Tonight,  I went to a Purim celebration at a nightclub, which should have been hilarious enough in itself.  I went in a costume that was also a nerdy science joke. Nobody got it. Only one person even bothered to ask. A lot of women were dressed as sluts. A lot of couples wore couples costumes. A person I met a year ago apologized for dreadfully third-wheeling me at the time, following it up with the reassurance that my recent lack of sexual partners (offered in joking solidarity) has absolutely nothing to do with me.

Fatgirling strikes one and two. It has everything to do with me — I have standards. Not everyone is ready for this jelly.

The last few months have been dedicated to the slow progression from thin(ner) and anxious to round and calm, and it’s been an interesting trip. I weigh more than I ever have, and yet, that number seems like a blessing compared to the feelings of inability that came with having a smaller body. It’s not that I don’t sometimes still feel a little bit off about being bigger than the girl in the cute short dress who can only do that one cute-girl-in-short-dress dance (you know the one, bobbing and slightly swaying the arms); it’s more that reaching emotional rock bottom can really make a person rethink her priorities.

Being thin didn’t make me happy. Being fat now isn’t what’s making me happy. Size determinism: Just as silly as any other determinism, and twice as destructive. Good riddance.

When I was in college, I had a very, very skinny roommate. As in, so skinny sometimes I worried that she was unhealthy. If I didn’t watch her load up her food with butter and/or cupfuls of olive oil, I’d have been truly concerned. One day, after I sat down with a plate of something veggie-based for lunch, said roommate tore into me.

“I don’t understand why you are caving in to fascist beauty standards,” she seethed. “Be happy that you’re big! I have total fat envy. I wish I could be fat!”

I just stared at her mutely, munching on my cooking-spray-prepped lunch, realizing that the angry tirade building up behind my eyeballs about how the many things she didn’t know about sizeism and the experience of being a large person could fill multiple pairs of my plus-size jeans probably wouldn’t be particularly useful at the time and place.

All I said, at the time, was: “Beauty standards? Dude, I just want to be healthy.” Or something of the like.

Which brings me to a new phase, yet again. I’m still accepting of my current size, and am reveling in not-writing. It feels absolutely liberating. However, my statement proclaiming a need to regulate my consumption for health purposes no longer boasts that healthy glow of nonspecificity.

Unfortunately, I am at a crossroads. It’s not the same borderline sizeist type crap you read all over the place. I’m not facing diabetes, or a need for bariatric surgery, or what have you. But my problem that I’ve been having for over a year now has not abated, and for all my attempts at conservative treatment, I’ve been told it’s either live with extreme pain or get surgery that might have all sorts of unpleasant (but not life-threatening) complications.

I just don’t feel ready to take that risk. So I’m going to manage the pain with meds, and try my best to self-treat–seriously this time–through nutrition. I have no idea if this will work. But I am too scared of irreparable surgical what-have-you to not at least try to see if I can tame my body into cooperating through cleaner eating and drinking.

I made my own googledoc complete with amusing title so that it won’t feel as serious as “Daily Tracker” or “SQ’s Burdensome Diet List of Doom.” It loosely tracks what I’m eating, so I can see my veggie and fruit balance, and tracks how much water I’ve had, plus whether or not I’ve taken my fiber supplement for the day.

To be honest, sometimes it’s fun to deal with equations. That, and wow, pizza takes a chunk out of my vaguely defined daily total. Maybe I should take off that total, actually. It just seems too much like Dieting.

Part of me fears that this might lead back to obsession over intake. I’m trying to keep this in the frame of not being about weight, or weight loss. It’s just hard, when the associations are so damn strong. I have only been not-dieting for a year, after 14 years of either writing every bite or thinking about how I should be writing. I want to think I can find a way back to homeostasis, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Even though I know I am comfortable with my body as is, I am frustrated that it is holding steady these days. You’d think I’d be over the moon about it, after a lifetime of uncontrolled yoyoing. Of course, maybe that’s just it: Habit dictates that I should expect my body to be fluctuating at all times. Staying the same weight for two months? What the eff is up with that?

I wonder if this is why people get into body mod, or actually put effort into projecting a dynamic sense of style. That seems like a much healthier way of gaining visual novelty without subjecting ones body to a regular expansion-contraction cycle.

Or it could be due to something a little more visceral. I haven’t had a square meal in over two weeks, and that blip was only because I was home for Thanksgiving. Sometimes, these little pleasures that we take for granted can make all the difference.

Sometimes, there is something to be said for conventional nutritional wisdom. I miss vegetables.

Any woman who has grown up FatGirl knows how shocking this suggestion was. I almost fell over on Walnut Street.

