After finishing up my very first year as an associate at my law firm, I invited my entire family—my mom, dad, brother, aunts, uncle, cousin, and even my 80+ year old grandmother—to the Peninsula Hotel for afternoon tea. We arrived at the iconic hotel on Superior and all 13 of us filed past the pair of gargoyled lions and into the revolving door, as a slight man uniformed in all white pressed his gloved hands against the glass so that we wouldn’t have to. Our reservation was at The Lobby, the hotel’s premier restaurant, renown for its Sunday brunch and afternoon tea service. As we waited for the brass doors of the elevator shaft to admit us, I touched my hair. I had taken pains with my appearance that day—I wore a pale yellow frock with delicate flowers darting across the skirt and a wide sash around my waist. I ironed my hair and pressed the curls so they looked more happenstance than artifice. I even had makeup on.

The elevator finally arrived and three guests ahead of us went in.  My family followed. My cousins tittered nervously, my brother looked uncomfortable but stared straight ahead. My parents were silent. My grandmother wedged herself into a corner. It was a tight squeeze, and perhaps it would have made more sense for us to take two cars up to the restaurant, but I could sense that no one wanted to be separated.  As the doors slid closed, I heard one of the women who had gotten in before us—a petite young woman with glossy brown hair, sparkling diamond studs hanging from her lobes, and a pristine white Mon Cler jacket—sniff rather loudly as my grandmother leaned back into her space. She then burst into a fit of not kind giggles as she whispered something to her companion, also bedecked in casual couture.

Standing at the back of the elevator, I could feel a bead of sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades, as I attempted to put a few more inches between myself and the woman standing next to me—a young black woman with her hair pulled back in a tight pony tail sporting a form-fitting black hoodie and running tights—as if I could—should—compensate for my grandmother’s faux pas. Perhaps taking a cue from me, the young black woman also adjusted her position and sidled away from the two aforementioned women to her right. As she did, the diamond studded one murmured, “Oh, you’re ok. It’s not YOU.”

In such a small space, it was impossible for all of us who understood English not to grasp the real meaning of her words. “It’s not YOU.” It’s THEM. More beads of sweat between my shoulder blades. My face flushed as a big ball of fury, shame, confusion, and anxiety threatened to crush all the intentions that drove me to bring my family—none of whom had ever dreamed of visiting a five star hotel—and my grandmother—who still had nightmares about the war and stood with her walnut hands clasped behind her curved back—to The Peninsula. I stared straight ahead, past the wispy black curls (dyed) of my Hahlmuhnee, wondering how long before we’d be freed from our vintage brass prison.

“Mmm-kay.”

That wasn’t me. And it definitely wasn’t anyone in my family. None of us could inject that level of contempt into two syllables. I cocked my head and stole a glance at the sporty black woman next to me. She looked both irritated and resolute. Tired. And the Mon Cler ladies next to her were not having it.

“Hey, what’s your problem? I told you, it’s not YOU.”

“I don’t have a problem,” she answered without missing a beat, without raising her voice above a mutter, without shifting her gaze an inch from the double doors, which finally began to open. My grandmother ambled out, followed by two huffy and puffy white jackets and a cloud of Chanel No. 5. As we walked down the wide corridor lined with glass cases shimmering with the largest diamonds I had ever seen, I turned to the woman who’d managed to say so much in so few words.

“Those girls are crazy,” I said with a shy smile.

“Yeah, they are. Don’t pay them no mind,” she advised before heading towards another bank of elevators past the restaurant. I looked past her at my Hahlmuhnee, who remained oblivious to the jewels that glowed all around her, the chandeliers that hung like upside down tiaras from the ceiling, the soft tete-a-tete of champaign glasses that threatened to unfurl the bullishness that led me to believe I could be good enough for admission to a club that seemed reserved for those who looked nothing like me, something Sporty Girl had understood implicitly in a way I was too spineless to absorb.

Later, over a cup of green tea and a plate of stiff British scones, my aunt looked over at me and said, “Joanne, you are so pretty.” I smiled back at her. But inside, I kept thinking of Sporty Girl, her quiet defiance on our behalf, and my instinct to internalize the gaze that rendered my family gratuitous. I thought to myself, “I am never going to be silent again.”

It’s been 15 years since that day at the Peninsula. Every time I go back—and I’ve gone back often (they have an excellent vegan tea service)—I think of that woman in the elevator.  I think of her now, too, what she taught me in our brief exchange about collective pain, the human struggle, the necessity of allies and the sheer power of compassion, whose brilliance put Cartier to shame.

I think of my Hahlmuhnee. I think of the beads of sweat down my back.

I am never going to be silent again.

#blacklivesmatter

Over the past two years, my therapist has set two modest goals for me:

(a) start eating lunch, and

(b) admit you have an eating disorder.

Earlier this year, I came very close to incorporating lunch into my weekday. From Monday through Friday, I run anywhere from 3 to 13 miles, and I furtively toyed with the idea of consuming a small meal around mid-day after some of my longer runs (5+ miles).  Sometimes, I would have a protein shake and on other days, I would enjoy a salad. Based upon what my therapist and running coach were telling me, I believed I was doing the right thing for my body and health, as well as propelling my fitness goals.

And then I heard about something called “intermittent fasting.”

All of the sudden, “experts” were questioning the notion of eating lunch. “Why eat lunch? Who says that lunch is a good thing? Who says you should always eat when you’re hungry? What an outdated idea!”  In fact, many of these folks were explicit proponents of something that my therapist and running coach consider to be anathema: meal-skipping.

So, after a few weeks of experimenting with lunch-eating, I resumed the old habit of going from breakfast to dinner with no calories.  After all, there were plenty of people who claimed to be way smarter than me saying that eating three meals and two small snacks a day was downright silly! Instead of hearing my therapist’s or my coach’s voice encouraging me to “eat some calories!” I heard podcasters and YouTubers and even physicians pushing me to: “Skip lunch! It’s good for you!”

I explained all of this to my therapist, outlining the potential benefits of intermittent fasting. I described to her how her voice had been drowned out by the voices of all those who had studied the power of restrictive eating and she said,

“That’s not an expert’s voice you’re hearing.  That’s Ed’s voice.”

---

“Ed” is the metaphysical incarnation of “eating disorder.” An “eating disorder” is defined as:

any in a group of disorders in which abnormal feeding habits are associated with psychological factors. Characteristics may include a distorted attitude toward eating, handling and hoarding food in unusual ways, loss of bodyweight, nutritional deficiencies, dental erosion, electrolyte imbalances, and denial of extreme thinness.  —Medical Dictionary.com

From the minute I walked into her office, my therapist has waged an ongoing battle to get me to admit I have an eating disorder. I have always assumed that it’s her sneaky way of “fattening me up,” as I often joke to her (except I’m sort of only half-joking). And even as I sit here today, I struggle with identifying myself among the ranks of the 30,000,000 people in the United States who suffer from this condition. I’ve never been a fan of pretending to have illnesses I don’t actually have and I’ll be honest: I find it particularly unattractive when people claim to suffer from self-diagnosed “depression” or “OCD” or “ADHD” (all legitimate disorders in and of themselves) or any other convenient “disorder” as an excuse for not getting your shit done.

Mostly, though, I object to applying the term “eating disorder” to me because I’m not skinny.

---

I have never been skinny in my entire life.  I have always fallen into one of three categories: (a) chubby, (b) obese, or (c) really obese.

It wasn’t until college that I started obsessing over dieting and losing weight. I gained the Freshman 15 (and then some), and was determined to undo it. I figured the fastest way to erase the excess fat was by eating as little as possible while also spending lots of time on the treadmill.  So, I ate one meal a day and exercised 5 times a week. This was the first step on my journey towards becoming a “yo-yo dieter.” While restricting so severely certainly yielded tangible results (my family constantly commented on how “great and pretty” I looked), it made me crave food in a way I hadn’t before. I often went on binges–sometimes for several days–to compensate for how “good” I was being on my diet. I would lose weight, gain it all back and then some, lose all the weight again, and then gain it back with yet a few more pounds. I repeated this cycle at least a dozen times.  I went from being 115 lbs as a college freshman to being 190 lbs by the time I was a practicing attorney.

But in all those years, I never looked at myself in the mirror and saw bones jutting out of my face or my ribcage pressed up against my skin–what I believed to be the hallmarks of an eating disorder.  No one in my family ever said to me, “Oh Joanne, eat something, you’re too skinny.”  So, to me, it didn’t matter that sometimes, I would go for days without eating anything but a handful of chocolates or cookies, or that I would binge on French fries and ice cream in the dark when no one else was home, or that I sometimes forced myself to throw up after I’d been “bad” over the weekend.

