When I was young, I was in shape. My wiry leanness came easy back then. Some combination of genetics and lifestyle meant that I could always eat what I wanted and my weight would never budge. In fact, my thinness was a central part of my identity. I was Ian Williams and I was thin.
I’ve always hated the gym. I need to compete in my exercise. The friendly needling of trash talk and shared sweat is what keeps me going hour after hour. Basketball was my drug. Never great but just good enough to hang in there, I’d practice on my own for hours when I wasn’t playing friends, breaking my rule on solitary exercise to perfect my shot. I put in practice in my driveway in the hopes that it would let me triumphantly thump my chest at whoever I ended up playing later.
I discovered punk rock and all the high school striations that come with being some hybrid of punker, nerd, jock and loser. Basketball and I fell out, but I picked up skateboarding. I was terrible at skating, but my friends and I would pile into my car with our skateboards and not come home for 12 hours. I’d come back, hungry and stinking, full of cigarette smoke and gas station hot dogs, burning more calories than I took in by several magnitudes every day I could get out, school be damned.
One day, it all stopped. I moved, then moved back, then moved again. I got married, went to college, dropped out, and started working in bookstores. My friends who skated weren’t around and I felt silly hitting the old spots at age 22, only to see a bunch of 16-year-olds there. Nobody played basketball anymore; I started to fall out of love with basketball, myself, watching the NCAA eat up something I loved and never being able to handle the interminably long NBA season.
I stayed skinny. Then I got extremely sick. My Crohn’s disease made me really skinny, godawfully skinny, skin and bones skinny, 6 feet tall and 105 pounds skinny. But I was thin, even as I was dying. My identity as a thin man was preserved. I still remember, plain as day after over a decade, the look of horror on my dad’s face when he expressed concern over my illness and I told him that at least I looked good, lifting up my shirt just enough to show the queasy combo of sunken gut and tight muscles from the peculiar exertions Crohn’s disease demands of you.
With a lot of time and medication, I got better. Not perfectly healthy, but better. After years on disability, I got a nice, sedentary desk job. My wife and I decided to have a child, so I quit smoking. The combination of remission, desk job, and smoking cessation caused my weight to rocket upwards. My body was suddenly weird, every bit as foreign to me as when my health was at its nadir. I hover near 200 pounds now, my face a bit jowly and my body doughy and lumpy, with little manboobs, a deflated butt, and a round, hairy belly which obscures all but the very tips of my toes when I look down.
