The Emancipation Of A Heavy and Weighted Heart In A Pandemic

By Abanti Chattopadhyay January 9, 2021 In Features, Intheirwords 1 BODY POSITIVITY, INTHEIRWORDS 3

I got given a gift that never stops giving – Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) with puberty. A death knell on countless women’s mental and physical wellbeing – both young and old, and all presumably amid some kind of a crisis, right now.

March 2020: I was 24-years old, and weighed 91 kilograms. Contrary to current public opinion, my thunder thighs didn’t save lives or make me unhappy. Audaciously enough, I, nevertheless, liked myself. Or, didn’t care enough to hate my body – whichever was the more manageable thought on any given day. It’s not as though I missed the bus to the Big Body Conundrum. I served my time with due diligence, but after a point, self-loathing was exhausting. Magically, I wouldn’t wake up in a nymph’s body overnight, so growing obstinately I became fond of my own.

There are several traps that I didn’t account for.

Body Positivity is a Ponzi scheme of emotional stability. That garbage is near elusive; a dubious sale in which the payment never really ends. When you have been down that road once and want nothing to do with it, what’s a big girl to do? 2020 was an intrusive host, and you, a guest. It didn’t ask before it messes you up; it just did.

Twelve months amid global paranoia. I suspended life plans; dealt with a dying father (this promises to be anti-climatic), and a dead grandfather (this, I’m afraid, is set in stone). I discovered my parents; became a child hiding in an adult. Then came the pièce de résistance: a kiss of COVID-19.

2020 was the year I woke up to the possibility of being both fat and bald. I had the gumption to be only one of those. My PCOS was left unattended for far too long, and she was finally making me choose.

So I buckled and shed the weight. And, as a friend quietly remarked out of my earshot: I got hot.

This essay isn’t a celebration of the 17 kgs I managed to plead out of my body. It isn’t a watered-down version of Chicken Soup for the Fat and Hurting Soul or another fat person inspiring you, notwithstanding their weight. I am not walking on-set, a months-old photo of me juxtaposed unto the screen, emphatically telling you that if I can, you can.

This is a lengthy anecdote where I veer off-course too many times before reaching the point I want to make. Losing my weight may have caused me to lose my mind, so yes – if I can, you can.

STRESS: THE ELIZABETH TO MY CHARLES. SERIOUSLY, SHE JUST WON’T LET GO

In 2019, I walked out of my first therapist’s office, convinced she was an idiot. I knew exactly what was wrong with me and just needed a professional to concur. A few Bandra shrinks later, I found someone (M) who confirmed what I knew to be true. I had debilitating anxiety, and its stress was slowly killing me. If anyone suspects if M just wanted to make me happy, she quickly added I reminded her of that one ‘over-smart, preppy child’ who’s loathed by teachers. Props to her for reading me correctly.

I think, and then I overthink. Despite what anybody tells me, I’m convinced my overthinking is the right move because I’d know if it wasn’t. When my father rang to tell me his cancer had returned, I wondered – endlessly so – if I would lose a parent that year. Quite dramatically, my grandfather had upped and died two months earlier. At his wake, a trail of crying and baffled relatives all wondered if 60 was the new 80 and if they should get that mole checked.

And in an unbelievable game of Statue – offices shuttered their doors; cars stayed parked. I moved back home, and the country played dead. I didn’t know if I was coming back to determined parents or a hospice – both posed their own perils. My mother laboriously tugged at my father’s strings, making him do this and that. Watching him play along was taking the front seat to a limp marionette dance.

The rancour of illness sticks to your skin. The pustules are unassuaged by seven, or even 11-step, K-beauty regimes. Chemistry can cure acne, but not a dying man’s anger.

And what did I say about attention? I crave it, and so does my ailment. Hillocks of acne on my cheeks and stubborn mounds of flesh around my knees rose up – reminding me again, and again – cancer or no cancer, you will still lose all your hair. I gave my disease its favourite comfort food – stress, anxiety and fermented bowls of unhappiness thickening it with a sudden abundance of free time into soft idlis.

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ON A SCALE OF A COLD TO CANCER, PCOS IS NO BIG DEAL

No one can fault me for not trying. By July, I had lost enough hair to coil the strands all together into a thick mat. My father – still alive, y’all – stationed in the next room, now cancer-free and without his lower right jaw, lamented a life he was not allowed to have. Between refilling his feeding bag, loud traffic of office calls, and the ubiquitous pile of utensils in our sink – I found the time to google PCOS, but not address it.