It also didn’t matter that I underwent four different plastic surgeries in an attempt to be skinny, or that I weighed myself sometimes 15 times a day.  It didn’t matter that I drank laxatives in the morning and at night and that the very last thing I did before bed was review the day’s calories in my food diary.

It certainly didn’t matter that I would often wake up feeling as though I could never be happy because I was fat or that I would routinely break down in my bedroom and sob into my pillows because the scale said the wrong thing. It simply didn’t matter that my life was one never-ending calorie calculation, that I could see the unyielding path of lifetime dieting stretch out before me in one clean straight line all the way to the horizon–a vision that kept me up at night and even made me question the point of living at all on quiet afternoons when no one is at home except for me and my dog.

None of these things mattered.

I didn’t have an eating disorder because I wasn’t skinny.

---

A good friend of mine is a champion for the body positivity movement–something I initially viewed with the same skepticism as “depression” and “organic food.”  She recently posited that it’s much unhealthier to suffer from an obsession with losing weight than it is to carry too much fat. I wasn’t sure I agreed. The cost–both financial and medical–of being overweight were well documented, with over a century’s worth of evidentiary support. Astronomical healthcare costs and the rising death toll from heart disease dwarfed any meaningful statistics on eating disorders.  I repeated the assertion to my husband over vegan quesadillas at our favorite Mexican joint: “Do you think there’s some truth to the idea that the cost one incurs to live up to some impossible ideal of beauty is higher than being overweight?” He thought for a moment and said, “You know, there a ton of people who suffer various medical conditions associated with being overweight.  Not a lot of people really ‘suffer’ from trying too hard to be perfect. I honestly don’t know anyone who does,” he concluded.  But then he tagged on, “Except for you.”

I nodded. Perhaps he was right. I thought of the nameless “skinny” women at the dog park–with their perfect legs and small waists, happily depositing bagels and chocolate donuts down their throats while their dogs pissed all over the water fountain.  Or the girlfriend who scarfed down bacon burgers and tacos for dinner on the regular with complete impunity, while still maintaining a size 0.  Or my own mom–eating white rice and cream puffs and cookies while never weighing a pound over 90 in her entire life. And then there are those who blissfully don’t give a fuck that their thighs swish or that their favorite pair of jeans from college would never be worn again or that they couldn’t run a mile without stopping. Surely, none of these women agonized over “calories in v. calories out,” had their weeks ruined over one bad selfie, or wept pathetically while kimchi-squatting over the scale for the 27th time in one day.  No, no, I reasoned. That unique variety of suffering was reserved for a fraction of a fraction of humanity and therefore, my husband was right–the health risks of obesity outweighed any collective suffering caused by disordered eating.

---

That night, at three in the morning, I woke up and could not fall back asleep. I stepped out of our bedroom into the pitch black living room, tiptoed over to the couch, and stretched out with phone in hand. I scrolled through the feeds of all of my social media. I went back through some articles I’d saved for later and decided that 3:03 a.m.  was as good a time to read them as ever.   “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong” surfaced provocatively to the top of my feed and I tapped.

To be honest, despite the overt “clickbaitiness” of the byline, I had skipped over it during breakfast the day before (when I typically catch up on the news) because I didn’t enjoy being told I knew nothing about obesity. After being obese for half my life, seeing a therapist to work on my “food issues,” and reading thousands of pages of books, blogs, and peer-reviewed medical studies on “fat,” I knew a shit-ton about obesity and didn’t appreciate someone presuming that I didn’t.

But instead of disagreeing with everything in the article, I found myself nodding my head.  This was not an article attempting to persaude its readers that obesity wasn’t linked with myriad of fatal diseases. Its point was something entirely different:

The emotional costs are incalculable. I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families. One remembered kids singing ‘Baby Beluga’ as she boarded the school bus, another said she has tried diets so extreme she has passed out and yet another described the elaborate measures he takes to keep his spouse from seeing him naked in the light. A medical technician I’ll call Sam (he asked me to change his name so his wife wouldn’t find out he spoke to me) said that one glimpse of himself in a mirror can destroy his mood for days. ‘I have this sense I’m fat and I shouldn’t be,’ he says. ‘It feels like the worst kind of weakness.’”

Abruptly, a grapefruit lodged itself in my throat and tears started fanning down my face. “One glimpse of himself in a mirror can destroy his mood for days” was an articulation of a phenomenon I knew all too well but could never say out loud. It was why I hated taking showers, often undressed in the dark, or punished myself by wearing the same dirty clothes for days–because I didn’t want to look at myself in the mirror or find out an old outfit no longer fit comfortably, for fear it would crater my mood.

On the very last night of my honeymoon in Italy, my newly-minted husband took a photo of me with his phone during pre-dinner drinks. I was wearing a white t-shirt and a frilly white skirt I’d picked up at a small boutique in Rome. In my head, I thought I looked nice. But in the phone-pic, I didn’t see a blushing bride or newlywed. I saw the same “man shoulders” I could never shed, the “chipmunk cheeks” I had spent $2,000 to surgically remove, the back fat I tried to starve out of existence in the weeks leading up to my wedding–in other words, the same dumpy girl I could never outrun, despite all the thousands of miles logged onto my calorie calculator.  By evening’s end, I was convinced that my husband of 10 days was disgusted with my appearance and ashamed of me. It was impossible for him to look at me without regret, I concluded, over the grotesque body he was required to “love.”  And I did what any other rational person in my shoes would do: I picked a fight.  Long story short, we spent the last day of our honeymoon bickering or shrouded in a stoney silence as cold and grey as the Pantheon across the square from our honeymoon suite.

To me, I had tens of thousands of photos like this one stored on my phone and other various digital devices that proved, indisputably, that I was not skinny, not starving myself, and therefore, not suffering from an eating disorder.

It seems I am not alone in believing that eating disorders are reserved for the skinny.  The article profiled a woman named “Enneking,” who’s story sounded too familiar:

Despite six months of starvation, she was still wearing plus sizes, still couldn’t shop at J. Crew, still got unsolicited diet advice from colleagues and customers. Enneking told the doctor that she used to be larger, that she’d lost some weight the same way she had lost it three or four times before—seeing how far she could get through the day without eating, trading solids for liquids, food for sleep. She was hungry all the time, but she was learning to like it. When she did eat, she got panic attacks. Her boss was starting to notice her erratic behavior. ‘Well, whatever you’re doing now,’ the doctor said, ‘it’s working.'”

I thought of all the times loved ones dismissed my struggle with food or assumed I was eating enough simply because, “You’re not that skinny.” There, in my living room at 3:14 in the morning, swaddled in a throw and the unique solemnity of insomnia, as I read one story after another that hit too close for comfort, I imagined all the nameless men and women who curled up into a ball in their beds or wrapped their arms around their naked knees in a “shower-in-the-dark” or averted their gaze from the dozens of accusatory mirrors in the gym locker room or woke up every day bearing the weight of a stone on their right shoulder–a stone permanently lodged there to remind them of one inexorable truth:

You will never ever be happy because you will always forever be fat.”

I cried.  For me.  For us.  For our self-imposed isolation.  For our inability to come clean with each other and to hell with our fucking shame. For that “emotional cost” I had been so quick to write off as trivial, in a breathtaking denial of a pain I knew as well as the face I hated seeing in the mirror.

---

In the past year, I have run three marathons. In 3 days, I’ll be running my fourth at Indianapolis.  Since October 2017, I have run over 1,545 miles.  I have often suggested to my social media followers and my therapist that running has been my salvation–that it is the only thing that allows me to set goals (i.e., run faster) unrelated to the way I look, and that meeting those goals requires a steady stream of calories.

About 10 days ago, in anticipation of a 20-mile run–my last significant run before tapering for the marathon–I consumed 1886 calories, an amount that is about 600 calories more than average. I have used a calorie calculator for over a decade.  I generally like to keep my “net calories” below 1,000.  Seeing my calories “in the red” on my calorie calculator incited intense anxiety, but I reminded myself how shitty things had gone the last time I’d under-eaten before a 20-miler.  The next morning, I was still tired after two brutal weeks at work and little sleep. The marathon I had completed just 13 days before still had a grip on my legs and I could sense their fatigue the minute I stepped foot onto the gravel path at Waterfall Glen. By mile 10, I wanted to pull over and lie down on the park bench or sprawl out on the cool dirt of the forest.  At mile 15, my coach pulled up next to me on his bike and sensing my struggle, suggested I call it a day: “I don’t want you to blow out your legs before Indy.”

I couldn’t look at him. But I didn’t have the energy to lie either:

“You won’t like hearing this. But I can’t stop, because of all the food I ate yesterday. I have to burn all of that off.”

