This is a Post about Baby Fat

My mom used to tell me that as a baby she had a hard time getting me to nap. When all else failed, she’d load me into the backseat of the car and drive around until I zonked out.

Driving home today I realized the same thing is still true, and it made me wonder whether things like that carry over a lifetime.

I’ve never been a napper, not even in college when I was supposed to have picked up a penchant for it. I only ever really nap when I’m really sick, but under the right circumstances I catch myself dozing off in the car (as a passenger!)

There’s a scar on the top of my right foot and nobody knows where it came from, even though I’ve had it as long as I remember. The same goes for the scar on the inside of my left pinky finger. I like the idea that mystery scars and birthmarks—I have the remnants of a raspberry on my left shoulder—are wounds from a past life. If there’s any truth to it, in my past life I got into the world’s strangest scuffles.

The older I get the more false memories I figure out, like the one where the bus crash in Simon Birch actually happened to me in the woods near my grandparents’ house.

As a kid I had a lot of imaginary friends, too, who I would walk home with from the bus stop and tell all about my family and my dogs and my school, where they were the new student. I wonder if imaginary friends and false memories and mystery scars and déjà vu all intersect on some plane where they come together meaningfully. Do kids still have imaginary friends? Is it a symptom of loneliness or a normal imaginative exercise?

Something anxious people joke about online is playing out “what ifs” in their heads at the worst possible times, like when we’re exhausted and trying desperately to fall asleep or we’re at work and have a deadline in an hour or something. Is this another iteration of imaginary friendships, this exercise in mental gymnastics of imagining if I said this clever or stupid thing to my friend or family member or colleague maybe things might be different or better or worse and oh god why didn’t I think of that superb comeback when someone said that shitty thing to me eight months ago? Anyone? Bueller?

I guess what I’m getting at is that I live in my head, like, a lot. And maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it’s an anxious thing. As a “writer”, when I decide I am one again after months and months of not bothering to try, sometimes I think if I write a short story or micro-fiction I can get it all out of my system, like maybe putting it in kind-of-nice words will get it out of my stupid brain and make it just some other story. Maybe those imaginary friendships I wish I had, even in adulthood, can exist and comfort me in fiction. Maybe not.

Was I just a super anxious baby and now I’m a super anxious adult baby? An anxious 23-year-old-infant who feels thirty? What could be worse?

Growing up—which, yes, I’m absolutely still doing—the concept of baby fat followed me around for years beyond the normal limits of what’s considered baby fat. I have a fast metabolism, I was a really active kid and teenager, and I have always been what doctors consider a “healthy” weight. Being tall helps. But eastern European women are built, as Lucy Dacus croons perfectly, “all soft shapes and lines / shape-shifting all the time.” I inevitably inherited the Polish baby-bearing hips and the broad, strong (lol) shoulders and the big feet and the tendency to carry weight in my trunk. Add onto that the luck of being tall and I look much like a goofy misshapen pear.

The women in my family have struggled my whole entire life with body image. Very openly. Very loudly. Very emotionally. The men in my family are lean and strong and unconcerned with how they look because, one, media doesn’t dictate that they should and, two, they get the job done. The powers that be cast me somewhere in between that lean and strong silhouette and the softer feminine one and so I have a whole host of body image issues where my upbringing and my feminist mentality are at odds.

Being a thin, white woman bitching about boy image is nothing new and not interesting or radical but in many ways, for me at least, it ties into my Midwestern identity and my issues with my family and with myself. It has always been a part of me. Watching my mom and grandma and aunt yo-yo diet my entire life was sure to lead to some kind of mental turmoil, given my cool genetics, right?

There was a summer in high school where I’d eat a shitload of ice cream everyday—not, like, a binge, I don’t think, but probably not a great idea for anyone—and obsessively weigh myself. I never purged or anything, and I don’t think I necessarily worked out any harder as a result of what showed up on the scale, but I knew as I did it something was wrong. I was a cheerleader in high school, so I burned off all the calories I ate and was strong and my body looked good and I had a mostly healthy relationship with my body, except that summer was probably after I was injured and couldn’t compete in the winter and felt terrible all the time.

