“Fat pig, fat girl, fat thing!” This boy never had a name. He was older, in another grade. He threw one of the red rubber balls at me, hitting me in the stomach, laughing as the weight knocked the wind out of me, leaving me gasping for breath on the ground. Catholic school, that failed experiment in my religious education, ended shortly afterward.

Being “the fat girl” happened suddenly. In fact, it happened before I was actually, medically, fat. When children started teasing me, I probably only weighed five pounds more than I should have for my height. But kids seize on small differences. The tall child is a beanstalk, the short kid is a shrimp. By the time my weight became a problem — when I really was the fattest person (adults included) in school — I had long since given up weighing myself or caring. Making it through each brutal day became the only goal. The rest of it — my health, my body — fell away. By the time I cared again, after I graduated from high school, I weighed nearly 400 pounds.

At public school in the new-money suburb my parents worked so hard to put us in, the children found a wide array of ways to torture me. I never thought of myself as a child. I never thought of myself as anything, really. I read books, and I learned that girls have best friends. But I had no friends. Kids who liked me when we were alone never acknowledged any relationship with others present. I never really knew who I hated more — the ones who hated me, or the ones who liked me, but only in private.

“Moose, Moose, Moose, Moose, MOOOOSE!” I sat on the hard, cold floor of the school gym, like I did every day, waiting for the bus. Kids chanted, some from my class, some from other grades. Older children, younger children, strangers — they knew my name, the one that Brad, the sixth grader who lived in the house behind mine, had conferred. I heard this chant in line. I heard it on the bus. I heard it on the playground. I heard it every day of my life, every school day, for four years.

In sixth grade, the teacher joined in.

“Not you!” she shouted, taking the paperback book out of my hands. She’d instructed the class to read silently. I opened a book, relieved at the chance to go someplace else for a while. She threw the book across the room. I remember her angry face, the flecks of foamy spit at the corners of her mouth, how deep wrinkles framed her nose. Her dentures didn’t fit properly, and her mouth never closed all the way. She called me “butterball” and pointed out the shiny smear of blood the day I got my period in class. She crowed at the discovery while my classmates shrieked with laughter. When I talk about these things, I marvel at the absurdity and the shocking level of cruelty. It seems like something that would happen to a stranger, something that would happen in a book. All I know is that this was my life. I was 12 years old, and school wasn’t safe. I went home and thought about how I would kill myself.

I moved from sixth grade to junior high school in a fog. I felt sad and afraid every day. I never had friends who stood by me. Teachers knew I was smart. They saw the test scores. They read my papers. None of them seemed to wonder why I did so poorly, especially in subjects that required verbal ability. I found it hard to focus because the fear never went away, not even when teachers were around. There was a boy in my art class who talked about his pubic hair and all the girls he’d touched. He leered at me and winked and then laughed with his friends about how easily he could land the whale.

Another boy at our table told me daily how much I disgusted him. He hated me in a quiet, powerful way. One day, out art teacher made us draw pictures of one another, of our hair. My hair tangled easily and I never quite managed to get out all the knots. The quiet boy had talent. He drew my ugly, tangled hair perfectly, paying special attention to the frizzy bump on the back of my head where I tried to hide a particular matted clump.

I longed to be invisible. I worried that anything I did that made me stand out — even good things, like drawing well or writing a story for the school paper — would mean attracting the wrong kind of attention. I loved to draw and paint, but I stopped taking art class in ninth grade because after our teacher left to smoke, a junior in the class went up to the board and drew pictures of me, nude and in impossible sexual positions.

One boy stabbed me with a pen. He pinned me against the wall in basic algebra — a class for math dummies — and told his friends to watch.

“I bet she bleeds gravy,” he said, jabbing my bare arm. I bled. I cried. I trembled. I know I should’ve screamed, or done something else to attract the attention of the wrestling coach in charge of the class, sitting at his desk and prying bits of black scum out from under his fingernails with a pocketknife, but I couldn’t actually believe this was happening until it was over. Even then, I couldn’t make a sound. I didn’t move until long after the bell rang and the classroom had emptied completely.