He knew better than to argue with me right then and there, and simply stated, “We’ll tackle this after Indy.  For now, I want you to walk every half mile for one minute for the rest of this run.”  He offered me some water and an encouraging smile and it was all I could do not to burst into snot-filled tears under the warmth of his compassion.  He cycled off back towards the start of the trail and disappeared around a thick copse of gilded trees.

I turned my headphones off and started pumping my legs again, listening for each footfall and envisioning the line they were creating along the path, a line I hoped could pull me along and far away from the questions I could feel nipping at my heels and lashing at my calves.

When will you ever stop counting calories?

When will you ever stop being fat?

When will you ever be happy?

Why can’t you beat this?

Have you ever tried running and crying at the same time? It is neither pleasant nor attractive. My croaking gasps echoed throughout the forest and I worried a fellow runner might burst through the trees looking to put a dying elk out of its misery. However often I pressed the heel of my hand to my face, the tears replenished themselves with an immediacy that was both annoying and alarming. This was no “self pity” cry because I didn’t want to run anymore or because my legs hurt or because I was upset with myself for eating too much.  No, I was grieving over the loss of my agency, the bitter irony of ceding all my power in a frantic grasp at control.  I cried not because my coach told me to stop running, but because for some inexplicable reason, I could not. I wept for “Baby Beluga” and “Sam, the medical technician” and “Enneking, the plus-sized eating disorder,” and the insidious sadness that infected all of them and me so unobtrusively I had simply taken for granted the fact that I could live the rest of my life knowing I would never be fully happy, because I just wasn’t that skinny.

It was a beautiful morning that day. The sun stroked the wisps of hair around my face and the dappled trees shook as if to acknowledge the ache spreading through my chest.  A friendly breeze hurtled through the branches and carried my sobs far away from my lips and wiped from my face any evidence of despair.  I wish I could tell you I stopped running, or even that I pulled over and walked every half mile like my coach instructed. But I did neither.

I finished two loops and literally ran into the arms of my waiting husband, who congratulated me  on completing my “last long run” before my marathon. I smiled and waggled my two fingers in the obligatory “V for Victory” sign my mother taught me when he insisted on taking a picture of me at the finish.  My sweet husband, who consistently praised me for my ability to change, when others couldn’t; who hollered my name unabashedly at every 5k, half-marathon, and marathon I ever ran; who bragged to anyone who would listen about how extraordinary his wife was… I guffawed at all his jokes, chatted noisily during the car-ride home, and planned out all the food we would eat to recover, so as to leave no room for the source of my indescribable shame.

---

About a week ago, during the middle of a particularly grueling day at the office, I stopped what I was doing and wrote the following in an email to my husband:

Within minutes, he wrote back:

That day, I did two things:

I admitted I have an eating disorder.

And I ate lunch.

---

In three days, I hope to run the fastest marathon I’ve ever run.  Afterwards, I intend to look straight into the mirror and tell the woman looking back at me just how proud of her I am.

I gained my Google addiction in the thick of my divorce.

See Exhibit 1:

or…

and of course…

As you can see, Google provided a wealth of information, good advice, and even a sense of solidarity–if there were answers out there, it was because other people struggled with the same questions and uncontrollable urge to stuff one’s face with donuts as I did.

Who needs therapists? or even friends?

I knew, however, that I’d reached a new low when I Googled the following:

---

I cry.

A lot.

I am that girl who cries at coffee commercials, that Fresh Prince episode (you know the one), The Little Mermaid, just thinking of Bambi’s mom, an uncomfortable confrontation at work, everything with a dog in it ever…  You get the idea.  The most inconvenient part about this is that the waterworks come with little to zero notice. One second, I’ll be calm and collected and explaining to my professor exactly why my paper is late and the next second, I’m wiping snot from my upper lip and hiccuping through what resembles begging.  My therapist (I did end up getting one to help with the divorce) attributes it to my inability or unwillingness to “deal with my emotions.”

People think that because I cry so much, because I’m so “in touch with my pathos,” that I am constantly dealing with my emotions.  Because I wear my heart on my sleeve, my emotions and I must be like best friends or something.  But my therapist is correct–I am terrified of bad feelings.  As such, I expend enormous amounts of energy running away from them, hiding from them, ducking and weaving at the mere insinuation of sadness or anger, with the hope that they will eventually disappear.  Sometimes, it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

---

And now I will talk to you all about something that I’ve never talked about in my entire life.

My dog Hemingway.

Hemingway was my first dog.  My family and I bought him from a puppy store (because I was young and dumb and didn’t know why puppy stores are horrible). He was a beautiful absolutely gorgeous cocker spaniel who won my heart because he was terrified of me.  He could barely bring himself to sniff the hand I gently stuck inside his cage and I knew right then and there that I wanted to bring him home and obliterate all his fears. But, things didn’t work out the way I’d planned. Hemingway’s fears grew into outright aggression and he started attacking everyone–my grandmother, my brother, my mom, even me. I still have the scars to prove it.  Eventually, he attacked my cousin–who was a little boy at the time–and sent him to the emergency room.

We ended up putting Hemingway down after that.

I came home from the vet that afternoon, locked myself in my bedroom and sobbed into my bed until my sheets were wet.  My mother too, who was heartbroken in her own way, cried a lot. This worried my father. He knocked on my door and asked me what was wrong. I explained that we put Hemingway down and after pausing a moment, he snarled at me,

“You need to stop crying about it.  It’s not good to show so much emotion.”

I could write a book about the philosophical, cultural, sociological and psychological underpinnings of my father’s cruel remonstration but, for some reason, it stuck with me. I took every last shred of guilt, shame, and grief that afternoon and threw it into a closet before running in the other direction–in part because I didn’t think I deserved to grieve over the dog I killed.  But also because I thought that my tears made me weak.  I very rarely let myself think about Hemingway for fear that doing so might somehow unleash a torrent of ugly emotions that have festered over the past two decades.  And so, there they reside–safely locked away in that closet from polite conversation, daily obligations, and even extraordinary circumstances.  I did not allow myself to think of Hemingway even when Daisy died, but for one fleeting thought:

Maybe Hemingway can show her around up there.

---

As much as I try to avoid being like my father sometimes, I am my father’s daughter.  I have inherited his passion for donuts and fried foods, as well as this completely ridiculous belief that emotions are bad. And like my father, I have alarmingly abrupt emotional outbursts.  My father–usually even keeled and slow to anger–will go orbital at seemingly innocuous offenses.  Like the time he nearly threw me out of the house because the rice was not cooked to his liking.  Or the time he almost disowned my little brother because he was convinced Jaesun was stealing his socks.  My father, so stoic most of the time, openly weeps at Korean dramas, soap operas, and Disney movies. He had to pause The Little Princess so that he could mop his face with toilet paper under the guise of needing to take a leak.

Despite being born in America, attending American schools, eating American food, speaking American English, watching American TV, listening to American music, I somehow still learned from my Korean Daddy that the best way to “deal with my emotions” was to pretend I didn’t have any.  As a result, as a 35 year old woman with a law degree and car payments under her belt, when crisis hit and the bad feelings came hell or high water, I turned to Google to help me cope.

And for the first time, Google failed.

---

Next stop was pharmaceuticals.  My doctor prescribed antidepressants, but I still found myself dripping bodily fluids into my keyboard at work while my estranged husband accused me of being a remorseless bitch over the phone. I went back to said doctor and asked him to double the dosage, to which he cautioned, “Well, the point of these pills is not to turn you into a robot…”  To which I replied,

“That’s exactly what I want. To be a robot.”

---

I was in such a rush to “get through the divorce,” I never once considered facing the feelings head on.  Ironic, I guess.  In my job, there’s a strategy called “fronting your weakest fact.”  That means that when making an argument in court, in lieu of waiting for the other side to point out your weakness, you prophylactically advise the court of it and then spin it.  In other words, you deal with your weaknesses head on.

In the case of my divorce, I threw a ton of money at the situation with the hope of paying for my guilt.  I felt (and still feel) insanely guilty for leaving my husband behind in our home. And maybe because of that guilt, I never let myself think about precisely why I was leaving my husband.  I wrote about how miserable I was all the time on Tumblr, talked about it with my therapist for hours and hours until her tissue box was in tatters, but, I never ever got down to the “nub” of what ultimately drove me away from the man I swore to love until the day I died.

It has been nearly four years since my divorce. Since then, I met a man who is, in so many important ways, very different from my ex-husband. I intend to marry this man in July.  I have a few things to tidy up before doing that: I’d like to make my final alimony payment before then, remove my name from both the mortgage on and title to the house my ex-husband has been living in since I left, convince my ex-husband to start paying for his own phone bill.

I have also decided that it’s time.  It’s time to step out of the closet.

