Running down the length of my spine are a series of tattoos I had inked on my twenty-first birthday; they are brushstroke Kanji, and, when asked for their translation, I ramble off: “Mind, Night, Writing, Beauty, Art, Dreams, and Self.” I don’t even stop to think about the subtle lie there enclosed anymore, as it has long since become fact by repetition, but every now and then it occurs to me, and I stop to think whether it’s a lie I still need to tell. Though every time I find the truth just on my lips, it remains unspoken, too terrible and humiliating to admit.
By the beginning of my senior year of high school, I weighed over 230 pounds. This is one of the worst possible times in one’s life to hit such a peak. Senior year means senior photos, the possibility of lead roles in plays, Prom, newspaper articles, ceremony after ceremony after ceremony. As class valedictorian and winner of academic and artistic honors and awards, I attended many such ceremonies, and was featured in quite a few such articles, and every time the photos were processed, passed out or printed, I winced.
My senior photos were the most crippling disappointment. I had my hair done, I bought myself a nice outfit, I went to a professional photographer – all of which were too frivolous of luxuries for my family’s finances of the time, but I was seventeen, graduating, hopeful, and all my mother could do was frown and sign check after check. The photographer and I went out into the picturesque autumn woods of Washington state, which were aflush with burnt orange and rusty yellows and trembling browns all set against a backdrop in such a gamut of greens that people from outside of the Northwest would have to strain to imagine them. These were all colors that should have worked well with my pale skin and copper-plated hair, the set up for quite lovely keepsakes to one day show my grandchildren as I push through the trunk of my memories, but the pictures were terrible. I sagged, I bulged, I was a pale fleshy mass crusted with acne, my long shanks of hair broken and unhealthy despite the styling, a mere discord in the resonant beauty of my surroundings. I did not keep any copies of the pictures personally, and I try to avoid the copies that remain in the possession of my family.
As an actress, I was relegated to the role of funny old ugly woman -- the comedic lead -- usually a crowd favorite and much more fun to play than the romantic ingénue. But the fact that I had no chance of being the lead, not because I could not act, and not because I had not put my time in and ascended to the coveted ranks of high-school-drama veteran, but because I was too big to play the part, because how could anyone possibly imagine someone would fall in love with that?, hurt terribly.
I was actually given the chance to read for Juliet in the first round of callbacks for our spring production of the Bard’s most well-loved and over-done piece. I remember a sense of warm resonance inhabiting my body when I told my mother, who just smiled sadly and shook her head.
My brother had more candor: “You know there’s no way.”
I should have been flattered when they called back fifteen girls for Juliet and only two for the Nurse, myself one among both counts. When the excited second candidate for the brassy matriarch related to a friend backstage that she thought she had done very well and had a good chance, her comrade just laughed and said, “Oh don’t be silly. You know that’s Lindsay’s part.”
I was standing nearby, behind the maroon velvet curtains of the stage, crushing the scene I was to read for my Juliet audition in my nervous grip. The small voice in my mind whispered, “She’s wrong, you still might be Juliet,” but the big voice said, “Don’t be absurd.” I should have been flattered at the recognition of my talent, but instead, the lines caught in my throat when I went onstage to read for Juliet. I could feel everyone in the audience laughing silently at me for even toying with the possibility of the part. I performed and enjoyed the part of the Nurse. At curtain call, Father Laurence and I received an applause twice as loud as the actors who portrayed the title roles -- everyone, after all, loves a ham. However, once the curtain had fallen and the stage struck and tucked away, I attended the cast party at a local ski lodge dateless, just as I did every dance and social event of my junior high and high school years. And while others splashed in the pool, I took refuge in the game room with the two others who didn’t want to go in.
My weight gain was, in the most part, a cyclical matter, as such things often are: in my depression, the thought of losing weight was unfathomable, and as the pounds continued to add on, the depression deepened, and thus depression begot pounds which begot more depression. I have never been slim. I come from a long line of hereditary metabolisms that do not burn, they glaciate, and to maintain a desirable weight, I will always have to eat significantly less and exercise significantly more, than most people. But I was never truly obese until high school, by which time all hope of change within the circumstances afforded to me by the small community in which I had grown up had dried up or bled out.