She eventually followed it up with “you should start eating meat. Or at least fish. You don’t get enough protein, it’ll give you more energy.” Eh, I’m going to stick with the shocking originality of the first one. The thought!

I eat plenty, of course. But I just find it funny that, at age 26, this is the first time I can recall my mom being the typical Jewish mother and pushing food on me.

Today I had a professor tell me that it doesn’t matter what goes wrong, one can accomplish everything if one projects the right level of confidence. Giving in to victimhood doesn’t do anything, he said. You can act on the world, or you can let it act on you. It’s all your own choice. There was this one day where I got up late for a lecture, and stubbed my toe, and dropped a juice glass on the floor all within the first 5 minutes of my day, he said, and I just smiled and started counting because I knew the bad stuff would just keep piling up. It got to 36. But I just went along my day with confidence, because that’s really all you need to get you through any tough spot.

I wanted to scream: “It was overconfidence that got me into every single mess in this considerably messy year, and what do you know about victimhood?” But I did not have the energy.

Today I flubbed my first big presentation, probably due to a mixture of exhaustion, poor preparation, lack of engagement, and low self-esteem. Maybe I could have put on a fake veneer of knowledge; maybe I could have let the continuing feeling of not-belonging slide off my back when I met empty stares in the audience. But I did not have the energy.

To some extent, I understand what my professor is trying to say. I know that he is trying to guide me from his own experience onto a path that’s more clear and less painful to bushwhack my way through. But part of me just doesn’t know how to handle what seems to me to be a false dichotomy of victimhood vs. empowerment. I understand that proactivity has always been the name of the game, and acting like you’ve won the war is the first step.

But (excluding the brief, catastrophic ones) of all the more persistent victimhoods I’ve ever experienced I’ve never overcome any of them through conscious action. Until recently I felt victimized by what I construed as an addiction to food. That seems to have cleared itself up through deus ex mono, or whatever other unseen force is at work to have freed me from perpetual concern over perpetual consumption. I don’t know if I can visualize a concrete plan to overcome low self-esteem and low self-fulfillment, any more than I can visualize a concrete plan to overcome the fascist beauty standards of omg TEH PATRIARCHY.

Sometimes, confidence cures all. And sometimes, victimhood is so ingrained that its subtlety can deceive. I wish I could figure out what actually victimizes me, and what I paint as victimizing so I don’t have to muster the energy I don’t have to conquer it.

With all the writing I have to do for school now, it seems difficult to wedge in any non-academic writing. But really, that’s nonsense: If I cut out Facebook, or time spent thinking about all the work I have to do instead of doing it, I’d have time to write this blog, some short nonfiction, AND become a stellar student. (I spend a lot of time just thinking.)

In a few weeks, I will be going to the Hazon Food Conference in Monterey, California. I am going as a representative of the organization that sent me to Israel; they are subsidizing my trip. I am delighted to get a chance to parse out two facets of my undifferentiated identity in tandem: my Jewish and my Body identity. That being said, there aren’t any events that I can see that involve body issues, but I intend to facilitate them if need be. While agriculture and sustainability and responsible consumption are important to me, I think it’s also important to discuss how we see our bodies within the Jewish community. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a dialog, and I want to believe that we can air this out and talk about it, especially in the context of all things food and human action and cultural context.

So I want to start writing a little bit here, again, if I can. Why I chose the end of the semester to start this up again remains a mystery.

A lot of things have changed over the last few months, continuing the change that started almost a year ago. I’ve been blaming it on the mono kicking my metabolism into gear (how else do you explain all this sweating, ick). But to be honest, I’m not sure why my body suddenly seems to be responding to nutrition and exercise the way I always thought it should, or at least the way I thought it did for other people.

Namely: When I eat normally, I maintain my weight. When I eat a little less, I lose a little bit of weight. I don’t think about it, it just kind of happens. For the first time since age 11, I am not dieting. My weight loss has slowed (most likely due to a medication that was supposed to make me gain 10 pounds minimum), and also for the first time in my life, I am thankful for that fact. As a graduate student, I can’t afford to go out and buy all new clothes every few months. There are reasons to be happy with the body I have. And I am grateful for that shift in perspective.

I’ve discovered something pretty important about this shift. Rather recently, I had the epiphany that I had yet to compare myself to the other, thin, pretty women in my department (and there are a lot). I’m used to comparing myself constantly to other women: thinner than that one, fatter than that one, never gonna be that tiny, for goodness sake eat something, etc. I’m used to contrasting myself unfavorably based on some arbitrary, most likely skewed perspective on size.

