There is a specific quality to the hallway of a high school when you are the person everyone has decided is the problem.
It is not loud.
It is not even always mean, not in the obvious way.
It is more that the hallway has a temperature, and the temperature is wrong for you specifically, and you feel it the moment you enter and you feel it until you leave, and in the hours in between you spend a significant amount of energy managing the distance between your face and what you actually feel.
I became very good at managing that distance.
My name is Claire Weston.
I am thirty-eight years old.
I own a fitness studio called Weston Wellness in Portland, Oregon, which has two hundred and forty members and which I started six years ago with the specific knowledge of what it feels like to hate the body you live in and want nothing more than to find your way back to it.
But I need to tell you about before all that.
I need to tell you about the hallway.
Millbrook High School was not a bad school in the objective sense.
The teachers were mostly committed.
The facilities were adequate.
The graduation rate was respectable.
What Millbrook High School was, in the specific subjective sense of being Claire Weston inside it from 2000 to 2004, was a place that had decided what I was and was not particularly interested in revising the decision.
What I was: the overweight redhead with braces and glasses.
What I was not: anyone’s first choice for anything.
The glasses were necessary for seeing.
The braces were necessary for the overbite my dentist had identified at thirteen.
The weight was more complicated.
Weight is always more complicated.
My mother was a stress eater.
I had learned this from her the way children learn things from parents, without being taught, by absorption.
When my parents’ marriage began to fall apart in the year I started eighth grade, I started eating the way my mother ate, and the eating was the specific eating of someone who is trying to fill a space that food cannot fill but that food at least occupies temporarily.
I turned eighteen on a Tuesday. No cake. No card. Not even a half-hearted “happy birthday.” Just my father sitting at the kitchen table, his wife stirring sugar into her mug, and my stepbrother leaning back in his chair with that look people get when they already know how the story ends.
I Saw a Homeless Man Wearing My Missing Son’s Jacket – I Followed Him to an Abandoned House, and What I Found Inside Made Me Nearly Collapse
He Took His Father’s Bedroom After Surgery. Then Dad Took Back the House
Discover why so many people are incorporating cloves into their routine.
3 Baking Soda Recipes to Burn Belly Fat