The sparsely populated Evergreen forests of Northwest Washington are not an area in which everyone can flourish. My childhood home was only a “town” by that vague qualification given to the presence of a post office. The central feature of Deming was the Nooksack River Casino, owing to its location on the Nooksack Indian Reservation, which drew out crowds from the city to pump blood through the veins of our one grocery store, our two diners, our two taverns, and the small strip of four businesses that changed innumerous times throughout my childhood – pizza restaurant, deli, dentist’s office, souvenir shop, coffee shop, flower shop. We had each of these novelties for a few months at a time. Everything else required a trip into the glitz and glamour of the big city – Bellingham, population 65,000, home to Western Washington University and academy award winner Hillary Swank.
A particular sort of area for particular sorts of people; farming families, loggers, burnt out hippies seeking communal living and liberal access to drugs. Those content with the local aristocracy being made up of the dairy farmers with the most ample tracks of lands and the family who owned the gravel company -- their network of trucks tearing through our woods to strip the river and alter its course ever more precariously each year. Those happy to rally at the annual “Logging Show” with its axe throwing and tree climbing and Mac truck exhibit as the major festival of their year. Or people like my mother, hermits, who’ve had enough of everything for the time being, and want nothing but to enjoy the gifts of silence.
As a child reared on too many books who never quite grew out of imagination games, I was not one of those people, and from a young age, my peers made it clear. In elementary school, I mostly kept to myself, volunteering in the library, reading book after book, imbuing a collecting of rocks I kept hidden at the corner of the playground with personalities after they stopped letting me bring toys to school.
“She talks to them instead of the other children,” the administration whispered to my mother, who was too enveloped in her world of programming code and caffeine, and also too liberal and sure my brother and I were able to choose the best path for ourselves, to enforce any kind of rules. But my teachers saw to it that anything I brought was confiscated, and only their threats of not returning what they found stopped me from trying to sneak My Little Ponies through in my galoshes.
The inquisition did not, however, bring me closer to my peers, and they let me know that I was just too different. On the first day of junior high, I tried to sit with a group of girls, one of whom I had played with from time to time when we were younger. They suffered me for a few minutes, and then another girl sat down. She was a Native American girl named Lisa Conway, tall and slim, loud-mouthed and pregnant three times before we graduated. She lived down the road, and my family attended potlatches at her house where we feasted on Dungeness crab and Chinook salmon pulled straight from the waters of the Puget Sound by her father and brothers. I played spin the bottle at one of those parties; that would be the first and only time I would play it in the whole of my adolescence, though I can’t remember actually kissing anyone.
Lisa, who I had once thought of as an-almost friend, looked pointedly at me, sneered, and asked, “What are you doing here? You don’t belong here.”
There were stiff giggles from around the table. I remember their eyes shining as they watched at me, toying with compacts and cafeteria food, thinking themselves women already. Without saying anything, I stood and left. The girls mostly treated me in this vein. While some had choice one-liners for me from time to time, testing the aim of their witty bullets at my expense, most just treated me as a blip on the radar, a non-entity unworthy of any kind of attention.
The boys, for the most part, were much more cruel. Every day for two years, I endured the torments and taunts of one particular set on my bus route, the leader of whom was the Crown Prince of the Gravel Empire.
Their favorite game, when tripping and simple taunts had lost their charm, was to ask me to be their girlfriend. Sometimes they would give me “presents,” like a strap off of a backpack, or call me at my house, regaling me with the details of their day as I clutched the phone, breathing heavily, too numb anymore to hang up. From them I learned that romance was a sham, a nasty trick played on me by people who wanted to hurt me, and in the absence of any earnest junior high sweethearts, I learned to believe I wasn’t worthy of anything else.
I cried every day on the long walk home from my bus stop. Sometimes I continued on the past my driveway, down a road poxy with potholes, ravaged by the gravel trucks that lead to the river. I would stand on the edge, crying, screaming, daring myself to jump into the sickly gray-brown of the Nooksack that swept ferociously through crests of mountain rock. One time I tried, but I caught my foot in the tangle of roots that lined its edge, and crashed down onto the bank, bruised but knocked out of my resolve to do any more. I held knives to my thighs, scissors to my stomach, envisioning just slicing away the fat, watching the cellulite spill out -- what could the real harm be? -- It’d only be a flesh wound. These behaviors had all the marks of adolescence, of angst, of an inability to cope with so many things coming together in my brain; and I’ve thankfully not become stuck in patterns of self-destruction like so many I know. I don’t assume to take myself seriously, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t left it mark.
