Page 16 of The Love Haters

TOTAL(Do better!)

This was literally everything I had to say about my day. This list was a full 3-D rendering of my inner life. And, for the record: this would have been a heartbreaking list. Any total over a thousand wascatastrophic.

Shouldn’t have had that black coffee.

Anyway—I amassed hundreds of these. That’s what my journals became. Just like the starvation study confirmed back in the forties: when you’re starving, that’s all you think about.

I must have become very boring. Honestly.

Sometimes, very late at night, I’d wonder if that was partly why Lucas cheated—before shaking myself by the emotional shoulders and reminding myself, again, of something that I mostly, usually, was determined to believe: It was never thecheatee’sfault. It was always the cheater’s.

Maybe Ihadbecome boring. But nothing about that forced Lucas tobang Lili Ventura.

They were broken up now, by the way.

More important, guess what I did after I kicked Lucas out of our apartment?

I ate a gallon of chocolate chip cookie–dough ice cream.

Not a pint. Agallon.

It was a melted soup by the time I finished, but I got there.

And then I ate nothing but ice cream for a week. And then… I bought a bunch of books on body positivity and read them all, unfollowed Lucas and everyone associated with him, gave my thighs permission to lovingly caress each other again… and declared an unstable truce with my body.

Quite the healing journey. I’d come a long, long way in a year. I was proud of myself—and my thighs.

But I was still a beginner, if I’m honest.

It was one thing to be body-positive in theory—and quite another to do it in reality.

I was still wearing black jeans and T-shirts every day. I was still keeping to the sides of the world, hiding behind other people in group photos, avoiding mirrors.

I’d changed my thinking, and changed my behavior, and given myself permission to just eat anything I wanted. I’d even—and this might’ve been a stroke of genius—found some beat-up old art books on the $1 cart of a used bookstore, bought them all, and used them to make a self-acceptance journal. This became a nightly project—cutting out pictures of plump, cellulite-laden Baroque ladies who had been painted naked (admiringly, it seemed) by old masters like Rubens and Titian and Botticelli and pasting them admiringly into a drawing sketchbook.

The idea was to pay attention to images of women who hadn’t been photoshopped. To unlock myself from our current era’s beauty standards. To draft a peace accord with my thighs. To redefine “beautiful” broadly enough to fit my current, non-starving, thigh-touching self into that category. To be at home in my body as it was—whatever that meant.

A tall-ass order.

But I really was kinder to myself now.

I just hadn’t put that progress to the test.

As harsh as it had been to starve myself that way, there was a certain comfort in my vastly oversimplified thinking. It reduced all the chaos of the world into one simple metric that—in theory, at least—I could control. As long as I stayed under a thousand calories a day, I was safe. Nothing bad could happen to me.

To which Lucas, and Lili Ventura, and the entire internet, had said,Challenge accepted.

What do they call those moments when your fiancé cheats on you with a pop star in front of the entire world?Opportunities for personal growth?

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