My Story So Far

Today, September 27, 2008, it has been 6 years since I started losing weight.

Six years ago, in September of 2002, at 21 years old, my life looked very little like it does today. Some things were the same - I was a funny girl, who could always make a room full of people crack up. I enjoyed myself with friends, choosing some of the smartest, funniest people in New York City as my company. I liked to go out for dinner or stay in and party. I didn’t like the bar scene or the nightclub scene, having spent enough time in both to know so. I was always up for a get together with friends, loved a beautiful day, wrote voraciously, read regularly, liked to see theater and watch movies, and adored tucking myself away in some unique corner of the city with a notebook and pen, to people watch and philosophize.

I was also very lonely, very sad, and very afraid. I weighed 265 pounds, a lot for anyone, but an incredible load for my relatively small frame. I shot up like a weed in the 5th grade, but never grew much more after that. Now, at almost 5’5 and more than 100 pounds overweight, a category that doctors describe as ‘morbidly obese’, I was indeed obese.

I was in therapy at the time. I’d been seeing her twice a week for only a couple of months, so things weren’t exactly getting better yet. I was actively struggling with depression; it had squeezed its choke-hold on me for longer than I consciously knew. I was susceptible to emotional highs and lows throughout each day - not the way a person with bi-polar disorder might experience them - but I still felt either very tragic painful lows, or just okay. I don’t think I ever felt truly, genuinely happy.

I was irresponsible whenever I could get away with it, not good with my money or my time, not good about staying in touch with people or making positive social connections when they presented themselves. I was bitter and fearful and furious and absolutely paralyzed by a running list of worries and a history of devastating mistakes, missteps, and messes.

The summer before this September in 2002 was, without question, the hardest season of my life. I’d already been through a great deal for a young woman, but the summer of 2002 met me without mercy and what was bad became hopeless. I have never felt and will never feel again the kind of panic, terror, grief, and absolute confusion I knew in those months. The dangerous path I’d been traveling down for so long culminated in chaos that summer. But I’d spent years creating the reality that would make it all possible.

When I was 17, I moved to New York to go to college. I’d traveled all over the world as a kid. We weren’t wealthy by any means but my mom was young and energetic and insisted that I experience cultures and worlds outside the narrow ones offered in the suburban Midwest. So I was excited, not nervous, to move to New York. I was leaving behind a huge family of overly-involved aunts, uncles, and grandparents who had all helped to raise me, since my dad wasn’t around. My family didn’t want me to move to New York. Or to study theater. Or to pursue my goals and ambitions. I didn’t care. I did it anyway.

But one’s need to run away from something does not always mean one is better off running toward something else. I arrived in the city, disconnected from my emotional reality the way most 17 year olds are. I was eager to begin my schooling and meet new friends and most eager to be away from my overbearing family. Except that within the first few days of being away at college, I sunk so swiftly into a crippling depression that I did not recognize myself. I didn’t know what was wrong, what hit me, how to help myself – I didn’t even really know that I was depressed. And I didn’t tell anyone.

I would sob for hours for no reason, skip class, avoid homework assignments, stay up late, binge-eat with friends or alone, beg my boyfriend at the time to shower me with attention, shop and spend constantly, sometimes taking hundreds of dollars out of the ATM in a day’s time, only to wake up the next day with nothing in my wallet. And nobody really knew that I was in so much pain. In retrospect, I’m not sure I even knew. But it never got any better.

That first year away at school was The Beginning. And the summer of 2002, the worst summer of my life, was The Beginning of the End.

So I spent those 5 years between age 17 and 22 making mistake after mistake, enduring grief after grief. I gained a ton of weight, lost some weight, gained some, lost some, gained a lot more. In high school I got straight A’s and B’s without trying. In college I failed out of at least 1/3 of my college classes and lied to my mother about my grades. I skipped whole days of class each week; one semester I enrolled for a class that I attended twice and never returned to again except to take the final exam. I would sleep until 5pm some days, stay awake until 9am the following day, and go back to sleep until 6 or 7pm. I ate constantly, eventually started smoking pot daily, drank whenever it was available to me, experimented regularly and joyfully with acid, ecstasy, cocaine, and, one time only, heroin. I was constantly broke, spending more money than I ever had, wracking up small debts here and there, some debts that my mother had to pay off because the bank threatened to freeze her assets, some debts I only finished paying off a few months ago. I screwed over employer after employer, lied about being sick, about family members dying, stole from cash registers, stole from the piggybanks of kids I’d babysit. I ‘completed’ every task to an eighteenth of my ability. At two different points during visits home to Chicago in those years, I suffered through two unrelentingly painful breast reduction surgeries, the second surgery due to complications during the first, because my large breasts were affecting my health. I endured massive irreparable scaring, excruciating pain, and long recovery processes both times. The bad surgery experiences just compounded my misery. I maintained only the friendships I could tolerate and hated almost all other people. I had a total of 9 possible outfits to wear because I was too heavy to wear most of my clothes and so broke that I couldn’t afford to buy new ones. When my mother finally called the school one afternoon junior year and discovered that I’d been lying to her about my grades, she confronted me and said she would not pay for any more schooling. I dropped out of college and moved home to Chicago.

