I’m prefacing this bulleted list of things I’ve done to myself and no longer do to myself with a quick explanation. One of my best friends was teasing me when I was having trouble talking myself into applying for an open mic night at a local storytelling place, because I have no trouble at all spilling my life openly into the internet. And she was right: I don’t. And I think it’s a mix of things: my inherent narcissism, which I’m actually a little fond of, my need to be the center of attention in very specific ways, my compulsion to write and to talk. But beyond that, I keep thinking about myself when I was struggling, and when I was in search of someone I could follow. I had a million amazing trusted loved ones, and it took a community to keep me from really damaging myself. But I also spent all of my free time looking, desperately, for someone who mirrored my anxieties, my difficulties, my strangenesses. We are all looking for our own representations, for proof that what awfulness exists in ourselves is also existent in others. My therapist tells me I have spent my life looking for my broken parts, only to come out the other side realizing I was never broken at all. It’s profound, satisfying work, and I write because I kind of hope there are other people looking for the same answer.

SO, here’s a list of mean things I did to myself that I don’t do anymore. Please stop being mean to yourself—and if you are in the middle of it, please stop hating yourself for hating yourself. You can get through this too.

• cutting
• taking college finals drunk
• refusing to eat until I got so hungry I was dizzy, and then only eating 300 calories
• overeating
• skipping enough rounds of my antidepressants that I gave myself what is commonly referred to in the medical community as ‘lightning storms’
• exercising after every meal so as to burn off all the calories consumed in that meal

There are more things. A ton more things. Be as kind to yourself as you can be.

I have never worn a two piece bathing suit. I remember when I was thin in high school my mom took me bathing suit shopping and I almost talked myself into this crocheted, retro, 70’s bathing suit in mod, muted colors but I was embarrassed by the hair on my stomach and stuck to a one piece instead. I remember that day so vividly because I stood in the three way department store mirror, taking inventory of a body so totally foreign to me that I couldn’t comprehend it. My mama encouraged me and showed me all variety of cover ups I  could use until I felt comfortable enough to hop in the pool, but I just couldn’t do it. I regret that decision to this day because I suspect that it informed a lot of decisions to follow. Allowing that initial moment of insecurity to define the sense of my adolescent self, still crystalline and pliant and moldable, meant years of pants in summmertime and anxiety about my upper arms and hours agonizing over my knee caps.

Sadly, it also means that my stomach has never seen a suntan. And I tan so well, totally evenly and deep and dark. And I’m sad about that because it means it probably never will. I have abs these days, that gorgeous middle line that runs down the center and some indentation near my hipbones. When I lift my arms above my head when I’m not wearing a shirt (and this happens more than you’d think—I spend a lot of time in the mirror) I can see my rib cage. I can watch my ribs move in time with my breathing and that rhythmic undulation is beautiful.

But, my midsection is pretty wartorn territory, and I am marked by my work. I think I’m at the point where I could consider proudly showing off the skin I own and the skin I’ve worked hard to belong to, but I haven’t gotten any of the encouragement I need. I don’t mean to say that I don’t have an incredibly supportive network of people who love me and are so proud of me. But when I say, I’m worried about wearing a two piece because I have stretch marks, the answer is—don’t wear a bikini. What I want to hear, and what I would love to hear in my own head in my own voice, is that my body is beautiful in this exact moment and I can honor it in any fashion I like.

I had a terrible crush on a lifeguard at my local pool when I was blossomy and new. I don’t know if he was just kind, or if he reciprocated my feelings, but I was in early high school and he was avoiding college and we spent tons of time together, swimming and talking and it was completely important to me. One day he was sitting at a table near the shallow end, where I’d just finished swimming my laps for the day. I started to pull myself out of the pool and up the ledge, using those hard earned muscles, when I looked up to catch his eyes on me. What shocked me in that moment is what still shocks me now: I felt no embarrassment, no anxiety about all the issues that plagued me on the regular. I wasn’t focused on the weirdness of my kneecaps or the curve of my upper arms or any of the things that I thought made me absolutely unbearable to look at. In that moment, and in some small way forever after, I was marked by the knowledge that my body was seeable, and seen.

I am looking for ways to return to that feeling within the large landscape of my adult life. I am loved and cherished and viewed and possessed, but I need a way to give those things to myself, too.

Dear Mike:

You changed my life when you died. When I think about the fact that you have been cremated, and what’s left of you lives in a box somewhere in my mama-in-law’s house, waiting for a bright sunny day where your ashes can be spread across some shining body of water, I shrivel a little. It’s such a visceral moment, every time it happens. I wonder what color the box is, what it smells like, what the material is. I feel like it should be a huge box, gigantic sized, but my guess is it’s tiny and industrial. We keep your guitar in our dining room, and one of the stickers you plonked on it has your handwriting. I feel like the box that holds you should have your handwriting too. I lent my dad a guitar tabs book, and he emailed me to say that the margins are covered with your scrawled notes and song ideas, small melodies written and probably never recorded. They should be in that box, too.