---

I started dating my ex-husband when I was 18 years old. I married him when I was 26.  I divorced him when I was 35.  We were together for nearly 18 years in total, during which I spent inordinate amounts of time in closets.  Walk in closets, broom closets, storage closets. I learned within a month of dating my ex-husband that he, too, had difficulties “dealing with his emotions.” He would grow angry with me over things (over the tone of my voice, because I left the ice cream out, that time I removed his hand from my bare shoulder because it was hot and sticky in our apartment) and I would get angry back. We would argue like a normal couple would. But, eventually, things would grow decidedly abnormal. He would begin hurling invectives–calling me names, getting personal. When he grew fatigued, he would shut me out altogether and pretend I wasn’t there. I would sob in the corner of our living room while he watched TV and ate dinner without so much as glancing in my direction. This would last for hours sometimes.  It was usually around this time–when literally crying for his attention didn’t work–that I would remove myself and hide in the closet.

There, surrounded by sweatshirts and jeans and t-shirts that smelled of his cigarettes with nothing but the waning daylight creeping through the crack underneath my door to keep me anchored, I would let myself cry and howl as loudly as I dared. It was safe in my closet. No one could see me falling apart in my closet. No one was there to witness my shame, because that is what it was.  Shame, crawling into me like a hoard of hungry ants and devouring up every inch of my body until it was coming up and out of my mouth in dry, heaving sobs.  There, within the four dark corners of my closet, I could tell God to go fuck himself, make all sorts of promises about how it was “over,” rehearse in my head exactly what words I’d use to cement the dissolution of our marriage.  There, inside my closet, I could pretend that I was the strong, bold, fierce woman I knew my mother and her mother before her was.  There, inside my closet, I would pretend that I could walk out of that closet, out of our bedroom, and out of our front door and never look back.

Eventually, though, I would hear my husband’s footsteps bounding up the stairs, his fists pounding on the door of my closet, as if he could rattle me out of there like a can of Coke stuck in a vending machine.  And all of my resolve, all the things I’d dreamt up in that closet of mine, they would evaporate.  Because I couldn’t bear to have him screaming at me any longer. I would open the door, fall to my knees, throw my arms around his legs and beg him.  Just beg him to forgive me for getting angry.  For having the audacity to fight back. For crying so much in my closet.

---

When I think now about why I eventually left my husband, I don’t think about the time he hit me. In all honestly, he was very very drunk and he almost missed. Although he could get “handsy” when he was mad, in all 18 years of our relationship, he only struck me once.  And it hurt my heart far more than it hurt my head.

No, when I think about the answer to the question, “Why did you leave your husband?” I immediately recall the one time I didn’t have a closet to run into when he lost his temper.

My husband was laid off from his job the day we closed on our first house.  I tried not to panic and look at the bright side.  I told him, “I make enough money for the two of us. Why don’t you take a little time and think about what you really want to do with your life? Art? Music? Teaching?” He spent the next three years playing xbox and getting high (behind my back).  After three years of collecting unemployment checks, I decided it was time to talk to him about finding a job.  I knew broaching the subject was like “asking for it,” but I could no longer bear coming home from work at midnight to him playing video games.

It was a sunny afternoon–bright and warm, after a long cold spell. I suggested we head to a local park where we could take a walk.  I thought perhaps the weather would keep him calm. Apparently, we were not alone in thinking that an afternoon outdoors was a good idea.  It was as if all the surrounding suburbs decided to pitch a block party on the rolling green grass. They brought lawn chairs and blankets, volleyballs and baseball gloves. There were bicycles, tricycles, and rollerblades traversing the very path I walked with my husband when I carefully inquired,

“So…, what is the plan for your next job?”

It started out the same way as all of our fights. Normal. We disagreed about things. We argued. Eventually, the argument grew heated and we headed to the car, where we continued.  And there, in the privacy of our parked car, he raised his voice. He started calling me a selfish bitch, accusing me of lording over him with my high paying job. He was screaming at me and I was crying, again, only this time, I had no place to hide. So, I got out of the car.  I decided that I would rather walk home in my sandals than have to be yelled at during the ride.  I started marching vaguely in the direction of our house, pressing the heel of my hand against my face to stop the tears.  I didn’t look back, I didn’t slow down, I didn’t stop walking.

“GET BACK IN THE CAR YOU BITCH!!”

He had pulled up next to me.  He slowed, rolled down the window, and screamed at me from his car. He started honking his horn to punctuate his words,

“YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME, YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THIS TO ME, GET BACK IN THE CAR!!”

I stopped walking.

The bright sunny park–with its volleyballs and rollerblades and picnic baskets and lawn chairs–grew eerily quiet.  I looked past my husband’s honking car to see a family of three–a father and two little girls, in matching helmets on their bicycles, stopped in their tracks.  The look on that man’s face, of pure incredulity and blinding pity as he watched me stumble towards my husband’s car–I will never forget it for as long as I live.  What was he thinking? I know what he was thinking:

“My daughters will never grow up to be like her.”

---

This “episode” catapulted me over the edge. I started to fall out of love with my husband that day, when he exposed my shame to the entire world on the brightest sunniest day.  It was as if he were declaring to everyone, “Wait and see boys and girls! Boy, have I got a magic act for you this afternoon!!  You see this woman??  She may look like a powerful big shot lawyer on the outside, but with a wave of my wand, I’ll melt away her facade and you’ll see her for what she REALLY is!  Sniveling, weak, crawling on her hands and knees if I so much as look at her wrong.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the reason I fell out of love with him was pretty simple:

I was angry.

Like, stupid sputtering spittle in his face angry.  I wanted to beat him senseless, pull all his hair out, kick him in the penis. I wanted to hurt him as badly as he hurt me.  I wanted to destroy him for destroying our marriage, for taking all the softest parts of me and tearing them to bits in front of a bunch of strangers.  But I learned that fighting back the way he did only made him more hateful, more cruel.  Therefore, I never allowed myself to feel mad.

Instead, I served him with divorce papers.

---

I was not a saint during our marriage. I have a temper, too.  I can get angry over things as inexplicable as stolen socks and undercooked rice.  I gather that many of our “fights” were escalated by my abject inability to cope with his anger and my propensity to cry.  And for a long time, I would say these things over and over again to myself so that a part of me would never have to walk out of that closet.  Because as long as I stayed in there, I wouldn’t have to go through with walking out of our house.  Walking out on him.

And here I thought, all these years, that I left that stupid closet behind me when I packed up my piano, all my books, my guitar, and camera and drove into the city to my new apartment.  I thought that when I started unpacking my things and organizing my brand new walk in closet, that I had finally come into my own.  I believed that when I showed up to court for the final hearing of our divorce, that I had seen the last of the woman who shriveled up into a quivering ball when my ex-husband started raising his voice and pounding his fists.  And I believed, truly, that if I made partner at a large law firm, if I dated enough men, ran enough marathons, made enough money–I would someday grow into the woman I always pretended to be before my ex-husband unmasked me.

I was wrong.  As my fiancé knows, I have nightmares about my ex, regularly. It is the one topic of conversation I avoid during my therapy sessions, which often requires me to lie to my therapist (“Oh, my ex?  We’re fine. It’ll be fine. No worries, I’m fine.”)  Two days ago, a good friend of mine asked me over Skype how things were going with my ex-husband, now that I was getting remarried. Digging deep on a Friday morning at the office, surrounded by my diplomas, briefs, and business cards, I confessed the following:

“I don’t let myself get angry with him, because I know how much pain he can still cause me.”

And there they were.

Those goddamn tears prickling the corners of my eyes.

---

The truth is, a part of me never left that damn closet.

And it’s time for her to come out.

 

~1960s.

My mother immigrated from South Korea to the United States in her early 20s with her best friend from nursing school. There was a shortage of nurses here in the States back then and it seemed that visas for nursing school graduates were being handed out like raffles at the corner store. Omma arrived in the “land of dreams” with whatever clothes she could stuff into a duffel bag, the money she’d been saving up that past year in Korea, and the small roll of ₩ her father had handed to her the morning she left.

With that roll of money, though, he handed to her something she would carry for the rest of her life. Her father, sweet, gentle, and painfully kind, loved her best out of his 5 daughters and 1 youngest son. After watching her parents bury three babies in three winters in their backyard, she offered herself to her father, she was to be the self-appointed “son,” despite being the wrong gender. While the rest of her family would remain behind on the farm each summer, her father would take her into town, groom her as though she were the eldest son instead of the second eldest daughter. He would never say so out loud, but my mother knew: “With this money, I’m taking not just my own hopes and dreams to the alleys of America, I’m taking all of theirs, too.”

Aiming to secure a position at Cook County Hospital here in Chicago while studying for her Boards, she and her best friend rented a one-bedroom flat for 99 bucks a month up in Rogers Park. Small, cramped and rife with code violations, my mother recalls how she and her best friend slept with all their appendages firmly within the confines of their one full size bed, to avoid whatever it was that made the scurrying sounds on their creaking wooden floors every night.

