the misfit west

Author: Jen

  • the inventory

    I’ve been spending so much time lately trying to crack the code of my siblings. Why do they do this, did they do that, how much do they lie, am I a liar, who were our parents, why is this happening? Smack dab in the middle of what happens when rich people (rich in my world) die, I take up to two hours every morning to research trust law imagining the judge yelling at me “you are an ungrateful beneficiary, you are the problem, this is civil court but you can go straight to jail.” That’s how it always goes in uneven matches like this. I learned young about the best justice system money can buy and through the early deaths of two people my sister can purchase her own version of truth. Money seems to act like developer fluid. The image was already there. It just makes it visible. While I’m lonely, I’ve avoided its influence, but when do I stop living my principles and start not giving a shit like them?

    My sister wasn’t supposed to get such a big chunk of money yet in a matter of six months, mom killed herself and the money funneled to my sister and in less than a year she lawyered up and now each morning I ask AI the same questions over and over: will she be surcharged? Can I avoid court? What is probate? Can you please look up case law? What’s going on in the birth chart of Pisces? How can I get her to drop the lawyer? AI, in its glorious fuck ups, tells me slightly different responses every morning and astrology becomes more reliable than the moods of my sister. Mom is finally deceased and yet how she related to me is alive in a trust that’s being withheld just like her affection. Some family lessons become cud to a cow; turned over in the mouth and seven stomachs before they are spit out and consumed again.

    Maybe that’s what graduate school gave me. The moments I started to solder together my memories into personal essays in a graduate class that invited me to write in their ranks, I thought I had a pretty good life. What I didn’t understand was that writing would begin changing the value of things. The first essay that came back was about my uncle. For years I remembered him as one of the good ones and in many ways he was. Yet the moment I sat down to write about him, an entirely different memory surfaced: an apple pie cooling on the counter and my finger stealing apples from the filling before he completely lost his shit on me. I wasn’t trying to write about anger, and I certainly wasn’t trying to dismantle my uncle. Yet there it was on the page, an adult man screaming at a child over apples in a pie and once written down I couldn’t quite put the memory back where I found it.

    That seems to happen whenever I write. The stories don’t necessarily change but their proportions do. People I thought understood became more complicated. The heroes become human. Villains become humans too. Memories that once sat quietly in their own corners begin introducing themselves to one another. A cast flashes into my mind during workout class. A doll appeared in my mother’s living room years after I left home. A shoebox with my name on it returns from my aunt’s house. One memory starts pulling on another and before long I find myself wondering whether I am uncovering a pattern or simply creating one.

    Yesterday, in workout class, I mused on how Gillette created an athlete out of me and that some of those lessons are never gone. A purple cast flashes in my mind along with a question: I knew my mom had forced the cast on me because she claimed I would walk around in a boot. There is a little tiny voice that questions her decision amongst so many other decisions: Mom hated watching me succeed. I wish I was making that up but it’s not even the stuff of a lyrical essay. It’s the stuff of mental illness unchecked and ignored all the way up to her suicide. Yet I could never say she hated me. I can say assuredly I always questioned love in my family. The ones who loved me most let their anger show in ways that had nothing to do with me, yet somehow I became the catalyst.

    First, it was psychological testing that ruined my chances in the military. Then there’s the other truth that I wouldn’t have succeeded at being told what to do anyway. Then, it was the cast. But I ended up breaking my foot again anyway at Christian basketball camp. Then, in little ways. Refusing to cosign student loans. And then, after my dad’s death, I was erased. All my possessions now belong to my mother. Each return home I would see another object that was allegedly mine yet somehow now was my mother’s. My Samantha doll from the American girl’s collection sitting in her living room. All heirlooms now missing according to my sister from “smoke damage.”

    I managed to stay in my uncle’s house long enough to see if there was anything left for me. Nothing came directly from my mother and then another shoebox was eventually returned to me by my aunt. Full of sentimental objects and even adorned with my name in my mother’s neat cursive. So, I did exist in some kind of distorted way for my mother. I existed in the form that I was least threatening: the only forms of affection I got from my mother were “I love you” on Facebook. The trust and my mother’s love become the same thing: I must search and search for artifacts that prove I exist, prove I did something, prove my mother loved me.