Or, more to the point, they shouldn’t be in any fucking box at all, because you shouldn’t be in a box. I think about all the things you’re missing. We’re having one of those spring days here where the chill is about to give way to that kind of explosive heat that almost requires you to tote around a second change of clothes, ready to go for when long sleeves are no longer needed. I was climbing mountains this weekend, leaning over low fences to rushing gorges underneath precariously hung suspension bridges, and wondering what it was like to not exist at all. What do we take with us? Can I take the wilds of upstate new york, all that wind and the smell of cedar and a sense that the world is endless and limitless? Can I take the moment where I stopped climbing nine flights of stairs to the top of a bell tower and bent over, savoring the acrid ache that accompanied my work to regain my regular breath? It’s strange to me that I will carry forward a hundred thousand memories that you’ll never have.

The world is a beautiful place, dangerous and precious and precariously hung over the lip of something much, much larger.  I knew that before you died, I’m sure, but  I know it now the way I know what the moon looks like even when I can’t see it. There isn’t a second to waste, a second to spare, and there are wolves everywhere. But in a way, that is totally delicious knowledge.

Thank you isn’t what I want to say, but it’s as close as I can get yet. Everything will ache, always, because you’re stuck in a box. The only solace I’ve found is doing my best to appreciate every living moment. You didn’t—I’m furious at the advantages you took, your lying and scheming and recklessness—but I can.

You were my brother for ten years, and family relations were complicated. But the purest, most honest truth I can tell you is this: I loved you when you were alive, and I love you now, even though you’re dead.

Sarah

Last week, I torpedoed a therapy session. My therapist is on an externship as she gets her PHD in, like, Buddhist therapy techniques. (Don’t hate, it’s amazing.) She’s finishing up at her current practice and headed off to put in a year at an army base. So we’re chatting, talking about the process and my progress and my happy life when I totally ruin the whole thing by taking a deep breath and an awkward pause, and announcing, shame faced:

“What I really want is a nose job.”

You know that moment in the movie where the record skips and everything changes? My therapist CHANGED: her posture shifted, she took her own deep breath, cleared her schedule for me during the summer, and started talking about things like hormones and expectations and thresholds. And I float outside of myself for a minute, and I look down on me: hunched over, ashamed and convinced that my instinct was right: I shouldn’t have shared this vulnerable part of myself with anyone.

I’m an old therapy pro, though, and I know enough to know that I should be able to tell my therapist the weirdest shit about myself without fear of rebuke. So I take another deep breath (Buddhist therapy practice, man) and use therapy vocabulary to ask WTF HER PROBLEM IS. (Take it from an anxiety ridden jewish girl: save the therapy talk for the office. No one in your daily life wants to hear about how you manifest your daily life by engaging deep in the core of your authentic self. Not even the person you’re sleeping with. It’s awful.)

“Sarah,” she says, “do you know why plastic surgeons used to refer potential clients to therapists before they would do any work?” My therapist has this ability to ask questions that I totally know the answer to in ways that leave me struggling for words. After I hem and haw for a couple, she interupts to explain that the concern with plastic surgery is that in can function as an entrypoint for some seriously disordered thinking. She hastened to say that there is nothing wrong with cosmetic surgery, but it requires some thought. Some analysis. SIGH, I say, in my head.

She’s right, though, of course. The annoying thing about that lady is she’s always right. What I need is a threshold, a sense of myself as full and fine and good enough. And there is evidence everywhere that I haven’t located it yet. I want a nose job. I seriously would pay a million dollars to reimage myself to look like Kate Upton. I’ve moved my goal weight from 140 to 120, even at the cautioning and concern of my loved ones. In my head is a list of procedures I need: dental veneers, under eye surgery to remove some clogged tear ducks, a brow lift, the nose job, laser hair removal…this list has NO end point. I can’t change my internal worth by changing my external framework. There’s still a Sarah in there, somewhere, and the things that are unexpressed and troubling me still trouble me, even if I turn myself into the extremely best physical version of myself.

We talked about the two pillars, the idea that life exists in extremes and it’s our job to bring our conscious experience toward the middle, away from extremism. (There I go again, with the talk. Sorry.) Trading in a disregarded, abandoned physicality for an extremely altered one is just moving from one extreme to the other. It doesn’t solve what’s troubling me, as appealing as it might be.

It’s not even that I actually planned on a nose job. It’s that I was finally brave enough to shine some light on an extremely complicated, spiderwebbed part of my soul. Somethings need air to resolve themselves, a little bit of time in the sun to thrive and climb or fade. The work is in integrating these complicated parts of myself so that I continue to see that I am flawed and human but it’s that which makes me lovely.

