j.k. armstrong

I don’t know of a time when Weight wasn’t wedged into the creases of my brain like a splinter. I think the first time I became aware of Weight, not only of your body but of your worth, was at a Pizza Hut in Caracas, Venezuela. My mom would always mop the grease off my slices of pizza. I couldn’t eat until she finished patting them down with napkins. I could only have been between three and six because across the street from the Pizza Hut was a plaza with these little motorized cars for children, and I was still small enough to be able to ride them. That Pizza Hut, those motorized cars, my mom removing fat– those are some of my earliest memories. I wouldn’t taste a fully greased pizza until I was in my twenties.

When I was in preschool, my mom brought me to her Weight Watchers meetings. I’d watch her weigh in, I’d see the look on her face. I learned to fear the scale and the notion of Weight sunk in a little deeper.

I was eleven when I stuck a spoon down my throat for the first time in a Chinese buffet bathroom. I was eleven getting advice from girls online about how to cover up an eating disorder, even though I won’t know the name for it until a home economics class when I’m thirteen. 

I also created my first comic book character when I was eleven: a very fat, depressed man. He came with a slogan he repeated, fat and proud. I think he was my attempt to remove the sliver, to push it out from within, asserting body positivity, saying that whether I’m fat or not, I’m proud (but also depressed). Anyway, my mom’s response was, “You’re not allowed to say you’re fat.”

That was the same year she started hiding snacks from me so I wouldn’t eat when I got home from school. Once, I found the hidden stash while she was out and took a treat, a Kudos bar, if you remember those, with the m&ms in them. My step-brother saw me and reported it to my mother when she got home.

She was furious, blind with rage, and sat me at the dining room table. She made me eat the rest of the box of Kudos right there in front of her while she called me names. I wanted to vomit. She gave me a pen and a pad of paper and told me to write something fifty times. I can’t remember what she made me write, only that my brother brought me my inhaler because he thought I was having an asthma attack. Looking back, it was a textbook panic attack. I was only eleven and it wasn’t even my first– gasping for air, racked with sobs that felt too big for my chest, trembling, freezing cold.

When I was released from my punishment, I took a shower and tried to wash the Kudos bars down with toilet bowl cleaner. Not my first and not my last failed suicide attempt. I poured it into one of those colorful plastic cups for children, the kind you can attach sippy cup lids to. I brought the cup to my lips, but couldn’t force myself to let the liquid pass.

I finished my shower, tried one more time to take a drink, then dumped it all out and washed the cup. When I left the bathroom, my mom had pinned a note to the door, putting in writing the facts of my gluttony.

I kept the note. A few years later, when I was fourteen, a therapist I got for an eating disorder hospitalized me for suicidal behavior. In a follow-up appointment, I sensed my mom might be more willing to hear me out given the circumstances. I brought up the incident with the Kudos bars. I told her it really hurt me.

She said it never happened.

I told her I kept the note where she called me a worthless pig.

She said I must have done something to deserve it.

I told her I ate a snack she hid.

She said I shouldn’t hold on to the past and told me to throw the note away, to let go.

But there’s no letting go, the splinter is inside me.

I’m thirteen or fourteen when I learn that, in addition to Weight, one must be cognizant of Size. The less space one takes up, the better. A negative correlation between size and value. Disappearing is best. Size zero: heaven, Nirvana, the Platonic ideal size, utterly unobtainable and yet ceaselessly longed for. So thin that there’s nothing left. I learn this in front of the jeans display at the Buckle in Crossroads Mall.

I’m sixteen and cutting girls I think are beautifully thin out of magazines and pasting them into a secret notebook I have, where I also log meals and count calories. I read pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia content on Xanga, LiveJournal, and Tumblr. I study Size and Weight obsessively– always know your enemy.

My best friend and I hide canned fruit under our beds so our moms won’t see us eating if we get hungry. It’s a strange admission from the both of us, seventeen years old, looking at a plastic container of preserved peaches and pears in a Coborn’s grocery aisle.

I was twenty-two and dating an alcoholic when I first put my fingers down my throat and successfully got myself to purge, a desperate attempt to survive alcohol poisoning. I’m twenty-four and in grad school when I get the hang of doing it sober.

I’m thirty-two and still putting fingers down my throat; I lost 65 pounds in ten months but I don’t think it’s enough. That’s the thing about fighting Size and Weight: They stay hungry, they always need more, they can only sink in deeper.  It isn’t enough, it’s never enough, until you’ve disappeared.