Jen Larsen's Blog, page 2

present perfect

I spent more than half my life hating
myself.

That’s—a lot of years. That is so much hate. That is so much time
wasted and so much time lost.

I was fat, and I knew that people noticed
my size. I knew they made judgments about me, about my body. And when I was
told or shown in a million tiny ways, over and over and over again, that I was expected to want less and think I deserve less
because I was fat, I said, okay. And I daydreamed a lot about what it would be like to lose all the
weight. Have you seen the way people smile in their After photos when they’re
finally skinny enough to be allowed to be happy?

So I wrote this book, and I called it FUTURE PERFECT. My Ashley, the main character, is a beautiful, confident, and fat teenager.  She’s facing a grandmother who loves her more than anything and is afraid that her weight will hold her back—and so she offers Ashley a bribe to get weight loss surgery. And Ashley is grappling with her fear that despite her own confidence, her grandmother isn’t wrong. And that’s even harder because her grandmother loves her and wants what’s best for her, right?

Jolene is a transgender girl whose parents are really
struggling with accepting what they think is their daughter’s choice and her
identity; she’s also being pressured into “doing something” about her body.
Laura’s parents have very specific ideas about who she should be and what kind
of future she should have, and expect her to follow in her father’s footsteps
as a lawyer. She wants to be an artist, but she’s not sure what exactly she
wants to do with her life.

They’re all struggling to stand strong
against what other people expect from them. But when I was Ashley’s age, I
would have accepted that bribe in a heartbeat. I would have thought it was a
great idea—a shortcut to a happily-ever-after, an easy way out in a world where
it is easier to be thin than to be fat, and I wouldn’t have to fight so much
any more for my right to be happy and chase my dreams and feel good about
myself.

In my early twenties, I discovered the “health at
every size” movement and it felt like a revelation. It’s the crazy, radical
idea (ha) that fat does not mean unhealthy, and fat does not mean ugly and it’s
a not shortcut for “you should be ashamed of yourself.” I was meeting all these
beautiful, amazing, confident fat women who were proud of their bodies, who
felt beautiful and strong and pushed back against the haters who told them they
didn’t have any right to be happy.

And I loved it so much.

I tried really, really hard to be like them. I tried
really hard to be what felt like brave and to love my own body and be
comfortable in my skin, but the idea that my weight was the entire reason I was
unhappy, depressed, anxious, was something I just could not shake, because sometimes it feels like so much of the world is
designed to cut you down and make you second-guess
yourself. Throw examples in your face of how you’re supposed to be and look and feel and act. Who you’re supposed to love and be attracted to.
How you’re supposed to present
yourself and your ideas about yourself to the world. And if you disagree—you’re
smacked down. You’re told you’re wrong.

I didn’t feel like I had the strength to keep on
fighting that battle. I was tired. And weight loss surgery seemed like a
miracle to me—a way to get out of this terrible cycle land myself a
happily-ever-after (where happy=thin, of course).

Imagine my astonishment when I realized that finally
giving in and losing all that weight, like I fixed nothing. Happiness
did not suddenly descend upon me in a glorious shower of sparkles. What
actually happened is that I realized that you can be unhappy in your body at
any size. And you will be, if you’re uncomfortable in your skin, with who you
are and how you feel. If you really believe that you need to be perfect before
you can be worthwhile.

I was so angry—furious—I had wasted all
that time waiting for my life to start instead of going out and being happy.
Waiting for a perfect future instead of grabbing a happy present.

So FUTURE PERFECT—this
book is about the person I wish I had known, when I was young and struggling.
The person I wish I could have been. This book is about how hard it is to stay
true to yourself, to believe in yourself and be brave and proud and strong—but
how important it is, and that it is worth it.

Ashley and Jolene and Laura—their
stubbornness in believing in themselves and their willingness to reject other
people’s versions of them—they’re the kinds of people I wished I had been as a
teenager. They’re the kinds of role models I would have liked to have had.

