Soft...

I remember sitting on the bus, going on some field trip at SCDS, and sitting next to Maya. She was small, part Asian. I remember looking at our thighs and thinking…yikes, my thighs are about twice the size of hers. That must have been about 3rd or 2nd grade.
Later, in middle school, I remember sitting in math class and looking down at my thighs, and then at the thighs of the girl next to me, mine seemed huge compared to hers.

My senior year of high school I stopped competing on horses, and thought I had better take up some other activity. That is when I started running. The summer after my senior year I would go tanning at the beach and eat fruit, and hope that while I was laying on my back, my hip bones would protrude to a degree that my swim suit would be held off my tummy.

After the first semester at college I was huge. I didn’t have a scale in the dorms, nor did I have many chances to look at my body naked in the mirror. When I came home for Christmas it occurred to me just how big I had gotten. At the same time I had fractured my ankle, making it hard to run. I tried to measure my weight by how far my stomach stuck out when looking down at it, to this day that is how I measure my weight when there is no scale around.

That spring, I had surgery on my ankle and tried to eat as little as possible, started counting calories. The summer after my freshman year at Lewis and Clark it was my goal to lose weight. I would try to eat little, start running, and tan, I had a part time job, which made this possible.

Sophomore year was mostly about bingeing. I would eat as little as possible, have broccoli and black beans for dinner, then drink and then binge uncontrollably and start all over the next day. I was in a drawing class at night a couple times a week. I used it as an excuse to eat as little as possible at night. Then I started going to the ceramic studio and working out my frustration with my boyfriend while avoiding food. I would work on clay until it was past dinnertime. Shockingly, my art reflected the struggle I was going through. I made a two foot tall slice of cake out of clay that year, with a giant fork sticking into it…telling, no?

Junior year I regained healthy living for a semester, living with a group of girls helped, we were all accepting, we did yoga (which made me more comfortable with my body image).

Then I went to Australia…
Maybe it was the postpartum depression after having an abortion, maybe it was being away from my boyfriend, maybe it was being homesick, what ever it was, and I gained weight, and could not stop. My clothes didn’t fit, I would binge and then not eat, and I lost interest in doing anything social. I was running, but it didn’t do anything.

When I came back I had to lose weight, but I also found out I needed another ankle surgery. The beginning of senior year I was fit and thin, feeling good, and I kept it up. This time my senior project kept me away from food; I worked so many hours on that.
I kept losing weight, made new friends, was social and thin, succeeding in school, but growing further from my boyfriend. After three years he finally figured out that I was starving myself, he would make me food, take me out, and tell me I had to eat, which made me even more resistant. By the end of senior year I weighed around 120 lbs, I hadn’t weighed that since 7th grade. I was never small; we have bigger bone structure, that’s how it is.

And then, the shit hit the fan. My struggle with food progressed, it literally consumed me, it was always on my mind, how to avoid it, how much of it I wanted, what I wanted, when I was allowed to have it. It became one more reason to kill myself, one more thing that was so stressful. When I went home after being in ICU, I weighed myself, I was so proud, I just barely tipped over 121, granted I had been in the hospital, not eating for a few days, but still, it was miraculous.

Naturally, I was forced into therapy after trying to kill myself. We talked about food, she was convinced I had an eating disorder, I had never really thought about it like that, I just thought that I was stressed about food…all the time. We worked on it; I went to a nutritionist, reluctantly. I knew about food, I knew about nutrition, why should I go to a nutritionist. I wasn’t thin enough to be anorexic, yet didn’t have the thought process of a ‘normal’ person. She wanted me to keep food journals, record everything I ate, which made me feel even fatter, so I would leave things off of the food journal. Because if I were an anorexic, I would eat what I was eating, I didn’t fit the profile.

I got huge that summer, threw out all of my clothes and bought a new wardrobe…size 8…it disgusted me, but I couldn’t keep busting out of my size 4 and 6 clothes. I made a sculpture out of my old pants, soaked them in liquid clay, and fired them. It was a vessel, titled ‘size 6’.

I went to a gym, worked at title nine, started cycling, tried to be okay with my weight, got a chubby boyfriend, and felt much better.

In a few months, I moved to Hood River, opened a store and stayed at around 145-155 lbs. And then I met Josh, retinal, tall, manly, emotionally void in the most stereotypical macho ways. I stayed at a constant weight, then realized how large I was after dating him for a few months, then I started to exercise more, on my bike, eat less, skip dinner (the ‘bad’ meal). Winter came and we house-sat, I continued to try to eat less, especially after the holidays.

When we went to Mexico and I got sick, really sick and there was no vegetarian food, and I lost my appetite. I had diarrhea for a few weeks, lost weight. And when I was at my thinnest I had been while he knew me, he had the nerve to tell me I was, “getting soft” and “needed to watch what I was eating, or get on my bike a few days a week, or run” (I think he interpreted my lack of muscle and excess skin as ‘softness’). I left work after he said that to me, drove to Fossil, Oregon, ruminated on how someone that ‘loved’ me could say that. I continued to ruminate for another week, found an apartment and told him I thought we should stop dating. I moved out, stayed at the best western for a couple nights and moved into my apartment. It felt like a divorce, I lost my appetite, and welcomed the lack of desire for food.
I lasted a month longer in that town, and then moved back to Seattle to open my store again. Living at home makes me want to cry and scream with rage. I ate as little as possible, distracting myself by spending 4 and 5 hours at the barn. Distracting myself with the business. I got down to 126.5, now I am at 129 on a bad day, 127 on a good day. I weigh myself almost every morning. I want to be 125, it sounds nice, appropriate. I still feel ‘soft’, Josh telling me that was an easy excuse to lose more weight. I just want to be a little thinner; I want a little less excess. Cycling enforces that, weight = slow. Running enforces that weight = slow, and harder on joints. I just want to lose a little more weight, and sustain it.

I finally figured out what life skill I got out of being an art major at a liberal arts college. I have a profound ability to develop an idea to maturity.

retinal

Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since Courbet, in favour of retinal painting... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.
Duchamp 1964

I love the concept of retinal art. It implies a certain superficiality to art. And if you think of classic, ‘fine art’ as painting and bronze, it is nothing but superficial; ‘fine art’ is a finish on another surface.
Similarly I think there are retinal people. If I had to pick a word besides ‘leave-it-to-beavery’ to describe my father, it would be retinal. His mother, an recreational ‘artist’, painted watercolors of little sailboats on Lake Erie, a pink rhodedendron, or maybe a little red lighthouse on the peninsula. R-E-T-I-N-A-L. My father, of course, loves retinal art, whether it’s by his mother, Courbet, Manet, Monet. Who doesn’t, isn’t that what art is supposed to be, nice to look at?
For my senior thesis I worked on a series of nest vessels made out of ceramic covered fabric. Ceramics, or clay, to my father means pottery. If its not pretty it damn well better be utilitarian. My vessels came from my idea and feelings of the word and concept ‘home’. They were white, cold, penetrable, delicate, fragile to the point of temporal, empty, and still.
“I could see these with flowers in them in our guest bedroom.” He says
…Yes, of course, put something in them, some shitty flowers, stick them in the guest bedroom…how retinal of you.