“Besides,” she said, “your nose is lovely.”

In the downward slope of my suddenly elegant neck is a shallow valley that houses two symmetrical, thin protruding bones: collarbones that I’ve never known before. I am mesmerized by them, and I wear deeper cut tops and necklaces to draw attention in that direction. When Josh kisses them, it feels to me like he is using a shovel to cultivate tender earth when he lands with a thud on the top of a treasure chest. It is an astonishing moment of recognition, and I find myself equally enthralled with wrist and ankle bones and the veins in my arms that stand out in relief when I lift weights.

However: you cannot physically and perfectly reset a body. When my fancy phone acts out and stops making calls and freezes during incoming text messages, I can system reset it. Every individual choice I’ve made for that interface, ever ap I’ve downloaded, every sound I’ve careful set, is undone in a matter of seconds. What I’m left with is the perfect reset of this device, just like it came straight off the factory line and into my hand. There’s no mark of the problems that existed merely minutes ago, and things restart like new.

My body is marked by my experiences, and I should have anticipated that when I underwent what will soon be a hundred pound weight loss. I am marked by the situations and experiences that brought me here, and I wear them in my skin. There are rivers of markings lining my stomach and my back, ones that run from the hollow on the inside of my biceps and ones that make their way down the sides of my breasts. They vary in color: the new ones are raw and red and angry while the older marks have mellowed to silvery, ghostlike wisps. But they are there. Forever. Alongside my periodically dislocated shoulder and the knee that pops out of joint, nestled in along the ankles I’ve broken so often I’m surprised they still work. Every piece of me tells my story, but the broken bones don’t bring me the shame that I feel when I look at the elastic souvenirs of my most recent journey.

What I wanted was a perfect body: taut and thin, lean and unmarred. What I’m getting is the best version of my own body, with proportions that are the same at 166 pounds that they were at 250. Josh has loved every incarnation of my body because every inch of it, every pound, belongs to me. He has squeezed my round tummy and complimented it’s warmth, and he has expressed his appreciation for the effort it takes to build that thin line that runs from the top of my stomach down—the one that indicates that my ab muscles are back in town. He admires my biceps when they exist. He loves my body because it tells a story in which he is a constant, important, intricately implicated character.

What I need to learn now is forgiveness. I think it’s a long road to accepting the fullness of my physicality, in which I admire all the pieces of me that make me whole, instead of focusing only on the parts I admire. Maybe this is a start.

Portrait of my father (outdated)

After school in the fall, the air is tinged with the sharp smell of incoming winter and loneliness that gnaws at the very bottom of the pit of my stomach

And in walks my father, late after a 10 hour work day,

Stooped slightly, bowed a little by the pressure of a long day, a gritty highway drive home,

The responsibilities that have caught him off guard and overwhelmed him.

His thick, wild hair in his work day uniform, has been tamed enough but not for long, and as he walks through the door, it rearranges itself, perking up even when he isn’t.

My father drops off his cracked leather briefcase, which I sometimes carry around when I am playing detective, and looks my way. Taking a deep, heavy breath

(which I will replicate ten years later, having learned it in yoga class)

My father turns to me, grabs the box of supplies we need to sell girl scout cookies,

And shoos me out the door, following closely behind.

As the crisp fall sunlight tilts into evening,

The winter sharpness increases while the loneliness has vanished.

 (2012)

A couple of weeks ago, I bullied my father into helping me do some gardening. This wasn’t the fun, lovely fragrant gardening version where you pick new blooming plants and lovingly drop them into the earth and wish them happy and healthy lives. This is the I hate my freaking decorative grass plants, because they’ve taken over and my entire garden looks like an overgrown sheepdog and OH MY GOD do I need some help.

So, my dad, who really is a gifted amateur gardener, rolled in on a sunny Sunday afternoon and…panicked. Sort of. The larriope he imagined were just small, annoying, useless decorative grass.  What he got was a secret garden-esque hedging, complete with long, deep, tuberous roots and a persistent desire to live.

It took us eleven trash bags to discard all of the grass we pulled. And it was the most satisfying thing I’ve done in ages. My dad worked the thin, flat shovel, positioning it directly underneath a stubborn clump of grass to find the roots. When he shoveled, I pulled and pulled and pulled, and out came these huge, rooted plants with fresh earth and happy worms. We saved the worms ( I love worms) and the fresh, dark, wet, amazing dirt to spread in the garden plot. That was just half of them. I’ve still got the other half to do.

There is value, and bone deep pleasure, in digging in the earth, just like there is so much value in digging into your own life. Just like I cleared a flat and clean garden plot, I am working on yanking out the deep roots of my own unhappiness. They shrivel in the fresh air and the sunshine, and I can remake myself, fragrant and lovely, clean and powerful.