Wearing the badge of an autoimmune disorder, PCOS lives deep inside the body, coagulating in little cysts in the ovaries – isolating women and cutting off everything we hold dear. It’s an emotionally crippling disease, even without well-meaning relatives weighing in on the additional five kilos from the last time they saw me.

The tentacles of this disease are unsparing. Women yearning to become mothers alternate between cursing their empty wombs and clinging to hope; caressing the thought of a baby, they may never have, like a phantom limb. Teenaged girls break much before their time, knowing that their acne scars cost them a date. Women who don’t understand what is wrong with their bodies, except that they know something is. Apart from being undetected, PCOS is often undiscussed, unattended and dismissed. From medical practitioners to irate parents – the apathy is satirical. While all its symptoms are alarming, the disease hasn’t merited the same research as a limp dick. What causes women to have PCOS, thus, remains a mystery. The assumption that a woman doesn’t try hard enough is more comfortable.

But I did try. From downloading a fitness app on sale, to cooking my meal with a teaspoon of oil, I ran from pillar to post to fix it. I concealed my attempts, each step taken in embarrassed tipped toes to avoid comparisons. On a scale from a cold to cancer, PCOS scores pitiably low. Sneering, my frail father reminded me of the common law hierarchy of disease, and sometimes, in exasperation, so did my mother. Perhaps they aren’t wrong. I still had a whole body left to destroy; my father was left with just half.

I apologised, but it rankled – their cruel lack of attention. This arena was not designed for me to win. I boomeranged between ‘you don’t try enough’ to ‘at least you are alive’. Did it only matter when I’m nearly not?

AND CUE: THE CINEMATIC VERTIGO OF HATE

On August 13th, I cut my waist-length hair, and along with it, my feeble pride hung a little below my shoulders. I desperately sent pictures of my sparse scalp to friends – without trigger warnings – demanding to know if they saw a difference from the last picture I sent them. The knot at the base of my neck grew more prominent and tighter, holding in it all my anxiety, renting it a bed for every night. The lockdown meant I was cut away from the world, allowed thoughts only of my hair and, if not my hair, my peaking scalp. I joined online forums about PCOS, and they all resonated my panic – can we get better if no one tells us how?

All the while, I posted colour coded Instagram panels, railing against diet culture. Still, my insides shrivelled another inch every time I saw myself naked in the mirror. A friend facetiously called herself the missing link between man and ape. I wanted to call her up, crying hysterically, and tell her, ‘no, that’s me! Look at me; look at what I’ve become.’

Thin lines stretched over my waist marked out all the extra flesh I wasn’t supposed to have. My stomach hung low in shame, every tendril of hair on my body, curling away in disgust. The part of me who knew better was fighting a lost battle. She knew the unkindness I was roping around myself was unjust. I reduced myself down to a number I hated; two digits I was convinced everyone saw when they saw me.

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LOSING THE FIRST 10 KGS

And one day, after hovering over an advert for spearmint tea for too long, I rang up my house physician, asking her for the number of a reliable gynaecologist. Doctors and my disdain for them go back a long time, but here’s where I want to stop and assure you that I am not an anti-vaxxer and I do believe in science. The packers and movers forgot to bring over to my adulthood the confidence to meet doctors, unsupervised. I was too used to my mother spelling out my problem as I sat coyly on the second chair, playing with the clunky plastic model the pelvic, on display. To break down my unspeakable despair over the phone to a neighbourhood gynaecologist was frightening. Continuing the rest of my adult life as a bald and reluctant motivational speaker was worse. So with gritted teeth, I did the deed.

D was a run of the mill gynaecologist whose flippant observation was that I was overweight (you don’t say!) and should lose the weight (what, no! really?) Six hundred rupees and 15 excruciating minutes later, I was none the wiser – but now, with a number to a nutritionist. I’m not calling D, utterly and profoundly useless, but I will call her, our red herring.

A, who subsequently became my nutritionist, likes to talk only at night. We’ve never met. She is a faceless display picture on WhatsApp. Her voice sounds like she’s a mother of a volatile toddler. I say this because she’s talked me down many ledges and I am not much better than a child.

Under her regime, I have to sleep by 11 pm and wake up by 7 am. She has exorcised all the sugar and starch out of my diet. I am meant to wriggle into tight workout clothes, and actually move my limbs that had almost stiffened with disuse.

