Salon.com > Rebecca Golden

All the weight I didn’t lose

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone knows this trick: You hold the camera above your face, stretch your neck and shoot. I take my own picture this way. You see my heart-shaped face, my cutely assertive chin, and my dark brown eyes. Sometimes I peer insouciantly over the rims of my glasses. You don't see the double chin or the pudgy roundness of my face. You don't see my body, apart from the cleavage I occasionally throw in. Pictures make me thinner than I am, or will ever likely be. That angle slices away more pounds than my surgeons, and that's saying a lot.

I am the “after” side of surgery, having lost more than 250 pounds. No one gets this, at least not without an explanation, because I still weigh over 200 pounds, and the weight loss fable is supposed to end when you're thin, not when you're merely “an average fat American.” I still wonder if I should get more surgery. I have so many pieces of clothing that fit, but that I reject because they cling in one place wrong. That particular place is my right thigh and calf, which are obviously larger than the left. (I call it my freak leg.) Doctors have no real explanation, but the general theory is that a fall I suffered when I weighed 600 pounds actually broke off a chunk of fat in my calf. That place just above my knee seems swollen, and is the reason I can't wear skirts anywhere close to above the knee. If jeans stick to the freak leg, I toss them into the back of the closet and try another pair.

Interview With My Bully: The bully who asked for forgiveness

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:30:00 +0000

No one person ever led the bullying I experienced as a child. When I try to remember that time in my life, I think of a mob of faces, and of the mercy I hoped for but never received.

I grew up as a fat girl in an unforgiving new money suburb. One time, I was going to play with a younger friend from my block when a group of girls surrounded us, some shoving me, some yelling "Moose!" (Moose was the nickname that plagued me throughout school, following me until I left for college.) The girl leading the mob, Stacy, had one year and at least four inches on me. Her golden good looks would've made her pretty if not for the furious expression she wore whenever she caught sight of me. I broke through the circle of screaming girls and ran till I got home. I never told anyone, though the violence frightened me.

I tried contacting Stacy, but she ignored my emails. I moved on to Delia, leader of the mean girls in my elementary school. Delia sometimes called me names, but generally stuck to catty mind games. One day in sixth grade, she walked up to my desk, looked deep into my eyes, and said I had "such a pretty face." Then she shook her head sadly. She and her eighth grade boyfriend tried to convince me his friend had a crush on me. I weighed 250 pounds, so it was unlikely. I saw her at our 20th high school reunion this summer. She teaches grade school now and commended me on an essay I'd written about bullying for Salon.

Fat girl: A history of bullying

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 01:20:00 +0000

At age 5, the last age at which I had a normal body mass, the school football coach's son punched me in the face. I have no memory of what prompted this; small boys can be a strange and violent people. I tasted blood before I felt pain. I am usually quick with a clever line, but the perfect comeback always escaped me in those moments. No matter how many times it happened, I was always surprised, devastated anew by the meanness, by the cutting words, by a classmate's fist.

But soon, they were calling me fat. I wore the ugly Catholic school uniform, a brown plaid pinafore with a white blouse and Peter Pan collar. Under this hot mess, I wore cheap polyester pants, also brown. All the girls had them.

"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.

Excuse me while I stick my head in the toilet

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:20:00 +0000

An unknown number lit up the tiny screen of my pink cellphone. Mindful of traffic, I pulled over into an empty parking lot.

“Is this the cleaner from the Craigslist?” asked the caller in a soft, lilting soprano.

“Um, sure,” I replied. “I clean houses.”

The parking lot was a cracked mess of broken concrete and foot-high weeds. The lot used to front Southwyck Mall, but the mall fell to a wrecking ball a few months ago, another casualty of the stagnant economy. My parents knew the people who ran the carousel at Southwyck. As I little girl, I rode the painted horses there for free.

“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.

My big fat obnoxious former self

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 11:40:00 +0000

The best thing about weighing 571 pounds is eating whatever you want. You don't worry about gaining five pounds. You know that it won't make a difference. You know that starving yourself and losing five pounds won't make a difference, either. The futility of the situation creates its own inertia. At 571 pounds, I thought nothing of drinking all the cherry Coke I wanted. I ate triple cheeseburgers and Dutch apple pie and quiche Lorraine.

Weighing 571 pounds should have meant that I had diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease at the very least. I had none of the above. I drove a car. I worked. I never became permanently fused to a plaid sofa. Burly firemen never had to remove a picture window from my house so they could haul me away to the hospital. Still, I longed to do ordinary things. I missed having the ability to get up off the floor unassisted, to sit in booths at restaurants and to ride in Japanese cars.

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.