    My sister had come down to Denver at one point and while I wished it was to offer support to one another it started to look like an inventory early on. My sister looking over every object, deciding if she wanted it or how much it might be worth. I felt like a child at times when I would discover something that she might have wanted. I took all the scraps I could relate to my family and initially I couldn’t look at some of them. The pain was so loud in the beginning I couldn’t sit with an object without thinking how we would ever move on from this. I kept looking for artifacts trying to find meaning while my sister seemed interested in entirely different things. I only know that by the end of the day I had a pile of objects nobody else seemed to want and somehow those became the things I valued most.

    A person probably never moves on from suicide. Right before he died, I told my uncle “Well it was my mom’s choice to die. And there is dignity in death.” He rewarded me saying “this is the clearest I’ve heard you in years” and it was that moment I knew he wasn’t going to sit with the pain that led to her death. My sister wasn’t going to sit with the pain of opting out of a visit that weekend before she died. My brother wasn’t going to own up to the protection order she filed against him. I wasn’t going to show anyone the text she sent the day before she died asking if I could be her counselor. None of us were going to save her. None of us could.

    That text sits in my mind the same way the trust does. A piece of evidence that refuses to stay in its assigned place. The mother who erased me after my father’s death. The mother who saved articles about me. The mother who left photographs and keepsakes in a shoebox with my name written across it. The mother who asked me to be her counselor the day before she died. Every time I think I have arrived at a conclusion another artifact appears and the inventory changes again.

    And so I write yet another version of a court filing knowing that I might not even be ready to look at the full accounting. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Not researching trust law. Not fighting over distributions. Not trying to understand my sister. Conducting an inventory. Looking through the records left behind by the dead and trying to determine what they were worth.

    My family loved me in secret. And I kept trying to live out loud and exemplify my value through accomplishments. I never learned my mother’s language.

  • automatically, without sound

    There is a muscle that runs from your lower spine through the bowl of your pelvis. Most people don’t know it exists until it wakes up. I had often heard about the psoas in yoga classes, the advanced ones where the teacher’s voice gently glided into authority of anatomy. One teacher often commented that we keep our exes in our hips and don’t be surprised if you randomly start crying.

    I was always moving. Feel bad, run, strength train, feel a little better, punish myself for feeling better. Then I started noticing my shape. I was never the thinnest in the room but I could hold my own in yoga classes, scantily clad in whatever overpriced Lululemon I had bought in spaces my income said I didn’t belong. I also started writing ever so carefully about eating disorders in my blog. I talked mostly about binging and purging and watched private messages flow in.

    In grad school, there was lots of encouragement of disclosure in a way that moved the class along, paralleling our ultimate use of disclosure in session to move therapy along. One girl talked about her eating disorder. She mentioned how the purging got so bad one day she could see and taste blood in her mouth. She was kicked out of our program that semester and had she never told us this info, I would have known.

    I keenly observed this woman like the other 21 folks in the program. How had they gotten here, were they better than me, did I have any business being here? And this girl, I saw her most. Her eating disorder wasn’t a secret to me. I knew exactly why she was always drinking water from her Nalgene, why the pack of gum was always sitting right next to her notebook, why she spent hours in the gym barely lifting weights while I ran mile after mile after mile on the treadmill.

    To this day, I know the calorie count in most foods. I know exactly what exercise will burn the most calories and how. I learned that to lose REAL weight, to lose the kind of weight to enter the disordered zone, you can’t workout as much as you would like. You simply get too hungry. I worked out at least twice a day and would become dysregulated if I couldn’t attend both my morning and evening classes.

    On break from school one spring, I found myself in a hugely crowded yoga class in Fort Collins, the last of four classes I had taken as I traveled back from southern Colorado. Class in Colorado Springs. Class in Denver. Another class in Denver. And now here I sat exhausted and forced into a place in the front of class where I felt the excitement of it all. Losing weight was a lifestyle now. Thoughts of thinness preceded every action and the goal was always to weigh less. And I had found the perfect community in which to mask it all: yoga.

    I had felt I escaped some fate when the classmate was removed from our program and the only difference between us was that I knew better than to talk about eating, disordered or otherwise. I knew better than to tell people the regimens I had lined out in my head that had to be completed for me to relax. I knew better than to go to lunch with anyone who might see me tuck away three quarters of my meal and vomit up the rest. If I didn’t do two a day workouts, one yoga, one running and strength training, I would feel anxiety so crippling that I could barely sleep. The only comfort was knowing that I could work out in a few hours when the studio opened.