In the fall of 2001, I began my journey away from depression and obesity with a move to Southern California to attend UC San Diego. In my first three months of school, I lost thirty pounds without even trying. It helped that I was paranoid about overspending my meal plan, and in an effort to save, I began drinking nothing but water, and eating rarely outside of meals. To Christmas break I brought back a slimmer body and many grinning tales of the antics of my small group of college chums. Though my social network was small that first year of university, it was earnest, and through these individuals I began to discover that one did not have to assimilate to be accepted.
My friends were bold, beautiful, and completely and utterly geeky, and in knowing them, I began to know and accept myself. The second week of classes found us plundering thriftstores to dress ourselves in full, sweeping skirts, loose simple blouses, and tight bodices that made racks of our breasts, then ventured to a Renaissance Faire where we caroused with others in costume, watched spectacles of knights and rogues and ladies, and to my blushing surprise, I was flirted with for the first time in the effusive bawdy interplay of wenches and rakes. We made journeys to Japanese markets for anime, manga, and obscure Asian snack foods; we wandered late at night through campus, perching on top of art, singing at the top of our lungs despite the raised eyebrows of passer-bys; we dressed up in lingerie and dark make-up to dance and laugh at showings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. On a clear night in November made passably warm by the dry décor of sweeping Santa Ana winds, we went skinny dipping late at night near Scripps pier. It took a bit of nudging at me to get me into the water, still in my underclothes, despite the fact I was only there with female friends, but as the crisp salty waves rushed over us, teeth chattering and adrenaline fueling giddy laughter, I finally bore all as well, nearly losing my bra and panties to undertow, and singing at the top of my lungs at the moon. By the end of freshman year, I was down fifty pounds, and significant cracks had split in the surface of the shell I had become burrowed in to protect myself from the outside world.
By winter of sophomore year, I had changed my name from Lindsay to the middle name my mother had wanted to be my true name, Morgan. By that time, the girl who was Morgan and the girl who had been Lindsay were two distinct identities in my mind. I even went so far as to refer to Lindsay in the third person, regaling people with accounts of her. Part of the reason I chose the name Morgan was that I viewed myself as androgynous with leanings toward masculine and perceived Lindsay as being unacceptably girly. I had long since de-feminized myself. In high school, I dressed only in clothes from the men’s section, absurdly baggy jeans and plaid polyester old man pants with oversized sweaters and t-shirts. Though I’d begun to adopt some styles of dress more suited for the woman’s body emerging from beneath my layers of cellulite, I still held onto the remnants of that identity. It took another year before I had shed it and began to embrace my femininity.
After another two years, I stopped losing weight. I was down to 137 pounds, very nearly a hundred below my uncomfortable high school peak, but I didn’t maintain that low for long. My body had protested heavily against going below 145 pounds. I was exercising for two hours a day six days a week, burning upwards of two-thousand calories on the elliptical machine, drinking three to five liters of water, and eating an almost faultless diet to lose those last eight pounds. I had bred out my taste for starches, fats, and most junk food. Potatoes, pasta, rice, dairy products that have not been cut down to non-fat -- these foods still hold almost no appeal to me. My sweet tooth was, and remains, my sole gastronomical vice, and neither then nor now have I tried very hard to rid myself of it, because a little vice now and then doesn’t hurt. I burned myself out with all of the exercise, and when I cut back, I popped straight back up into the mid-140’s. My body, it appeared, had reached its limit. That’s still a difficult fact to accept, but one I believe I’ve made headway on.
By that time my social network had grown exponentially. I threw parties where I could expect forty to fifty friends and close acquaintances; I was a regular at many gothic and 80’s clubs where I was often approached by people to ask me what formal training I’d had in dance to have developed such style; a demi-celebrity in the Renaissance Faire circuit who could drift from camp to camp and always find company; a member of many gaming and artistic groups. I had just overcome one of the most difficult obstacles in my journey - the schism of my closest friend, Markee - which, though it had been painful, was a key in my growth.