I wrote the book for the teenaged me who
needed to know that she didn’t have to give in. I wrote the book for the girls
now who are trying to be strong and pushing back against people who say they
can’t have what they want or be what they want unless they look a certain way.
Who keep hearing that they’re not allowed to be happy unless they’re a certain
size, or have a certain body type or look a certain way or act a certain way
that other people find appropriate, whether or not it is what you want and who you are.

This book is my message
to my younger self, to everyone struggling against other people’s demands and
expectations and messages, to all our current fears and all our worries and insecurities—you are seen, and you are understood. You’re not alone, and you are
not broken and you have nothing to fix. You are worth something right now. You are lovable and good and
have I mentioned not alone.

There’s no such thing as future perfect and
a happily ever after. You’re perfect now, just being yourself. There is no
future version of you that deserves more happiness, more good things, more
success and more love.

It’s incredibly hard to keep pushing back and
it hurts sometimes and it can be exhausting and demoralizing but it is so worth
it and you are so worth it.

snap decisions

This is what I remember the most. The doctor said, “It’ll be nice to be able to walk down the aisle of an airplane, right? To fit down the aisle, and to not see that look of horror when someone sees you coming.”

He said that because I weighed three
hundred pounds. He said that because he thought that all I wanted in life was
to not be that creeping horror, shuffling sideways to the back of the plane,
trying not to make eye contact with anyone because I didn’t want to see their
relief when I passed by. Trying not to make eye contact with the person in my
row because I didn’t want to see horror, and I really didn’t want to see pity,
and I really didn’t want someone to lean over and explain to me that I was fat
and that there are things I could do about it. Like water and jogging, or
carrots and the Thighmaster.

He said that like it was a fact about all
fat people. All fat people hate themselves. All fat people know that what’s
good in life is really only accessible to thin people. Thin is the most
important variable in of life’s equations. Thin equals happy, thin equals
beautiful, thin equals a life worth living.

The most embarrassing fact of my life—and
oh, how many embarrassing facts there are in my life—is that it was true. I was
angry at him for saying it, for buying into the cliché of the fat person. For
assuming that my life would transform immediately. Because he was saying all
the things I had secretly thought. He was reinforcing all the secret fantasies
I had about the way everything about me would be more amenable and lovable and
acceptable to the whole rest of the world. To everyone on airplanes and
everyone in my life. To myself. When I lost all the weight. When I got weight
loss surgery.

He was my psychological consultant, the
doctor who was tasked with clearing me for surgery. He signed off my mental and
emotional fitness to get a surgery that I genuinely believed was going to save
my life. Not just physically—though I was actually damn healthy—but emotionally.

And three months later I got weight loss
surgery. Seven months later I had lost over a hundred pounds; a year and a half
from my surgery date, I had lost about 180 pounds.

I lost a lot of things along with the
weight. I lost my sense of self. My sense of proportion. My sense of dignity,
of maturity, of control. I was skinny, but my life wasn’t suddenly and
magically perfect—and that completely astonished me. It sounds ridiculous, having
really fallen for the fairy tale of weight loss. But I had fallen for it
completely, and then was blinded by the egregious lack of a happily ever after.

The nature of the weight loss surgery I got
is that you can completely ignore the things the doctors tell you to do. They
say, exercise, don’t drink, don’t smoke, eat well. And you don’t bother to do
any of that, but still lose weight. You still lose every pound you want to
lose, and then some.

The problem was that I lost all those
pounds, but I didn’t have to change a goddamn thing about my self. I didn’t
have to address any of the emotional or psychological issues. I didn’t have to
figure out why I had been depressed—why I was still so, so depressed, despite
the fact that the one thing I thought had been ruining my life was suddenly
gone.

I was skinny, finally, and I was fascinated
by the physicality of it. It was like my skeleton had floated up to the surface
from the bottom of a murky pond. I had muscles and tendons and bones and in the
shower I’d soap the ridges of my ribs, the knobs of my hipbones, and be amazed
to make their acquaintance. It wasn’t pretty—I lost so much weight that I
didn’t look like myself, and then I lost past that, to the point where I looked
like a sick stranger. Briefly, I was a size two. Sometimes I was disappointed
that I couldn’t be a size zero.

