by Sarah Hepola
My brother is defiant like this, too, which suggests either a genetic predisposition to Ultimate Cheeseburgers or a rebellion against the bean sprouts and barley of our food co-op childhood. Kids often dive into the indulgences their parents place off-limits: television, sugar, sex. And I became an adult who actually enjoyed carpet bombing her gut with processed meats. “The next time you eat a fast-food burger, I want you to really think about it,” a friend once said. So I did. And I thought: This is great!
Of course, I had the added pressure of growing up female in the diet culture of the ’80s. After the age of 12, food stopped being sustenance and turned into guilt, sin, reward, penance, entertainment, love. Cramming food into my mouth brought a rush of rebellion, but I was never sure who I was fighting. My mother? The advertising industry? Jane Fonda? (Poor Jane Fonda. She was only trying to help.) Whoever I intended to punish with that routine, the only one who got hurt in the end was me.
Our bodies carry the evidence of our neglect. By the time I stopped drinking, I was nearly 50 pounds overweight. I had ulcers that felt like the lit end of a cigarette held up to my stomach lining. I had a mysterious rash splashed over my arms and legs. I had two twisted knees that cried out when I descended stairs, a painful reminder I literally could not support my own weight.
I never thought of myself as neglectful. I’d been a single woman living in New York City, after all. I took care of myself all the time. I opened tightly sealed jars by myself, banging a spoon against the metal until it relented, and I installed shelves in my kitchen, using a power drill and torpedo level to hang them properly. I couldn’t fob off the finances to my spreadsheet-oriented husband. My wife never did the laundry. (Actually, the women at the drop-off dry cleaner did my laundry, and I thank them.) I carried the responsibility of rent and work demands on my own tensed shoulders, and the way I eased those knots was to reward myself with a nice bottle of wine at the end of a long day. Maybe a six-pack as well. This was taking care of myself: a conscious decision not to shame myself for my own roaring appetites.
Go to any spa, and you’ll see the same philosophy at play. It’s time to take care of you finally—here’s a glass of champagne. When it comes to selling the luxury experience, alcohol is more central than warm hand towels and tinkling water sculptures. They serve booze at beauty salons, high-end stores, resorts, upscale hotels. What’s the most famous perk of flying first class? Free drinks, of course. Alcohol is the ultimate in pampering.
But “pampering myself” all the time led to a certain sloth. I let cat food tins languish in corners, and I let bills go unpaid. In Brooklyn, I was sleeping with a guy who used to come over at 3 am, and in between tokes on his one-hitter one night, he said, “Baby, you need a new couch.” I looked closer and was startled by what I saw: My velvety red futon had become filthy with splotches of soy sauce and red wine. There was a strange crust on one cushion that might have been cheese. It’s not a good sign when your stoned fuck buddy is giving you decorating tips.
People who don’t take care of themselves will also struggle to take care of others. One night, I came home so blind drunk I left the front door flapping open, and at some point, my cat walked out into the night right before my eyes. My cat. The one I was beyond paranoid about keeping indoors. The one I loved with such ferocity I thought I might go insane if anything happened to him. The next morning, I was in a panic trying to find him, only to open the front door and see him sitting on the stoop, looking up like: Where have you been?
I couldn’t believe I let that happen. But addiction siphons so much attention, and the most precious treasures will get tossed in the backseat: children, husbands, basic hygiene. I heard a guy once complain about how much he wet the bed when he was drunk. But he didn’t stop drinking. He got waterproof sheets.
And I get it. When you are alone and drinking every night till you pass out, who really cares?
I asked myself that often. Who really cares? I’d given up many things by the end. Hanging my clothes. Making the bed. Shaving my legs. Zippers or clothing with structure of any kind. I threw towels over spills until the towels began to seem like rugs.
And I told myself this was OK, because our society was beyond warped in its expectations of women, who were tsunamied by messages of self-improvement, from teeth whiteners to self-tanners. I was exhausted by the switchbacks of fashion, in which everyone was straightening their hair one year and embracing their natural curls the next. I wanted to kick the whole world in the nuts and live the rest of my years in sweatpants that smelled vaguely like salami, because who really cares?