My mother took French in middle school and high school. Beyond a handful of conversational phrases (“merci beaucoup”), that part of her brain might as well have been lobotomized. Picking up languages has never been her forte and English was (as she still describes it) an accursedly inconsistent tongue (“wolves” for “wolf” but “roofs” for “roof”???). Attempting to pass the nursing exams was itself a challenge, but doing so in a language with which she was only superficially familiar was a lot like trying to navigate the Grand Canyon with nothing but an old compass and a blanket of stars.

Omma did love looking up at the stars, though. Her “home” (she still calls Korea her home) consisted of a small farm guarded by blue-grey mountains and forests of thick green pines. The stars were so clear each night, she could almost reach out, pick them out of the darkness, and hold them. Chicago, on the other hand, with its hulking feats of steel and glass, the endless pairs of eyes glimmering from traffic, even the moonlight that reflected off the back of the silver snake that wound its way throughout the city at all hours — all these lights drowned out the prospect of stargazing.

So, in lieu of looking up, my mother looked down — at the Lake. Like no “lake” she’d ever seen back home, Lake Michigan extended beyond the horizon. She’d never lived so close to such a large body of water and the notion that it was clean enough to supply the city’s drinking water intrigued her. She found herself wandering over to Lake Shore Drive often, after a grueling session hitting the books, when she was hungry and didn’t have money to eat, when she was bored and was not in the mood to talk to her roommate, simply to watch the foam curling up onto the shore like a furtive but welcoming smile.

You will never meet a woman more hard working than my mother. 40 years into a successful nursing career, and she still takes on the 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. night shift when no one else can — not because she needs the cash, but because that’s just what needs to get done. She poured over those books each night until the Roman letters swam together like a family of crawling ants and the hunger pangs she couldn’t quite satisfy shrouded her wits in fog. But what good is remembering something you can’t understand? The language barrier proved too tall for my 5 foot-nothing mom.

On the afternoon of the test results, she called her father on the payphone around the corner from their apartment. Though, normally, she didn’t like to cry in front of anyone — least of all her parents — she couldn’t help herself.

“Daddy, I failed.”

I can hardly think of any combination of three words in any language that is more heartbreaking, more humiliating, than the one my mom uttered into the payphone that afternoon. She thought of the roll of money her father had handed to her on the day she left for the States, how she had spent almost all of it with the assumption — the presumption — that she would pass her exams and secure a full-time job shortly thereafter to pay for her rent, a pair of new shoes, and, eventually, an airplane ticket for her father. She would have to return home, her cool hands empty but for the bitter residue of failure.

Her father comforted his No. 2 daughter the best he could through the static of an international phone call and my mother’s brokenness, and told her that she was not a failure, that of course she could come home. But then, he said something she didn’t expect to hear:

“But, Sunny… If you come home now, you might regret it for the rest of your life.”

Tough words to hear and certainly tougher words to say to a 20-something year old with nothing but the couple dollars she fingered in her right coat pocket to her name. Omma hung up the phone feeling nothing so much as the weight of her father’s words hurtling down her back as she turned east, towards the Lake.

It was a typical winter day in Chicago — impossibly sunny while being brutally cold. There were few people brave enough to face the biting wind that hurled off the lakeshore, like pages being ripped from a book. Omma, both hands in her pocket, stepped one foot in front of the other along the lakeshore trail, wondering where she could gather the funds to survive another round of exams and even if she could scale that impossible hurdle, how she could pass them when she’d already failed.

Slowly, a figure began to emerge from the periphery. A small, old homeless woman, her frail body stooped in submission to the cold as she continued to tread towards her. Gripping the handful of quarters, dimes and nickels she had in her right pocket, Omma rounded her narrow shoulders and watched the toes of her shoes, as they sidled closer and closer to the edge of the Lake. She had no money to give away and wanted to avoid the inevitable entreaty that appeared determined to cross her shadow that day.

Sure enough, a pair of wrinkled upturned hands were shoved underneath my mother’s nose. She had no choice but to look up then. The beggar lady was short, but still a little taller than Omma. Her skin was haggard and as white as the foam trapped beneath the ice, framed by gritty strands of grey hair. So cold, but all she had on was a light spring jacket.

“Ma’am, do you have a dollar for a cup of coffee? It’s so cold,” she inquired in perfect American English.

Eventually, my mother would learn to employ the second most powerful word in the English language: “No.” But on that day, for whatever reason, even though the loose change that was starting to get slick with sweat in her right coat pocket was virtually all the money she had left at that moment, she said the other:

“Yes.”

She pulled her hand out of her pocket and poured the change right into the wrinkled palms, which were beginning to turn red. The air was unforgiving and Omma started to bring her hand back to the warmth of her coat pocket, but not before the old lady snatched it up into her own. They were so so cold. She tried to pull away, to yank her hand back to safety, she began to tell the beggar that it was okay, she didn’t need effusive demonstrations of gratitude with the few English words she could bring to her chapped lips.

But the old wrinkled lady didn’t say “thank you” or “god bless” or “have a lovely day,” as she imprisoned my mother’s hand that afternoon. She said something else — something that my mother would never forget. Something that she would one day repeat to her American daughter:

“You’re going to pass that test.”

---

presently.

Four more blocks down Lake Shore Drive (“LSD”) before I’d cross the mental finish line: Erie, Ontario, Ohio, and then Grand Avenue. My thighs were burning and the hole in my stomach threatened to spill out of me and onto the pavement with each step. I could have stopped then, I could have even stopped a mile earlier, but numbers are important to me and it was absolutely imperative that however long it took, I logged at least 17 miles this morning. So, four more blocks eventually became two whittled down to one and then, finally, I was bent over, holding my chest so as not to have my lungs splatter into the tiled floors of my building’s lobby.

Every week, I hear some version of the statement “how lucky we are to have one of the most awesome running trails in the country.” I agree. Lake Shore Drive is show-stopping in the sun, hauntingly lovely in the mist, and sexy with its amber glow at night. When I finally decided to move out of the burbs and into the city, it was not a coincidence that I ended up walking distance from the same Lake that my mother used to visit so frequently during her earliest days here in the States. I’m not superstitious and I’m still not sure if I believe in God, but I do believe in my mother and I thought that whatever strength she drew from the Lake, whatever magic seeped into the shore, perhaps some reservoir of it remained for me.

I used to hate running. I only started running along LSD to lose weight. It was a purely functional activity — I didn’t run for some of the reasons other people talked about, to “clear my head,” to “relieve stress,” to “feel great!” I hated running so much, I could actually feel my stress levels climb with each pump of the legs, as I constantly checked my watch to see how not-far I’d come.

But, with the “most awesome running trail” basically a stone’s throw away, I started running this past summer, once a week, a few miles on Saturday morning. I’d take pictures of the Lake, the sun bursting over the water like a fluorescent egg yolk, the misted cityscape hovering like the dreams I left behind each morning on my pillow. I rarely listened to music when I ran. It was summer and I enjoyed the thrush and sighs heaving into the shore, just inches from my feet. It reminded me just how far away I was from the life I once lived, how much closer I was to the life my mother once started, right here, in the same place.

Within a few months of my “virgin” run along the lakefront, I ran from my apartment all the way to Hyde Park (where I went to law school), almost entirely along LSD. I left my front door at around 6:20 in the morning, when this side of the world was still veiled in the thick opiate of dreams. Though the distance was intimidating, there was something unspeakably beautiful in the sound of my feet hitting the ground. It was just me, the fog, and the trail winding out in front of me. To my right, Lake Shore Drive was quiet; only a few cars would round the curve every few minutes. To my left, though, the Lake launched itself against the rocks, cleaving to the shore as though trying to penetrate the fog, the sand, the cement, my running shoes, my heart.

It was, in fact, the perfect setting to meet an old beggar lady, one who would hand to me all my dreams come true in a brown paper bag in exchange for the AMEX card I slipped into my shoe that morning. But in all 9.34 miles I ran that day, no wrinkled fairy godmother appeared to bring my heartbeat to a boil. What “test” was I aiming to pass, anyway? There was no do-or-die moment looming over me — I had made it: I lived in one of the nicest parts of the city, had a great job, a loving family, two happy dogs, and a body that, by then, attracted enough attention to satisfy even Scarlett O’Hara.

I would soon learn that “failure” can often disguise itself as success. Or, perhaps more accurately, sometimes, “success” can cost too much.  In less than a week, I’ll be running my first marathon.  To those who have asked me whether I’m “excited,” my retort is, “Would you be excited about running 26.2 miles? No? I didn’t think so.”

