Ramshackle Glam (Tumblr)

For about four years in my mid-twenties (roughly ages 22 to 26), I was anorexic.

Just typing out that sentence is a big deal for me, because for a long, long time it wasn’t something I admitted even to myself, and certainly not to anyone else. I’ve always referred to it as “that time when I was super fucked-up” or “that time when I decided not to eat ever again” – jokey, hyperbolic half-truths intended to swing the conversation towards lighter subjects. I’ve never even said the word “anorexia” to my mother; I called her yesterday to talk to her about this post so she wouldn’t be blindsided (although of course she knew anyway). But over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself saying out loud to one friend or another, whenever a related subject comes up, “Oh yeah, I was anorexic.” And we talk about it or we don’t, but it’s out there either way.

I’ve been trying to figure out what changed; what made me start feeling like that was a thing that I could – even should – say. For a long time the thought of laying that boulder of a title on my shoulders was beyond comprehension: sort of like “I have a mental disorder,” it’s the kind of thing that once you say, you can’t take back. But now I don’t care who knows this about me, just like I don’t care who knows that I have an ugly tattoo on my lower back or that I take Zoloft to control my anxiety or that sometimes I put my children in front of the TV because it’s 6PM and I’m done with the whole “parenting” thing for the day. All facts; all things people might take issue with; all things I’m cool with saying out loud.

So what happened? I think maybe I realized that the reason I was so uncomfortable admitting that I was anorexic was far too closely tied to the reason it happened in the first place: I wanted to pretend everything was great. Perfect, even.

Oh man, am I ever not perfect – a fact that I’ve covered in this very space ad infinitum, to the point where it’s sort of funny to me now that I was ever interested in even pretending. In addition to all the stuff that makes everyone imperfect (being a human being, essentially), I have (treated, thank god) anxiety disorder, and severe, crippling (and also treated, also thank god) insomnia. And yeah, I was anorexic. I did drugs when I could find them to make it easier to not eat (and in early 2000s Hollywood finding hard drugs was about as difficult as finding someone who was “writing a screenplay”). But I really didn’t have to, because the rush that I got from watching the number on the scale slip down was all the high I needed.

Even when I lived in LA, I never spent much time in Venice Beach; I have only two memories of the area, actually. The first took place in 1999, when my actor boyfriend and I spent the summer before I went to college living in Oakwood Apartments: a temporary housing complex located over on Sepulveda (which isn’t in Venice Beach; I’ll get to that in a moment).

We lived there in that one-room studio, sleeping on a Murphy bed and eating off of someone else’s plates while we went on auditions and he tried to persuade me to skip that whole “college education” thing (or at least enroll at a California university). I did entertain this idea pretty seriously both because I was in love and because I simultaneously booked a lead role in a DJ Qualls movie called The New Guy (which was, as I’m sure you can imagine, quite a work of cinematic excellence – but as the saying goes, actors can’t be choosers) and one of the lead roles in the pilot for a TV show based on Cruel Intentions (which I think might not have ever actually gotten made – obviously because I turned down the role and there was no other actress in all of Los Angeles capable of being quite as extraordinarily bitchily prep-school-girlish as me. Or maybe because the script was terrible. I think it’s being made now, though. I don’t know).

Mostly I was tempted to skip college in favor of continuing my career as an actress because doing this sounded very grown-up and glamorous, but – THANK GOD – I eventually decided that college was probably a better idea than not-college. (To my children, who may read this one day: you are going to college. And if you try to pull what I tried to pull on my own parents and say “weeeeeell, mayyyyyybe I’ll just go be an actor instead,” do you know what is going to happen? I am going to get on a plane, and I am going to kidnap you, and then I am going to physically deposit you where you need to go. Which is in college.)

Maaaaaajor digression: back to Venice Beach. My first memory of Venice Beach was with that boyfriend and a bunch of his friends: we all rented bikes in Santa Monica and drove them down to Venice, and ended up at some beachside bar that sold very cheap but massive goblets of beer. Except I was underage and so I couldn’t have any and was annoyed, and then I was more annoyed that I had to bike back up to Santa Monica with a lot of extremely drunk people. Did I mention that I hate bike-riding?

The second memory was much better: it was the day after I went to see Kendrick’s band play at a little place in Silverlake, which I guess technically constituted our second date. He crashed on my couch (which, again, I am writing for the benefit of our children, but I think everyone knows where he really crashed, n’est-ce pas?). And then in the morning we held hands while we walked my shih tzu, Lucy, over to the coffee shop to pick up breakfast for ourselves and for Francesca (who was my roommate at the time), and fell in love.

I mean it: I remember the exact second I fell in love with him: we were walking down my block, and Lucy pooped, and I made some joke about who was going to pick it up and saw this expression of utter horror come across his face, because he’d never had a dog and I don’t think he was emotionally prepared to deal with feces quite so early in the morning, and something about the fact that we were talking about dog poop at 9AM and laughing about it and walking down a sunny street on our way to get donuts made me realize that I could spend a lifetime with this person.