    I never excelled too much at restriction or a slow measured approach to diminishing myself. The purging was the main gist of it all. I had trained my belly and my brain to feel certain amounts of food and automatically and without sound I could easily discard fresh meals. My secret wasn’t always kept that way and one time at work I was caught. In conflict with a coworker, he sharply said that maybe I ought go puke about what had gotten me upset. He knew. I had been sloppy. What bothered me most was how much money I would waste. $250 of sushi in the toilet at Mizos. Pad thai down the drain at Anongs. Pastries barely chewed down the toilet at Coal Creek.

    This went on for years. The binging and purging never seemed pervasive enough for me to do anything about it. Vomiting at this point wasn’t so much about staying thin as it was the feeling of relief that followed fullness. Feelings and thoughts expelled into nothingness. I started to get better at restricting, adjacent to a man who had the disorder as well. We entered an unspoken competition.

    Embarrassment and shame became ugly smelling incense lingering in the air and he floated right in with it. I watched posts about the flat earth and alleged spiritual enlightenment fill up his Facebook wall and X feed. In reality, he was an abusive prick who took way too many drugs and didn’t know how to cook or eat at regular intervals. He always had a woman to do this for him. The thinness I had managed right before things went south was in direct response to this man. Can’t win for losing with a personality disordered person.

    I eventually broke up with him and around 2019 I no longer had the privilege of worrying about weight. I was fired for doing community organizing and getting a free breakfast and lunch program into an elementary school. Who knew food was so political. Every Saturday after that I sat at the Farmers Market handing out double up food bucks, suggesting squash over potatoes to women thinner than me, nodding along to conversations about clean eating. I was the expert. I knew exactly how many calories were in everything on every table.

    A year later I was dating a man who excelled at ski mountaineering and said something sweet about the roundness of my belly. I think he intended to be sweet, talking about the bulge like a pineapple, but instead it landed like a verdict. I had stopped running the numbers long enough to gain the weight back and didn’t know what to do with a body I no longer recognized.

    The binging and purging shifted after that from food flying out of me to drugs and alcohol. Fired, single, and now a drunk. I would drink until I passed out so I didn’t have to feel the inertia of falling. At some point the fentanyl made purging involuntary. Projectile, sudden, out of my control the way nothing had been in years. My body lying still on the couch, feet crossed at the ankle without me noticing, the psoas locked and silent. I had stopped moving entirely. I didn’t know yet what that was costing me.

    The eating disorder slowly went away not because I worked at it but because everything I knew was no longer true. My mom killed herself that fall. My uncle six months later. I stopped weighing myself sometime in there and didn’t notice until summer. The grief was so total it crowded out the counting. There wasn’t enough room in my life to both stay alive and quantify doing so. I held off on my licensure. I stopped working. I waited to see what would be left.

    After the great losses of my mom and my uncle, I went to a doctor. She gave me a simple formula. Keep added sugar under 26 grams. I started eating chocolate almonds and cereal to manage the cravings the opiates had left behind. I tried Club Pilates but it was too fast and left my hips feeling sore and unmoored. Another studio with Turkish wooden reformers was out of reach financially. I eventually landed on the Lagree method, which was slow and deliberate. Moving that carefully after years of running myself into the ground started to work. My body finally started to feel what it was like to move without punishment.

    Despite all this, I ended up losing weight again. From 224 to 170 as of yesterday. I used to use this formula where folks who are 5’0″ weigh 100 pounds and then you add five pounds for every inch. That math tells me I should be around 170. Looks like old formulas and habits die hard. This weight loss was the way the doctor wanted, though. Simply cut out added sugar and watched two pounds per week until it stayed.

    Great loss cured me and I kept circling that like a drain. Most of my family is dead or estranged and I worry I’ll go unclaimed when I die, that my landlord will clean out my house the way I cleaned out my uncle’s. My aunt texts me about food because it’s neutral ground. Last week she told me they split one steak three times a month and mostly eat toast and eggs, that they all just need to walk more, with you as the exception. I held my phone for a second. Everyone compliments the disorder and calls it discipline. No one compliments the balance because the balance doesn’t look like anything from the outside. I don’t ask if she knows. That’s exactly how it always worked. Don’t say a thing. Keep it quiet.

    I run until I think Angel has waited long enough in the car. All four windows down so she can watch. One front leg, separation anxiety, overweight in ways the vet keeps mentioning. I don’t count the miles or check the time. Somewhere around thirty-five minutes something opens up in my hips. Not a thought, not a number. The psoas, maybe, finally loose for a reason that has nothing to do with burning anything off. Just the body, moving because it wants to. Angel watches from the window and I wave at her like an idiot. She doesn’t care. I don’t care. I never start crying on the run. But I understand now why someone might.