More Interesting Reader Response
Although I get at least one message like this a week, and sometimes as many as three, I sometimes don't have explicit permission from the message's author to post it, or I'm sometimes too tied up in other work obligations to do so. Luckily, this following message's author made clear that I could share her story, and it came to me on a week when I had a second to transfer that story to this public space.
I make it available to you for the same reason she made it available to me, and for the same reason other such messages are here: in other people's stories of their struggles with eating, weight and body image, we find some comfort, some encouragement to keep working to make ourselves better and a community of sorts.
"Dear Mr. Bruni,
Thanks to a full-time job, small freelance positions, and a deep commitment to a long distance relationship, I hadn’t read a book since the summer of 2009—a choice I didn’t necessarily make, but rather it just happened. A former English major, this is the longest dry spell I’ve ever been through. For some reason, no one ever tells you that 23 is intense and chaotic, though I’ve found hard work and tremendous tenacity yields moderately rewarding experiences. At any rate, I picked up my first two books in over a year over this past Labor Day weekend—two beautiful memoirs about coming of age with some sort of mental debilitation. They were John Elder Robison’s Look me in the Eye and your own exploration of adolescence, family, friends, ingestion, and mental maturation.
"I wanted to genuinely thank you, Mr. Bruni. To be honest, I came to my own conclusions about my relationship with food just recently, without any actual help from you or your book; but your writing—the elegant prose and quirky anecdotes that recall struggles similar to my own served as much needed confirmation that I’m not alone in this over-indulgent world. Yes, you can suffer from an eating disorder of the mind and test your own “food science” and obscure theories without formally not eating; yes, you can feel an extreme disjoint between your brain and your stomach; and yes, although you never become unaware of a partially great, albeit partially awkward, relationship with food, you can return to a sense of normalcy. All of this, as you write, takes both care and candor. But you know this already.
"Like you, I come from a family who appreciated food long before Dunkin Donuts became ultra calorie-cognizant. I like to think that my only true affiliation with my Jewish heritage is my appreciation for holiday meals equally for the company and for the cuisine. My greatest memories? Fall evenings when my dad returned home from work at his small-town chocolate store just five minutes from the house, promptly at 6:00, when my mom would serve my (much) older brothers and I golden chicken cutlets—meagerly blotted of their oils—and a hefty bowl of bow-tie pasta with Canadian bacon (bad Jews, I know) and pine nuts. Winters when my mom figured out how to continue to barbeque succulent sirloins from the butcher shop of my favorite restaurant, Bryant & Cooper—my preference over Peter Lugers for the simplicity of the salt-and-pepper seasoning and their exclusion of a cloying butter glaze. Even I had my limits. Butter on beef was one of them.
"During my middle school years I truly believed that the higher the calorie count, the better, if only to piss off my home-economics teacher who practically fainted when we were told to bring in the box of our typical breakfast to learn about nutrition. She scorned me for using two packs of frosting atop a single cinnamon roll, though I wasn’t sure what was so horrible about 700 calories a serving at the time. I was a growing girl! Plus (and I’ll give you a preemptive warning and request that you don’t slap me for this) I was skinny. A twig of a girl growing up, thanks to my family’s speedy metabolism.
"And we were lucky—because, while other indulgences didn’t trail far behind, chocolate was my weakness, of which we had an endless supply at all times. My dad is the 3rd generation of a 4th generation chocolate store, my brothers representing the latter era. So sugar was just part of my blood. Nut patties, dollops of fresh and homemade caramel, radioactively green marzipan enveloped in both milk and dark chocolate—I was impartial to what or how much I ate. For a while, it didn’t matter either.
"It wasn’t until I hit the years in which women inevitably grow out instead of up that I recognized the possibilities of weight gain. The outcome wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. While I’m not sure I have the capacity to quite balloon out, I could look great, or I could veer to the mushy side. College, with the delicious offerings of Ann Arbor, like craft beer, deep fried breakfast potatoes, post-football burritos, and, oh yeah, late night chicken ziti rolls to cure the drunk munchies, I certainly got mushy. The typical freshman 15, no doubt. The next four years would be a struggle to figure out how to find balance, and living abroad in Prague for four months, frequenting fried cheese sandwiches and pork knuckle, didn’t help.
"Ten pounds chunkier than healthy and twenty pounds beyond what I ideally wanted to be, I embarked on a journey I wasn’t prepared for. It lasted from the summer of my Junior year until I graduated, and it happened during a time that also entailed a terrible break up from a boyfriend/best friend, the loss of a close friend’s mom to breast cancer, and the daunting task of graduating and finding a job in this economically depressed city. I was sent into a whirlwind of consumption contemplations, because weight was something I needed to control. I should add that my mom and brother have ulcerative colitis, the Eastern European stomach affiliation which causes severe weight loss. Was it wrong to compare myself with the sickly-thin?
"Without boring you with too much detail and sounding like every other girl striving for a svelte figure, I can sum it up with the message I tried to relay in a personal essay I wrote for my English class during Senior year. I was unhappy with myself. The ultimate representation of myself is and always will be my body, which I had a rapidly deteriorating relationship with. But ultimately, I wasn’t starving for food—I was starving for stability.
"When life spirals out of control, I think that the most insightful of individuals are able to at some point find a clearing—a space in time when you can look down upon yourself and reflect. In so many ways, running was just this. It was, I like to think, a mix of endorphins and the chance to be alone with myself in nature, in the city, with music, in silence. It was my time, not anyone else’s. Beginning with a mile or two at first, I didn’t see any changes. One affliction women suffer is that it takes an enormous effort to drop five pounds, let alone ten or fifteen, whereas a guy can switch to Bud Light and run for the bus and drop a pant size. You saw it yourself—you could fluctuate somewhat easily if you put your mind to it. I started with coming up with my own comparable ideas about food, and how to eat it in order to lose weight. I tried things (though I hate the word things, I’m using it to refer to much of what you talked about) I’m ashamed of, though it didn’t last long. I now run between 3-6 miles, 5 days a week whether the air is humid or frozen. I do yoga. It’s my time, and it proved worth it in the end. I found mental and physical stability in just an hour a day.
"Like you conclude, there are relapses. There are self-doubts. There are good days, and then there are not-so-good days. To me, the strongest person can simply recognize this and admit to both the positive and negative, the good and the bad. It’s about awareness more than anything, which is why I have permanently iked on my hand as a reminder the Yiddish words ich bin, which translates to “I am.” You can fill in the blank from there in an effort to be mindful of every decision in life. You can be happy, tired, fat, skinny, purple, if that’s what you choose. Just be it, and be it really well.
"Your book, your writing, and your story unequivocally helped me not to close a chapter of my life but to reflect on it enormously."