Then, only a few months later, I moved back to New York because I needed to escape from reality again. I fell co-dependently in love with a gay man who knew he was gay but was “in love” with me too. He disrespected and used me as a woman and a friend. I read his private diaries and tried to manipulate his life. I burned bridge after bridge, shocked friend after friend, closed door after door, hurt my family, lost my mother’s trust, and ended up 21 years old, a jobless, penniless, college dropout who’s main goal each day was to smoke weed and not break down into hysterical sobs.

I came from a happy, healthy, well-adjusted family in suburbia. I left for college a bright, eager, albeit chubby young woman. I was kind, thoughtful, generous, interested, curious, and talented. But something inside me melted somewhere along the way and I’d taken to giving up. And no matter who pleaded with me or how worried my mother was, I only ever tried to change my situation in half-assed fits and starts, if at all. I never admitted to anyone that I was in way over my head, didn’t recognize myself anymore and was in a lot of pain.

I wasn’t a bad person. If you’d met me at the time, you wouldn’t think, Who is this horrible girl? I was still funny and fun, smart and curious. Although, Kevin has told me before that when he met me at this point in my life he was intimidated by me; I was brash and abrasive and confrontational. All that aside, I know I didn’t appear to be insane or unwell. I still had a lot of friends who respected my opinion and enjoyed my company. I’m sure I did appear to be really pissed off, unhappy, and uninterested in changing. And I was those things. I was also failing at life.

Which brings us to the fateful summer of 2002. I’d just moved back to New York that June against my family’s wishes. The gay guy and I were sleeping on the floor of a friend’s apartment. We were fighting constantly, both out of work, broke but for the few hundred dollars we’d collected when he cashed in some stock. I spent each day weeping, writing, smoking, “updating my resume,” walking down the street in pain because I was so heavy that it physically hurt me to move, stealing food from local grocery stores, and hoping the gay guy would want to have sex that night - the closeness I felt when we laid down to go to sleep at night, the only closeness in my world. Everything seemed bleak, I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew that things were not good and it couldn’t go on for ever. At the time, I thought I was at my rock bottom. I was dead wrong.

We got into a fight so awful one night, tears, screaming, packing of suitcases, that I punched the gay guy in the mouth. And then he beat me up for a good 45 minutes.

It was a terrible night. I finally fell asleep as the sun came up. I woke up early the next morning and left my friend’s apartment in my car. My friend, S, was my first college roommate, my dearest friend, a girl who I’d supported unconditionally while she’d been crippled with depression herself. She was my confidant, my only ally. She assured me we’d get through this together, that I’d made a mistake in punching him, but that this mess was now going to come to an end, that I would be able to turn my life around, that she would help me, that I would live with her, that he would have to move out of her apartment, that she just needed a day to sort things out. That night I went to stay at another friend’s place.

The next day, S called me and said I should come over for coffee. When I got to her apartment building she was waiting in the lobby - with all my belongings packed in plastic bags and boxes. She told me I was crazy and needed to be in a home, she told me she couldn’t know me anymore, couldn’t help me anymore, didn’t want anything to do with me. She told me that the gay guy, (who, for the record, was as equally depressed and irresponsible as I was and who she’d never met before this summer) would be living at her apartment. Then she called all our mutual friends and told them to watch out for me because I was dangerous.

I found out later that while she talked to me in the lobby, while I took in these words she was saying, looking around the room for some sense that this was a dream or that I was on a hidden camera show, while I tried to decipher the things she was telling me, the gay guy was waiting in the stairwell with a portable phone at the ready in case I tried to hurt her.

Now. These were people I’d known for years, people I knew very very well, people who knew me very very well. They knew I wasn’t in a great place in my personal life but they also knew that these swift actions on their part were completely unnecessary. It was almost as if they were getting off on the drama of it all, on watching someone else hit rock bottom as they hovered above their very own.

You see, I may have been clinically depressed. I may have been lost, confused, fat, misguided and I may have made some questionable choices in my life, choices guided by fear and pain. I may have been used and demeaned, pushed to the absolute brink in an abusive relationship where I did not have a voice, a relationship that was mutually destructive and chaotic. I may have lashed out at him in the only show of physical violence I have ever been compelled to display. But by no means did I deserve to be punished. And by absolutely no means was I crazy.