The truth is, I’m terrified of failing, that I will somehow peter at our mile 22 or end up walking the last 3 miles. I realize, now, that marathon running is like anything else–fraught with both triumph and doubt.  I consider all of the times I stepped forward with no guarantee of success, when no one–not even an old beggar lady on the street–had faith in me.

This morning, each step forward was an uprooting, the pavement trying to keep me tethered to all the doubts that have been clawing at me:

“You’re just not light enough,”

“You’re just not fast enough,”

“You’re just not strong enough,” and

“You’ll always be alone.”

I felt the wind trying to pick me up and cradle me against the shore, and I almost let it.

But I didn’t want to have to pick up the phone and say,

“Omma, I failed.”

Luckily, the sound of my feet hitting the ground… it told me something:

“You’re going to finish that race.”

Hahl-muh-nee* woke me up with the sun and told me to get ready for school.  I pretended not to hear her and squeezed my eyes shut.  Though I could feel the sunlight hitting my face, the cold night air lingered in my room.  I swept the covers over my head.  Even so, I could hear the water running in the kitchen and a chorus of summer’s cicadas keening outside my window.  I smelled that Hahl-muh-nee was frying eggs for me downstairs, and my stomach began to rumble uncomfortably.  I rolled over onto my side.

“Sun-Young!  Hurry up and wake up, or you’ll miss your bus!” Hahl-muh-nee yelled from the kitchen.

I opened my eyes still inside my cocoon and stared for a moment at the soft folds of my blanket, allowing my breath to waft over my face and nose as I sighed.  I counted to ten and then I jumped from the bed and stumbled over to the bathroom.

After brushing my teeth and splashing my face with a few drops of water, I rubbed my cheeks dry with the plush pink towel that hung next to the shower.  I glanced at myself in the mirror and smiled at the glowing redness that spread across my face.  I ran my finger across my right cheek.

I wanted to go straight to the kitchen, but I could see Hahl-muh-nee rustling through my drawers.  I had already picked out what I would wear for my first day of school: my favorite spring blue dress and my red beaded necklace.  I opened my mouth to tell Hahl-muh-nee, but before I could bring the words to my lips, she began tugging an ugly white sok-neh-bok** dotted with tiny flowers over my head as soon as I walked through the door.  I tried to resist, but she lifted my arms roughly without saying a word in response to my muffled protests.  When she finally got my arms through the top portion of the sok-neh-bok, I crossed them across my chest, glaring at the small mirror that hung next to the door. When she grabbed for my foot while holding the matching white pants, I said rather stiffly, “Hahl-muh-nee, it is not cold enough to wear sok-neh-bok.  Besides, I am too old to wear them.” She sniffed and said, “Don’t talk nonsense.  Do you want to catch a cold?” and proceeded to shove my feet through the length of each cotton leg.  Afterwards, she pulled out a hideous yellow shirt with green and blue stripes, but this time, I lifted my arms for her.  There was no point in fighting Hahl-muh-nee.

I was completely dressed and hungry, but my Hahl-muh-nee ordered me to sit down and wait on the floor while she found a comb and some rubber bands.  I crossed by legs, leaning against the soft quilts of the bed, and ran my fingers through my black hair, my chubby fingertips peeking between the locks.

She sat down behind me on the edge of the bed and pulled my hair together with her right hand.  After smoothening out all the bumps and ripples, she let go of it, making it fan out across the back of my shoulders.  While she gripped the top of my head, she began to comb, reaching the tips of my hairs without slowing for any knots or tangles; my head pulled back roughly with the motion of her hand.  She began parting my hair; I could feel the corners of my eyes lifting to either side of my head.

All of the sudden, I felt her shift.  Her hands grew gentle, and she said, almost embarrassed, “I was watching Sesame Street yesterday with your baby brother.  I saw this very pretty Korean girl, who wore her hair in pigtails.  She reminded me of my Sun-Young, so I will do your hair like hers.”

When I reached the kitchen, a plate of one fried egg and a boiled hot dog, along with a tall and formidable glass of milk were waiting for me.  I took one metal chopstick to test my yolk—to make sure it would not break and was pleased to find that it was hard with a tinge of green, just the way I liked it.  I alternated between bites of egg and hot dog, ignoring the milk.  I wasn’t thirsty.

After finishing my breakfast, I took my plate to the sink and turned around to leave the kitchen and grab my bag for school.  But my Hahl-muh-nee stood at the doorway and looked pointedly at my untouched glass of milk.  I turned around, picked up my morning nemesis, and gulped it town while training one defiant eye on Hahl-muh-nee over the rim of the cup. While still wiping my lips, she hustled me out of the door, lifting my small backpack onto my shoulders.

“Listen to your teacher and come home safely,” she said.  When I looked back halfway to the bus stop, I saw her standing there still, watching me.

---

Teacher had big red toenails that stuck out of her sandals.  She looked like a white hahl-muh-nee, but she smiled a lot and talked really loud.  I did not understand what she was saying.  She was speaking the Dominick’s language, the words my mother and father spoke at the grocery store.  I once saw my father sign his name on a piece of paper, with big loops and curling letters, just like the glowing orange letters of the Dominick’s sign–just like the letters scrawled across the chalkboard.  But I smiled at Teacher when she said something to me, and bobbed my head as if on cue so that I could tell Hahl-muh-nee that I had followed her parting instructions when I came home.

The other children at school were different from and the same as me.  Some had hair the color of kimchi or the bright yellow radishes Hahl-muh-nee would wrap into kimbap, others had blue eyes and pale skin, like the kids in Sesame Street.  They seemed to laugh a lot, like Teacher.  They were beautiful to look at, and my eyes wandered often to one girl with long yellow hair the color of Cinderella’s and a high-pitched giggle that reminded me of a nest of birds that lived in the oak tree in our front yard.  I did not speak to them, though, since they were all speaking the Dominick’s language, and I could not.  Instead, I let Teacher file me from one classroom to the next, whispered “A” and “B” and “C” when told, and otherwise rested my chin in my hands as I stared uncomprehending at the chalkboard, while wondering whether Hahl-muh-nee was going to meet me at the bus stop when I got home.

It was lunch time.  So I followed the rest of my class to the end of the room, where our belongings were stacked neatly underneath our assigned coat hangers.  I pulled out the brown bag my Hahl-muh-nee must have packed when I wasn’t looking, and peeked inside.  Kim-bop.  Hahl-muh-nee knew this was one of my favorites.

For lunch, Teacher had us sit in a circle on a gigantic rug with the letters of the alphabet zig-zagging across it.  While gingerly fingering the top of my brown bag, I saw that the girl next to me, the one with the yellow hair, was eating a sandwich, like the ones my Hahl-muh-nee would make for breakfast.  I had never eaten one for lunch before.  I looked around and found that no one was eating rice and ban-chan; everyone else had sandwiches, little baggies of fruits or cookies, and juice boxes.  I quickly closed my brown bag with a tight fist.  What was wrong with Hahl-muh-nee?  Didn’t she know what was proper to bring for lunch?  I looked down at the colorful carpeting and waited quietly for everyone to finish eating before throwing the brown bag into the garbage with everyone else’s trash.

After lunch, Teacher said it was time to go home.  So we went to the end of the room again and began gathering our things.  I sat down and began pulling my pant leg up to put on my shoes.  The yellow-haired girl came next to me with another boy and looked down at me.  She said something and pointed at my leg.

I noticed then that, while pulling up my pant leg, I had revealed my sok-neh-bok.  She pointed at it again, and said something, but I shrugged and shook my head.  She began to laugh, pointing at me now, urging the boy next to her to look at my sok-neh-bok.  They both began to laugh.  I shoved my shoes on, turned my face from them while putting on my jacket, and vowed—swore!—that I would never wear sok-neh-bok again, no matter what Hahl-muh-nee said.

While sitting on the crowded bus, I stared out the window with my chin resting on my fist, trying my best to ignore my reflection.  I did not look at the yellow-haired girl who was giggling with her friends in the very back.  I stepped off the bus—I was glad that Hahl-muh-nee was not there waiting for me—and stalked home, not slowing down to pretend I was coming home from a grand adventure, as I did when Hahl-muh-nee and I walked back from the park.

---

She was waiting for me at the door.  I did not greet her as I should have, but walked inside, took my shoes off, and ran to my room.  I threw my bag into the corner of my closet and rushed to the mirror.  I pulled roughly at the rubber bands that Hahl-muh-nee had put into my hair that morning, until it flowed down my back, trying to imagine that it was golden yellow.  I laughed out loud, trying to imitate that high-pitched giggle and stringed together what few words of the Dominick’s language I managed to snatch from school that morning.  But it did not work.  My hair was a dark, course black and my eyes would always be small and brown.  I would never look like the girls at school, I would never be able to master their bright colored words, I would never ever be one of them.