My siblings were small when I was in high school and so I took them to the beach often—the one I wrote about in RIVRGRL—and when it was an especially hot weekend my mom and aunt might come along too. I have a visceral memory of sitting on beach towels with them, people watching, and listening them comment on which women were wearing swimsuits they “shouldn’t be wearing”. And it wasn’t really malicious, I think, not intentionally at least, but a defensive reflex that said, “I hate my body, but at least I know I should be ashamed of it and hide it even when it’s 90 degrees out.”

It broke my heart and pissed me off, like most things do.

By this point I was coming into my own as a young woman and a feminist and I remember asking, “Who cares? Who gives a shit? What are you doing?” And I think it made them feel bad, but the nasty comments stopped for that day, at least. A small victory.

So much of my experience of womanhood has been centered around my body and what it looks like and feels like and how it compares to others’ and a deep hatred for traditional exercise to complicate the whole thing. It has been defensively, at eleven or twelve years old, insisting the skin—not fat!—I could pinch around my middle was just “baby fat”. It has been, in high school, wondering seriously if I was experiencing my weight in a disordered way and whether it counted as body dysmorphia. It has been, in college, looking back on cheerleading pictures and gazing at what my legs once looked like, long and lean and strong.

Now, it’s being very conscious about the way I speak to my siblings, who have both been coerced to diet. It’s looking at myself before I get in the shower and not cringing because, even if I want to, I know it’s not doing me any favors. It’s ignoring the imaginary notion that I should be ashamed of how I look because…what? Looking a certain way is good or bad depending on what the media says? Trying to look at my body and see a functional organism that lets me swim and ride a bike and cook and whatever else is a conscious effort constantly at odds with my reflex to pinch my “baby fat” and step on the scale and look at pictures of celebrities and wonder if maybe I ate more spinach I might look more like that. I fucking hate spinach! Whenever I get stupid enough to buy some, it always goes bad before I can eat it!

I look absurd in jumpsuits because I’m little-ish on top and weirdly wide on the bottom, and I need to learn to not give a shit. If I want to wear one—if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t, because imagine the potential for poop emergencies in one of those things—I can and I should. My body is my body and although I don’t necessarily have to be proud of it or whatever, I can’t punish myself for the way my bones and muscles, configured from my family members way way back in the old country and having to, like, squat and milk goats or whatever, look now in the 21^st century. It’s stupid. Who cares?

I suppose this is all to say that I started writing and things got buckwild again because all the weird shit I thought when I was a kid rooted itself deep in my brain and has bloomed in stupid, meaningless anxieties in adulthood. Fun! Your body is good. It’s doing its best. The lumps and bumps and stretch marks—or lack thereof—are good because they’re yours. You’re, like, super hot, if we’re being honest here. And I’m not being corny. It’s the truth.

It’s your body and it’s a good one. Go jump in a puddle or something.

Lexie

Recommended listening/ reading/watching for “This is a Post about Baby Fat”:

“Shrill” on Hulu (based on Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West

“My Mother & I” by Lucy Dacus

“Juice” and “Tempo” by Lizzo

“Stand Tall, Molly Lou Melon” by Patty Lovell

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

“Here’s the Thing: Body Dysmorphia is the Worst” by Sophia Benoit

This is a Post about Identity

If you haven’t already heard, today is the first day of my new Big Girl Job. I wasn’t sure how to write about this because, aside from it being exciting news, I don’t have much to say yet. But then I had a tiny little epiphany and a blog post came to me.

In the midst of signing my formal acceptance and consenting to a background check and all the standard stuff, the hiring manager asked which first initial I wanted to use for my company email address, A for Alexis or L for Lexie. Professionally and academically, across the board, I’ve always gone by Alexis, although I grew up with everyone calling me Lexie. (Although I bristled in high school whenever anyone less than a best friend shortened “Lexie” to “Lex”.)

As an adult it seemed like it was time to shed my childhood nickname in favor of my legal name, which I guess I think sounds more professional. It always felt impersonal and foreign to hear people call me by my given name, but eventually most people got around to calling me Lexie anyway when we got to know each other well enough. Y’know…how nicknames work.

At my job in retail, I used Alexis as a defense mechanism, purposefully impersonal because I didn’t plan to stick around long. Go figure, the longer I was there, the more people started calling me Lexie. It kind of felt like that meant I’d been there too long, but really it just meant I was making friends. Not that serious, dummy. But that’s how I felt, and this job offer came at just the right time to get me out of a place I never planned to become familiar.