It doesn’t go away, you see. I thought that
my body wrong when I was obese; I thought my body was wrong when I was thin
past the point of health. I thought there was something wrong with my body
whatever I looked like, because there’s always just one more thing to fix
before I look perfect, feel good in bed with hands on my body, feel sexy in a
dress or a bathing suit, feel comfortable in my skin.

I felt helpless before. I tried to dodge
out of the feeling by getting weight loss surgery, and now I’m angry. That I
wasn’t fixed, yes. But also that so many people deal with this, this exact and
pervasive struggle at whatever size they are, whatever shape, whatever they do.
That we’re not good enough, with the implication that the best we have to offer
to the world is an appropriately sized pair of jean.

Magazine articles about body image talk
about loving yourself despite your flaws. Sometimes they get really radical and
they talk about loving yourself because of your flaws and that is supposed to
be empowering. And it pisses me off because we’re talking about flaws here. A
body that doesn’t look like the body of a Victoria’s Secret model is a flawed
factory reject. My thighs aren’t the thighs of a figure skater, so they’re not
good enough, but I should love the flubby little things any way because I am so
incredibly self-compassionate.

I want this: I want to say, don’t love
yourself even though you’re not perfect—love yourself because you have a body
and it’s worth loving and it is perfect. Be healthy, which is perfect at
whatever size healthy is and at whatever size happy is.

And of course that’s totally easy and I
have just caused a revolution in body image. Let’s all go home now.

Right, so, I don’t know what the answer is
and I don’t know how to make it happen and I don’t know what to do except keep
yelling about it, wherever I can. Saying there’s no magic number and there’s no
perfect size and of course you know that, but we have to keep telling each
other because it’s hard to remember sometimes. We have to keep saying it. We
have to figure out how to believe it.

Feliz Crompleaños

It’s possible that yesterday, on the ninth birthday of crommy
crom, the bombest of crommests, we spoiled him the tiniest bit. It’s possible
this is because every time I look at his little face, which has gotten so very
gray, my heart seizes up and I get to thinking about the life spans of dogs and
the feeling of loss and the inevitable heat death of my own personal universe and
my heart seizes up and my brain goes all haywire and then suddenly my dog is
buried under an avalanche of love, some of which is in boughten form.

In the morning we jumped right up, when he indicated he was
awake by whopping me on the head with a heavy paw and whining about the difficulities
of being him, Crom, in the world without a person to love him or understand the
pain the he, Crom, suffers every day vis a vis being understood, loved properly
the way he should, treated with the respect he deserves, and not ever having a
stomach full enough of things that are not kibble, which is evil formed into small
crunchy pieces and sent to earth to plague him.

We leapt into the world where he got to run free and happy
in the park and then fly down the seawall, barking after birds without me trailing
behind weakly saying no, stop, Crom, hey, don’t, what, oh, hell, fuck, and damn.
We stopped at a play structure and clambered all over it, and he went down the
slide many times, and then demanded that I too go down the slide many times (dampening
my butt) as he followed after, and then we experimented with various configurations
of going down the slide together, most of which were awkward but all of which
he celebrated as successful.

We ran across the big old soccer field, and then I hooked him
up to his leash and he towed me across the boulevard because he had opinions
about our next stop, the pet store. He had strong opinions about how fast we
should get there (quickly) and how we should improve our time (by diving into
traffic and cutting diagonally across the street) and three small older ladies
found his determination charming and hilarious because they were not the ones
trying to hold back a 35 pound dog who is stronger than I am and always has
been.

At the pet store, he carefully inspected all the offered
wares and selected a four-foot-long bull penis. I handed it to him, and he
bolted for the door because no way was anyone going to take away his bull
penis, no how. He dragged me home and he settled down in our bed with his bull
penis (our bed!) and he spent the entire afternoon gnawing that thing down to a
greasy spot on our bed (our bed!).