It took a while for me to realize: I cared. I didn’t need to do these things because it pleased men, or because it was what I was “supposed” to do, or because my mother clipped something out for me from O magazine. I should take care of myself because it made me happy. Remarkably, impossibly—it felt good.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER moving to Dallas, I went on a diet. It was one of those old-fashioned diets with frozen fish sticks in geometric shapes, a serious throwback in the day of lemon-juice fasts and lap bands. I walked out of the strip-mall store where I had weekly weigh-ins with all the shame of a pastor emerging from an adult video store at 1 pm.
Why was I so embarrassed? Because I felt like a failure to both sides of the body wars. To women for whom appearance was everything, I was a source of pity. To women for whom diets were evil, I was a sellout.
When I was coming into my teen years, diets were nearly a developmental stage. Adolescence, motherhood, diet, death. But by the time I walked into that fluorescent office, covered in pictures of women in smart suits with their arms raised overhead, the word “diet” had become radioactive—thanks in part to female writers I knew and admired, who fought against the false notion that thin was synonymous with health. The past ten years had seen the media embrace more curves and cushioning, all of which signaled progress—but none of which meant I needed 50 extra pounds.
Still, I worried I was letting my anti-diet friends down—as though my intensely personal body choices needed to be their choices, too. The whole point of feminism was that we deserved the agency of our own choices—pro-choice, in the truest sense of the term—and yet I feared my friends would judge me as frivolous, or vain. But fearing another person’s opinion never stops them from having one. And my focus on external judgment kept me from noticing the endless ways I’d judged myself.
For the past decade, I did that horrible thing, resolving not to think about my weight and yet thinking about it constantly. Every time I awoke. Every time I passed reflective glass. Every time I saw an old friend and I watched their eyes go up and down me. At some point, no one complimented me on anything but my hair and my handbags. I was certainly vain then; I just didn’t happen to look like someone who should have been.
Mine was a recipe for unhappiness. I was fixated on my weight but unwilling to do anything about it. And I couldn’t do anything about it while I was drinking, because booze left me roughly 1,200 calories in the hole four times a week. There’s not a miracle diet in the world that can pull you out of that quicksand. In fact, when I did try to diet, I made a mess. Cutting out carbs and swapping beer for liquor is a trusty formula for blacking out.
So I went the old-school route. Calorie restriction. Reasonable portions. Water, not diet soda. Half the steak, not the whole steak consumed and instantly regretted with a sigh and one hand on my belly. After a lifetime of “all or nothing,” I needed to learn “some.”
The weight fell off me. Fifty pounds in six months, as if it never wanted to be there. I was astonished by the lack of trauma this entailed, after all those years of bad-mouthing diets as a form of punishment and deprivation. And the scale couldn’t tell the whole story of my change. I woke up, and I felt happy. I stopped avoiding cameras and old friends. My underwire bra no longer dug into my belly, which was a constant source of grump. When I passed a mirror, I was startled by the person I’d become. Although perhaps it was more accurate to say: I was star
tled by the person I could’ve been all along. The person I had buried.
Self-destruction is a taste I’ve savored much of my life. The scratch in my throat left by too much smoking, the jitteriness of a third cup of coffee, the perverse thrill of knowing a thing is bad and choosing it anyway—these are all familiar kinks, and one feeds the other. But was it possible to change my palate—to crave something good for me, to create an inspiration spiral instead of a shame spiral?
I started making my bed each morning, even though I was going to climb in it later at night. I started washing the dishes in the evenings, because I liked waking up in a clean house. I started going to yoga, which is an entire practice of learning to support your own body.
“You’re stronger than you realize,” my pink-haired yoga instructor told me one day, as I wobbled my way through a handstand, and I started thinking she might be right.
