Open Letter Series: #2

To the girl eating Cheez-Its while working the front desk at my gym:

I don’t know how to explain this, but I think I love you.

Let me elaborate.

My relationships with food and exercise have always been complicated. I’m not a “happy medium” sort of person. Feast or famine, marathon runner or couch potato, strict veganism or fast food binge fest. I have a hard time practicing moderation in anything let alone all things. I oscillate between clean eating and eating nachos in bed, simultaneously worrying about my waistline and mentally incapable of giving any more fucks.

The night you were working the front desk I was mid-manic obsessive phase. No gluten, no dairy, no meat. At least 15 miles of running per week, preferably closer to 20. I had just finished running 6 miles. Legs trembling, knees creaking: I was hungry, and tired in a way that sleeping doesn’t fix. I don’t know whether I’m running to or from something when I have these fits. Maybe both. Maybe I’m running away from myself and towards that ever-receding Ideal. Trying to sweat out my guilt and regrets, trying to run faster and farther and out of my own body in a way that’s never going to be possible.

You were perched on a stool, one hand blindly groping into that gaudy red box of salt and fat and preservatives I can’t pronounce. And you didn’t eat them daintily or one cracker at a time. You ate them by the handful, shamelessly. You inhaled those greasy orange squares, savored the traces of salt and grease on your fingertips. We made accidental eye contact as I left, and you shrugged unapologetically, smiling slightly as if to say Well? What about it?

Gym culture is predicated on a delicate charade, dependent on two basic premises:

1. People’s dissatisfaction with their current state of being.         
2. The belief that they can attain a coveted Ideal if they work hard enough.

Where that dissatisfaction stems from, and what physical ideal serves as inspiration varies from person to person. But the overarching message stays the same: “You need to change. We can help you”. You need to get bigger, or smaller, leaner, or more flexible. Fold, bend, lift, stride, strive, drive through the pain. If you work hard enough, one day you will be happy. If you work hard enough, one day you will not have to be you anymore. Sleep more. Hydrate. Avoid carbs, avoid fat, avoid alcohol. Avoid, and avoid, and avoid.

Food is such a strange and heavy topic. History and heredity taught me to measure my worth by the depth of my emptiness. The outcrop of collarbone, concavity of ribcage, precise angle of scapula arching away from the spine, the deep pelvic basin. My brain perceives these as signs of order and self-control. Every indulgence comes laden with comfort and guilt like a string of lost battles in the war for perfection. The fact that the words “food” and “indulgence” are so integrally connected in my head says something about our relationship.

I don’t really know how to say what I’m trying to say here, except that it was perfect. You were perfect and perfectly timed, because I was trying so hard to control, control, control myself and failing. I know you didn’t mean to, but you gave me permission to be human. You gave me permission to crave salt and fat and weird preservatives. You entered the holy temple of The Ideal and unapologetically ate something so familiar and comforting I could have cried.  

So thank you for existing. Thank you for being unapologetic. Thank you for not sitting there, drinking a protein shake like obvious product placement in a low-budget movie. I think I love you, and I know I love Cheez-Its. And I’m trying to love this body, with all its impulses and strange cravings.

-b

(P.S. if you haven’t tried the Tobasco Hot & Spicy flavor yet, you aren’t living life to the fullest.)