I have become weak

On revering old strength, my sobering loss in weight loss

Note: I know many of you signed onto this Substack with the expectations of getting more book reviews with my critical but oversharing eye. They’re coming back, I promise. I just got some stuff on my mind these days.

As an only child to parents with bad backs, I have always been quite proud of my physical strength. There are very few instances in my life in which I needed the physical help of anyone for a task, I have always managed it on my own.

I have lived alone since I was 25 years old, I am 36 now. I hire movers when I am leaving a state, other than that, I never need help in my homes, shifting sofas, tables stacked with books, my headboard-and-mattress, boxes of gardening equipment . And of course, every jar reveals itself to me easily, the lid popping satisfyingly. I like this about myself.

I have always relished in my strength. In high school and college, when drunk, I became infamous for giving any man worth his salt (taller than my 5’8 height) piggyback rides, doing laps around the friend group. I never failed.

And yet I have always been admonished, and felt shame, for my corpulence. To be fair, my impossible relationship with my body begins at birth, when I am born a perfect baby. The expectations are set against me.

I do not stay perfect long, I am soon an off-the-charts Big Girl. The tallest in the class until the eight grade, square bodied, broad shouldered. When I got into the University of Chicago, my dad recited lines of Sandburg’s “Chicago,”

“My daughter, strong shoulders, to the City of Big Shoulders,” he said.

I was always heavyset, something my family and doctors thought was a product of a lack of discipline (and lying). There was no explanation for contradiction, how my legs were pure muscle, my arms, too. Or why I carried all my weight in my torso. My body’s disproportionate distribution made me even stronger, though.

When I am 22 years old, I am diagnosed with a rare endocrine disorder, one-in-a-million type shit. I learn I am a mutant. I like this, I tell people this all the time. I enjoy reading their reactions. I learn so much about them. Really—the fact that I am diagnosed at all—is a miracle. My world-renowned specialist tells me I am the youngest diagnosis she ever had. That I have an answer, that this disease explains so much of why (and how) my body is how my body is? Salvation. I am relinquished from a burden of blame years of therapy and self-love aphorisms I could never buy.

In exchange for my deliverance, I learn there is really no treatment for the disease. Health problems, in my liver, my heart, my cervix, will stack against me. And of course, my body is resistant to all medications I am prescribed, cocktails meant to treat something without treatment. I even enroll in a medical trial. For two and a half years, once a week, I had to mix and inject my own dosage. I carefully drew out the saline with one needle, then inserting it into the sealed solution container of the medication, plunging the saline inside. I invert the solution half a dozen times, extract the mixture with another needle and inject myself subcutaneously. No one ever helps me do this. After over a hundred injections, I learn the medication had been “totally ineffective” for me.

Really, throughout my mid-to-late-20s, I’d describe my method of taking care of myself as “totally ineffective.” I am largely detached from my emotions, I do not eat well, sleep enough, I drink too much, do too many drugs. I regret less of it than common sense tells me I should.

Can I blame myself for being resistant to taking care of a body that is resistant? That not even medical intervention designed up by foremost specialists will move her? Besides, my body perseveres so well, she endures, she is fucking strong. Rarely kept down for more than half a day by a hangover, can conquer a 10 mile hike or carry a 50lb suitcases filled with accessories and shoes. And she never fears a jar of gherkins.

I begin to learn to take care of my body, but it takes me many years. I take care of her even though she resists.

Three years ago, I meet with my endocrinologist. She wants to prescribe that a miracle drug, That Miracle Drug. I tell her no, absolutely not. She cannot force me to take it, of course. But she is looking at me like I have grown a second head.

“And your blood work has remained worrisome. Over the years, we’ve seen little improvement with your current medications.”

I am shaking my head.

“This medication is quite literally designed for endocrine complications like yours.” Her brows are deeply furrowed.

There is simply not enough time or space to describe the current of feelings and contradictions within me in this moment. It is a cacophony at the intersection of nearly all of my life’s greatest struggles.

But in this fluorescent room, I am still trying to punish my body.

Punishing my body, it is such an ingrained habit, I do not need it tattooed. I have—like nearly every modern American woman, dieted, exercised, logged, repented, regretted, I have counted, I have abstained, I have starved, I have gorged, I have punished my body over and over again.

I agree to take the medication, after she shows me a study she is co-authoring.

When my body begins to change without my permission, without my effort, I feel nothing. Honestly, I do not really notice. I thought that maybe I would experience terrific gastronomical distress, that a newfound proximity to my porcelain throne, pink tablets, fiber supplements, was the exchange for becoming becoming.

Instead, I have no side effects. The scale is slow, I like this. No one comments on my changing body. I like this the most.

It is the great privilege of my life that my friends have never commented on how my body has changed in the last three years. I mean that in earnest. That I am so surrounded by people who understand the complexities of bodies in our modern era, who are empathetic to my complex medical and emotional history—I know this is very rare. Maybe as rare as my disease itself.

Of course, my impossible relationship cannot be solved just so easily by numbers. It does not matter how my body may shrink, nothing will change the ratio of my body’s composition. It is like someone opened me in photoshop, clicked “transform” and shrunk me by a percentage. Everything else the same. This is the condition of my disease, my fat composition, is written into my mutated DNA and only a knife can change it. Miracle O Drug or not.

My feelings about my body do not change, for better or worse. And then, a few months ago, I couldn’t open a jar of gherkins. The next week, two outdoor chairs get wedged together, like they did the last summer, and I can’t separate them. I struggle with boxes I hauled into my own basement. My bathroom door comes off its hinges, like it did two winters ago, but I can’t hold it up with the same ease. I call a friend to help me level it.

This is the first change I did not consent to that I care about, and I find I am very upset. I move through my house, testing what I can and cannot do—there are new cannots everywhere.

The chairs are still stuck together and I got the jar open in the end. But it was in this frustration, this newfound weakness, that I began this essay.

I had never stopped stopped to consider how my body had made me strong. That my abilities, and independence, were a testament to my shape. I loved (and now lost) something about myself that was a product of the very thing I hated the most about myself.

And listen, I’m not the kind to hit the gym—to want to work it back—what I liked about my strength that it was innate, natural, always a part of me. Something I did not think about, something I never had to consider.

What a blessing my opulence was—it granted me so much freedom.