I was still myself. I was still the kind, loving thoughtful person I’d always been. I was still S’s friend. I was still the girl she’d held two nights before and said “I totally understand. We’re gonna get through this.”

Let me be clear: I do not blame her for wanting to protect her emotional wellness. I do not blame her for needing space from the drama I’d created. I think she was right to want the dysfunction out of her home. But I was not crazy. Nor was I a danger. I was just very lost. And to tell me white lies to get me to come over and collect my things, to sit me down in the very public lobby, while tenants and their families shuffled in and out of the building, picking up take-out dinner or doing their laundry, glancing our way as they did, to use words like “crazy” and “mental home”, to calmly explain to me how my life would be further dismantled and without mercy, and to act without empathy as if I was a danger to anyone was not only humiliating, but also excruciatingly painful. I wanted to cry out “You’re wrong! You have it all wrong!” But I wasn’t going to fight her for the right to be treated like her equal. If she didn’t want to give me that, I wasn’t going to demand it. I remember taking a deep breath, chuckling slightly to myself that it had all come to this, and deciding to let it be. I looked into the eyes of a person who was my best friend hours earlier and now felt like an alien.

I left her there in the lobby. I packed all my things into my car all alone. She did not offer to help me as I made the six or seven trips back and forth between the building and the street. I slammed the trunk shut. I climbed into the car and pulled the door closed. I stared at the dashboard. I cried harder than I had in my whole life.

I was completely alone. The co-dependent relationship that toxically fueled me for years had been dissolved in a matter of hours. The best friendship that I counted on had been removed amidst lies, manipulation, and betrayal. I had made a mistake two nights prior that I knew was bad, but that I thought was forgivable. But I’d made graver mistakes for five years prior from which I could not walk away. I had $12 to my name. I did not have a bank account or a credit card. I did not have a place to live or even a place to sleep. I was over 100 pounds overweight and I didn’t have a college degree. I had just lost the two people I counted on the most and as I sat there and wept they were systematically placing phone calls to our mutual friends to warn them about me.

My mind seemed to be working simultaneously in slow motion and on high-speed overdrive. I could either drive home to Illinois, without enough gas in the car to get there, to face my mother and the dead-end life that I believed awaited me there.

Or I could take my pain, my hurt, their betrayal, my huge huge mess of a pathetic excuse for a life and find a way to move through it and fix it on my own. I could use this excruciating paralysis as a rock bottom. Too much had occurred to be ignored. Too many people were raising their eyebrows at my questionable judgment. Too much had been ruined to do anything other than work to repair it.

Luckily all of our mutual friends who received those phone calls laughed them off. They knew I was in a bad place, but they also knew I wasn’t a threat or a danger. And that I was still myself. They shook their head at what had taken place and agreed to help me out. And after a good week of not eating or sleeping, of weeping and staring off into space, of calling friends to ask if I could sleep on their couches, I was unable to sleep yet again one night. The futon mattress of the hot, sticky, roach infested apartment I was staying in was too lumpy to be comfortable. I sobbed myself to sleep for the last time that night, realizing as I cried that the crying wouldn’t get me very far. And I woke up the following morning and made a list:

Lose weight
Get out of debt
Get a job
Get an apartment
Graduate college

It seemed like a massive undertaking. And after what felt like a lifetime of failed attempts at becoming more stable, a list like this one was almost laughable. But I knew it had to be done or the alternative was true darkness.

I could have gone home to Chicago. When my grandfather heard from my mother what happened he got into his car and tried to drive the 15 hours to collect me. She forced him not to. It was my choice, she said, to stay in New York or go home. I had called her several days after the drama took place, never having been good at telling her when I was hurt or needed help. I tentatively told her the whole story. The messy relationship with the gay guy had spiraled out of control, I did not have a handle on myself, we’d gotten into a fight and I punched him hard in the mouth, S tricked me into picking my things up from her apartment and then told me I was crazy, I was now completely destitute, I had my car and a few possessions, I needed a job and a place to live. When I finished the very long story, I held my breath, waiting for a harsh monologue about how I’d yet again made a series of bad decisions that had let to even worse consequences, how I needed to come home immediately, get a job, and clean this mess up, how I needed to figure out my priorities.

Instead, and I will never forget this, there was a moment of silence and then she said “Jenifer. You’re not crazy. You’re absolutely not crazy and you never have been. You might have a lot to figure out and a ways to go before you feel better, but you’re not crazy. And you most certainly do not need to be in a home. I’m so sorry your friends hurt you like that. You know your grandfather has always said that the number of true friends we will have in our lives are fewer than we would sometimes like to believe, that people you were sure you could trust will betray you and lie to you. That’s what’s happened here and I’m so sorry. You’ve made some big mistakes too, but this will all be okay someday.”