I’d like to say that this just evaporated into thin air, but like any junkie, I realized that I’ve just replaced it. In place of thinking I am fatter and uglier, I think I am less intellectually capable. My body may fit into a certain space, but my mind does not. It’s the same inadequacy, but perhaps even more damaging. I don’t know.

I have more to say about fat identity, the “dude, you’re not fat” commentary, nutrition, and life in a new city (not that the two readers I may have attracted are still reading), but for now, I suppose I should get to work on that bit of perceived intellectual inadequacy. Back to reading.

I’ve said before that one part of my unresolved identity stems from my glaring lack of style. I don’t mean that I always look stupid or unkempt or ugly or what have you. I just don’t really have a certain cohesive way that I like to dress. For the most part, I’ve woken up every morning of the last 26 years (minus the ones pre-motor-skills when Mom was in charge) and thrown on anything that was at the top of my drawer.

I looked fine. Put-together, respectable, generic. Not bad. But I also never really felt good or comfortable, either.

Over the years I’ve made some half-hearted attempts to add pieces to my wardrobe that I actively enjoy wearing, but they’re interspersed with the usual boring stuff, some of which I’ve had since middle school. I just never had the energy or will to seek and replace over time.

And I always had the FatGirl mentality that if it fits and minimizes your hips, hold onto it for dear life and never let it go.

I’ve noticed a substantial shift since I moved into my new apartment. About a week ago I carefully stacked my shirts into the old oak dresser I found on Craigslist, happy for a sense of order. However, every day since then I’ve opened the drawers and thought: “I do not want to wear ANY of these things.”

Nothing. None of it feels right. I want to wear clothes that make me feel good and young and smart and sexy and powerful and I have no idea what kinds of clothing will do this, but I know that I have a whole chest of drawers full of clothes that do the opposite, and I am actively refusing to wear any of it, with about two exceptions.

Thank goodness the weather here has already started to turn colder. I think my fall clothes might hold up to scrutiny.

The other day I finally got the cartilage piercing in my right ear that I’d wanted for years, that I was originally waiting to get as a reward for reaching a certain weight milestone. For over a year I held off because I hadn’t “earned” it. That milestone came and went months ago — without my active participation in any sort of weight loss effort — and I’ve stopped marking progress by weight; and so the piercing happened not as a reward, but as a simple marker for holistic progress, a physical notation of life in September 2009.

It marks where I am now, here, in time and space, with a changed body, a changed mind, a changed spirit. I have rebooted. Now I need to grow into my new skin.

I just don’t know when or how to get started. But this time I’m not going to let that be an excuse to let mediocrity reign as status quo for yet another year.

Tonight seems significant, though. Tonight marks 9 months since the dividing moment.

By some quirk of mechanics and fate, I am alone right now. I am starting a new chapter of life, but not with a new life.

Of all the confusing things that came of the last nine months, the fact that this realization is in any way bittersweet wins the prize for totally confusing as hell. I felt the same way, even as relief flooded every cranny of my soul, eight and a half months ago when I discovered that the decision I might have to face was not mine to make. I have no idea what chemicals go to work in a person to make her wonder about something so morbid with anything more than complete and utter gratitude and disgust.

My laptop is on my lap, and that is all. I know I have been blessed. And yet I am alone. I feel bittersweet, and because of the strangeness of it I am completely at a loss for what else to feel.

There are three mirrors in my new apartment. One is in the bathroom, over the sink; when I look in it, I see round shapes, sagging skin, the fear of aging and fear of largeness. One is behind my bedroom door; it is full length, and I never have to look at it unless I choose to do so, so I keep the door open and the mirror hidden. The third is above my dresser; it only shows me from midchest and up, and at the very least seems to reflect a healthy reality.

So far, that mirror and I just give each other passing glances on our way to other things.

The return to normal following my grand adventure has not progressed in a linear fashion. There are days that seem like any other day, and there are days when I ache to be back on the road, and days when I miss someone that I will never see again. The whole year for me has been made up of isolated days of euphoria followed by jarring revelations and months of recovery. It’s not as severe as bipolarity, but I do feel as if I’ve spent the last nine months stumbling through alternate universes where things that are not supposed to happen to me happen anyway.

Losing my job was one. Breaking up with the man I thought I was going to be with for life was another. Getting mono at age 25 when I hadn’t so much as shared a glass with anyone, getting into graduate programs when I didn’t (and don’t) have an inkling what I want to do with my life, living at home again. Traveling by myself for a whole month. Getting the hot guy.

