Control

(2004) I noticed it for the first time, sitting naked in the bathroom. I’d gone upstairs to use my parents’ shower because my mom kept an issue of Us Weekly and Vanity Fair in a rack to the left of the toilet bowl. Eight years old, I sat down on the toilet, feet dangling as I tugged at the elastic of my soccer shorts and underpants and scooched them off over my legs in one fling. I leaned to the left, grabbed a magazine, and laid it perfectly over my lap, in the long crevice my thighs made when my legs pressed together. Somewhere between reading to myself out loud, inspecting the loose subscription card hanging out from the bottom of the magazine, and teetering back and forth from one butt cheek to the other, the magazine slipped, falling upside-down on the marble ground, and revealed the nakedness of my legs.

I thought that my legs looked like pears. Smaller by my knees, but growing wider as they approached my hips. As I traced their outline, I remember thinking that none of my friends had legs that looked like pears. That the legs I’d drawn on a stick figure version of myself for art class that day were straight. That legs definitely shouldn’t look like pears. They don’t look like pears. Right?

(2000 through high school) Everyday I ate a bagel for breakfast. Not sure if I’m a creature of habit or just stubborn. It’s the Taurus in me, if you believe in astrology.

Sourdough bagel. Lightly toasted. Regular cream cheese. Three knife-fulls from the stout container, schmeared more generously with every swipe. Eat each half in four bites, gaining confidence and speed until the abrupt end. Fast, transactional, habitual, mindless. Wipe the corners of my lips, get every last drop of edible gratification onto my tongue and down my throat. Quick sip of water to wash it down. That was breakfast. And it would stay breakfast. It wouldn’t cross my mind, not even just once, throughout the rest of the day.

(whenever) They say your memory is one of the most unreliable parts of your consciousness. That you can be the most convincing liar you know. So convincing that your memories can be clouded by delusion, until you’ve completely erased the facts of an event or situation and replaced them with something entirely made up by the workings of your own imagination. Emotionally traumatic or charged memories are the biggest candidates for faulty memories.

Elizabeth Phelps is a graduate student in psychology at Princeton. She tells The New Yorker that there are three main parts of the brain that work together to store emotional memories: the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the visual cortex. When these three parts of the brain work together, the brain attempts to encode memories that occur during times of intensified, emotional situations. However, as the memory itself is emotionally heightened, the clarity of these memories begin to blur, because we experience these memories through tunnel vision, only remembering what we felt, rather than the real details or banalities of the experience.

It’s weird to think that we remember things because of how they made us feel originally. That memories originate from a place of pain, a place of hurt, or a place of discomfort. But I’d say that these memories work in the opposite way for me. I’d argue that pain keeps the memories as loud as the experience itself.  Pain is secondary to the memory, a circumstance of cause and effect. For me, memory causes pain, not the other way around. Yes, I’d say that it’s my memory that’s the ultimate culprit.

(2012) Around sometime in high school, someone told me that a single bagel is the equivalent of eating five slices of bread. Density comes with a price, I suppose.

Sourdough bagel. Lightly toasted. Regular cream cheese. Nothing has stopped me, but every bite turns into a little more guilt as each swallow turns into muted and delicious regret.

I get in my car to drive to school with the sour taste of carbs and dairy on my tongue. As I’m taking notes in my sixth period class, I feel the calories digging their grave in my stomach. I drive home from school and blast the radio as loud as my stereo will go, trying not to reminisce on my bad behavior from this morning. My mom calls me for dinner and I eat with the loving memory of my breakfast in mind. As I’m going to sleep, I wish for God to send me the gift of self-control in the morning. Maybe I won’t want to eat it tomorrow. Like an addict’s fix, the bagel never leaves my mind.

Do you remember when bread became bad?

(2015) It’s the Christmas break after my freshman year and I can feel it. You don’t have to tell me, I can feel it weighing on the sides of my hips, off the bottoms of my thighs, drooping from the corners of my cheeks. When I’m drunk, I’ll make an excuse to go to the restroom, stumble in front of the mirror, and lift my shirt in the middle of the public bathroom, exposing my stomach and unfairly squeezing at its fat, trying to remember if I have a little more to grab since this morning. I decide that I do and feel my disgust a little louder. But I won’t stick a finger down my throat. I’m not disciplined enough to refuse the slice of pizza my friends have waiting for me at the bar. I’ll never be brave and I’ll never be disciplined, even though the smallest part of me wishes I would be.

(2007) When I was 11, my mom bought me a brand new swimsuit for a family vacation to Hawaii. It was my first bikini. When I put it on in the store, I absolutely loved it. The bottoms were a bright turquoise blue and the top had turquoise and white flowers on each lightly-padded triangle. I couldn’t help twirling around the store, totally infatuated with the shape of my body in the reflection of the mirror. My bare belly was absolutely exhilarating. The way that the padding in the top gave me the slightest raise to my bare chest made me feel invincible.

My mom stood there, laughing quietly to herself. In hindsight, it probably was hysterical to see a pre-pubescent 11-year-old in a two piece, feeling like a woman for the first time. To see a young child feeling like a movie star, to watch your daughter decide what sexy actually feels like. To see a young girl, dancing half-naked around a store, unstoppably and unapologetically in love with every inch of her body.

(2017) The single most radical thing a woman can do is love the body she was given. One day I’ll strive to be radical.