We had been friends since freshman year. She was not the first friend I had made, but she was the second, and the summer after that school year was complete, we became roommates. That first summer was a humiliating mess of poverty and disputes with the two other friends we had gotten an apartment with. But in the midst of it, we kept each other going, making games of spying in thrift stores and dressing as pirates to go looting at the grocery store. It was only because of her, and the other friends I made in those first few years, that initially I was able to begin my social budding. New people still terrified me, and calling up close acquaintances for an outing was almost nearly as bad, but that fright was manageable with a good friend by my side to be the first one to say, “Sure, let’s do it,” so that even if none of the other people I had invited ended up showing up, I wasn’t alone.
When our paths began to split, and she moved out because of irreconcilable differences with another housemate, I felt momentarily lost, floundering in a dark place I thought I had long since shut away, but somehow I pushed forward. I strengthened other friendships and, at the same time, made a point of going out utterly alone now and again. Though new people continued to terrify me, I found I was able to push past that fright and extend themselves too them, even being all by my lonesome: I no longer needed the crutch of a companion. In the summer of 2005, I made a solo trip to Europe. I had gone the summer before as well with a good friend and my little brother, but circumstance drove me to return on my own. I wanted to explore graduate schools and to visit a friend studying in London and no one that I knew seemed actively interested in crossing the Atlantic. I probably could have found someone to go, but I didn’t, and as time would tell, it turned out to be for the best. I departed the United States terrified, certain I was going to be miserable for the next month, cursing myself for not having found people to travel with. But my first night in a Dublin hostel, I ventured to chat with people in my dorm room and found myself swept away by a pair of students from Southern California to spend the night at a pub drinking and dining. There was not a night on the trip that I didn’t go out if I was in the mood for it, and I shared hikes and dances and drinks with people from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, England, Canada, all over the States, Uganda, Australia, South Africa, Japan, Spain, and a whole slough of other places. My afternoons I mostly spent wandering the streets and hills in introspection and reflection, visiting all the sights that I wanted to see without having to make compromises, but my evenings brimmed with companionship. For the girl who spent years in the library cataloging books during recess, this was a marvel.
When I begin to doubt how far I have come, I remember the day that I caught my mother grin broadly before and breaking into a flurry of giggles as we strolled across a Cosco parking lot a couple of years after my move. The explanation she managed to push through her amusement was that I had flirted with the check-stand clerk, and it was the first time she had ever caught me in the act of flirtation.
“I just can’t believe how much you’ve changed,” she remarked. “It’s in the way you walk, its in the way you talk, it’s everywhere.”
Though she was always on the fringes, she was always there, not quite knowing how to tell me what I needed to do, or feeling that she should, but always telling me I should do it.
Further, the girl who was Lindsay is becoming less distinct from the girl who is Morgan, they have begun to blend, and in that, I find the greatest sense of accomplishment. Social contact is still a struggle -- will always be a struggle. I face reoccurring bouts of paranoia in which I perceive everyone to be simply pandering to my desperation, truly hardly being able to stand me, better off without me, and will one day realize it and never bother to talk to me again. If I find myself worn out by stress and strain, this disparaging voice grows louder and more frequent, and I invariably withdraw to lesser and further degrees. But the roots of these episodes are withering, as my journey takes me further and further from the events of my childhood and adolescence. I don’t imagine they will ever decompose completely, but these experiences have become part of the catalog of calamity I owe to my childhood, one I will always bear, but can file away if I allow myself to.
Though I will claim many battles, I will not quite claim the war, yet. What I fail to tell curious onlookers who may catch sight of my tattoos is that the middle Kanji is not Beauty, but Beautiful. I have only ever told one person this – a very good friend who also struggles with her self-image for a whole host of both similar and vastly different reasons. I have begun to accept myself as a worthy friend, an admirable performer, a blooming socialite, but not as a lover. I have experimented with my sexuality, been on a handful of dates, but flee from any possibility of a real relationship. The memories of my taunters are still too acute. How could anyone want that? They could not, of course, it must be a ruse -- sinister ruse of an ephemeral course that life is really quite all right without thank you very much.
But as my mother once told me when I was in the throws of a particularly strong fit of self-derision is this:
“The assholes cannot win.“
If I allow their haunts and jeers to haunt me for the rest of my life, to stand as a wall separating me from an entire facet of life from which most people draw such fulfillment, then they have won. And if there is one thing I cannot abide by, it’s to allow myself to be beaten without a struggle. I have grown and will continue to grow.
The assholes cannot win.
It means beautiful.