But it all started with an alternate universe I stumbled into at around midnight between January 2nd and 3rd, when, in a dark walkway on a boat traveling between Santa Cruz and Espanola, I chose to turn right instead of left, and my previously stable and linear life shattered into pieces in the moments following that single wrong decision.

I have wanted to shout this into the canyon for months now, because it’s not something that I can easily say in quiet tones in civil conversation. I even have a hard time talking about it with family and close friends, though I have the goal of someday turning my personal horror into prevention for others. I think this is a good place to shout it, finally, because it necessarily informs everything I do now — it especially informs how I think about and treat my body, a body that was horribly abused and has yet to recover fully, both physically and emotionally. A lifetime of disrespect confirmed by outside disrespect…I was not asking for it by any means, but among everything else forced upon me that night, mandatory self-reflection was one imperative I couldn’t push away.

One day in late December, my family and I were wandering through an open air market near Quito. I stopped to buy a mango, and when I looked up my family was gone. I stayed put and craned my neck to see if they were nearby. I walked a few meters, looked again. Walked to the edge of the street, waited. No luck. So I put on my sunglasses to hide my light eyes (they attracted attention) and used my sense of direction to get back to the rendezvous point we’d set. When my family showed up ten minutes later, my mom and brother were frantic. They thought I’d been dragged into a dark alley somewhere. But my oldest brother gave me a kiss, and whispered in my ear: “I knew you were fine.”

Israel was more to me than a chance to see the place that, as a Jew, I am meant to identify as ancestrally and culturally significant. It was more to me than a chance to see, up close, the land in conflict. I chose to stay for an extra three weeks because I needed to see if it could be done; if I was capable of overcoming the fear and timidity that were forced upon me by violence. I needed to get back my agency, which was ripped away from me by force. I didn’t know what to look for, but I knew where to start looking. I chose to travel alone because I wanted to believe that I was capable of assessing situations and making the right decisions without relying on somebody else to do it for me. I chose to stay for an extra three weeks on my own because I had to prove to myself that I could do it; that I was the woman in the market at Quito, not the woman in the dark walkway on the boat between Santa Cruz and Espanola.

Now that I’ve done it, I think I can say that I’m a little bit of both. I stayed safe, I removed myself from questionable situations. I found my way around a place I did not know, a place where I did not know the language (even though many Israelis speak English). But I also made some mistakes that, while they did not lead to the same catastrophic outcome, did lead me backwards a few steps.

I trusted a man who set off the alarms in my brain — some entirely not his fault, like his speaking in accented English. I trusted him because I was so shocked that I was capable of loving, when I thought that muscle had atrophied into nothing in the months of dulled existence, that I poured everything into that love even though deep down I knew it could never be what I needed it to be. If I had taken ten minutes to step out of the warmth of euphoria into cold logic, I would have known to stop before the addiction took hold, before I had to fall down once again.

I’ve fallen a lot this year. I keep forming new scar tissue each time something breaks. But I hope the scars are not like the one on my right knee, newly formed when I wasn’t looking where I was going and went flying over a low stone barrier in Beersheva. I don’t want to wear them where everyone can see them. But I hope every now and again they will serve to make me stronger, to prevent my falling in the exact same way twice.

The next day was a 22-hour day. We spent the night in an open tent at the Bedouin Experience, an incredibly touristy attraction that involved riding camels and donkeys and idealizing an incarnation of a culture that is all but extinct these days. The Bedouins accidentally woke us up at 3:30 instead of 4:30, and I brushed my teeth in the dark to the sound of an owl calling “hoo, hoo-hoo” in the palm trees above.

We ascended Masada via the Roman Ramp by sunrise, climbed down the snake trail by 9AM, hiked the Ein Bokek river trail by noon. At the head of the trail, one of my new friends was very upset. I stayed with her to talk her down, and he stayed with us, as it was his job to bring up the rear. He may have been there for our safety, but I still felt a profound discomfort being alone with a man carrying a gun. He said later that it was then that he became interested in me, but I did not believe him. I could not believe him.

Relaxing on the kibbutz after swimming in the Dead Sea, he came out to hang up some shirts to dry that he’d washed, including the shirt he’d been wearing. Married Cindy and I commented on the scenery. It was harmless enough, shirtlessness appreciation. Watching all the pretty young men.

At dinner, he started to sit down next to me, and I told him that I thought someone was already sitting there. It was his glass, it was him that was already sitting there. I apologized. He sat down. We started talking. I asked him questions. Suddenly, the dining room was empty except for us, and Janice told me to finish up my orange, that we could keep talking outside.