And then we napped the nap of the just (and for some of us
the just-have-eaten a four-foot bull penis). For his evening walk, K took him
to the beach where he frolicked like a dog who took a deep and satisfying nap
after eating a four-foot bull penis, and then came home and napped the nap of
the dog who had played in the park and then ate a four-foot bull penis and then
chased birds at the beach and who had never napped before and was making up for
lost time.

Bedtime is always an adventure of a routine for all the pets,
because at bedtime we feed the cats a can of wet food divided between them, and
then we offer the dogs the can (and a decoy can) to lick clean.

“It’s Crommy’s birthday!” we said. “We should
give him a real treat!”

“We should give him a cake!” K said, and you have
never seen a prettier cake fashioned of an entire can of cat food, with a candle
right in the center, and a can with some scraps to distract Woody.

“Feliz Crompleanos!” we sang, and looked askance
at the candle, but we blew it out for him, and then he sniffed his cake, looked
at Woody going to town on his can, and seemed to feel he had gotten the bad
side of the deal.

“Eat your cake!” we urged, and he sniffed it
again, and then delicately lifted the entire patty of cat food off the plate
and in a single breath hoovered it into the black hole of his head. And then he
was mad, because Woody was still working away at the empty can that this patty
had come out of.

We fed him a Pepto Bismol, because we realized that this was
probably not the happiest day his digestion ever encountered, and then he was
ready to play his customary game of bedtime tug as if he had not spent the day
eating questionable things.

He is nine years old now, and so grey, though fast as ever
after the birds who mock him, excited as ever about a slide, as stubborn as
ever about the excellent ideas he has, as loud as ever when he snores, with the
silkiest ears and the worst farts in the world. He’s my little monster-brat
baby and nine is too old for him to be, because he needs far more time to be
terrible and sweet and ridiculous and whiny. It’s never enough time.

begin as you mean to go on

Back in the molten days of the primordial past, when people
who posted things on the internet made super a lot of fun of the word blog
(BLLLLLAAAAAAWG) and congratulated themselves for not writing blogs, I was
congratulating myself for not writing a blog. I was writing an ONLINE JOURNAL
and that meant carefully crafted mini-essays that delved into the minutia of my
life but in a poetic, charming, introspective-but-relatable way that made you
laugh, and cry, and cheer.

Or that’s what it felt like I had to do. The pressure, my
god. To always write something funny or smart or wise or knowing or smart or in
some way crafted to give you the feels and feel like you loved me. I started
off writing almost every day and it slowly slowly drifted down to just
sometimes and almost never but I kept writing online for almost ten years and
then I got paid to write online for a couple of years and then I said you know
what, I do not want to write online any more because I am afraid every time I
post something I am only opening myself to ridicule and misery and who the fuck
knows where that came from, because I’ve never gotten hate mail or hate
comments but such is the stuck-in-your-own-brainness of so many folks in this
world who need to get unstuck from their brains and be the -ness they need to
see in their lives.

Anyway, this latest tick over to a new couple of end digits
in the year, you see people reflecting on their past and thinking about their
journeys and being all retrospective and introspective and nostalgiaspective
and I realized I don’t remember very much about my year at all.

I did not like school in any way and always felt bombarded
and raw and vulnerable. We looked for an apartment for three months or so, and
found one and loved it and moved in May. My best friend and soulmate was
getting sicker and sicker, and the hospice care versus transplant journey was so
fucking fraught and endless and the story ended with a race to his bedside to be
there for his last breaths, labored and sucking and painful, and a part of me shrunk
into a tiny ball of pain that still beats inside my chest, behind my heart. And
– what. I gave up on so many manuscripts and book proposals that I had written
and been proud of and somehow just got crushed into tiny bits and discarded. I
discovered I loved screenwriting but the script I was writing would never get
produced because epic space operas were too expensive, especially when they’re
written by nobodies. I stopped writing anything else. I abided.