We’ve heard so much about the tragic consequences of bullying lately. Facebook and other social networks have added a new, baffling dimension to children’s attacks on each other. But long before “bullying” was a national conversation, there were people like me. People who faced a gantlet of assault, taunting, humiliation and sexual harassment, people who were denied meaningful parts of their education. The children — who, famously, can be so cruel — were as advertised. And in my life, the adults either didn’t care, couldn’t be bothered, didn’t notice or actively participated. My advanced-placement European history teacher, a self-proclaimed feminist who wore a pro-choice coat hanger on a necklace but never called on girls in class, called me stupid in front of the students. When I asked her for help preparing for a test, she told me to get out of her sight. I think looking at me actually made her sick.

People who tried to help thought the best way to end this daily nightmare would be for me to do the right thing and lose weight. My parents called the school, complained to individual teachers and gave me bad advice. “Just ignore it,” they told me, echoing the ages-old bullying strategy that never works for anyone. “If you ignore them, they’ll stop.” I have no idea what they should’ve done, or if anything would’ve helped. At the time, lectures on my weight just made me angrier and sadder. Given how intensely miserable I was, tending my health was beyond my reach. Suggestions like that infuriated me. Despite my classmates’ best efforts, despite my teachers’ utter failure to look out for me, despite the callousness of principals and the great distress I caused my own family, I had this crazy idea that I had a right to courtesy and an education no matter what I weighed. This idea made me defiant — and defiance was the only thing I had going for me for a long, long time.

I’m still fat. I peaked at about 600 pounds before losing more than half my body weight. Still, I’m not thin, and probably never will be. One day at the gym, after swimming a mile and showering, I heard the sound of teen girls laughing. I saw them behind me, pointing at me as I changed clothes, making whispered comments to one another.

“If you think this is bad, you should’ve seen me before I lost 300 pounds,” I told them. I stared them down. There were shamefaced and murmured apologies. At 35, I finally managed to win a round with some mean girls. Hooray for me, I thought.

But despite it all, I think people may be good. The recent public outrage over bullying gay teens makes me believe that. Efforts by Dan Savage and others inspire me to hold on to this thought. I have no regrets about not killing myself at 12. I’ve been to Australia, loved good people, had amazing friends and even written a book. I manage to have comebacks all the time now.

“Hey, baby,” a 14-year-old boy at the mall thinks he’ll make a scene and entertain his friends.

“Call me when you grow some pubes,” I tell him. His friends laugh. He scowls and tells them to shut up. I triumph over a bully. Over a child, really. I know it’s petty, and that I have other reasons to feel good about myself and to let go of the ugliness of my school days. I know that. But I’ll take what I can get.

“You can come clean tonight?” the woman asked. “Two bedrooms. Should be an easy job for you. Please.”

I gave her a number that seemed fair and sped off with my vacuum and a gallon of Clorox to a spanking new Ye Olde Village-style mall. I got a lost a few times; every building looked exactly alike.

A tiny, pale woman with a baby on her hip greeted me. She looked at once exhausted and imperious. She’d just come back from three months in New York, and her husband hadn’t cleaned anything – he never so much as wiped the kitchen counter during the 90 days he spent alone in the condo. He didn’t tidy up after shaving and left tiny pieces of hair on every surface. I could probably have braided the bathtub had I but time and inclination. (That tub alone made me want to kill myself just a little bit.) I instantly regretted giving my quote over the phone, but I’d given my word. And that’s how I ended up spending Sunday on my knees in front of someone else’s commode.

I clean strangers’ toilets for money. I have two college degrees, and I sold a book to an overseas division of Random House. The money hasn’t come rolling in (though I pray to Oprah on a regular basis), so I clean houses as a way to pay the bills between royalty checks.

This toilet was particularly brutal: It mocked me with all its nasty human feces stains and the dusting of wiry black hairs around the base. White surfaces and human hair have become the bane of my existence. Hair clings to the outsides of toilets like Romeo to Juliet, Brad to Angelina, or me to the strawberry vodka and cranberry juice that this work makes me crave.

My college friends have prospered, and they worry about investments. The last guy who dumped me (“I can’t do the boyfriend-girlfriend thing,” he told me as we snuggled together in bed) drove three hours to Columbus so he could rescue his money from Charles Schwab. As I detail the rim of the bowl with a toothbrush, I think about Barack Obama.

I went to see him speak just before the election. Funny how politicians love to visit Ohio in the fall every four years or so.

“Your 401K might be a 101K,” he quipped. “The question isn’t, Are you better off than you were four years ago? but, Are you better off than you were four weeks ago?”