I dropped my head to my chest while my face became wet, but I did not want to cry.

I heard someone behind me.  I looked up into the mirror again, and started at the set of eyes that stood next to my own.  They looked so much like mine.

“Come.  I’ve made a fresh batch of kim-bhop.  Come, before they get cold.”  Hahl-muh-nee smiled and turned to walk to the kitchen.  I looked back at the mirror once more, and smiled too.

I turned away and followed in her footsteps.

---

My grandmother was a hard woman.  She was a single mother of five children; her husband, the grandfather I never knew, died sometime during the Korean War.  She did not speak of it, but I have heard hushed stories of them hiding in caves and running in the night to avoid being captured by some nameless Enemy.  My father tells me he used to catch fireflies in the dark, and when I think of those nights, of them being chased by something unknown to them really, I see the fireflies alighting on my father’s shoulders while he ran.

On the bitter grey morning my father stepped onto the train destined for the hotbed of the Vietnam War, my grandmother gripped his hand from the platform and prayed.  She stayed apace with the train as long as she could, while the snow landed on their outstretched hands and her voice chased my father’s heart into the jungles of Vietnam.  The image of my grandmother standing on the cold and laden platform that morning as the train took him to war has stayed with my father all these years.  Maybe, like me, he wondered whether she would wait for him there when he returned, while he grasped her prayers that morning like a talisman, to keep him safe.  The only time I’ve ever seen my father weep was the morning she died.

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I miss my grandmother, especially at night.  When I was little, I could hear her whispering prayers while I pretended to sleep, tracing the strange patterns the streetlamp outside my window splashed across my legs.  The lights and patterns are still there, but I cannot hear her whispering anymore.

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*hahl-muh-nee translates to “grandma.”
**sok-neh-bok translates to “long underwear.”

Fifteen years ago, I brought home my Daisy girl.

She, a 6-month old bichon poodle, stole my heart the moment she waddled over to me and greeted me by lifting her tush into the air for a salutary scratch.  That second, Daisy ceased to be “just a cute dog,” and became my best friend, soul mate, darling… All the things I have been reluctant to name any human.

Daisy has lived up to the reputation of “poodle” in many ways.  She is aloof.  She has never enjoyed being held for longer than a minute or two.  She does not take kindly to uninvited impositions on her personal space–even by me.

She liked taunting her younger brother Billy (the black puggle we brought home the day after we took home Daisy) by snatching his toys and jumping up onto the living room couch–a feat Billy was unable to master until he was several months old.  Daisy has never been overly friendly with other dogs and in some cases, she has been just short of hostile.  Whether she is the largest or the smallest of a group canines, her entitlement to the first and tastiest morsel of food or treat is sacrosanct–in her mind, at least, and she has the scars to prove it.

Daisy is greedy.  I once made the mistake of leaving a box of petit fours on the floor of our living room.  We were a mile into our drive to a dinner party before I remembered and turned back. I rushed into the house hoping I’d beaten the dogs, but the damage was done.  Our hardwood floors were strewn with wrappers with not so much as a smudge of chocolate in sight.  We made a mad dash to the emergency room with both Daisy and Billy and both went through the unpleasantness of charcoal and the Pump.  And…surprise surprise: my Billy, a 35 lb overweight puggle had nothing but dog food inside him; whereas, my tiny little 13 lb bichon poodle was stuffed to the gills with French pastries.

 

Daisy is also a bit of a drama queen. She yelps at the slightest discomfort, often refuses food for emotional reasons, and regularly comes down with mysterious illnesses that miraculously disappear as soon as we drive up to the animal hospital parking lot.  There was, however, one instance very early on in our lives together that Daisy wasn’t being just a drama queen.  When she was about two years old, all of a sudden, she stopped eating.  For the first day, I let it be, assuming she was just on one of her random hunger strikes.  But when she went two days without eating…and started chewing instead on the tallest blades of grass in our front yard…and depositing small puddles of vomit in the nooks and crannies of our home, I started to panic.  We carted her over to the animal hospital and were told we’d have to leave her there overnight for IV fluids and monitoring.  I left my Daisy girl in that sterile clinic devoid of love or warmth for two whole nights.  And during those two agonizing nights, I wrestled with my comforter alone, praying when I could not sleep, dreaming when I did, and ultimately concluding that whether or not Daisy lived through this bout of illness, I would never ever forgive God for doing this to the both of us.

After four whole days of no solid food, I was beginning to lose all hope that my Daisy would recover.  I trudged through the parking lot of a now all-too familiar animal hospital, said “hello” to the staff that knew me as “Daisy’s mom,” and tiptoed into the back area with Daisy’s vet towards Daisy’s “quarters”–a tiny little kennel.  There, I watched with dread as Daisy once again turned her head–with as much disdain as her weak little body could muster–from the small thimbleful of food the vet waved around on a wooden tongue depressor.

I whispered, “Can… Can I try?”  The vet handed me the tongue depressor.  I stretched out my hand, my heart a grapefruit in my throat, throbbing as though I’d just run a mile.  Slowly, I brought the food closer to her chin, praying for just a quick lick or a nibble.  But, before I’d even gotten to her nose, she scarfed down the entire dab of canned food I’d offered, sending a jolt right up and through my arm and into that grapefruit lodged in my throat until it landed back safely in my chest.

…as my greedy little Daisy licked the food off my fingers.

---

Even when I lived with my parents, Daisy was considered “Joanne’s dog.” It went without saying, then, that she came with me when I got married and moved into my husband’s home.  However much she loved my husband (and she truly did adore him in some ways), Daisy was mine, in body and soul.  She was with me on the day I moved into my husband’s 3 bedroom townhouse.  She slept on my side of our California King sized bed.  She was with me when I woke up during the wee hours, while the sun was still cavorting behind the darkness, to write my little poems and vignettes.  She shadowed me as I traveled from room to room of our house, as she never liked me out of her sight or smell.

Daisy also came with me the night I slipped out the front door of our townhouse and ran back to my parents.  July 7, 2011.

I will remember two things for as long as I live:

The sound of my bare feet slapping against the pavement that night as the stars overhead peered rather coldly down at us.

And… the thumping of Daisy’s heart, beating right into my own, as I pressed her ever closer to my ribs and carried us away.

---

I have grown very familiar with the sound of my Daisy’s heart.

Three years ago, just after my divorce–when Daisy and I were living together in a high-rise apartment in the city–my Daisy went into heart failure.  Her four beautiful long ballerina legs folded abruptly beneath her and she fell to the floor like a poorly designed table.  She not only lost control of her legs, but within a few seconds, she was sitting in a puddle of her own urine.

And she wouldn’t get up.

According to the vet, my Daisy’s heart was big–too big for her little body–and eventually, her heart would fail again.  I was told it was only a matter of time–“time” meaning 6-9 months that I had with my Daisy.  I would soon grow overly acquainted with terms like “syncope” and “mitochondrial valve.” I downloaded an app to count her breathing, watched for signs of distress, listened for the dreaded “crunching leaves” in her lungs.  What started out as one vial of pills would eventually grow into a cadre of pharmaceuticals that I would have to assemble each morning and night.

Too often, I found myself in the crowded dusty “office” of my Daisy’s vet. The walls were lined with big fat books, charts and medical records were hastily stashed into corners and then forgotten, a sinfully outdated computer wheezed almost as loudly as my Daisy did.  Dr. A. would shut off the lights as soon as we walked in (if they weren’t already turned off) and he would launch immediately into an analysis of Daisy’s ultrasound.  With a circling motion, his hand would zero in on what was visibly the largest organ in Daisy’s small body:

“You see here, her heart–well, it’s gotten quite a bit larger than it was the last time.”

And sure enough, there it was, in black and white: Daisy’s heart, truly the size and shape of a large grapefruit lodged uncomfortably between the two delicate wings of her ribcage.

“She’s a fighter, but in time, her heart will fail.  Or her kidneys.  Or liver.  It’s only a matter of time.”  And as if on cue, when asked just how much “time,” he would reply, “About 6-9 months.”

For two years, I administered her medication, walked her 5-6 times a day so that she wouldn’t have accidents in the house, stocked up on doggie diapers and pee pads, hired a “pet taxi” to drive me back and forth to the vet for quarterly checkups (I didn’t have a car). I won’t put a brave face on it:

It all sucked.  Big time.

But it was a drop in the bucket compared to the work it took to keep the panic from crawling up the deep, smelly well I would bury it in each morning. At night, I would listen to her struggle for breath and wonder at how she ever managed to sleep.  There were times when the ugliness of it all would get the best of me.  One morning, after spending nearly an hour attempting–and failing–to get Daisy to take her medications, I sat in the middle of my kitchen at 5:30 in the morning and started sobbing, “But you’ll DIE if you don’t take these!” I wailed at my Daisy’s big round eyes.  She’d sat prettily enough, waiting for me to offer her another “Pill Pocket,” which she would swallow, expertly spitting out their contents without so much as an iota of remorse.

