When I was fat.

I didn't break 100 pounds until I was 18. I was always the stick-thin girl, who people always thought was about 8 years younger than I was.

At 22, the movers at my parents' thought I was 11. At a wedding when I was 15, the quote was, "You like you're eight, talk like you're twenty, and look like I did in the 70s," a bit of a double-edged compliment. I was just not-carded for the first time ever buying hard alcohol for a fabulous single ladies' martini night. Admittedly, it was top shelf, and when the woman asked how I was I noted, "I've been better. My room mate (insert confidential here)." With my angst and gothic eyeliner she decided that to prevent me from buying alcohol would be a bad idea. Good call, checker lady!

I've always been the one who's been carried, lifted, tickled and marveled over.
"How is it you are so small but eat so much?"
"Lina's so little and the kettle is so big!" This from a co-worker because in order to stir the 50 gallon pasta pot on the Vulcan stove at work, I needed a footstool and looked like some kind of exotic witch in cargo shorts, a wife beater and an apron, hair wrapped in red bandanna, purple against pale skin. This was common where I worked, a 90-pound girl hauling 50-pound sacks of flour and 30 pound boxes of potatos off of the Sysco truck. I would be buried behind stacks of dishes taller than I, warring with the ceramic in all of its hot hot heat and heavy burning weight. Carrying 60 pounds of mozzarella at the pizza joint where I worked last summer was an accomplishment that caused everyone to open the cooler door for me.

At 17, my prom date and boyfriend Rob and I had been taking swing lessons and he was able to swing-flip me through the air and it was amazingly hot.

I celebrated with my best friend and room mate my freshman year when we both finally broke 100 pounds. College hit, and I started drinking too much soda, eating at the dining hall, and not taking care of myself. Then France hit, and I drank my weight in beer and wine and vodka. Next thing I knew, in the winter I was chubby. How? When? What?

I was shocked and crushed and surround by drop-dead-gorgeous French women. Spring came around, with allergy season and no central AC. I dropped the weight in about three weeks (when you can't eat for the nausea, at all, for the first 6 hours of any given day, that initial fasting burns off pounds.) This isn't a healthy system, and in my old age I've become more creative about liquid calories (current solution: Berghoff Genuine Dark Beer nom nom nom.) It still makes April, May, and June a bit of a puzzle -- how do you eat when you're starving but you physically can't without throwing it all back up again?

I put all that weight back on the next winter. I was living with an extremely emotionally abusive room mate, who had such great lines as, "You spend so long getting ready in the morning in the bathroom. It's a shame you don't come out looking any prettier." I was eating as a carnivore for the first time in years, ground beef and too much cheese and Le Mai's Italian-Vietnamese-Philippina cookery. I put all that weight back on and some. I weighed in at 120-odd pounds. Nothing I owned fit me anymore, most particularly my pants.

When I went shopping over Christmas break with my mother and my shame, I found two pairs of pants that sort of fit (as in they were baggy and not fitted and had to be hemmed because of length and belted extensively at the waits because nothing would fit my thighs and my waist/hips or lack thereof in the same fucking pants. These fat pants have haunted me ever since, and I dreamed of wearing all my hot fun pants from France that were effective sized 00 - 2. I was a size 4-6 and it crushed me.

Then I picked up a hipster BFA boyfriend and started running with that crowd, hot and cold running alcohol, too many cigarettes, too little sleep, too much caffeine. The weight melted away through this painfully unhealthy lifestyle in combination with spring allergy season. I became gaunt, painfully so.

I weighed in at 105 pounds. "Too skinny," a friend who had lived (effectively) with me over the summer said many months later.

I was finally happy with my thighs. I was so beautiful, so thin, and so many pretty pretty boys would try to pick me up at the Vid, perfect hipster artist musicians using pick up lines from NY Times headlines.

