A drive with mom, and a yearbook photo from 1982

I was wearing a striped shirt and dark brown stretch pants while sitting in the front passenger seat. My mother said, "If you lost weight, you could move a lot easier." I flexed my legs and told her that I could move just fine. She paused for a moment and then added, "If you lost weight, you wouldn't sweat between your legs so much." I replied with, "I don't sweat between my legs." She got angry with me and said, "You know what I mean."

The truth was that I didn't know what she meant. I was 17 years old and she was 39. She was talking about her problems with being fat and assuming they were my problems, too. Even though I was morbidly obese, I could sit in cross-legged yoga positions and was very flexible. I also didn't realize that "between your legs" meant what my mother would call "the wee wee area," and not between my thighs. That being said, I didn't sweat in either of these places as I don't seem to sweat much at all (and still don't), but I guess she did.

What my mother didn't say was that she wouldn't be as embarrassed by me if I lost weight. I also concluded that she'd love me more if I did. I think that I remember that exchange in the car, which was not atypical for my mother and me as she often was critical of my fat while ignoring her own, was that I had reached an age where I understood what wasn't being said as clearly as what was.

The striped shirt I wore on that day lives on in local history as it was the one I was wearing when I was photographed with another classmate as "most artistic" among my high school classmates. I won't publish the entire page, but I will say that all of the other categories for people who were daring, flirtatious, musical, etc. showed people in staged positions looking happy and having fun. I guess the photographer not only didn't feel I (and my compatriot, whose glee at posing with me is clear in his countenance) warranted a fun picture, but not even a reshoot when I was ready and smiling instead of being caught in an awkward open-mouthed moment.

A Bus Tale, and graduation photos

When the final bell rang and school was out, every kid was happy to get to the school bus and head for home. There were so many buses that we had to leave at intervals and I sat nervously waiting for our bus to be called. I wasn't anxious because I was itching to leave, though that was true. I needed to get to the bus as quickly as possible for reasons that had nothing to do with getting the hell out of Dodge.

If I got on the bus when it was even as much as half full, I faced a gauntlet of humiliation. I needed to reach it before all of the empty seats were gone. It was also preferable that I got a seat as close to the front as possible. If I had to walk past many occupied seats, I would receive "the disease" treatment. Each person who I walked by would shout, "(Shari's) germs, I quit!" This would be passed up and down all occupied seats until every single person on the bus had pronounced their inoculation from incidental contact with the space I occupied. A seat in the front spared me this echo chamber announcing my diseased status.

If all of the seats were partially occupied, there was an added layer abasement. Each single occupant of the seat would scoot over to the edge to block me from sitting with him or her. It was only after I stood helplessly unable to sit because all seats were full or blocked that the bus driver would demand someone move over and allow me to sit with him or her. This part would cram himself or herself up against the window and squirm throughout the ride. Sometimes, he or she would also theatrically hold their breath as if they were in the sphere of contagion. My relief didn't come until enough kids got off so that I could move and sit alone.

My disease was being fat. Every single day, I spent 45 minutes on the bus to school and 45 minutes on the bus home being ridiculed, bullied, and treated as if I were the most disgusting creature on earth. It was unrelenting. Is it any wonder I stopped viewing myself as human?

When I was ready to let Tito know what I had been before he got to know me, I sent him the two pictures below. I referred to them as "before" and "after" my weight loss, but the truth was that they were when I saw myself as subhuman and when I saw myself as human. The way I was treated throughout high school and elementary school never shamed me into changing. It filled me with so much pain and trashed my self-esteem such that I had no energy to deal with my body. I also saw myself as a walking pile of trash. It was only after Seanna became my mentor in college and treated me as worthy of respect and possessing value that I was able to muster the ability to take care of myself and see myself as worthy of care. Shaming me only made things worse.

Typing, and a letter from June 26, 1987

The classroom was lined with desks covered in IBM "Selectric" typewriters. They were beige-colored, but dingy, especially around the bottom where the greasy palms of teenagers who were learning to type rested as they learned. Our teacher taught us how to feed in paper and correctly position our hands such that our left index fingers touched the "F" and our right the "J".

We'd then do exercises to try and teach our brains to hit keys without looking at the keyboard. S, S, S, S, A, A, A, A, D, D, D, D. Now, type the word "sad" over and over and over again until an unconscious connection is formed between your fingers and your brain.

Many of my classmates hated typing and saw no use in it. Our high school divided students into three "tracks." Those in the "secretarial" track learned to type with gusto. Those in the "college-bound" one grudgingly learned because they were warned that their future would include typing long, academic papers. The final group, the "trade" or "general" track members, pecked at the keys in a desultory fashion and waited for the waste of time to end.

No one could have imagined that, decades later, we'd all be spending a good portion of our lives in front of keyboards no matter what our careers ended up being. I was in the "college-found" track, but I embraced typing with more enthusiasm than anyone in the room. I loved the idea of getting words out faster than my hands could write them in cursive. My brain was always miles ahead of my hands and this helped them catch up just a little bit.

My mother picked up an ancient typewriter at a yard sale for a few dollars and I would practice at home by typing out what I thought were the lyrics of KISS songs. When the keys weren't jamming up or getting stuck, I was typing "I was vaccinated with a rip-torn needle because I'm hooked on rock-n-roll" from Peter Criss's solo album. I couldn't understand that he was singing "Beethovan" so I just made something up without concern for it making absolutely no sense. That was not unusual because I often didn't understand KISS's lyrics even when I could clearly understand the words. They spoke in so much innuendo that my naive 14-year-old mind couldn't comprehend.

I rarely typed Tito letters because I usually wrote to him at work and had to walk down to the basement office in the residential home and liberate the only typewriter in the office from the secretary's space. Dragging that heavy thing up to my office area was more effort than I generally wanted to go to, but I did bother on a few occasions. This letter (edited to remove some names, but otherwise intact) was the first one. Much older and more mature me cringes a little at how cavalier and snarky I was about my clients at the time. However, it was a hard job and I think many of us joked about the work because it was either that or cry. (As always, click on the small pictures to load a bigger version.)