If you’ve been through this before–and I daresay that many of you have–I felt like I was going through all the stages of mourning, right then and there, on the cold slick and horrifically unsympathetic floor of my kitchen, even though Daisy was still alive enough to be a snot-nosed brat about her medication.

And that’s what it was: living in a perpetual state of psuedo-grief, as if my heart were running through a dress-rehearsal for the real thing every single day.

But Daisy had been with me through every large moment in my life.  She was there when I graduated law school, when I landed a job with a large law firm, when I got married, when I bought my first home, when I made partner.  She was there, right by my side, during all the worst times in my life–she came with me to the city when I finally moved out of our home in the suburbs.  She was right by my side as I leafed through divorce papers and tried not to think about how my life was in shambles.  Through it all, Daisy has been the only constant in a life that could be mercurial and cruel.

And I promised her, day and day out, that I would not quit on her.

---

At the suggestion of my boyfriend (with whom I moved in after two years), I spoke to my mother about having Daisy move in with her.  There was no question that Daisy preferred the bright, sunny, and warm home in the suburbs, surrounded by rolling green grass and filled with all the familiar smells of her childhood.  My mother readily agreed and Daisy settled into her old stomping grounds with ease.  At first, I sparred almost daily with a guilt that threatened to knock me out flat; but, with each call from my mother who assured me, “Oh, Daisy is fine, she is better than fine! She is eating so much and her stool is perfect [I’ve developed a healthy obsession with dog stool since becoming a dog owner]!  Her breathing is fine and she follows me everywhere!”–I grew more certain that my decision had been for the best.

Weeks and even months slipped by without so much as a hiccup from my Daisy’s grapefruit heart, and I started to think to myself, “Maybe she’s got another 2 or 3 years left in the tank… The doctors were wrong.  All she needed was to get out of the damn city and back into a home where she could be fat and lazy and spoiled all day long.”  Without her labored breathing as a constant refrain of my subconscious, life started to get back to “normal”–Daisy was my Daisy, a little rounder under my mother’s care (grandmothers are licensed with a perennial right to overfeed, I’ve been told) and I would only get to see her a few times a month, but it was well worth it to hear my mother crow with pride into the phone, “Daisy is fine!  She is perfect!”

A few weeks ago, my mom texted me the following:

“All doggies are doing just fine!  Time went by so fast, Daisy has been with us almost one year!  She came to me last year July!  She does not want to walk and it concerning me b/c she gains weight but I can’t force her either! She still loves to eat!!! Otherwise she’s doing fine!”

A few days later, I left for New Hampshire.  My boyfriend’s family had rented a house on the lake, and we would be staying there for 8 days.  My mother provided regular updates and we talked on the phone–not so much about dogs, but regarding my discomfort around large bodies of water.  A few days into the trip, while on the pontoon for an evening glide along the lake, my phone rang.  “Omma,” it said.  And I thought for a split second about sending it to voicemail, but instantly changed my mind, thinking, “I can just tell her I’ll call her back once we get back to the house.”

“Hi Omma, what can I do for ya?” I answered.

“Well–”

And that’s about all she was able to get out before devolving into one of the most wrenching sounds a person can ever be forced to hear:

Your mom crying.

---

Daisy stopped eating.  She stopped moving.  It seems she had an infection in her kidney.  But she wasn’t responding well to the medication.

The remaining days of my “vacation” consisted of marathon texting sessions with my mother and phone calls with Daisy’s cardiologist.  I would wake up each morning and wind up the coil of emotions–fear, resentment, grief–that had loosened in my dreams.  I spent hours in the kitchen, cooking as much food as I could for my boyfriend’s family, because it was the only thing that provided me with something to do–something that didn’t take up too much of my brain to be taxing, but just enough to keep me from diving head-first into the self-piteous well that had erected itself in a matter of minutes after that excruciating call with my mom.

My mother sent a pic of my sick little Daisy to me and my brother, to which my brother responded, “She’s a Fighter.”  And the name stuck.

My mother would repeat

She’s Fighter,”

under her breath, and every time, it was like a dart shot into my chest.  My little mother, still unfamiliar with American parlance and with her habit of omitting articles, reminded me that at some point in the past few years,

I had become the adult in our relationship.

That I couldn’t bring to mommy my puppy with a broken heart and kidney and have her fix them for me.  In fact, what had been particularly painful about the call from my mother was how evident it was that she was coming to me to fix everything.

Yes.

Daisy is a Fighter.

But, I realized that in the days to come, Daisy–and all those who loved her–would need me to be a Fighter, too.

---

I have always respected those who have fought on behalf of neglected, abused, and homeless dogs and been secretly ashamed of how weak I am–too weak to be the activist I so admire. To be honest, I’ve been too afraid to be a foster parent, to volunteer at a dog shelter, because doing so would require me to come face to face with the illness of this world in a way that I didn’t think I could handle. I would always end this train of thinking by telling myself, “Joanne, the most important thing you can do for animals is to love and care for your own dogs to the best of your ability.”

And for many many years of Daisy’s life, that was good enough.

And then one day, I decided to follow my boyfriend’s advice and try going vegan.

Unlike many of you, I didn’t go vegan for the animals.  I went vegan because I knew my boyfriend well enough to know that he would break up with me (despite his protestations) were I not to join him.  I also figured that it couldn’t hurt my never-ending quest to lose some weight.  Going vegan did a lot of things–many of which I welcomed.  First and foremost, my boyfriend didn’t break up with me.  Adopting a plant-based diet together brought us closer than I could have ever imagined.  Second, while I didn’t lose any weight, my cholesterol plummeted, rendering me virtually immune from heart disease.  Third, I started this blog that you are reading right now–amassing tons of recipes that I actually like to eat on a daily basis and that others apparently do as well.

But something happened that I never ever expected.

I started to become the activist I’d always wanted to be.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not some undercover agent for PETA taking illegal footage of slaughterhouses or anything. And I still haven’t worked up the nerve to volunteer at an animal shelter because I’m terrified of how many dogs I’ll end up bringing home on a weekly basis.  But once the shackles of cognitive dissonance came off, I was free–free to love animals as deeply as I wanted, without slamming headfirst into my own hypocrisy.  Because here’s the thing:

I knew that however much I loved animals, some portion of my heart had been cordoned off and saved for hamburgers.

That piece of my heart was a piece I couldn’t give to Daisy.

But that changed once I went vegan. All the mental resources I was channeling towards maintaining the piece of fiction I’d inherited–that I could love animals while still being totally ok with their needless slaughter just so I could eat my fried chicken sandwich and samgyupsahl–were now available to actually do something about my love for dogs and cats and horses and elephants.  The vast majority of us grew up with this wall erected around our hearts–each brick of that wall a lie that they told us, at first, and that we told ourselves, after, only because it allowed us to eat bacon with impunity.

I’ve been dismantling that wall for over a year now, and have confirmed something I always sorta suspected:

Compassion is stronger than desire.

And I am so relieved I could love Daisy with every last square centimeter of my heart during her final days.

---

I took Daisy back to my home after returning from vacation, as my parents were off to Mexico for a vacation of their own.  I would have her for nearly a week.  At first, I thought that my role would be similar to the one I’d executed earlier–make sure she takes all her medications, take her out for frequent walks, monitor her breathing and lungs.

Don’t let her die.

So, I made all the little preparations around my house to provide for Daisy’s care.  I bought all kinds of food to tempt her with, brought home syringes to help me force-feed her medication, dusted off a couple of sealed bags of Pill Pockets, and gave my dog walker the heads up that he would be on double duty for the next several days.

But, Daisy was too weak to do much more than rest.  She didn’t want to eat anything or walk much, either.  We took her to the hospital and admitted her for two nights–something I know she hated–but when her doctors were as mystified as we were about her unwillingness to eat, we took her back home.

At home, I curled up next to Daisy, pressed my ear against her chest.  I recalled the sharp thumping that synced with my own heart that night I ran away from home with her.  Now, Daisy’s heart sounded as though it were adrift–still beating, but inside of an ocean.

I finally realized that being a “fighter” was much more about what I shouldn’t do:

Don’t force feed her medication.

Don’t shove syringes of food down her throat.

Don’t take her out for walks she can’t handle.

Don’t subject her to a battery of tests that would only hurt her.

In other words, finally, after three years of telling her I wouldn’t quit, I would have to fight my own anxiety and grief and let Daisy be.

 

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Daisy took her last breath on the morning of July 26, 2017.  She was loved, fully.