I have no 401K. I have no mortgage and am lucky to have rent money about half the time. I’ve struggled with disability all my life. I once weighed almost 600 pounds, leaving me chronically broke and underemployed. After having gastric bypass surgery and dumping most of the excess weight, I still rely on disability and the health insurance it provides. But I struggle. I had minus $200 in the bank as Obama promised to help send my (nonexistent) children to college.

Walking home from that speech, I passed a pawnshop, doubled back, and sold the gold necklace I’d put on that morning on the off-chance that I might appear in news photos or in television footage of the crowd. The pawnbroker counted a fifty and a hundred into my palm, and I deposited most of the money, bringing my total net worth up to an awe-inspiring minus $87.

Months later, with Obama in office, I’m certainly not the only one struggling. Even with the recession in full swing, though, my clients can still afford me. People who have money to keep their dogs in daycare can splurge for a Craigslist cleaner every once in a while to spare the lady of the house the indignity of scrubbing her own toilet. I meet compact, perfect women, their biceps toned and tan, and I feel large and shabby by comparison. They usually hire me only once; given the uncertainty in the job market, no one wants to make any long-term commitments.

I suppose I could find other ways to make ends meet. But cleaning has a physical aspect I relish. I could never have done this work before I lost the weight. I also like the feeling of having done something. When you transform a filthy hellhole into a clean house that smells faintly of orange furniture polish, you know you’ve accomplished something.

Cleaning a house will teach you a lot about its occupants. I clean a minister’s house and find propaganda videos about Muslims and their evil plans for Christendom. I find pornography. So much pornography. Almost none of my clients, even the very wealthy ones, own books. People have all manner of weird bedroom habits, too – habits that have nothing to do with sex.

“When the girls were young, I told them they had to make their beds. So they started sleeping on top of the bedspreads,” one client, 40-something and a doctor’s wife, tells me. She shrugs. Her daughters are 15 and 17 and they don’t remember what it feels like to sleep under clean bedsheets. Or how to clean their own bathroom vanity. I find a bowl of elderly body wax next to their sink, tiny pubic hairs thrusting up from the surface like a thousand football fans doing the wave.

Very rich people want the cheapest price for household service. A dainty blond surgeon shows me her home. Every hard surface gleams with marble or imported hardwood.

“I need windows spot-cleaned, I’d like the litter boxes emptied, and you’ll need to buy a canister vac. They’re the best on my floors,” she tells me. She wants me to clean her 4,000-square-foot house for $80. Cleaning a house that size could take as long as six hours. Between gas, supplies and equipment, I need to charge $20 an hour to turn a profit. I give her my estimate – $100 if I can do it in five hours. I never hear from her again.

My friend Adam got a divorce, and I clean his place once a month. We dated briefly. I liked him that way, and he liked me like a pal. But I’ve dated other men, too. In the last year, I’ve been out with a guy who was afraid of soup (“too much stuff … overwhelming”), a serial shoplifter, and a man who once faked his own death. Adam has a steady girlfriend. I wish him well. I tell myself I do. I pick up his-and-hers pairs of shearling slippers in Adam’s bedroom. I stare out the window for a long minute before turning on the vacuum.

The house full of husband hair made me long for all those wistful moments picking up children’s toys or hating Adam’s (very sweet) new girlfriend. The john seemed like the worst that apartment could do to me till I saw the stove caked with grease and the rotted remnants of a hundred spilled sauces. It was so wretched there was no way I could finish it all in one night. The client agreed, and I offered to come back the next day to tackle the rest.

It took me two hours to do the cook top alone. I scrubbed till my hands went numb. My nails looked like I’d stuck my fingers in an electric pencil sharpener and the wounds were saturated liberally with oven cleaner. The smell of chemicals burned my nose and eyes, and I wondered about the health effects of inhaling an entire bottle of Easy-Off. I could swear I felt a tingle in my ovaries. I can probably only make flipper babies now.

“Take these to the Dumpster,” she said, waving one manicured hand at a pair of enormous trash bags. I grabbed one bag – all I could carry with the vacuum and my bucket of cleaning supplies – and took it outside. I got in my car and hauled ass.

I drove a steady 80 miles an hour from the far ‘burbs into the broken-concrete heart of the city and then the artsy neighborhood where I can afford (barely) a charming apartment in a building across from a vacant lot. I pass a burned church, a huge sign in front bearing the slogan “On Fire for the Lord!”

On the way up the stairs to my third-floor apartment, I calculated my profit. Eight hours of cleaning and two hours of travel time. $12 on gas and another $10 on supplies. My profit: $78 and a ruined home manicure.

