Surprisingly, I managed to fall in with a group of girls who were considered popular, Elizabeth included. Even more surprising, I got my first boyfriend. We never spoke. Actually, our breakup talk—initiated by me—was our longest conversation during our entire daylong relationship. The reason I bailed: his previous girlfriend implied I’d have to make out with him, and my inner perfectionist shouted, “What if you are a bad kisser?!” I couldn’t risk it and was too terrified to go through with it. Overall, really skinny seemed to be treating me well, at least from an outside perspective.
As I fried away my frizz for hours a night, thinking, Take that, Fluffy, Dani Sherman was changing. Yes, I was changing my look, but my desire to fit in was tested by the biggest change of all.
Books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret make getting your first period sound exciting, something to be eagerly anticipated. But really, is there any rite of passage more humiliating? At least that’s how I felt. Everything about this change into something unknown to me—a woman—freaked me out. First, the act itself was disgusting—like ewww gross, a horror movie in your panties. Second, this intensely mortifying gross experience is somehow never private. I decided I could avoid some of this by not telling my mom. So I concealed the blood, using tissues as pads. Reality check: tissues last only so long. I needed parental guidance to tell me what to do to stop Scream 4: Panties Edition from staining all of my clothes.
“Mom, I think I may have gotten my period,” I blurted to her the next day, tears dripping down my face. I wanted to disappear.
“Oh wow, congratulations. My little girl is growing up. Wait, you think? Are you bleeding?”
“Yep!” I shouted between sobs.
“Why are you crying? This is great news.”
“I don’t know,” was all I could say, through broken tears and heavy breaths.
My mom, having gotten the confirmation she was looking for, put her arms around me, holding me tightly. Ugh, teary-eyed and huggy. Like, please, anything but that reaction. And, as I predicted, everyone wound up finding out: aunts, uncles, cousins, my father. The very moment when I most wanted to crawl into bed, hide, and never be noticed by anyone in the outside world was the same moment that all attention was on me, with mazels and the Jewish minhag (ritual) of the slap in the face—and that slap hurt!
Then no sooner did my mother bring home my first box of pads than I got boobs. Does anything scream, “Look at me!” more than two protruding knobs of flab? I was becoming a woman, except I could never compare to the women around me, like my own mom and Elizabeth’s. They belonged in this upper-class town, and there was one thing I knew for certain—I sure as hell didn’t.
I was different from this town and privileged life I grew up in. I didn’t belong here, and I hated it. I hated the fact that it was so hard for me to find my place, to fit in, to be normal. I hated the fact that I felt so different—so weird—and I couldn’t put my finger on why. But most of all, I hated myself for hating it so much. I knew these were lucky problems, and how dare I feel bad about myself when there were so many real problems in the world? I also felt like I could never do enough to make up for all I was given. I would never be enough.
I calmed this guilt and self-hate with the only control I had, control over food. This meant further tightening the reins on my eating, thinking the less I ate, the better I would feel. I would chew on Cotton Candy Bubblicious instead of eating breakfast or lunch. Every single night, I would order steamed vegetable dumplings or steamed chicken or shrimp with mixed vegetables with no sauce. I would savor each bite I took. Even the blandest dish tasted like heaven to my starved palate.
I liked eating my one meal in private because I could take my time and really savor each bite. After I was done, I would still have a twinge of hunger in my tummy, and that would make me feel satisfied. I would play soccer every day after school, and while I was running, I wouldn’t only think about being the best on the field, I would think about all the calories burned, and about how when I sweated, my stomach skin would get cold. Someone told me that meant you were burning calories, so I would always feel my stomach for that coldness and smile a little when I touched it.
I decided to stop pretending to be a cool, normal girl. Normal? I could laugh at the fact that people actually believed that farce. Normal people don’t think about ways to lose weight 24/7. Normal people don’t have to study into the early morning to keep up. Why should I even try to fit in? It was making me stand out and be noticed in ways that I didn’t feel ready for—like my daylong bogus relationship and comments about my cool clothes, which made people take notice of what I believed to be a not-good-enough body. Plus, caring about my clothes and makeup wasn’t me. I was over pretending. I didn’t know what me was, but I was trying too hard to be something I wasn’t, and it was getting tiring. I started wearing baggy sweatpants again (let’s be real, comfort always mattered more than style to this girl) and tossed my makeup. Every day after school, while girls made plans to go to the mall or head to each other’s houses to do their homework, I went straight home, put on my back brace for my bad posture, which I hadn’t told a soul about, not even Elizabeth, and did my homework alone.
“Why don’t you hang out with us anymore?” Elizabeth asked between classes in the hallway one afternoon.
“I don’t know. Just been busy,” I mused, then changed the subject. “So, my darlin’, in more important news, what’s going on with you and Robert?” I gave her a nudge with my elbow.
“Well, we were at this party, playing spin the bottle…”
Worked like a charm. Deflection, deflection, deflection.
Going home alone also allowed me to avoid the after-shopping group trip for Chinese food at Tea Garden, where I used to get sesame chicken. There was no way I could eat that anymore, with its sugary sauce and pools of oil. It was hard enough to make excuses about lunch. If I stayed with the group, how would I skip what had been my favorite dish? That deep-fried and battered chicken that had once made me salivate now made me want to gag.
The girls were changing anyway and not for the better. Boys, parties, and material things seemed to take priority over anything, friendship included. Those topics were bullshit to me, and I preferred to spend time alone then be bothered with it. Looking back, I would have felt this way anywhere I went to school. There are good people and bad people everywhere, especially at that impressionable age when people are discovering who they are—and simply put, baa—kids become sheep and are easily swayed in their opinions, sometimes doing the wrong things just to fit in. I wasn’t comfortable with what they were about, but I also wasn’t sure what I was about either. I couldn’t handle the bad kids—the kids who were mean and made fun of other kids—and most of the good kids were like me: shy, unsure of themselves, quiet. I couldn’t navigate and find my own friends while dismissing the mean girls around me.
That’s why I decided I’d rather focus on things I could control: my diet, sports, and schoolwork. That’s what truly made me happy, or at least protected me by keeping me safe from experiences and people that could potentially hurt me. For the rest of seventh and eighth grade, I lived like this—waking up from anxiety-ridden nightmares about heading to high school, where things were sure to get lonelier and much more complicated.
My fears were right. When high school began, I was left with soccer, homework, and my eating disorder—the only friend I could trust, the only friend I could count on, and the only thing I could control.
FULL Life, September 2013
“Are you feeling better?” my dad asked as I entered our shared office. I saw the big fish hanging on his wall. My grandpa had caught it many years ago, and it had been hanging there ever since, back