Tag Archives: middle school dance

The Most Destructive Relationship You'll Never Ditch

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Late in the winter, I unknowingly offended the gluten free community.

To be fair, it was my 140-character compliment, in which I gushed over print design and food photography for a digital magazine serving the gluten-free community that sent me into a war zone.

I was backed, virtually, into a corner for more than thirty minutes while some stranger made me forget how to swallow my fear.

“Cute,” I’d said.

It was one word, intended to describe the magazine’s bright and fun color scheme. But this guy didn’t think so.

“There is nothing cute,” he said, “about being gluten-free.”

And then, as if taking a virtual breath, he unleashed so much anger and frustration on me that I literally sat on my living room couch reading the words out loud, desperate to make him understand that I had merely been awestruck by the way the colors danced across my computer screen.

I had merely been gawking at the way somebody turned food into something magical.

My relationship with food has been, for most of my life, a relationship. Which sounds pretty dumb, if you think too hard on it, but I don’t think any of us remember a time before food was good or bad, revered or ignored. I don’t think any of us were ever allowed more than a few years of “eat whatever you’d like, whatever makes you feel good inside.”

Maybe the cavemen were. Maybe. But choosing to eat something has always been a bit like finding the middle school dance partner in the swell of hormonal and anxious bodies grinding in the cafeteria: nerve-wracking and thrilling.

Choosing to eat what you want should feel like asking that cute boy from your art class to jam out to Blink-182 with you Friday night in the cafeteria. As in stellar. Just stellar.

It shouldn’t be hindered by whether you’re able to walk in heels or the strobe lights block your vision of him or the popular couple shimmies past and you suddenly feel that sense of defeat all over again. But it is. Many times, it is.

I’m 22. That’s young, I know. But in five years, I’ve driven all over the food relationship map.

I’m there now. It’s kind of like standing at the dance after the last song, the lights coming up and the boy from art class sliding by, glancing over as if you have forgotten him, as if he cannot come over and ask you to fist pump, no no no. It had to be your doing.

That’s how it feels, sometimes. Like you took those four hours of techno music and strobe lights for granted and now you are starting at square one again.

I know how gluten-free guy feels. I am there. Trying to figure out what, if anything, doesn’t keep me awake until two a.m. trying to figure out why I entered an abusive relationship with food in college, one that’s screwed me over.

It’s anything but cute. The photos might look glamorous, the plates shining white, the dairy-free, gluten-free plated entrees all properly aligned and unified on the digital page.

But it’s still hard. Still something I haven’t mastered. Still a relationship that keeps me up in the middle of the night, mad for the mistakes I made in the past.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.

Middle school boys with too many girls to dance with inside dark cafeterias were not meant to feel like Less Than Enough.

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With a hair flip and a sideways smile, he captures all the girls in the seventh grade.

His younger brother rattles off the list of middle-schoolers swooning over the college boy in a twelve-year-old’s body. Hollister hoodie sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Ray-Ban sunglasses shield his eyes inside the living room.

“Five out of six girls respond to the look,” the younger one says. He darts his head dramatically to the side, chin to shoulder, his sixty-pound four-feet-tall body not having quite the same effect.

He says he won’t date any of them. The southern mothers wouldn’t want that. Would rather their daughters wait a few years to find themselves standing in the foyer, some sweet talker’s hand around their waists as the father looks onward from the living room couch.

Weeks later, in the comfort of my own living room, four states away, I learn that he has forgotten the art of loving himself. The boy with too many girls to ask to dance. The boy with the football arm and hot-sauce-lined lips. The middle of the Oreo, the creamy gooey goodness we are first to reach for, has forgotten his place between the Tall and Lanky and the Small and Slim.

He has turned husky into a curse. Swapped strong for weak. Twisted thick into a something he does not want to be.

Instead, he’s taken to skipping out on sandwiches. Pining for afternoon walks around the entire metropolitan area. Fifteen miles of feet padding across foreign sidewalks. Fifteen miles to shed the ounces of him that glue together the Small and Slim boy to the Tall and Lanky.

I do not have an answer for this boy, hovering between sucking in his insides and scarfing down every last morsel of meat on the baby back ribs.

I only know that middle school boys with too many girls to dance with inside dark cafeterias were not meant to feel like Less Than Enough. They were not meant to take solitary laps around the neighborhood until all the damage of yesterday and the day before fall off them in beads of sweat around their necklines.

They were meant to play basketball beneath hanging nets. To finger piano keys in auditoriums. To scribble football predictions on portable white boards.

They were meant to be nothing but themselves, to love with strong hearts, to glue together the wild and crazy older and younger ones.

They were meant for so much more than wishing themselves away.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.