I turned on physical exercise a long time ago. I was a kid who loved the slap of dirt on her hands, but middle school gym was a reminder of my early puberty and late-round draft pick status. I withdrew indoors, into films and books and fizzy bottles. I hissed at organized sports and hid from any activity that broke a sweat, and what I mostly thought about my body is that I wished I didn’t have one. I preferred virtual realms. Email, phone, Internet. To this day, I love writing in bed, covered in blankets. Like I’m nothing but a head and typing fingers.
So I started inhabiting my own body again, because it was not going to go away. I rode my sea-foam green bike along the wide tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood. I took long walks, in which my mind dangled like a kite string.
People noticed when I lost weight. You look so healthy. You look so great. And as much as I enjoyed these compliments, I feared them as well: that they would go away, or that I was too greedy for them in the first place. It made me uncomfortable how much my weight loss changed my perceived value. After I quit drinking, I saw the world differently. But after I lost weight, the world saw me differently.
It was like I’d suddenly become visible, after years of camouflage I didn’t know I was wearing. There is something undeniably attractive about a person who is not hiding—in clothes, under extra weight, behind her addictions. My mother and Anna were right all along: There was great beauty in nature.
IN THE EVENINGS, I pulled out a leash for Bubba so we could walk outside in the buzzing summer night. The cat had been sick for a while. He was 15 years old. I didn’t know how much longer he had, and if I wasn’t careful, I could spend a whole day freaking out about this.
When I met Bubba, he was an outdoor cat. But one day he came back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment with incisor bites in the side of his cheek, like two toothpicks through raw dough. There was a series of expensive surgeries. A long stretch of recovery time. He became an indoor cat after that.
It was a miserable power struggle to break him. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to win an argument with a cat, but good luck with that. He would slip out when we weren’t looking, settle scores in some back alley near midnight, and return two days later like Don Draper crashing through the front door after a bender. What? What are you looking at?
I loved him for all of this. I, too, was drawn to places that would destroy me. I, too, came home with bruises, and it never stopped me. The cat was an appealing mix of strapping adventurer and cuddle bug. People say cats are aloof, but they are just very, very discerning about whom they trust. I liked caring for that cranky little guy. Women can be very good at ladling their love into the unsmiling mouth of a creature who nonetheless needs them.
I come from a long line of nurses on both sides of my family. We give gentle strokes and change bedpans and wipe up vomit splashed on the floor while cracking vaguely inappropriate jokes. When I think about my own failure to take care of myself, I wonder sometimes if I wasn’t unconsciously waiting for someone like me to come along. Pay off my credit cards, clean up my oopsies. Other people’s messes can be so much more interesting than our own.
Maybe that’s why I needed the cat so much. This may sound absurd, but cats are caretakers. They will kill your mice and curl up at your side when you’re ill. One night in Brooklyn, I became fluish and had to lie on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with my pillow and a duvet. It was one of those moments when my loneliness ached like a broken bone. And the cat padded into the bathroom and lay down beside me, and we slept like this, both of us curled against the warm side of the other.
Now it was my turn to take care of him. The sickness required pills, popped into his mouth twice a day. X-rays, constant experimentation with his food. Jennifer was a veterinarian now; the child who once saved wounded birds had grown up to be a woman who saved people’s pets. When Bubba got sick, she was the person we both needed.
My new house was mere blocks from where Bubba had once prowled, and when he started meowing at the door again—after years of remaining silent on the issue—I wanted to do something for him. Let him roam his home turf again, before he died. I wanted to find some compromise where he could venture into the lusty outdoors that called to him—but stay tethered to me.
The leash was my big idea. Jennifer swore up and down it wouldn’t work. Leashes were against a cat’s nature, she insisted, and for a long time, she was right. Then one day, I put on his harness—blue vinyl ropes along his haunches, like he was about to jump out of an airplane—and he discovered this simple act of surrender led to the outside world.
He inched through the doorway with his nose twitching. When his paws touched the familiar dirt, his whole body went electric. This. All of this. The breeze in his fur. Those feral smells. A blade of grass dragged along the side of his mouth. He rolled around in the dirt. He sniffed the grille of my car like it contained all the decadence of the world.