Two hot girls from our group in tiny shorts and tank tops walked past us as we strolled in the twilight. “I really like your gun,” stroking his arm. “Thank you,” he said. I’m embarrassed for America. And I’m embarrassed for myself. What am I doing here? Why are we walking together? I don’t want to be the asexual big sister while the bikini girls flirt with the sexy Israeli medic.

And then, under the tree where two peacocks perched, so dark that I could barely see his outline, he asked if I had a boyfriend. What? Are we really doing this? Where is this going? It’s all alarmingly familiar — the accented question, the perceived interest, the flattering attention. It can’t be real. It can’t be happening to me, again. And yet, here he is, asking if I might be interested in seeing him — not during the trip, because he’d get fired, but after, during my solo travels, maybe we could have something. I say maybe, but in my head I call bull. And I wonder if I should have lied, said I have a boyfriend, headed for the hills. But he is so compelling that I can’t bring myself to lie. I have no idea why I trust him so immediately.

After the others go back to their rooms, we continue to wander the lanes of the kibbutz, talking about the army and school and international affairs and the differences between our countries and cultures. Before we know it, hours have passed and we are incurably lost. I do not care. Suddenly he has gone from the scary young man with a rifle to one of the most fascinating people I have ever met — who also happens to be one of the best-looking people I have ever met. I ask him why me, when there are bikinigirls around who are all interested him.

“I want a girl with a mind,” he says.

Eventually, he asks directions from a kibbutznik passing by. The words that come out of his mouth have no direct meaning to me, and yet they strike me somewhere deep in my soul. Before now, Hebrew only existed to me in the synagogue, in the Torah, in blessings over bread, wine, candles. He may have been asking how to get to the main road, but all I hear coming from this beautiful man’s mouth are words spoken in the language of my prayers.

We move into the shadows and kiss for the first time. The rifle creaks on its strap as he pushes it behind his back to take me into his arms. His kiss is aggressive. It is familiar and novel at the same time. Red flags raise, and yet I ignore them because I don’t want the feeling to stop.

That night I cannot sleep, knowing that he is a few meters away in a different room, and wondering how I will feel the next morning. All I can feel right now is a flutter in my stomach and a spark where before there was nothing but a dark tunnel all the way down.

Our romance is secret, furtive, temporary. He is my shadow in sunlight hours, and my lover in the shadows. Nobody knows what we are doing; few suspect. We hold hands when nobody is looking. He gives me a foot rub under the table. He cares for me when I become sick, and tends my wounds when I foolishly fall in Beersheva. I lean into his arms as we stand on a pier overlooking the Mediterranean Sea one night in Tel Aviv. He is kind, gentle, and romantic, but incredibly demanding when we are alone. He never tries to make me jealous with the bikinigirls, and for once I feel truly valued for something deeper than my body, the body he insists is amazing, even if I don’t believe him.

I think people do not suspect, because why would they? He is the most gorgeous, fascinating man in our group, with the added pull of the exotic due to his nationality, his accent, his mannerisms, his dangerousness. He could have his pick of a crowded field. With this many skinny girls, why would he choose the FatGirl with messy hair and nonexistent fashion sense? My first instinct is to go with the usual FatGirl trope: we’re easier, because we think we have to take whatever we can get. But these are all American girls. We are all easy pickings for the exotic man. And yet, when we are all relaxing by the pool on Shabbat, and he is sitting there, shirtless, smoking a hookah and looking like a dragon, and he is swarmed by bikinigirls in full regalia, I see that he is still looking at me — sitting off to the side, fully clothed and convalescing, the least sexy I could possibly be, and his eyes are still locked on me as he breathes a cloud of smoke and smiles in a way that only I can see.

Time would prove this to be a limited heaven. He swears he cares about me, that I am very important to him, but I know that what we had only existed for nine days out of a lifetime. I saw him again, but only once, only for three hours, walking through Akko alarmingly naked-looking without his rifle, and all I could do was pine for a feeling I’d never had before but found myself addicted to — that I was just as good as the skinny girls; in fact, somehow, better, in all my physical extraneousness.

On the last day of the mirage, we sit on the outskirts of the southern wall of the Temple Mount, resting on the ruins as our guide talks about the poetry and songs and art that have been created about this place. Suddenly, I am overwhelmed by a feeling I cannot identify, and I look up across a sea of faces and Jerusalem stones and lock eyes with him. We stare, wordlessly, hungrily, and for once we are not hiding anything, and I feel drunk with the intensity of that one sustained glance, with the holiness of that moment.

It is the most erotic moment of my life. And even if it never grew any further from there, if I can remember that one moment when I am seventy, I hope that it will bring me some kind of grace.