their back, in public, as though it’s a problem, when your behavior every day indicates the opposite. Fuck you.”
The next day I called my dad. I felt lower than I had in years. Something unthinkable was coming into focus for me: losing a hundred pounds had not mattered. I was still at the mercy of other people’s standards and expectations. I was flooded with hopelessness. When strangers and society-at-large called me fat, they didn’t know that I’d just lost 100 pounds. When they accused me of being weak and lazy, they had no idea I spent hours at the gym daily, and when they advised me to eat better, they weren’t aware that I was starving. And so I felt that, regardless, as long as my body was fat, I would be on the receiving end of judgment, both from strangers who didn’t know better and intimate partners who did.
“It doesn’t matter, Dad! None of it matters. Even if I lose another hundred pounds, it won’t matter. Then I’ll have loose skin and I’ll always have cellulite and my boobs will be saggy. I already have wrinkles. Nothing, nothing can change that!”
More than feeling betrayed by and disappointed in Chad, I felt like I’d fooled myself. I’d thought that losing weight had been so productive and restorative. That each pound lost abated my insecurity a little bit more. I thought I’d been fixing myself, from the outside in. And yes, while I’d accomplished a lot besides pounds lost, none of it mattered if society and my own boyfriend couldn’t accept me. Regardless of the work I thought I’d done, it all fell away in the eyes of others.
When I stopped by Chad’s house, he started crying before he even asked if I was breaking up with him. I told him I didn’t want to but that I felt shattered. Eventually he persuaded me to get in bed and he tried to make love to me, but my body heaved with sobs as he attempted to undress me. The next day at my house, I eyed the massage certificate, wondering if it might be just the thing to take my mind off things. But imagining another person looking at and touching my body made me shudder.
In the weeks that followed, Chad promised to make things up to me, but the incident was too big a blow. After a stressful month that climaxed with me screaming that I didn’t love him, I broke up with him. Life got even more stressful when our radio host of twenty years was let go and Katie, Jared, and I were left to fend for ourselves at work. I took on new duties, a new title (“Producer Whitney”), and much more responsibility.
With all these changes, the tidal wave of self-doubt and depression crashed just like clockwork. Even after all the developments of the past year and a half, one thing remained true: my body was a problem. I was still fat, and the people who loved me, either consciously or subconsciously, couldn’t deal with it.
8
BEING FETISHIZED ISN’T FLATTERING
For the next six months the only saving grace I had was Donna, Chad’s friend whom I’d met months earlier. We spent all our time together. She built me up when I was feeling low, she ate Chinese on Friday nights with me, she told me when Chad was sleeping with other people, and we laughed so hard together that we spit out our drinks. We gave each other pet names: she is Boo Boo and I am Boo Boo. I’m not sure whether we lack creativity or if we are so codependent that we have to go by the same name, but it works for us.
After a few months Donna encouraged me to get out into the dating world again, so back to OkCupid I went. This time I was quite a bit heavier and I didn’t have as much luck on the site. Some examples of messages I received were (all spelling and grammar is theirs, not mine—I mean, come on):
What wonders the interwebs archive. You were cute till those full body pics. Cardio
Cute smile and XXL boobs yes please lol
your eyes smile are sexy hot I love thick wide curvy hip women hot. Have those? Online now?
So imagine my surprise when a message arrived in my in-box that fit all my criteria: the man who sent it was physically attractive (so much so that my knee-jerk reaction was to wonder if it was
some kind of sick joke). Adequate spelling and grammar. (He exhibited comprehension of to/too/two, there/their/they’re, and to top it all off, he used Oxford commas. Be still my heart.) College education. (He’d even been to more than one!) And perhaps the most important qualification in the arena of online dating: geography. Having once lived in my own hometown, he now lived in Asheville, a beautiful mountain town full of artists, breweries, and breathtaking nature. It was a few hours away, but definitely within driving distance, and it seemed like he visited Greensboro fairly often.
As I scrolled, my eyes darting across the screen from photos to paragraphs to compatibility questions, I learned that his name was Owen, he was into photography, and he studied international business in college. In one photo he wore linen pants and a crisp white dress shirt with the first few buttons undone and sleeves rolled up, standing in front of a Mediterranean-looking body of water. I almost had an orgasm before I could touch my fingers to the keyboard.
I threw my legs over the edge of the bed and turned my lights on. I looked at myself in the mirror. How could I respond to this dude? I sat back down on my bed, pulling my laptop over. I took a deep breath. I clicked on my own profile to remind me of what Owen had seen before he messaged me.
My self-summary:
I’m Whitney. I’m 28. I dance everywhere always and laugh way too loudly. I have an affinity for all animals, especially cats and beavers. Down to get turnt on every occasion. Good grammar turns me on more than your six-pack ever will.
I Do It with the Lights On Page 13