He tugged too hard, then I tugged too hard, but eventually we found our rhythm. We got so good at this nightly routine, we could stay out there for an hour at a time, exploring grassy corners and wandering into the undiscovered country of the driveway. He lay with his fur against the cool gravel, and I stared up at the sky, two animals finding their way into the wild on a short leash now.
TEN
SEX
My first date in sobriety was with a guy I knew from college. When I saw him at the restaurant, he was more attractive than I remembered, though he was wearing jeans that either marked him as above fashion or distressingly behind it.
“I don’t mind if you drink,” I lied to him.
“I know,” he said, and ordered a Coke.
I was getting to the place where I needed to date. (Not want, mind you, but need.) In the cocoon of my crooked little carriage house, I watched documentaries back to back and unspooled fantasy lives with men I’d never met. The tattooed waiter who read Michael Chabon. The handyman with Paul Newman eyes. I could see myself losing years this way, living nowhere but between my ears.
So I forced myself out the front door with trembling hands and burgundy lip gloss. All dating is an unknown country, but as far as I knew, mine was uninhabitable. Even friends who didn’t struggle with raging booze problems were unclear how I was going to date without alcohol. “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed a guy for the first time without drinking,” said my 27-year-old coworker Tracy. And she was a professional sex writer.
How did this happen? We were worldly twenty-first-century women, who listened to sex podcasts and shared tips on vibrators and knew all the naughty peepholes of the Internet. And yet somehow we acquired all this advanced knowledge of sex—threesomes, BDSM, anal—and zero mastery over its most basic building block. The idea of kissing unmoored me. Touching a man’s lips to mine without the numbing agent of a three-beer buzz sounded like picking up a downed wire and placing it in my mouth.
After dinner, my old college friend took me to a coffee shop, where I drank hot chocolate on a breezy patio. I liked him. (Mostly.) He was a doctor. He remembered the oddest details about me from college, which was flattering, like he’d been thinking about me all al
ong. I told him a poignant story about my past, because I sensed this was the scooching-closer portion of the evening, and he took my hand, which was resting on the table. Such a simple gesture: four fingers slipped into the crook of my own. But with that subtle and natural movement, my arm became encased in a block of ice. Oh God, the panic. I was afraid to pull away. I was afraid to invite him closer. I was like a doe who had spied the red laser sighting of a gun on my chest. Do not move.
They say drinking arrests your emotional development at the age when you start using it to bypass discomfort, and nothing reminded me of that like sex. In the year and a half since I’d quit, I had confronted so many early and unformed parts of myself, but sex continued to make me downright squeamish. I was horrified by the vulnerability it entailed. Sometimes I walked around in disbelief about blow jobs. Not that I’d given them, but that anyone had, ever.
As I sat on the patio with my frozen robot arm, I kept flashing to an alternate version of this date. The one where I poured rocket fuel down my throat and went barreling toward him with a parted mouth. Instead, when he dropped me off, I darted from his front seat so fast I practically left a cloud of dust. Thankyounicetoseeyougoodnight. I climbed into my bed and pulled the duvet up to my chin, and I understood that I was probably never going to have sex again. Because if you only know one road into town, and the road collapses, what can you do?
Alcohol was the beginning of sex. It was there the first time I kissed a guy, at the age of 13. It was there the last time I slept with a guy I’d only just met, two months before getting sober—a bartender at Lisa’s fortieth birthday party who spoke just enough English to convince me to leave with him. In the nearly quarter century that spanned those two points, alcohol let me be and act however I wanted. One of my favorite ways to have sex was right before a blackout, when I was still there but I’d gone feral, and I could let all those low and dirty words spill out of my mouth. Do this. Do that. But now I wasn’t sure if I liked sex that way because it felt good or because guys dug it when I got wild. That’s what I wanted more than my own pleasure. To make myself irresistible. To blow his freaking mind.