Two weeks and about forty disgruntled meals later, I was down three kilograms and my heart, a fraction lighter. The little screen on my weighing scale flashed 88. I was moving towards a direction that I never had, in all my 24 years. I had never had to lose weight and while this hardly means anything, at the moment – to my sugar deprived mind – it meant the world.

This was a reprieve. I told people and convinced myself that weight loss was a health issue. Truthfully, this had contorted into vanity. Weeks crawled by. Workout hour no longer felt like punishment. The closer I came to 80 kilograms, the more anguished every setback made me. Every morning, I stepped into my bathroom with intent. Perched on my pot, my feet angled like a ballerina’s, I waited furiously for my body to expel last night’s dinner. I kept thinking: get rid of this extra load.

Any gram gained was heavy with guilt. It was proof of the food I shouldn’t have eaten, it was the urine I should have let out; it was always a repercussion of something wicked; of weakness, to which I had succumbed.

Finally touching 80, I was still doggedly chased by my own self – still held hostage by my weight. I was a champion for body positivity, but for other people’s bodies. For my own self, I had an unattainable standard.

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AB COVID HUA TOH KYA HUA, ABHI BHI MOTI HAIN

When I woke up for a fourth consecutive day with a sniffle, and with a body that could barely prop itself up, my parents and I knew the shit had finally hit the fan. The miniature life I was living, shrunk overnight – like a limp, deflated raisin, as I withdrew further into my house – shutting my door to the rest of the world. For the next fourteen days, I woke and slept intuitively – driven by moods and the weather – and how drowsy the medication made me. I’m a veteran homebody. My acclimatisation to a smaller world was instantaneous. I had a wonky schedule of reading, Netflix and yoga, and I knew the rest of the day would course through. Covid was a surprise vacation.

When my first meal appeared, I realised that even my body had to take this break, with the rest of me.

My gut flinched looking at my plate – bowls and servings of food and ingredients I had taught myself to forget, all neatly lined around the vessel, in hopes of healing me. Yellowed potatoes peppered with cumin and curry leaves; thick dal heavy with salted butter; and a bowl of halwa with cashews one could spot them from the moon, all cooked in the unshakable taste of ghee. How could I eat this? How many times should a person have to fight the same battle?

I heaved after walking two steps. And resentfully, I spooned in all the food. Knowing it was needed was not the same as believing. After the first night, I whipped out my yoga mat. I sat down to work away from my dinner, but I stayed still for hours, waiting for one of my hands to make the slightest moves.

The next fourteen days were spent suffering and healing in parts; begging for the overthinking to stop and waiting as it slowly did. My thighs lost some of their firmness, and the muscles around my joints softened a little. While my weighing scale showed 75 kilograms, reflected in the mirror was a 90 kilograms person. For a fortnight, I oscillated between anger and acceptance. You know enough about me now, so which do you think won?

HOW TO SCAM YOURSELF OUT OF HATING YOURSELF

It’s been over a month since COVID bid its bitter farewell, but I still haven’t grown into a healthy personality. However, what I have been able to do is recognise the harm I am causing myself.

I don’t blame myself. My reaction was fanned on by a community who can’t unsee it; my father once likened me to an elephant in my fatter days. Now he says it’s too much and I must stop. Heavy or thin- he has to have an opinion on my body. Relatives egged me on, calling especially to tell mom my body type was not suited to the kurta I wore at an event, and that friend who deemed me hot, only now.

The internet told me to stop obsessing about my weight while selling slimming teas and butt-lifting creams. As mixed signals go, this is the worst one.

Last week, I left a barrage of messages on my partner’s WhatsApp – calling myself ugly and worthless. Begging for reassurance from him that I was neither. I didn’t want to ask for the validation but looked for it nonetheless. He passed the test, and we’ve lived happily ever after (as of now), but I hated having to go to him for it. Unwittingly I became allergic to myself, not food.

Eating, and to enjoy my food, is my right. I repeat this to myself every day: to feed yourself is not a crime, and to look like you eat isn’t one either. In this lies your health. I believe it today. For the days I don’t, apart from my army of vehement minders, I have a paean. How far I’ve come, and how far I can go if I go with all of me.

To that friend, I want to say, dropping the weight didn’t make me hot. I was equally ravishing earlier as well. So why didn’t you see it, I will ask. Why didn’t you ever tell me then?