On Breaking Up, Weight Gain And Listening To Our Own Cries To Grieve

I’ve gained about thirteen pounds since January 1st.

I don’t weigh myself anymore these days. Since we transitioned out of the anorexia-happy early 2000s, I judge my body only by how it looks and feels but my radar is rarely far off.

Lately my body feels heavy.

My clothes still fit. But they’re tight. My appetite’s hearty: it won’t subside, no matter how many platefuls of salad I try to get it to remember it loves. Every once in a while when I am putting on a bra I notice that my chest no longer resembles that of a prepubescent girl’s and I think ‘Huh. Probably time to cut some carbs.’

And then I don’t.

I’m not here to body shame myself or anyone else. I have a complicated relationship with my physical form, as most of us do.

But lately I have this particular creeping feeling in the back of my mind that I am trying to handicap myself in some way. Like the extra weight that’s settled onto my frame is begging not to be accepted, but warred with.

The deeper choice is not pasta or salad. It’s engagement or restriction of living.

***

Here’s something I feel icky about and don’t want to admit: Some of the happiest times of my life have been the times when I am dieting.

Memories of a particular autumn in Guelph, Ontario come to mind.

It was the year after I graduated college and I had just moved into the attic of a century home with a full set of new, eclectic roommates.

There was Brett, the wiry and eccentric novelist who had bought the house as a divorce present to himself. Jessie, the troubled high school senior who’d been outcasted from her parent’s home and followed me around town like a lost puppy looking for love. Reg, the ghost roommate who left his room once or twice a day and never seemed to eat, sleep or use the bathroom during the same hours as anyone else. And finally Dan, the kind-hearted musician who worked nights at the local bar and had a grin that made my heart stop momentarily each time we would cross paths in the kitchen.

The entire autumn season stayed contained within the glorious problem of my waistline being several inches too big. Each day I’d wake up at 5:45, the streetlights blinking sleepily outside my attic window, and pull a well-worn pair of Roots track pants over my body as I headed to the gym for 6am sharp.

I’d have a two-hour workout under my belt before most of my housemates were up for the day; often returning to find Brett flipping eggs drowsily in the kitchen, offering up a distracted smile as I passed through the bottom floor.

Jessie would be the next one to rise, crashing and banging around her second-floor bedroom before darting out to work a shift at the fast food restaurant down the street. Reg remained evasive, slipping in and out of the front door to make his University classes only when the rest of us seemed to be elsewhere in the house. And Dan would be the last roommate I would encounter most mornings, stumbling into the kitchen around noon sporting a navy blue bathrobe and rousing the coffee maker from its midday slumber.

I loved the simplicity of watching life from the sidelines that autumn.

Each day I worked out, cooked a rotation of low-calorie meals, rooted through edits on the manuscript that would eventually become my first book and used my imperfect body as a glorious, pre-packaged excuse for staving off the messier parts of living.

That season marked a transition point in my life that in all honesty, I wanted to avoid.

I’d graduated from University about a year prior and finally landed my first job as a writer, which thrilled and intimidated me in equal measure.

My on-again-off-again relationship had come to a screeching halt earlier that spring. My University boyfriend — whom I considered my first Big Love — decided that if after five years I couldn’t guarantee a proper future with him, he’d shop around for someone who would.

My closest friends — the ones I’d come to see as much more family than peers— were moving out of town and onto new, bigger opportunities. I applauded their successes in public, then went home and swallowed the hollow ache of their absence in private.

I have never been known for my trepidation but graduating from college left me in a peculiar and unusual position: one of wanting the past back.

I’d loved every moment of University — not for what I learned inside the classroom but for everything that flourished around it. The late nights spent bonding with new friends, turning over what felt like the world’s most pressing problems, certain that in the years to come we’d solve them. The nights out hopping from bar to bar, trying to meet up with everybody’s latest crush before crashing into a pile with a takeaway pizza on someone’s foldout couch. The years where every high and low needn’t be shouldered alone because there was love and camaraderie around every corner — an existence of perpetual togetherness.

The first period of my life in which I’d ever truly been happy had disintegrated beneath me when I walked across the graduation stage in late spring. And in the year that followed I stayed frozen, like a deer staring down the headlights of its future.

Unwilling to move in any particular direction, I spent the summer eating the terror I didn’t want to feel. I packed on fifteen happy pounds that I was now tasked with the role of losing.

Until I looked the way I wanted to, I reasoned with myself, I couldn’t move out of my college town. I’d have to stay here and make the best of things: engaging in frequent lunch dates with my ex-boyfriend and throwing myself full-force into remote work. The past, I wagered, might be something like a frightened house cat: willing to come back if I just stood in one place for long enough.

And so my routine and I took to each other with delight. Keeping the world small and my bristling ambitions under wraps.

*****

Seven years after that autumn in Guelph, I found myself in the midst of a world re-opening after COVID.

I began the year at my partner’s condo building in Miami: the person I’d hunkered down with for the past two years of our four years together.

COVID was terrible for all of the regular reasons: the restriction, the isolation, the secondary grief and the universal cabin fever that eventually wormed its way into the most resilient psyches.