Even if I don’t stay at this job for my entire career, I feel so lucky to have found what feels like the perfect place to start. It’s a nonprofit, so the people working there are doing it for the love of the job, not to make big money. It’s reading and literacy focused work, which is the exact kind of thing I want to be doing. There are a dozen people on staff, including me, and they eat lunch together outside when the weather is nice. As far as I can tell, none of them are republicans. And they are as excited about me as I am about them. It’s an amazing feeling.

I don’t know if there’s a lesson here, except that I’m grateful this job found me when it did, because I was feeling ready to give up (again). The job hunt was hard on my ego, and especially so thanks to a brutal winter that ramped up my depression ten-fold. Like I did when I graduated high school and was anxiously preparing to go off to college, I feel like I should be blasting “Shake it Off” by Florence & the Machine and dancing around my bedroom.

This is a short post and I’m glad for it. It’s refreshing to share good news and leave it at that.

Tomorrow is my 23^rd birthday. I feel good.

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Identity”:

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson

This is a Post about Peter Pan

I feel inexplicably thirty, and I have for a long time. In reality I’m closer to twenty than I am to thirty, but years of certain comments will age you up mentally.

You’re an old soul.

You’re so mature for your age.

You’re wise beyond your years.

I guess, in a way, those things are kind of true. I had my brain stolen when I was sixteen, then my body at seventeen, and my family at eighteen. That sounds dramatic, I know, but grief wears you down.

Sylvia Plath wrote somewhere, “I feel old, but not very wise.” I concur.

(I can imagine my older readers rolling their eyes a little at this point. I know thirty is young, but when you’re barely breaching adulthood, it feels eons away. It feels like you can’t even imagine who you will be when you’re that age. It’s spooky!)

The prospect of getting older has always struck me dumb with terror. I call it Peter Pan Syndrome. While most of my peers were eager to seem older and be older, growing up has always felt like a punishment to me. Look close enough and you can find a photo of me on almost every birthday where I’m crying. My mom made a whole collage frame full of them for my high school graduation party. In hindsight, that’s undiagnosed anxiety triggered by too much attention on me, but also the great big fear of getting older.

Even from a young age my future always felt uncertain to me. I had a hard time making and keeping friends in grade school, and I worried a lot about how I was supposed to go through puberty and the whole gambit without at least one close pal by my side. But when I found my friend group in middle school, I was still afraid, which was made extra scary because I didn’t know what I was afraid of.

I remember very vividly the one time in my life I wanted desperately to be—or at least seem—older. I was twelve or thirteen years old, spending a lot of time on MySpace, and crushing aggressively on an eighth grader. I filled out a bulletin (remember those?) he posted called “Girlfriend Application” and after the blank for age I think I wrote 14 or 15. Like he couldn’t look in a yearbook and do a quick calculation if he really wanted. It would be my first job rejection. Who’d have thought!

MySpace bulletins also served as public forums to fill out quizzes or answer questions about yourself so that your friends could get to know you better. I remember one quiz I filled out asked whether I was more preppy or punk, and I wrote something like, “punk b*#%h!!!” and my big sister called me out for swearing. (This is a big deal at twelve years old.) I think I told her it was a typo, which, in hindsight, makes me laugh out loud. Later on, my aunt would join MySpace and ask why my profile said I was sixteen, and I’d tell her it was a “glitch”.

All this posturing to appear older, and for what? I think it was equal parts preteen identity crisis and wild, pubescent desire for male attention. I failed miserably at both, which was probably embarrassingly apparent to my close friends watching it all unfold from a distance, although we were all doing the same dumb shit then.

But then my hormones eventually mellowed out and I settled into a standard of existential dread, and here we are today.

Later on, when it came time for me to apply to colleges I had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression for about a year, so the fear kind of made sense. But between financial aid and trying to choose a major and even settling on a campus, I remember weeping to my mom regularly, “I don’t know what to do.”

I picked my university basically at random. In fact, I never even got to take a campus tour because a blizzard stood between home and the tour we were scheduled to go on, and we never rescheduled. The first time I saw my campus was on orientation day, a couple months before move-in. (Pro tip: If you’re someone crippled by anxiety, don’t take this route. It’s dumb and shortsighted and will make you feel like the sky is falling.)