No, I stopped binge drinking. That’s a thing. Why wouldn’t I
think that was a good thing, an impressive thing, a thing to be proud of? My
ability to self-sabotage is a magical and powerful one, and my fear of writing
is a powerful one, and the combination is like a Wonder Twins kind of thing
where my terror and my uncanny ability to dodge around the things that cause
terror become me having maybe too many glasses of really bad wine and then
saying WHOOPS guess I can’t work!

No more of that.

More thinking about what I want, and what will get me there.
More thinking about where I am now, alongside all the thinking about where I
want to go. More being here and taking care of myself and loving my family than
panicking about not being enough and trying to bury that misery and self-hate.
Less self-hate.

More posts. (BLLLLAAAAAAAWGS) More keeping track of my life
and marking small moments, less generalized anxiety. More writing, less [     ].

I’ve read two books so far this third day of the year, and I want to read 100 total. I’m in the middle of plotting a novel, and I want to write it, all of it, steadily. I’ve decided to trek to the library every weekday to write, and I have done that, despite Rainfall Warnings and sheets of rain and self-doubt. I’ve started plotting this book, and it’s about girl gamers and a fuck you to #gamergate. I’m worried about Crom because he seems like he’s always anxious, always. I love my wife more than most things by which I mean any of the things. We just bought a pink couch and how does it get better than that? Well, in an infinite number of ways for an infinite number of folks but right now for us, it is an upgrade in the quality of life we started upgrading already with the purchase of full-sized electric blankets on sale. Also we roasted a duck for New Year’s Eve, and that was an olympic effort. Why does anyone roast a duck? That is a question for the ages.

I am happy to be alive, for the first time in a really long
time. How are you?

last night of the year

This year has hurt. It has torn me into pieces. And I have helped, enthusiastically ripping my own self to shreds in the service of coping and trying to deal and trying to survive. But I have survived, right?

That’s the thing. We’ve lived through this year, despite the pain and the horror, the grief and the sadness, the frustration and the anger. We’ve navigated the ugliness and plowed right through the awful and we’ve paused at the beautiful things – because there are always beautiful things, whether or not we’re in the mood to do some of that counting our blessings shit – and now we’re right here at the end of it.

And the beauty of these completely arbitrary and artificial demarcations of time and years and lives is that we have a spot to just stop and take a breath and maybe if we’re in the mood for it, think about those beautiful things, or just be grateful we made it through the unbeautiful things of every shape and size. And congratulate ourselves for being here. Cheer for the luck of our loves and our lives. Make a resolution, maybe, or just make it through. Whatever you need to do.

I’m going to celebrate my still-hereness, and I’m going to forgive myself for all my floundering and my many mistakes and missteps and miseries and in twenty nineteen, I’m going to do my best, the way I always try to do, whatever that ends up looking like. And also write more letters, and floss, and smash the kyriarchy.

Happy last night of the year, from the western side of Canada. Love to you, and yours, and all the beautiful things that you deserve (all of them).

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waving not drowning

What I did was promise my little dog I’d always come home for him. It didn’t cure anything. And I still want to—I won’t say die, because dying is messy, and scary, and painful and ugly and terrible.

But I don’t want to be around any more. If that makes sense.

Unfortunately, since there are few other options for “not being around anymore” (unless cryogenics has advanced past preserving Walt Disney’s head?) I think I should probably cut the shit and just admit that I’m suicidal.

I’ve been arguing about it. The therapist asks, “are you suicidal?” and I scoff. Actual scoffing, with a scoff-face and scoff gestures and scoffing my head all around scoffingly. “Pfsh,” I say, which is a scoff noise. “No. Geeze. I just—you know. Want to be dead. But not die. That’s totally different.”

“Okay,” they say slowly, gently. “Okay. Well. Do you have a plan?”

“Pfsh,” I say. “I would if I wanted to die. But I don’t. See?”

“Okay,” they say nodding, pursing up their lips, wrinkles forming on their forehead that I want to smooth down for them. “Do you feel safe?”

That always makes me think of Gandalf. IS IT SECRET? IS IT SAFE? But I don’t laugh because this is a very serious conversation.

“Yes,” I say.

Which is true. I feel safe from imminent death. And I also feel like that’s a bit of a disappointment.

