[photo by Ryan McGinley]

I remember when I was a SPIN magazine intern in the late Nineties, one day an art department editor I admired greatly stopped me by the water cooler to tell me I was the skinniest person she had ever seen. I immediately said “thank you” and she looked a bit alarmed. I was 21 and she was probably my age and my weight now. Around that time, a few years out of fit modeling and druggy club days in the “heroin chic” era, I still took pride in my boniness. I insisted I had no eating disorder but I would eat exactly one lemon cookie each day and build my day around the least amount of foods that could atone for that indulgence. I thought of myself as an ascetic like my beloved Gerard Manley Hopkins; I thought myself as too poor for real food as every artist I looked up to. . . but the truth is I may have just had an eating disorder.

It began some time when I was studying abroad in Oxford. I was miserable at first and then I wasn’t: a mania of sorts. My meals I still remember: one apple with one spoon of honey in the morning, one can of Sainsbury’s tomato lentil soup for lunch, one can of beans and two carrots for dinner. I had exactly seven cigarettes throughout the day. I loved this whole routine, the precision and the certainty. The control. Once a week I allowed myself a warm chocolate chip cookie from the farmer’s market. I drank beer when I went out but not too much (I preferred Ecstasy of course). I spent as little as I could on food and watched myself disappear into that ancient city.

Growing up my mother ate barely anything and fetishized every “Hollywood diet.” Everything in our house was nonfat. My mother would scold my dad for buying pastries for us and him. My mother was incredibly beautiful and so when she said she barely ever had dinner her whole life growing up we were to interpret it as that was how you turned into the great beauty she was. She had earned it. Of course she was short and curvy while I was tall and thin so she could place her dieting goals on me more easily. Constantly packages of cookies were hidden from us, at the grocery stores chocolates were allowed but with great performative consternation. Mostly the idea was we didn’t have money for too much food. But in our apartment complex no one was thin and no one had money. In our apartment complex, everyone else seemed very happy.

*

One of the first signs of a Lyme relapse for me is losing alarming amounts of weight. In the past year I lost thirty pounds without trying and recently as I’ve gotten better I’ve put back on 15 without trying. That’s the thing: without trying. What is it that eats me up in these illnesses? Spirochetes? Other pathogens? What was it that no matter how much ghee and olive oil and nut butters I would shovel in, my body would still insist on looking like it did when I was 20 and trying. In this past year when the worst fight of/for my life took place, at one point I was just barely over 100 pounds, the lightest I have ever been, scarily thin for someone 5’6”. Doctors somehow were never that alarmed because I always looked fit somehow and when I would tell them I feel best 30-40 pounds heavier, more than one insisted I was too heavy then.

I remember a few years ago when antibiotic use and heavy exercise—and perhaps just general happiness?—put me at 60 pounds heavier than I was then. My doctor told me I was now “BMI overweight.” This was hard to understand as I wore size 4s and 6s mostly. I went home and plugged my weight into the BMI calculator and indeed I was “overweight.” My doctor put me on the Bulletproof diet until regulating what I could eat and when I could eat it just got depressing for me. Eventually some of the weight came off but I kept thinking I was the happiest I ever was at that heavier weight, and I probably looked the best too.

*

I was told years ago I had high testosterone which is why when I take up exercise I always gain weight and becomes rapidly muscular. It’s a look that feels better than it looks, I always think, because I was raised to think a “ballet body” is the best. My mother wanted that for me of course and so for years I suffered through ballet classes at the community center until it was clear to everyone this was not for me.

Around the time a few years ago when I was at my heaviest, I decided to return to ballet for the first time in over 30 years. I bought a black leotard and black ballet slippers which all looked beautiful to me and then I went these classes in LA’s Echo Park. The first day of class I felt the same self-consciousness I did at age six. We were all in our 20s, 30s, and 40s, but I was probably the heaviest. Me and one other girl maybe. The teacher was impossibly thin but was all about “body positivity,” a phrase she used a lot. I had to work hard not to roll my eyes at her in her size 0 glory exclaiming that over and over. It took a few classes for me to get over the fact that this was a tough sport for anyone with a body unlike hers and I quit again.

It reminded me of my mid 20s in yoga school in Santa Monica. I got my teacher’s training certificate at one of the country’s most prestigious academies, a scholarship kid yet again in a room full of glowing motivated Angelenos whose life revolved around sun salutations. It meant I had to work extra hard—and this yoga school was known for being brutal. One of our teachers was the daughter of a famous calorie restricter pioneer and she never ate solid foods. She was probably 50 but looked more like 80. The other was a fanatic about ballet and ballet bodies. The only time I got a compliment from her was when she grabbed my waist, quite harshly, and said to the class “this is why she can do this pose! Anything more, an inch, not possible!” The classes were six hours and we were advised not to eat two hours before so I would sneak granola bars into the bathroom with me. I had practiced yoga since I was 19 but it took this experience to sour me to it. I passed the final with a B- and swore I would never return there and I never did. Yoga always felt a bit weird to me after.

*

These days I dream of exercising again but it’s not to lose anything. Or gain even. It’s just to feel good. I think of tennis and how much I love watching it and how the only sports essay I wrote—on tennis—was the only essay that got a nod in the Best American series. I think about how I flunked out of tennis classes as a preteen because I could not handle the rigor and also because of my crush on my teacher. I was also briefly on swim team, like my mother had been in Iran, but I also could not handle that. As middle schoolers, my friends and I took jazz dance classes and it was clear even then I was not someone who would excel in physical activity.

My life was the great indoors: reading and writing and drawing. I heard my mother once tell my father she worried I would get fat because I was lying around with a book all the time. And I didn’t.

In my late 20s, I dated a well-known writer who would always comment on how thin I was—it was neither a compliment or an insult. He had a theory writing fiction made women thin—he had dated many of us and he felt every woman novelist was wasting away. I gave him counterexamples and it was like he never heard it.

As I walked through another horrorshow year of illness last year, I had to pretend I did not hear everyone saying “but you look great.” I know much of that was because I fit clothes like model fit clothes—they don’t at all and that’s why we love it, the image of stick figure swimming in layers of materials meant to shield one from the elements. And maybe from the gaze too.

In the last few weeks people comment on the fact that I “look healthy.” I no longer worry if that is code for putting on weight. I take it as it is. I am fairly sedentary except for some walks with my dog so the added weight makes sense. Every pound seems earned by a functioning body. The scale that I have cried over for so many different reasons now is the opposite of what is was last year—a ritual I would dread as the numbers got lower and lower against all reason. Now I am suspicious of it because of other things—I am gaining weight and I am supposed to be checking the numbers so that they don’t get too high. I am supposed to dread the ritual for the reasons supposedly everyone does: you can’t be too much. But you can’t also be too little. Just enough. What is that enough?

The best part of where I am today is that I forget that question all the time.