After a couple weeks of debilitating homesickness, I got comfortable enough, and ultimately stayed there through graduation. Even dating in college was a headache at best. I used dating apps like Tinder to meet people, but when it came down to actually meeting in person for a date I backed out, too anxious to actually pursue anything real. The attention was nice, but the prospect of actually engaging in an adult relationship? Nightmarish. The line I got regularly, which had already lost any power it may have had when I was in high school, was, “You’re so mature for your age.” I don’t even know what that means, except that I think it makes older guys feel better about hitting on barely-legal girls.

When I dated a guy I met in my dorm, I liked to imagine what life would be like for us after we graduated and we miraculously settled into our careers. Our relationship was deeply boring—mostly we just made out and watched The Office and sometimes went to parties where he expertly led me away, his hand on the small of my back, when the cops came—and imagining us as Grown-Ups was much more fun. We could move out west and he would be a park ranger! I could write novels in our little cabin in the mountains! We could have a billion dogs! Probably not kids, because he wasn’t really interested in that, but wouldn’t they be so cute if they inherited his curly hair?

The other shoe dropped when my mom and grandma came to pick me up for a weekend at home and, when I asked if he wanted to meet them, he said no. Very un-thirty-ish. So that relationship didn’t last long.

Even my current partner told me once, when we were sitting at a picnic table outside my dorm after class, that I seemed so mature for nineteen. I think he could see something in my eyes because he added quickly, cautiously, “Is that weird to say?” In hindsight, I could kick him for saying that to me, but knowing who he is and who we are together, I understand his meaning was, basically, “Thank god she’s not going to ask me to go to house parties.” We are the same that way, which is why it’s been working out so well. I can imagine us, realistically, in our thirties, because it looks a lot like how we are now, but maybe with some rugrats and a stable job on my end.

I think the best year of my life, so far, was my last year at my university, and so I’m grateful I was able to stick it out, bad dates and clichés and all. That community, once chosen at random, now means the world to me. I hope when I’m really thirty I’m back there starting my family.

The other side of the coin is that I am, really and truly, not your typical early-twenty-something. Sometimes I wish I were thirty so, when my coworkers ask me to go to the bars after work, I could say, “The kids have soccer tonight!” instead of fumbling for some excuse that sounds better than, “No, thanks. I don’t…want to.” My ideal Saturday is spent ping-ponging between antique stores with my partner and maybe grabbing dinner somewhere before we go home and sit on the couch to watch a beloved movie for the fifth time.

I guess this means my brain is thirty—that is, settled into an extremely comfortable, mundane routine—but my body is still twenty-two and appears as though I should be having raucous fun. I don’t want the responsibilities and pressures of thirty, but the illusion of adjusted-ness is appealing. (I don’t think thirty is a magic number where everyone figures their lives out. In fact, I see a trend of people not “figuring things out” until they’re much older, and thirty looks much like eighteen or twenty-five, in the grand scheme of things. Thirty, here, is mostly a symbol. Sub in forty if it makes you more comfortable. Stick with me, here.)

I am a June baby, which means when I graduated high school I was still seventeen and I was the last of my friends who could legally drink in college. In reality, it’s a few months’ difference in age between you and your peers, but being the baby of the group for so long maybe contributed to my fear of growing up.

At the same time, though, I have always been the “Mom Friend”. This means I get tipsy after a single beer and I’ll hold your hair when you puke and tell you to text me when you get home safe and, if we’re lucky and you listen, steer you away from some dumb guy who’s cosmically destined to waste your time and break your heart. I guess this is why I feel like a thirty-year-old baby.

Maybe thirty feels like an anchor. My life, at the moment, is a little tumultuous and uncertain, and so the mysticism of being thirty is that it means maybe things will be more stable. My brain and my spirit are ready for some stability, but the rest of me needs to catch up, because she’s probably secretly afraid of being a real-life grown up. Of having a mortgage. Of having a 401K. Of being stuck in a job she hates. Of finding herself in a job she loves, maybe. Of having a kid! Or two or three!

I suppose when you consider this conflict in me, the desire to make like Peter Pan and fly off to Never Never Land at odds with the desire to Be a Stable Adult, a lot of other stuff makes sense. My penchant for describing policy with Spongebob gifs, serious but still playful, comes back to all this. But certainly I’m not the only one.

Thank goodness I turn 23 this year. Seven years to go!

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Peter Pan”:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays by Chelsea Hodson

The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad by Adam Gnade