Mostly I feel sad, and exhausted, and broken into shards that are too sharp to touch, and rubbed thin, almost transparent. I feel sick and anxious and thick with dread. I feel stuck. Unsaveable. That this is the how it is and this is just how it goes and my voice is too small and weedy to shout it all down.

Shouting is hard. Right now I’m not super good at hard things. Which includes planning to die and then the actual dying.

I think, though, that I don’t want to die. I don’t want to wish I were just not around. I don’t want to give in, and every day that I don’t is a really good day, a non-zero day, and that’s something.

Sometimes I resent making promises, even to a dog. It doesn’t seem fair to be beholden, because who knows what’s going to happen and maybe there will be nuclear war and I’ll be horribly radiation burned and—I don’t know. The metaphor doesn’t seem funny any more.

This isn’t a cry for help, or a bid for sympathy, or a notice, or a warning. I think I never really process anything until I talk myself through it with my fingers on the keyboard and the words showing up on the screen, sometimes surprising scary ones and startlingly deep ones and deeply, deeply stupid ones.

I didn’t expect to write this. I am hesitating about posting it. But you can’t deal with something until you look right at it, is what they tell me. You’ve got to stare it in the eye before you can punch it in the face, set it on fire, stomp it out. Eventually. Baby steps.

Naps. Reeses peanut butter cups. Breathing, not dying. I can do that.

vulnerability

When my memoir came out, I stopped sleeping. Well, I stopped for about a month before it came out, and then luckily it came out sooner than I expected so maybe that shortened the Epic Time of Unsleeping, overall?

It felt endless, so I guess it doesn’t matter how long it actually was.

I was excited about the book, and proud too. I had always wanted to be a writer, to publish a book, to stop lolling around whining about my DREAMS and actually do something about them and I did, I did that. I wrote an entire book and found an agent and sold it to a wonderful publisher and I was so so excited and thrilled and feeling lucky and good.

And all of that excitement, I think, that long road from idea to manuscript to book-in-the-world, obscured that last bit. That the book was going to exist outside my head. It would be something that people could pick up, and read, and have opinions about.

It is probably pretty common, that bone-deep urge to stand over someone who’s reading something you wrote so you can explain to them what everything means and why you said X and what Y means and look how funny that joke is and here is the opinion you should have about it (even if in real life you would actually hand someone your manuscript AND FLEE FOR YOUR LIFE).

With a memoir, it felt like that times ALL OF IT AND EVERYTHING. I don’t have just my writing and my careful selection of just the right word as if it were carefully arranged fruit on a decorative plate. It was my life there. Me. All the mess of me, and the truth of me, and the stupid things I had done and thought and the decisions I made. Just sent out into the world defenseless.

People would pick up the book and inevitably not just have opinions about the writing but ABOUT MY SOUL. Or my reasonable approximation thereof.

What it boils down to: Publishing a memoir makes you feel insanely, madly, horribly, painfully vulnerable. It is a little bit terrifying. It is completely strange. It’s kind of exhilarating. And if you don’t just say, you know what screw this I have no control over what people think let’s just let go and let Goethe, you go crazy.

So I went a little crazy for awhile.

I got better, though.

But this feels very similar, here waiting for my episode of In Deep Shift to happen. It was an amazing experience, strange and wonderful and crazy and enlightening and it changed me completely. That week of filming shook me awake and slapped me around and pushed me back into my life. I gained a tremendous amount of bravery and hope.

I moved forward after years of stagnation, trying to figure out what was next. I moved to Madison, and I found the courage to pitch a YA novel that tackles the bullshit politics of weight and happiness and self esteem and I started to figure out how I could be a writer, all the time full time and it was good.

And Jonas filmed the awkward, halting start of that. Tears and terror and dopeyness and reluctance. He put his hand between my shoulder blades and kept gently propelling me forward. He helped me recognize the incredible support network I had around me; he helped me find faith in the possibility that I could be a support for myself, too.

It’s all on tape, and I feel so incredibly vulnerable and completely exposed and a little scared. Here I am again, laying it all out to be picked over.

