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This isn’t to say that one of us had it better than the other. Truthfully, I like that my family eats together and then scuttles away to the far corners of the house for peaceful, independent reflection. The idea of a family that is all up in one another’s business for days at a time is incredibly cinematic and romantic. It just wasn’t what I was used to and appeared to take more energy than I like to spend on anything that isn’t going to make me more attractive or wealthier.
Back at dinner, Jazmine and I were cracking up as the waiter brought us a sampling of charred octopus (a sea creature I respected too much/was too broke to ever attempt to digest), foie gras, and a beet salad. Zero of these ingredients had ever been on one of my grocery lists, but when in Brooklyn, I suppose . . .
“Honestly, we should make some sort of guide for white guys dating black girls for the first time.” Jazmine’s epiphany hit hard in the quiet of the dining room.
“Oh my god, this should be a YouTube video!”
And there it was. The idea was simple: instead of trying to glean something from Jazmine’s experience, we’d proactively craft some basic rules for my boyfriend and his family. After all, it wasn’t my first time spending time with white people, I just actually needed these white people to like me and make me comfortable lest I have to leave their home under the cover of night and find the closest Holiday Inn Express with an in-room microwave in which to have a turkey TV dinner alone.
“So what are you worried about?” Jazmine asked, half rhetorically. It’s not like she didn’t already know the myriad cultural differences that could be assumed. Still, some things bother some people more than they bother other people.
“The bonnet situation.* If I use the bathroom at night, I don’t want them to say anything.”
This made Jazmine laugh. It’s not like we could control his family’s actual reactions to me, but also what a specific fear.
“It’s just that I haven’t really even worn it around Darn,” I pointed out.
“Wait, but what about your hair? You just let it tangle? ’Cause I know he doesn’t have silk pillowcases.”
True.
She continued, “Well, the video should definitely show you in your bonnet, but you know white people sleep in full Berenstain Bear hats and gowns,* right?”
Around this time in our laughter, dinner arrived. Scallops, skate (a fish, not a rollerblade), brick-oven chicken, and aged rib eye on the biggest and whitest plates I’d ever seen required the server to drag another small table over to accommodate the feast. We reached over each other to try all of the savory dishes.
“I guess I just don’t want them to talk to me about Twelve Years a Slave. Actually, it’s probably best if we don’t talk about slavery at all. Do you think they’ll talk about slavery?” I asked.
“I don’t think they’re going to talk about slavery. They might talk about Shonda Rhimes.”
“Oh my god, what are they gonna say about Shonda?” I panicked.
“They like Shonda, don’t worry.”
I was definitely tipsy by this point. “Okay okay okay, but is it worse if they are, like, self-congratulatory about our relationship? Like, ‘We’re good parents because our son is dating a black girl!’”
“Wait, what does he look like?”
I showed her a picture of us on my phone. Friends always want to see who you’re dating. If I have any (good) dating advice, it’s get a presentable picture together ASAP, or suffer scrolling through his (probably terrible) Instagram account for one where he looks clean, competent, and confident.
“Yeah,” she began, illuminated by the blue light from my phone mixed with the dim candlelight, “his family should thank you for giving him a chance.” Shade.
Darn once told me that his mom saw a picture of us together and told him, “I’m so proud of you, you’re dating a woman.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, fearing that perhaps he would be my second boyfriend to reveal he was gay after months of investment.
“Oh, just that I kinda always dated immature girls and you’re, like, an actual adult woman,” he said, which was funny because I was living with three roommates from Craigslist on a floor-bound mattress. Darn was also a YouTuber, but he found success at seventeen and lived alone, in a one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg at the height of its popularity (Girls was still on HBO, for context). I thought he was living the dream. He’d already transcended YouTube and was hosting a TV show on cable. A car was dispatched to take him to work every morning, where he’d sit in a makeup chair beside Alexa Chung. I didn’t just love him, I envied him. Still, I believed that I was going to find that kind of success one day and we could succeed together.
Jazmine and I discussed the loathsome task of teaching Darn’s family slang, should it come up.
“No, that’s not what ‘nappy’ means. No, that’s not what ‘ratchet’ means. Don’t say ‘ratchet,’ please.” The video script wrote itself.
The owner approached the table while we were laughing and seemed relaxed. Food writers have a reputation for being uptight and hard to please, and here we were with nearly cleaned plates, polishing off our drinks and smiling all the same.
* * *
* * *
The week before Thanksgiving, Darn dumped me. Harshly. I had already paid for the flight to Nebraska and it was nonrefundable. One thing that’s worse than being alienated by your boyfriend’s family and seeking refuge at a Holiday Inn Express in Omaha, Nebraska, where you’ll enjoy a turkey microwave dinner by your lonesome is spending Thanksgiving alone in your apartment in Brooklyn, eating a turkey TV dinner knowing that your ex-boyfriend gets to be with his family and you get to be with your too-small TV and the cast of Sesame Street on the Macy’s Parade broadcast.
