The Queen Of The To-Go Box
Regret isn’t something I have held on to very tightly these past couple of years. To me, mobilizing and moving forward is all there is at the end of a long day. That was something I learned from the fattest president of the United States, the only president born in the great state of New Jersey: Grover Cleveland. Bear with me, growing up, I was in the Trivia Bowl from 3rd to 5th grade so I made it my mission to know a presidential fact about every single president. (Abraham Lincoln was the tallest. James Madison was the shortest. Martin “Old Kinderhook” Van Buren is the reason we say “okay” to this day.) But the fact with the story behind it that I liked to tell most was the fact that Grover Cleveland was so fat that he didn’t fit in the White House bathtub. As a chubby kid, that kind of stuff was reassuring that size is an age-old struggle, not one that was just happening to you.
In the 10th grade, I had dark rings around my neck that my parents couldn’t figure out. Stretch marks striped around my waist, growling at a soft belly. I’ve had my period since grade school but by the age of 15, I hadn’t seen it for a year. But that menstrual irregularity was more than fine by me, because whenever I did have it, it was torturous, long, heavy, and exhausting. A new bad habit I had was playing with the skin tags on my shoulder and chest, which grossed my friends out. I had hair on my chin. I had cystic acne that there was no remedy for. Sometimes, in the car, I felt like I couldn’t breathe without the window all the way down. But this all occurred at the cruel age of puberty, something which I already did not understand so trying to figure it out seemed meaningless at the time.
One winter break, my parents, worried, took me to work and I saw a doctor. He told me a lot of things that day. I had checked the box for around 20 or so symptoms of poly-cystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). I had several benign cysts on my ovaries that were causing me thyroid problems. I had an excess of testosterone in my body. Buzzfeed Videos actually has a great vlog of what a modern day PCOS lifestyle looks like. There is a tiny but mighty PCOS community on YouTube that I found but they focused mainly on the upcoming fertility struggle. But this stuff is very new and was definitely not there 5 years ago when I was confused and suffering.
Growing up, I was fat from a young age. Preventively and ironically, I was an active child enrolled in both gymnastics and dance class. I had a horrible childhood diet. Most of this related to my culture, as a Haitian woman, the daily consumption of rice and meat was almost compulsory. It was what I grew up with. My parents, however, were both nurses and both tried to keep our diet stable. By over-correcting with me, my sister actually lacked nutrients — as she was lactose intolerant and a very picky eater. Her ovaries and hormones were fine, however. It was just me.
According to my doctor, PCOS was more common than originally thought to be at its initial discovery. It was my parent’s medical intuition and education that brought me here so early. Many women, especially my age, had it on varying degrees and scales and would find themselves in the same spot I was in the years to come.
He worried about me specifically, because of family history of heart disease and diabetes. He said that I, specifically might never be able to have kids naturally, might never be able to lose weight naturally, and if I were to ever develop cancer in one those cysts it would almost be impossible to operate because of a lot of swirling complications above my head. 15 and in the face of somebody who told me I might never have a baby, I did not know if there was much else I could do. I would go through cyclical periods of weight loss, losing 20–40 pounds in waves. I always ended up gaining in the end. Then, I turned 16 and I got less scared.
Fear tends to fade. Time made struggle start to seem invincible. I started to build all this spirit out of my self-comfort for when I would need it most.
When I came home from my first year of college, my mom took me to the Bayshore Community Hospital for bloodwork. I had to get bloodwork annually to check on my ovaries. But this time, she told me to look up Bayshore’s bariatric center. One of the ladies at work recommended it to her. She told me to specifically research the gastric sleeve operation, so I did. About a week into that summer, I met with a doctor. He handed me a bunch of paperwork. I had to take a sleep test, I had to do more bloodwork, which meant fasting and a million other tasks. Things seemed to be moving fast. I was just about to turn 19 and this seemed like a lifetime commitment. The doctor told me if they ever needed to operate on my uterus or my ovaries having less of an organ in the way would be helpful. I would have a much lower risk of diabetes, sleep apnea, heart disease. The symptoms of my PCOS would be cured.