But I’m braver now, and a little stronger and a lot smarter and I’m pretty proud of myself for saying yes to the experience and yes to the opportunity to talk about the bullshit fairytale of weight loss and the incredible struggle to find happiness and solidity in your own skin. I wrote the memoir because I wanted to tell people they weren’t alone, tackling body image issues and anxiety and unhappiness and I did this episode for the same reason and I’m scared to be so vulnerable but I think, I think it might be worth it.

I’ve been sleeping okay.

taking it all off

When I was fat, I thought the only things I had any control over were my shoes, my eyebrows and my hair. Everything else was a mess, but maybe you wouldn’t notice if you saw how well groomed I was, right?

And so I spent really a fantastic amount of time hunting down the beautiful shoes that would broadcast around the world my sense of extraordinary style. And researching aestheticians who could give me an eyebrow arch that could cut you. And a hair stylist who would finally turn me into the sassy, punky, cute and sexy, pretty pretty badass princess I was inside my heart, but not on top of my head.

And money. I spent a lot of money too.

I was picky, so so picky, and never quite entirely happy with any of my choices and I knew, because I am not entirely self-delusional and only slightly stupid, that my dissatisfaction wasn’t because my hair looked dopey, it was because I was hunting desperately for enlightenment, peace, and true happiness that I would never achieve in the stylist’s chair but only through a deeply internal spiritual journey etcetera and so forth om mani padme hum, I know, I know.

Even when you’re so completely aware of the lie you’re telling yourself, it’s still so desperately alluring—that it could be that easy, so easy, to get what you want and make your way to who you want to be.

When I was fat, it was a way to try to make up for the fact that I was fat. When I lost so much weight, it was clear that I still wasn’t perfect, but these were obstacles I could overcome. The shoes and the eyebrows and the hair were out there, by god by golly by gum.

I manage to subdue it most of the time, to maintain rationality and be pleased with myself in a general sense, but when depression comes creeping in on all fours, usually in the winter, it’s harder to fight off the impulse to try and instafix everything with another pair of boots and a better hairstylist who is better at hairstyling and personality augmentation.

It’s been happening lately—I was sad. I decided to grow out my hair and have Mermaid Hair, shiny curls to the middle of my back in pastel colors. Except that my hair is fine, and so straight it’s a negative four on the Kinsey scale. And it grows about a quarter of an inch every third century. So I was constantly, eternally frustrated with it, too short, too shaggy, too much of a mess, cut it all off, no wait I’ll grow it now, cut it all off, no wait what was I thinking? Just another frustration on top of all the other frustrations in my life. Another reason to dislike myself.

Last week I was filled with epic loathing when I looked at my latest attempt to grow it out, and I made an emergency appointment and she took it all off and it looked so bad and I cried. Hair is very emotional, you guys.

I thought I’d dye it. Or get another, better haircut. Or grow it out again. Or try a different dye than last time. Something, anything. This documentary show I had been a part of, it was going to air soon and there would be interviews and there was a pit in my stomach about how I’d look in these interviews for this show in which I was supposed to be a beautiful butterfly emerging from a chrysalis but what kind of butterfly has a pile of burned feathers on its head for a haircut?

And then I stopped. And I stepped back and I thought about why I was panicking—this show. This show I had done, that was about figuring out how to be happy. Stepping back from the half-conscious chasing after superficial, temporary pointless things. About how to become whole.

So I decided to stop. Quit. Be done. I was finished.

My girlfriend found a coupon for Great Clips and we headed over and I said to the stylist, please buzz me.

They were very startled, and they said, okay are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Are you sure you’re sure that you’re sure?

I said yes, please. I am done.

It was already fairly short on the sides and she took off the top and when she was done I ran my palm over the soft dark fuzz and I saw that I looked nothing like myself and exactly like myself and I was completely delighted.