I cried. It was like music to hear her compassion. “You’re not crazy,” she said. And instantly the whole terrible mess had been reduced to a nasty scrap on the playground. She laughed at the roughness my friends displayed and reminded me that they weren’t really my friends after all. She also reminded me that I had a lot of work to do.

She told me she’d support me emotionally however I needed her to, but that she would not give me a single dollar unless it was for therapy and even that she would send directly to the therapist. She urged me to think long and hard about what I wanted and how I intended to get it. I now know that my mother saw this as my rock bottom and as a last opportunity for me to wake up. It was.

I spent the rest of the summer sleeping at friends’ apartments and other places, sometimes sleeping in places I should not have been sleeping. I was, for all intents and purposes, homeless.

A dear friend who was one of the most influential at that time helped me get a part time job at the theater company where I’d studied during college.

I met with someone at my old college to get a referral to a clinic of therapists and, after a series of phone calls and questions, I made an appointment with a woman named Karen. I began seeing her that June, shortly after the night of The Punch.

I landed two more part time jobs and I saved up enough money to be able to rent a room in someone’s apartment. The day I moved in there was one of the best days of my life. I finally had my own space, albeit small and odd, but that didn’t matter. I began to carve out more and more of a life for myself. Having a job, being in therapy, and having a certain place to sleep each night felt like winning the lottery. I was a very far cry from leading the kind of life I someday hoped to have where I would be free from my weight, my depression, where I would have a college degree and a direction, but I had begun. And in contrast to the darkness I’d known earlier that summer, I was in heaven.

A friend who’d always had a weight problem started Weight Watchers that summer. I watched him drop 30 pounds in a blink. That September, I began to think that maybe it was time for me to do something about my weight problem. My therapist had suggested Weight Watchers time and again – she’d say that whenever I was ready, it was an option to consider.

On September 27, 2002, I was finally ready. I weighed in on a Friday afternoon. The scale said 264.4 pounds. If I’d stepped on it a few months earlier it probably would have said something closer to 280. I’d lost weight during my difficult summer. I knew that for sure.

My true journey began that day in September. Within the first month I’d lost 20 pounds. I was beyond thrilled.

Six years have passed since then. And I am incredibly proud of how I’ve spent them. I never gave up my effort to lose weight after that day in September of 2002. I have faltered occasionally, maybe even regularly, and succeeded from time to time as well. But I have continued to work at it. And I’ve lost 100 pounds.

I eventually got better jobs and more opportunities and then I got my very own apartment, instead of just renting a room in someone else’s. I remained in therapy, working constantly not only on the present and how to improve mine, but on the past and what led me to this place. Karen and I worked together for five years. She saved my life.

Also, after a lot of meetings, interviews, research, loan requests, and soul searching, I returned to college about a year after that difficult summer. I had to pay for it all myself and I had to work four jobs to afford it, but I finished my degree. I graduated only two years later than my original graduating class, with a BFA in Acting, having received only A’s and B’s the second time around. I exercised constantly, ate well as often as I could, worked all the time, saved money, paid off my debts, repaired friendships and slowly repaired myself.

I reconciled, in some respect, with the gay guy, who is now someone I’m able to have a distant friendship with, but not someone I’ll ever be able to be close to again. Interestingly, S and I have never reconnected. I’ve seen her from time to time, avoiding her when I do, and we still know some of the same people so I get occasional updates on her life. I’m not sure I’m ready, still, to forgive her for the lack of compassion she showed me that night in the lobby. She knows I’ve lost the weight, turned my life around, and have a full, happy world now and it does not escape me that her mishandling of my situation that night spurred me into action, but it’s hard for me to forget the misleading conversations we’d had in the day prior, the cruel look in her eye that night and the lack of compassion and understanding she exhibited. I think she regrets some of her actions as well and is too fearful to come to me with an apology. I owe her an apology too. But that part of the story has yet to unfold.

Six years ago, my life was very different than it is today. This morning, I woke up my to my loving boyfriend kissing and hugging me. He knew me then and knows me now and respects and admires me for the transformation he’s witnessed. He made me breakfast this morning while I finished writing this, our two adorable cats playing on the living room rug. In a few minutes I’ll go for a run and then take a yoga class. It will be a busy weekend for us, with shows to perform in and rehearsals to attend and friends with whom to spend time. And I’ll go to work on Monday morning at my salaried job, complete with health insurance benefits and paid vacation days, and smile to myself about how little anyone in my current life really knows about what my world looked like six years ago.