So, I’ve lost 82 pounds, which is amazing, but somewhere along the way I’ve lost something far more important. I misplaced my sense of myself, which should be tied to something far more finite and far more relevant than the number on the scale. Lately I wake up with my weight in my head— 172 172 172 says my brain endlessly—and when it’s not that number, it’s the smaller number I still want it to be. I hate math. There’s no room for numbers in my head.

When you make a life change, however small, it is a dynamic change. You’re playing human dominoes, and you ought to install a basement somewhere or else they are going to fall forever. Who am I if I’m not the things I’ve been doing to live my life for the last 15 years? I’m learning now that I don’t know much about myself. Most days, this knowledge is totally intoxicating. On the cusp of 29, I barely know myself and my unfathomable depths are well worth plumbing. On bad days, I’m terrified. When I’m balanced, I can hold both of these thoughts in the same teacup, at the same time, but when I’m not I tip everything over.

Here’s what I’m learning about myself: without the anxiety of the daily feeling of not fitting into my skin, I’m willing to try anything. Which includes, trying on wrap dresses, going to hot yoga class, registering for charity walks, learning to shoot guns, learning to cook…a million things. But I don’t know yet how much of this I’ll settle on. I don’t really know what to do if I hate all of the things I’ve tried and I don’t know what to try next. I am currently worried that I’ll forever be a dabbler, skimming the surface of all the things I want to try without settling on anything.

Identity is fluid, and I am trying to see myself as the root of a plant that will climb in four directions and flower at the top, content to blossom in the fresh air it finds wherever it lands.

Look, I gotta complicated relationship to faith. I was born Jewish, to a semi-faithful father and a recently converted mother. When Dad left the temple, we cast about until we found unitarian-ism, which is where I did my growing up days. I have been through periods of extreme religious faith where I consider myself exclusively Jewish and celebrate hannukah only. I am currently courting a local unitarian church, and they do some lavish, music-driven xmas eve and xmas festivals. As well as a pagan celebration of the sun king, and a monday night buddhist meditation for the holiday program. (I love the UUs.)

Anyway, all this is to say, regardless where I was in the endless struggle to determine and understand my faith, I have ALWAYS been crazy for the santa-and-coccoa version of christmas.

We celebrated lavish christmases growing up, and I’m only realizing now how over-the-top they truly were. My mom loved xmas, and I loved it too. We decorated our house, put up a tree that dripped with ornaments and lights, and spent the month of December watching holiday movies and dreaming about snow. Life wasn’t necessarily easy growing up, and my parents did everything they could to give us the picturebook holiday celebrations they were denied in their growings up. Our holidays were sometimes so feverishly exciting that, come christmas itself, I would burst into tears at the sight of the over-stuffed christmas tree. Sometimes there were so many presents that Santa would leave some in the hallway, leading up to the xmas tree. The overwrought excitement was delirious and contagious, and my brother and I designed a ritual we cling to even today: we would sneak out early in the morning on christmas day to see what Santa had left for us.

So, I have tried to educate my low-key spouse on the tricks to an outrageously fabulous christmas, and he just doesn’t bite. He likes Christmas, sure—who doesn’t like a holiday in which a major component is an industrial bakery degree of endlessly available chocolate cookies? But he does not go for the wistful, month-long celebration. He doesn’t want to take a million late night walks to see who in the neighborhood is “ready” for christmas (another brother sister tradition that continues today). He doesn’t want to watch Home Alone 2 Lost in New York a dozen time. He doesn’t understand the appeal of a thousand tiny stocking stuffers. Usually, this disappoints me, emotionally, in a way I can’t exactly pinpoint. I know that when he is a papa, he will be a holiday-crazed, spare-no-expense papa, and we will raise bebes that weep at their extravagant holiday celebrations.

But this year, his low-key approach is saving my life. This holiday everything is tinged with melancholy and actual sadness, not the traditional excessive expensive holiday exhaustion. This year I am actually exhausted. So I will send out holiday cards, and do most of my shopping online to avoid desperate, miserable shoppers. Which is a shame, because my dad and I get a ton of pleasure out of surfing the top of the insane wave of xmas eve shoppers. And we’ll buy a handmade wreath from the nursery, and maybe this will be the first year we get a real tree. We’ll hang our strings of lights next to our menorah, and worship in a million ways, and give thanks in a thousand more.

I’m a little bah humbug, right now, in part because everything is poignant. There isn’t a christmas song that doesn’t make me cry right now. I’m adjusting to a daily cry, these days. Yesterday, I managed to make it til 7:30 before I got in bed. I rally, usually slightly faster, but I’m optomistic that my low-key holiday approach might help me launch back into my glamorous christmas outlook.

Love you guys. Happy whatever you celebrate, and happy life.