Women keep saying to me, I wish I could do that! I could never pull it off! And I am proud that I have managed to not jump up and down and shout you can you can you totally can and you should oh my god THE FREEDOM but when I catch myself in the mirror I am jumping up and down inside. I love it. It does feel like freedom. And showering takes half the time and I wake up looking just flawless and it is nice, so nice, to have a reminder every day that I can do this, this being me thing. I don’t need props. I got this.

me + Oprah = bffs

Honestly, I don’t really remember how it happened. And that can pretty much be said about the entire process, start to finish.

It was not too long after the memoir came out, I remember that. And I was still reeling from the whole process—interviewing and public speaking in public and the crazy, unexpected opportunities (Good Morning America? Sure okay!) and other crazy things that just totally fell through but mostly the fact that PEOPLE WERE ACTUALLY READING THE BOOK.

(also PEOPLE the magazine!)

The only way I had managed to finish the thing, and send it off to a publisher and let it be packaged and published and shipped out into the world where just anyone could pick it up and have an opinion about me was because I managed to completely suppress the fact that this was the inevitable result of, you know. Publishing a book.

So I was a little crazed at that point. When someone (my amazing publicist at Seal? An email from the ether?) contacted me and said Hey, there’s this documentary show on the Oprah network? It’s this guy Jonah Elrond, right, who had this extraordinary experience once, and documented his transformation.

Now on his new show, what he’s doing is traveling to people who have also had transformative experiences and talking to them about what they’ve gone through and what they still need to do, in their lives, to be happy. So we think maybe you’re a transformed kind of lady and we’d like you to be on an episode! And I said oh yeah, sure cool, that’s cool.

Nothing happened for awhile, I remember that. And I pretty much forgot about it, but then there was a flurry of phone calls, and conference calls, and a video chat with the host/creator and some other people (and I think I actually ended up buying the professional version of Skype right in the middle of it because we kept having connectivity issues) and then there was a great silence again, during which I pulled my shoulders back down from my ears and sighed a great sigh of sort of relief because the whole thing seemed very complicated.

But news, occasionally—they’re deciding on candidates! We’re running it by Harpo! They really like you! They’re still talking about things and the business! I think at some point I realized there was a small possibility that Oprah her own self had maybe actually possibly said my name out loud and I closed my eyes tight and wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

I mean, you know how the story ends—they chose me for one of their stories. An hour-long episode. They’d come to Utah and hang out with me and my friends for a week. They’d interview family. They’d bring along ideas and tools and have people for me to talk to and adventures for me to have and it would be a blast, they said.

And then they showed up in July, and it was one of the most surreal weeks of my life. I took them thrift store shopping. They took me to a dojo to learn how to reconnect to my body and also be fierce and join a ninja club. The dojo master and his students were entirely welcoming, generous, and just crazy talented.

We did karaoke! We threw an enormous fourth of July shindig (that could not have been even half as great without my incredible and talented roommate Sare), went to dinner, went on a nature walk with a lovely therapist, went on a run through the mountains at sunset, did so many interviews, learned my favorite new joke of all time ever, met the cutest dog in the world outside of my own dog, bewildered the neighbors, laughed like a loon, and hung out with some of the warmest, coolest, kindest people on the crew ever, ever. Some of them went shirtless and that was pretty good.

Oh my god, it was—it just was. It was everything, every day, all day.

Every time I wasn’t on camera I was upstairs in my bedroom, hiding under the covers. Quite literally. My friends, my gorgeous, so-lucky-to-have-them friends, they rallied. My best friend flew out from San Francisco to support me and local friends all came to hold my hand (and be on television) and do karaoke and remind me that this was cool, it was awesome, it was an amazing experience and it was overwhelming but it was wonderful, right?

It was pretty wonderful.

And now the episode is on its way to the television screen. In Deep Shift premieres on February 6, and my episode airs on the 15th. And I am filled with glee and excitement and panic and worry and gladness and–oh, just all sorts of things.

I don’t think I can watch it. Being there, inside my head, experiencing the entire week, that was pretty astonishing. Watching myself wander around wide-eyed and doing my best to not fall over for 52 minutes? I can’t do it. You watch it for me! Don’t tell me how dorky I look.