I was furious. In the heat of it, I broke into his apartment with a credit card (I knew he wouldn’t be back for a few days—we’d booked our plane tickets together) and retrieved all of my belongings before stealing all of his light bulbs. He’d return from the airport at night with none of the lights in his apartment working. Was it juvenile? Yes. Was it badass? Yes.
The following weekend I met up with Tim, a mutual friend of Darn’s, to shoot a video titled “Meet Your First Black Girlfriend.” We shot all over Williamsburg, and it went live a couple days later. After writing a short description, I linked to the video on my blog and went to the bathroom.
When I returned to my room, the video already had over a thousand reposts. This was virality. Within hours it had over ten thousand reposts. I called my mom.
“Mom, this is the big one.”
“What, Kilah?”
“GO TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL!”
After a totally normal amount of time to wait for a page to load, I listened to my mom breathe as she watched my video. When it ended, she laughed.
“You’re so goofy.”
And that was that. My first real taste of “success.”
When I walked into work the next morning at the social media agency, everyone regarded me a little differently. Sure, I wasn’t the most famous person on earth, but there was something about multiple news and pop culture outlets organically picking up on the success of my video that elevated me in an office where our only real job was to beg news outlets to cover whatever our clients were doing. Suddenly the entry-level girl whose main job was deleting comments on the Princess Diana Facebook page that referred to her (accidentally or otherwise) as the Princess of Whales was a rising star in her own right. No one asked me to take the notes for the meeting that day.
By the next weekend, Tim and I were already hard at work on our next project. A scathing video called “Christmas Cookies for Singles” in which I’d improvised a lament over my loneliness while cracking eggs into a bowl of powdered ingredients. En route to Tim’s apartment, a person brushed past me to cross the street. I looked up to see Darn, looking back angrily. We didn�
�t exchange words, but his face said it all. Not only was he, too, sad about the state of things, but he’d seen the video along with millions of other people.
That was all the resolution for the relationship that I needed. I’d had plenty of good ideas for YouTube videos, and Darn would convince me that the ideas weren’t good, or that I shouldn’t spend my time doing things without him. It had been six years since he found viral success on YouTube, and while I was thinking he was so great and had outgrown the platform, the truth was he had peaked. In a major way. As a teenager. He’d been projecting his own fear of failure onto my creative outlet, and I bought in. And why wouldn’t I? He was the one with everything I thought I wanted. He must know better than me what I should do, right?
Wrong. So wrong. Oh my god, so wrong.
Another couple of days of editing and “Christmas Cookies for Singles” was published and it, too, went viral. Back-to-back viral videos. Maybe I had just gotten lucky, or maybe it was within me all along. All I knew was that having a boyfriend was good, but having a certifiable talent felt better. I spent the next year making videos for every major outlet—MTV, Oxygen, the Huffington Post, Essence, Cosmo—and collabs with John Green and other YouTubers with large followings. But I also spent that year feeling angry. Why hadn’t Darn seen my potential? It was there the whole time, but he made me think it was silly or simply not enough. Now I’m removed enough to realize that I had to go through dating him to get to where I am today (yes, it’s not just something Oprah would say, it’s actually true). My relationship with Darn made me realize that my self-worth can never depend on how much someone else believes in me. There’s nothing worse than being introduced by your significant other as a social media manager, or some other job title that completely misses the point of who you are and what you’re capable of. Sure, I want to be in love, but not at the cost of what I’ve built. No fucking way.
Weight
I’m twenty-nine years old. It’s the first time in my life I look in the mirror and I like my body. The curves are in the “right” place; I look like a woman and not a teenager. I can afford the clothing that looks good on me. I don’t burden myself with buying smaller sizes now, in hopes of losing weight to look better in them. I just want to have a closet full of things that look good on me regardless of the size. I have no idea how much I weigh (due to careful avoidance of scales), and I no longer believe it has much of a bearing on my life prospects. I’ve got a huge scar on my stomach, cellulite on my thighs, and though some days are worse than others, I’m on the other side of it.
* * *
* * *
At twenty-six-and-a-half, I get the news that I have two giant tumors on my liver. I’ve been feeling sick anyway and can’t exercise without being in a ton of pain. This diagnosis and the rapidity with which my health is failing means that I will spend the next few months on the couch. My fear and anxiety about becoming irrelevant during these inactive months causes me to binge eat ice-cream sandwiches every night. I take the trash out every morning to try to trick myself into thinking it’s less of a problem than it is. My only life regret (and I spend a lot of time of thinking about it these days, given that my survival isn’t guaranteed) is being so hard on my body. If there was cake at a birthday party, I made a big show of wanting it but not being able to bear what it would do to my stomach or arms or thighs. I should have just eaten the damn cake. I might be dead in a week, and I spent nearly every day of my life hating my body and denying myself good things. What a waste. In rebellion I gain twenty pounds of fuck it weight as the likelihood of dying seems more imminent than ever.