Later that afternoon, we (plus Francesca and my mom, who was visiting) drove down to Venice to have lunch by the beach. We were sitting at this little wood table on a restaurant patio, drinking beers and eating poutine, and “I’m A Believer” came on the radio. Now, I am a person who will absolutely, in all possible situations, drop whatever needs to be dropped in order to dance and sing when this song comes on, because I am obviously a MASSIVE dork, and so that’s what I started doing.

And?

Kendrick did it too. Completely unprovoked. So the two of us sat there at that table and bopped and sang and completely mortified my mother and my best friend, and I was like YES. THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR ALL ALONG.

My Post-Baby Breast Augmentation: A Video Diary

For a long time – longer than I wanted to admit, and certainly longer than felt “okay” – Kendrick and I were not getting along.

I wrote about it in this post, back in January ’15, at a point when I thought we were on the way up towards a place where we’d be better – back to the couple I know we are, or at least want us to be – but it took much, much longer than that.

I’ve gotten emails from a few readers, and a few comments here and there – “I’ve noticed you haven’t been writing much personal stuff; are you okay?” – and the answer is…well first, damn you guys are observant. And second: no, I wasn’t okay, and part of why I wasn’t okay was because I was trying to – to some extent, anyway – pretend that I was, because while I write about my life on this site, there are some things that are too upsetting to present for public consumption, like my fear that my marriage wasn’t everything I wanted it to be.

But “pretending I’m okay” never works very well, and it never lasts very long; it’s not how I operate.

Remember that weekend that I packed up the car and drove to see Francesca in LA? I think it was obvious that something was going on with me, but I didn’t want to talk about it at the time. What was going on was that Kendrick and I were fighting and fighting – it felt like there wasn’t a single sentence that either of us could utter that wouldn’t set the other off – and I just wanted a break. I wanted to lay flat on my back on the floor of my best friend’s apartment and not have anyone be mad at me for a second, and so that’s what I did.

It wasn’t about anything massive – with couples that have been married a long time, I think it rarely is. No one cheated; no one did anything irreparably damaging. We just both felt like we were giving so much, and yet our interactions so often focused on what the other wasn’t giving. It felt frustrating and disappointing and, most of all, exhausting.

Fast forward several months, and we are stopping in the middle of a walk around the neighborhood just to kiss, just because. We are holding each other while we watch a movie instead of crawling to our separate corners of the couch. We are talking so much that it takes us two hours to get through a half-hour TV show. We are making each other laugh.

Yesterday we were walking back from an Easter Day parade, pushing Goldie in the stroller while Indy ran ahead taking photographs of flowers and of us, and I looked around me at the complicated, imperfect, beautiful thing that is our life – a life that, strangely enough, doesn’t look all that different now than it did a few months ago – and thought: this is good.

The thing that changed wasn’t Kendrick; he didn’t magically start doing everything I wanted him to do. And I don’t think I changed much, either – not in any especially concrete ways. What changed (and is still changing) was how I – we – saw things. I’ve started realizing – for the first time? – how much of a burden I’d been placing on my marriage. I’d been laying the full weight of my happiness on “us” and how “we” were doing, and ignoring the fact that there are many, many people and places and things in addition to – and beyond – my husband that make me feel happy, and whole. And this is as it should be – but when I allowed myself to take the time for those things, or even simply admit that I wanted them, I felt guilty. Because shouldn’t my family – and specifically my husband – be enough? By choosing to be with my girlfriends for a weekend, for example, am I choosing also to not be with Kendrick, implicitly suggesting that by choosing time with someone else over time with him, something is grievously wrong?

A few months ago, right when I was in the middle of the worst of it, I called one of my best friends crying after yet another fight, and what she said to me was something I’ve never forgotten.

“Jordan,” she said, “You can’t expect anyone to be everything to you.” Her husband, she said, had difficulty being there for her emotionally when he came home from work and she wanted to talk about how she’d had a hard day, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t there for her in countless other ways; that he didn’t love her and that they shouldn’t be married. What she’d come to realize that it meant was that if she needed to talk to someone in this specific situation, she should probably…well, call someone else.

And that is it. That’s exactly it. When you are married, when you have kids, it’s so easy to make your entire existence – every iota of your happiness – about what happens between the walls of your home. Your family life is so consuming that you start expecting it to be everything.

I was expecting Kendrick to be everything. To give me what I needed, to get out of my way when I wanted him to, and to know the difference ahead of time. And what I was forgetting is that his job is not to fill all the holes in my life to bursting, but to simply be the man I married, and the man that I love.

It’s not a matter of changing your partner, wresting and bending him into some version of what you think is the perfect companion…it’s about letting him be the human being you chose to build a life with. And then remembering how many other wonderful things there are in your life, and giving yourself the space to seek them out when you need them. It’s a decision that you can make, and one that you can make at any time – to let things be, and take it a little easy on each other. And it is so freeing.

So what I’m trying to do – and what I think has made the difference – is stop trying to change my husband. And beyond that, to stop categorizing every facet of him as something I like or something I don’t, something I’m okay with or something I’m insistent on changing. Because when you just zoom out, when you remember that whatever little thing that’s frustrating you is just a speck, just a tiny pixel in a much larger image, it can help you see that the picture itself – it, life, you, the both of you – is good.

Midcentury style at the Hotel Lautner, in Desert Hot Springs. 

Two-ingredient (!) Nutella brownies. Insanely easy; insanely good.