I was wasted away, and so genuinely happy about it. Over that summer I picked up (or was picked up by) a talented Canadian music producer. I knew, that were I ever to gain weight, he would love me less. It's a cruel reality. I was working as a bus-girl dishwasher at a local pizza joint, Mother Bear's, and a barista at City Bakery. Croissants, leftover day-olds, for free. Extra pizza slices. Full-fat milk lattes. All the dairy butterfat I could possibly consume, for mostly free with my labor.

The weight came, and I was ashamed. I was embarrassed, and I knew Peter wanted me less. I knew I wasn't as sexy for him. I hurt everywhere from this. I was afraid. I doubted myself. I feared that I wouldn't be able to cut it when I moved to LA/NYC with him. I was terrified of the body-beautiful culture of these two cities. I knew I couldn't hack it, that I wasn't like them, that I would never be as beautiful, no matter how I starved, no matter how little I ate.

The summer came, I started cooking (or not cooking) raw foods. I went vegan and cut out all of the easy food in my diet. I stopped eating refined sugar. I became that hot sexy stick girl of spring and summer again. I picked up regulars at the coffee shop and at the adjoining bar. (Coffee and beer, next door? Made of win.)

I was working on my feet for 8-12-14 hours a day, and carrying loads of boxes of thirty-pounds of mozzarella and bus-tubs crammed with dirty dishes. I had muscle tone and energy and calves of steel. I was fit, and muscled, and balanced for the first time... ever. I ditched the Canadian; I believed in myself. He didn't like that much. It wasn't convenient for him if I had any self-esteem.

I lost it with my first desk-pushing job this past winter. I had a loving, wonderful boyfriend who told me constantly that I was beautiful. I didn't believe him, not for one single dirty second. He thought I was beautiful, but he was deluded, and I knew this. I was the ugly duckling, the over-worked career girl, who worked 10 and 12 hour days and had no time to cook or eat. He loved me anyhow. He loved me with my baby paunch stomach and my un-muscley arms. He loved me, even with my thighs. His love was a tonic for a lot of the poisons that my ex-room mate and Peter had filled me with.

For that I am eternally grateful.

Now it's spring again. I can hardly eat, especially on weekends with no 8 to 10 hours of AC filtered air to help my allergies. I'm drinking my calories in a creative vegan hippie fashion. I eat when I must, light-headed and spacey from hunger that I cannot feed.

Now, even with my thighs, I believe I could be considered beautiful. For the first time, in so long, I believe it more than 50% when people tell me I'm desirable.

I almost hurt someone, physically, at Indy PRIDE when she was talking about the body of a girl I had slept with a few years back. She had "saggy boobs" from her "health problems" and was all "fat". This lady is curvy, voluptuous, and fucking hot. Her breasts, her curves, she was a delight. I've never been so insulted in my life, to have some stick-thin girl in her early 20s telling me that a woman that I value and treasure, who is loyal as a dog and beautiful as a rose was ugly and unattractive.

I exorcised my closet a few days back. All of the fat clothes. All of the winter clothes. Almost everything I wore the winter I lived with Cody. Almost everything I wore in the winter in France. I pulled it from my closet, from my life. I took it from me -- that is not me, that baggy-clothes wearing slip of a thing, so afraid of being perceived as fat and unattractive.

Certain that a bit of pudge, a wobble or a ripple or a fistfull of extra flesh would mean the end of people and men specifically perceiving me as beautiful.

"Elle sait que ses fesses sont son ticket-restaurant."

I know how I get ahead here. I know that since I've started dressing cute-tiny-girl corporate goth at the office that I've made leaps and bounds with the (mostly) male upper management. They respect me and trust me and value my ethic and smoothness with customers, even the uptight male ones.

I know that if I were fat, even if I was stylish and smart and well dressed, they wouldn't think as much of me. They wouldn't believe in me.

I wouldn't believe in myself.

This disordered thinking has broken so many talented beautiful women that I know. I strive to tell my women friends often how beautiful they are -- because it must be repeated to even begin to believe. I've been doing this since I was 16, and I plan to continue.

You. You are beautiful. You are sexy. You are loved, you will be loved, and you have been loved. I know this. I want you to believe this. I am dying to believe this about myself.