Ah, but when I got to him, I found out my Heathcliff had other ideas. “Forever” could wait.
“Oh, you don’t get me yet,” he said.
It was a punch in the gut. I thought I was the one getting gotten. He had said all these things, practically asking my parents for my hand in marriage while I was in a serious relationship. Swearing to me up and down that he was a changed man. Now here I was, ready to pledge my love back, and to kiss him as the curtain came down. And it fell on my head.
He insisted on playing me songs off Battle Studies. “This one’s for you,” he said, again and again. I recognized myself sometimes. Other times I just felt the hurt again. I named a person he had dated. Weren’t these songs also about her, too? He paused, then told me he could never find material to write with her.
I almost puked. I was material. Slowly, insidiously, a realization creeped into me, a monster with claws clutching my brain with one hand, then making a fist around my heart with the other. All this time, all those years, he was breaking up with me to torture himself enough to get good material.
“Did . . . were you breaking up with me to hurt yourself?” I asked. “Just so you could get a song?”
I had thought I was crazy. There were times he left, and it was my fault, and I have taken responsibility for those moments. But other times a breakup was so out of the blue that it seemed to come just as we were finally getting somewhere.
Now I knew the truth. I was a pet bird. He would throw me into the sky and watch me catch air and soar long enough that it meant something when he pulled a gun from his back pocket to shoot me down, expertly aiming to graze a wing, never a kill shot to end the misery. To think that every single time I lay on the ground, broken and bewildered, he took his time walking over. Observing me to jot down notes and hum a new song of heartbreak.
And every time he “found me,” I looked up at him, grateful to be taken in, sorry for the trouble I must have caused him.
I wish I had walked out right then. I didn’t. He had me so messed up that inside twenty minutes I was all in on his “wait and see” terms. It felt inevitable to be in love with John, so I continued talking to him for months. I told friends I was “back with” him, and they stocked up on emotional bandages. But I knew now not to let him get close enough to shoot me down again. This bird wasn’t going back in the cage, no matter how bad he needed a song.
21
True Beauty
September 2009
In the summer I reflected on what a hard year it had been. I knew there had to be a reason that God was allowing me to go through this, and it was my job to find some sort of light in all of it. I knew He wouldn’t want me to suffer and have nothing to show for it. I’d become a punchline for weight jokes, tried to have a normal relationship, and then gone running back into the arms of a man who tortured me.
I was offered a television show, The Price of Beauty, where I would travel the world to examine what different cultures find beautiful. I knew it could be a way to show how we women try so hard to contort ourselves into these boxes of what appears ideal to men and what will make us deserve love, even from family. I said yes immediately and decided to bring CaCee and my hairdresser friend Ken along to be on the show with me.
For me, it was a very spiritual journey, and it upended a lot of my own notions of what was beautiful. In Thailand, we explored the complicated subject of colorism and discussed the lengths many people go to keep their skin light for social status. I was shocked to meet Panya Bunjan, a singer who had disfigured herself using bleaching agents. Back home I felt I had to tan to be attractive. In Uganda, we visited a village where members of the Hima people explained to us that a woman is only beautiful if she is what our society deems “overweight.” We visited a fattening hut, where a bride prepared for her wedding by adding as much weight as she could. In Brazil, we examined the notion that plastic surgery was so commonplace that you were a freak if you didn’t have it. CaCee and I were on an emotional Eat Pray Love kind of trip, whereas Ken kept trying to keep everything light.
Most heartbreaking and eye-opening for me was meeting Isabelle Caro, a French model with anorexia who was eighty-six pounds when I met her. In 2007, she became the face of the disease when she posed nude at fifty-eight pounds for a Milan Fashion Week billboard campaign to fight the pressure on models to starve themselves.
When I met her, she had worked her way back up to eighty-six pounds and still seemed so fragile. Isabelle’s disease had started near the end of high school, when she was trying to break into modeling, around the same time I signed with Sony. While I was told I needed to lose fifteen pounds to be a success, she told me a modeling scout advised her to lose twenty.
As Isabelle talked, it was hard not to cry, seeing the skeleton move beneath her tight sheath of pale skin. I kept looking away, but her beautiful eyes pulled me in. We were two women who had been told we needed to be skinny to be worthy. That shame was killing her, and I felt lucky to have escaped that. I asked her how she found the strength to be so open, showing what anorexia really looked like. She answered that she was doing it for young girls. I thought about that girl I heard about in Scottsdale. I decided I needed to do more. Not just withstand judgment but call it out.
I left her side feeling bulletproof from all the criticism I still faced about those photos from a chili cookoff, or even the praise when people thought I looked “good.” Nobody’s words—compliments or critiques—should define the value of our souls. What if, all this time, our “problem areas” were not our stomachs or thighs but our brains? I’m not saying people aren’t cruel—believe me, I know—but we can’t allow ourselves to do the work for bullies. Give a girl an insult, she’ll feel bad for a day, but teach her to hate her body, she’ll feel bad forever.
After The Price of Beauty, I knew I needed to separate what really mattered to me and what mattered to my ego. In subsequent interviews, I worked hard to say, “I like the way I look,” whether I was up or down ten pounds. All kinds of women started coming up to me, not to give me a supportive word, but to say that I made them feel good. “We look good,” I would hear. They thanked me for setting an example that we don’t need to measure our self-worth with a scale.
In November of the following year, Isabelle died at age twenty-eight. I think about her so often, and I am grateful for the experience of meeting her. She made her life matter, and wherever you are and whatever you believe, please say her name aloud so she is remembered: Isabelle Caro.
IT WAS WHILE WE WERE IN BRAZIL SHOOTING THE PRICE OF BEAUTY THAT I got the call about Daisy. On September 14, my sweet, wonderful dog was staying at my parents’ house while I traveled. She was in the backyard when she was snatched by a coyote. The coyote ran off with her, and we never saw her again.
CaCee was with me when my mom called, frantic. I lost it in a way she’d never seen before. Daisy Mae was like my child before I was a mother, and I adored her as a constant companion. She was also, in many ways, the last reminder of my marriage. I felt a crushing sense of deep loss and a feeling of being truly alone.
Twitter was new to me, and I went on to ask people to help find her. I paid dog trackers to look for her and robo-call the neighborhood. People made fun of me for caring so much about a dog, but if you have ever loved an animal, you cannot fathom that someone wouldn’t understand my need to find her. People contacted my family with prank leads, and some of the news stories about Daisy were grotesque in their mean-spiritedness. The journey I was on, traveling the world—and the women I met—gave me strength. I didn’t know how much I was about to need it.