And yet there was something I found stabilizing about the time. Forced with no option but to face myself, I dug my heels into deep trauma work and unearthed a literal lifetime of challenges I’d avoided unpacking.

I quit working and read for sixteen hours a day: stopping only to lift weights and stretch out my limbs.

I quit sugar and alcohol and watched my mental clarity sharpen with every passing day.

I quit a lot of my own, most deeply-valued bullshit and struggled to navigate the world more honestly — battling the chronic veneer of my ego as it reared its ever-tempting head.

My partner supported me lovingly from the sidelines of it all: cooking elaborate dinners when I failed to eat, dropping kisses on my head as I read with fervour, leaving the house for long stretches at a time as my need for alone time increased.

And then increased some more. I threw myself into a gruelling one-year Master’s program.

And then increased some more. I took a six-week solo hiking trip.

And then increased some more. I signed a lease on an apartment in another city.

Many couples thrived in the chaos of everyday life and broke under the tension of entrapment. My relationship, it turned out, operated under opposite principles.

Solitude bound us together. But when the world opened back up, we found ourselves with wildly different places to go.

*****

Every autumn comes to an end, and that one in Guelph was not an exception.

With the New Year looming, the autumn leases that Jessie, Reg, Dan and I had signed were approaching their expiration and we each had a decision to make.

In mid-December I turned in the final edits on my manuscript. Brett, who had lovingly parsed through it line-by-line, hugged me with tears in his eyes, beaming with a fatherly pride so pure I almost struggled to stomach it. Jessie met an older guy at the fast food joint she worked at and opted to move in with him, packing a Costco-size box of condoms that I had sternly gifted her alongside a lecture about safe sex. Reg finished his University term and slipped back to his home town without saying goodbye. Dan and I split a bottle of whiskey late one night and finally consummated the tension between us, joking the next morning that we’d flip a coin to see which of us would be the one to move out.

It was never a real debate. Snow was lining the streets outside my window and the autumn — including everything it represented for me — was coming to an end.

I had a job offer waiting for me in a big city. A second book I’d lined up to write. I had a toned midsection, a regulated nervous system and a quiet acceptance that the past had finally worked its way out of my system.

The house cat was not finding its way back.

Instead, the future had arrived: with a new set of challenges, griefs and opportunities. I made the conscious choice to follow it forward.

***

By springtime of 2022, I’d settled contentedly into the flow of solo life in Toronto.

On Valentine’s Day I stepped on a plane and left Miami, knowing in the pit of my stomach that I was bidding a major part of my heart and the past four years of my life goodbye.

And as it turned out, life went on. I worked obsessively on a dissertation for my Master’s program. I boarded planes to Colorado and Lisbon. I reunited with old friends, fell into a happy rhythm with new ones and tenderly, cautiously began opening myself up to a romantic connection with somebody wonderful and new.

And yet the more I accepted the pull forward into the future, the more a distinctly old feeling reared its head: the one that accompanied me through the summer in Guelph when I packed on my grief weight that I spent the autumn shedding.

My mind wanted to rush into the future.

My body did not.

My body reached, with increasing frequency, for the carbohydrates I so rarely consumed anymore. And then for sugar. And wine. I watched myself with an almost detached fascination through the early weeks of August as I failed to curb my own impulses and allowed the old, internal criticisms of my body creep back in.

This is not a story about the horrors of having weight on one’s frame. The anorexic 90s are long gone and quite frankly, some extra weight suits me.

This is a story about understanding that our bodies are always, without question, responding to what’s going on for us on a deeper level.

In the summer of 2022, as I sit here writing this now, I want to be the person who is ready to greet my future with open arms. I want to finish my Master’s program, kickstart the next phase of my career, walk consciously into healthy relationships and step confidently into everything the next decade of my life has to offer.

But I’m not quite ready. Not yet. And my body sees this even when my mind cannot.

My body knows that some small, very vulnerable part of myself is still perched loyally by the front door of my heart, waiting for the past to come back. For the world to lock back down, for my nervous system to re-regulate with the last attachment figure it knew well, for the simplicity of a life without vast and endless choice available to it to come eliminate the outside noise.

This part is small and unreasonable and she needs tending to, the way a parent tends for a young child.

‘You want to move on?’ She hollers as the end of my dissertation looms near. ‘I’ll keep you here!’ She digs in her heels and refuses to focus on my research. I file for an extension into the fall.

‘You want to get attached to someone new?’ She spits venomously as I hum along to love songs while cooking dinner. ‘I’ll change your body!’ I learn to communicate conflicting feelings as they arise.

From the outside, my inner child’s war cries look like self-sabotage. From the inside, I see them for what they are: a call to grieve.

Inside my own mind, I sit down with this unreasonable child.

I pry the chocolate gently from her hands and tell her we have better forms of comfort now. We can take the time she needs, but has so rarely ever been granted. To read slowly. Learn slowly. Move on slowly. Nourish our minds and our bodies and relationships while we let the past go at the pace of molasses.

This tiny child inside of me, always rushed into a future she wasn’t ready for, is at last given permission to rest. So on a chilly day mid-August, her and I pull my old Roots sweat pants out of storage. We plan to hunker down for autumn.

The past works its way out of my system, cushioning my body with its imprint as it goes.

And for a season, I will let it make me soft.