* * *
* * *
At twenty-five, I’m in the gym every single day. I have a short list of people who I think would be pissed off by my thinner frame—who would be jealous. They don’t want me to succeed and they think they’re better than me because they’re currently thinner than me. I’ve found the confidence in my video creation and comedy, but I still want to apologize at every audition about my appearance and somehow let them know that if they give me the role, I will stop eating to look good enough on-screen. Anytime I don’t book an audition, I assume that is why. Maybe that’s what weight always was to me: a preoccupation to push down my other fears of inadequacy. After all, skinny people run art and entertainment. What a privilege, to have your emotions and struggles deemed worth sharing because your thighs are no wider than your knees.
* * *
* * *
I’m seventeen the first time I make myself throw up. The last time will be somewhere closer to twenty, but I’m not thinking about living that long anyway. I lose thirty pounds in a semester, and I stop going to classes. I cry every single day. I sleep thirteen hours a day minimum. I’m clinically depressed and going to therapy and taking anxiety medicine. Nothing helps. The disorder follows a major falling-out with my group of friends from high school just before starting my sophomore year of college. I feel like I have no home base. A campus that isn’t bad, but is seemingly inconsequential in the scheme of the universe, fills me with dread: a constant reminder that nothing matters, the least of which, me and my dreams. I pass out in the middle of a presentation. I play it off simply as exhaustion. My eyesight completely fails while I wait in line to pick up birth control at Walmart, and I just sit on the ground waiting for it to return. I’m sick, and what’s worse than feeling guilty that I got myself into this by ever shoving my fingers down my throat that first addictive time is being too ashamed to tell anyone what’s happening to me. Living with a roommate who weighs ninety-two pounds soaking wet makes it easy for weight loss to go unnoticed. I’ve never felt more trapped and hopeless in my life.
* * *
* * *
My mother has made the decision that Lanie and I will switch to a public school for the rest of high school. Things were never great at Covington Latin. We had to do work-study to afford going there, but I was always assigned sweeping and dusting and as a consequence I had a lot of allergy problems that year. Plus the rich Catholics kept accusing me of stealing (I was the only black person) and my mom got tired of coming to the school explaining that we didn’t even have a CD player so why would I be stealing CDs?
I built up the idea of going to a “real” high school and the OC-esque memories I was sure to make once I started there. But once again it isn’t like that. Everyone knows I am younger, and I don’t jump into extracurriculars right away. I do, however, start eating salads at lunch and coming home to do Slimatics, an ’80s aerobic video workout, every night. In six months’ time I lose forty pounds in a “healthy” way. Students, teachers, and my mom are all asking me how I’ve done it. I am finally known as something. Oh, Akilah? Yeah, she’s the skinny girl. She didn’t used to be, but now she’s reached some unattainable goal. It’s like a drug. Instead of only being known as the smart black girl, I am also thin for once.
It’s a testament to how small my worldview was back then that I wanted this so badly. I had no idea that everyone was really just thinking about themselves, and that it’s much better to be known as the funny or smart girl. That there’s nothing inherently remarkable about my body being a certain size. But I was a kid, and nothing else intriguing was happening in my high school.
* * *
* * *
It’s fifth grade, and I get a note sent home about my weight. Apparently the school nurse has classified me as overweight at 126 pounds at my age. My mom leaves it open on the counter, surely without thinking I will see it. I cry to myself that night after I eat an entire box of cereal. In a year where my grandmother passed away and my teacher is a piece of shit, being classified as different from the other kids feels like a personal failure. Here’s another thing to worry about. Have the other kids noticed? Is that why none of the boys like me yet? Is that why I’m not “popular”? Of course not, but it’s then that I decide to let the pursuit of being thin become half of my personality.
Most of my phone
calls to friends at that age are about how skinny and pretty Britney Spears is. If only I looked like her (a girl on the other side of puberty with a team of people making sure she looks flawless daily), how much better life would be. And what’s hard to admit is that I wasn’t totally wrong. Yes, we live in a world where Britney Spears benefits from how attractive the world finds her. Every woman does. But to be so young as to not see that that was wrong and to be overcome was unfortunate.
Anxious Energy
THINGS THAT GIVE ME ANXIETY ON A REGULAR BASIS
People owing me money and not paying me the money
Missing good sales/deals because I’m waiting on said money
Instagram. All of it.
How my toenails look without polish
Assuming everyone can see all of my pores
Clutter
Having to leave my house when I am broke
Working out but not seeing results
Random pains that are probably nothing, but are probably something, right?
All the apps I don’t use
Low phone battery
Forgetting to put things in my calendar
Shoe dirt
Backpack dirt
Constant fear that thick eyebrows will go out of vogue
Flies
Tagged photos