Having 80% less of something, stomach or otherwise, never seemed appealing.
Sometimes, I liked how much space I took up on a daily basis. It was hard to imagine myself as less. But I couldn’t imagine myself as more. I felt full. I felt enough.
I had the surgery the first day of August. It took longer than expected, a same day surgery turning into a week stay before I had school. I wasn’t good with anesthesia. It ran in my family. Me and my sister both resisted it. We had bodies that didn’t trust easily.
Afterwards, I was on a liquid diet for two weeks. I felt myself burn. After two weeks, it was no bread or rice for a year. Among other things, like not being able to eat and drink at the same time and constantly hiccuping and burping. I became used to throwing up, not just because I was sick but because I ate too much for lunch or something just didn’t sit right. When I got an average stomach flu that winter, things looked anything but average. I would never be the same again. My body would never be the same again. Like all surgeries, there were risks. As the Queen of the To Go Box & the Broke College Kid, I relied mostly on what the dining hall could give me without bread, soda, or rice. I had to say goodbye to pizza, breadsticks, Sprite, curly straws. I loved all of those things dearly. They’d been close friends of mine for years. Me and food suddenly stopped speaking one day. I don’t know who dropped who first.
It’s only been Year One and I have made a lot of mistakes, learning how to eat again. It has been a year of frustration. It has been a year of never getting full. It was a year of struggling how to define the word enough. It was a year of wondering how to hold still during transformation or getting a size 18 tailored down. It was a year of fighting the weight loss narrative everyday. And with recent shows in the media glorifying getting your jaw wired shut and the role of the fat woman’s body swallowed in this spineless wave of body positivity that won’t even look itself in the mirror, I had been fed up for a long time and change didn’t cure anything about it.
In 2017, one of my favorite writers in the entire world and a phenomenal woman in general, Roxane Gay, wrote a book called Hunger. It came out while I was working a speech and debate summer camp for high schoolers the summer before my surgery, so I read it. She talked a lot about how her culture shaped her body. She said, if I could talk to my high school self and ask about my weight…I would tell her that I wished I weighed now what she weighed then. I kept a highlighted version of that book on the desk of my dorm and returned to passages often for guidance throughout this whole journey. The same way I did when I was on the road for self-acceptance and craving discipline. In January of this year, Roxane Gay revealed that she had underwent the same exact surgery as me in an article for Medium’s Unruly Body anthology that she curated and created for.
In her article, she stated “As a fat person...I am supposed to be working on the problem of my body. I am supposed to apply discipline to physical unruliness. I’m not supposed to be fine with my body. I am not supposed to yearn, simply, for people to let me be, to see me, accept me, and treat me with dignity exactly as I am.”
When I read that, I cried longer than I had in a long time and it felt good. I had been so afraid that I would be betraying my body. I was so afraid that I would be betraying the foods I had loved & how much they meant to me. I was afraid I would be betraying those women who I had always had a solidarity with, who I usually shared my fears with and took up space with. I was afraid I would be accused of not loving me or my body enough and what message that would send. I was afraid of not being able to have kids anyway. Was that body positivity? Was this self-love or self-care? Or can I just not eat anything? Would I keep asking myself these questions, every single day?
The scariest moment of Year One was getting sick in the winter. The body does drastic things for revenge when the stomach is empty. Stuck in bed with a stomach virus, I looked up the story of Grover Cleveland again, patron saint of New Jersey, to make myself feel a little bit better. Silly enough, I wanted to know what they did about the bathtub. I learned that once the White House knew he couldn’t fit, they just built a new bathtub in the White House. Simple.
They moved on. That was it.
He lived there, comfortably, happily. He was also the first president to be married in the White House. When they left the White House for the first time, his wife looked around and told the staff “We’ll be back”. Sure enough, they were.
His last words were “I have tried so hard to do right.”
Mine too.