I opened the door and was greeted by the stink of the cat box. My living room looked like a rogue nuke hit it. I should clean, but I’m not going to. I’m taking a long bath and having a large glass of pink vodka. If anyone asks, it’s the maid’s day off.

I missed other things, too. I missed having a job that took full advantage of my various skills and talents. I found it difficult to convince newspaper editors that a 500-pound woman could cover whatever came up in the course of a day. I missed having a boyfriend. I found myself at the age of 33 trapped in my mother’s house, disabled and alone much of the time.

I had no idea I weighed 571 pounds; household scales don’t go above 350. I found out my weight one day at the pulmonologist’s office. His very efficient electronic scale spelled it out for me, the number writ large in neon green lights. That sort of a number comes as a huge shock. You try to deny its significance. If you’re me, you leave the doctor’s office, head directly to Wendy’s, and buy a Classic Triple, large fries and a cherry Coke. You eat this meal in your car, and you cry like a little girl.

I’d had wakeup calls before. Five years ago, I weighed 525 pounds, and managed to slide into denial about this fact. I did nothing about my weight. But something about this new number, 571 pounds, disturbed me profoundly. It may have been the proximity of the number to 600. I had told myself in the past that 525 pounds was barely 500 pounds at all — really fairly close to the 400s. But 571 pounds? I finished my cheeseburger and started researching gastric bypass surgery.

I stopped eating fast food and drinking soda pop and made an appointment with a surgeon. I joined the Y and stuffed myself into the world’s ugliest bathing suit — a backless, braless “swim dress” with matching underpants — so I could do water aerobics and swim laps. My Russian surgeon required me to keep a journal of everything I ate, to eat six times a day and to take vitamins. I learned that after surgery I would need to do these things for the rest of my life. I developed a taste for protein bars and grilled chicken.

My doctor had no idea of the irony-fraught historical ramifications of my operation: He was as a descendant of Cossacks disemboweling the granddaughter of Russian Jews. Still, when the day of surgery arrived, I let some people cut me open and rearrange my guts. I woke up and saw the scar for the first time. An eight-inch line of steel staples divided my torso. I walked the hospital halls, putting in 10 circuits a day, 10 times past the nurses station where my caretakers snacked on Doritos and sugar cookies. I admired the knitted Christmas stockings and construction paper decorations lining the corridor, but I made them take the candy cane off the door to my room.

Now, seven months later, I can clasp my hands behind my back when I stretch after aerobics. I can ride in a Hyundai Elantra. I can sit with my knees together. I can cross my ankles. I’ve even taken to man shopping on the Internet. We postops take extraordinary pleasure in the suddenly ordinary. Wiping your ass? That is a red-letter day for some of us. These are victories, sure, but also the sort of clichés that abound in the world of gastric bypass. Everyone takes the same “after” picture: They squeeze into one leg of an old pair of fat jeans and mug for the camera. It is my effort not to become a weight loss surgery cliché that is my deepest struggle apart from my continuing love of food.

One of the only good things about weighing nearly 600 pounds is the sense of uniqueness it bestows. People had no trouble remembering me. I was a rare, elusive creature. But, day by day, as I dwindle down, I become more and more ordinary. Weight used to define me, even manufacturing my personality. My whole persona, the boisterous, obnoxious fat girl, lent me an aura of toughness. As the weight comes off, I find myself changing inwardly, becoming more feminine and more delicate in ways that both delight and terrify me. When walking down the street makes you an object of pity and disgust at worst, and unfettered curiosity at best, you need a certain amount of righteous hostility. But the battle armor doesn’t fit anymore, so I go out into the world without its reassuring heaviness. I have lost some of my dense outer layer of crankiness. These days, I’m a bit more open, a bit more hopeful in my presentation. And yet, I despise the idea of losing my big-girl righteousness as I lose the weight.

People like to tell prospective bypass patients they’ll become a whole new person. This never appealed to me. I never hated myself. I hated some aspects of my body (breasts should point up, e.g.) but never the inner person. But like it or not, that person has changed. Losing 180 pounds will do that to a girl. As I move forward in a drastically altered body, the inner fat girl diminishes. Much as my body troubled me, I can’t help feeling nostalgic about that girl. I hardly think about Cherry Coke and fast food anymore. But that girl’s scrappiness and general bad attitude saved my life a thousand times. I’m going to miss her.