By the time I started high school, I was significantly heavier than most of my classmates.
By the time I started high school, the decision had been made.
The decision was: Claire is the one we can do this to.
Not a formal decision.
Not a meeting.
The specific informal consensus of a social group that identifies a target and processes that identification into behavior so gradually that it becomes ambient.
I was the target.
I had been the target since middle school, but high school amplified it in the way that high school amplifies everything.
The jokes in the hallway.
The specific thing that happened when I walked into the cafeteria, the scanning of the room, the calculation of which table was the least hostile, the walking toward it with the specific gait of someone trying to look casual while every nerve ending is alert.
The gym class.
The gym class was its own category.
I will not spend much time on the gym class.
I will only say that forced participation in physical activity in front of people who have decided you are a target is not what the curriculum intended but it was what it produced.
There was one person.
There is always one person, in these stories, and it is tempting to be cynical about this person, to say that one person is not enough, that one person cannot change the weight of an entire institution.
And you would be right about that.
One person cannot change the weight of an institution.
But one person can change what the weight feels like.
Her name was Alison Park.
She was small and Korean and had the specific quality of someone who had decided, early, that other people’s social configurations were not binding on her behavior.
She sat next to me on the first day of freshman biology.
Not because she had to.
The teacher assigned seats alphabetically, and Weston and Park were separated by several letters, but the person who should have been next to me had not shown up on the first day and Alison had slid into the empty seat and said: the lab would be better with a lab partner.
She said this as if it were a practical decision rather than a kindness.
Which was exactly how to make it land.
She became my friend.
My only friend, which sounds sad and is also true, and which I have made peace with because the truth of it is that one Alison Park was worth more than several dozen of the alternative.
She sat with me in the cafeteria.
She walked with me in the hallway.
She came to my house on weekends.
When someone made a comment at my expense in her presence, she looked at them with the specific look of someone who finds them less interesting than they believe themselves to be.
She did not perform her defense of me.
She just was not available for the routine they had with me.
Which made it routine that required her absence to function.
She graduated with me.
She went to the same university I did.
She is now a pediatric surgeon in Portland, which surprises no one who knew her then or knows her now.
At university, the freshman hallway was not the Millbrook High School hallway.
The temperature was different.
Nobody there had decided what I was.
I could be anything.
I chose to be different.
Not because I wanted revenge.
Not because I wanted anyone’s approval.
Because I had spent four years being told something about myself that I was starting to believe, and I did not want to believe it anymore, and the way to stop believing it was to change the story.
The changing was slow.
It was the changing of someone who has spent years in a relationship with food as comfort and who has to learn a different relationship, which is not simple and is not linear and is not the before and after story that gets turned into a magazine feature.
I found a nutritionist who did not make me feel like a problem.
I found a personal trainer who did not use shame as a motivator.
I learned to move in a way that felt good rather than punishing.
I learned to eat in a way that was sustainable rather than extreme.
I got contacts.
The braces came off the summer after freshman year.
None of these individual things was the change.
The change was the specific accumulation of them, the slow building of a relationship with myself that was kinder than the one the hallway had been offering.
By my senior year of university, I was someone I recognized.
Not thin in the aspirational way.
Strong.
Clear.
Myself.
I got a degree in kinesiology.
I got a certification in personal training.
I worked for seven years in various capacities in the fitness industry, the specific unglamorous work of someone who is learning what actually works for actual people.
I saw a lot of what didn’t work.
I saw the shame-based approaches.
The before and after culture.
The way the industry sometimes used people’s insecurities as a product.
I decided I wanted to do something different.
I opened Weston Wellness six years ago.
The philosophy was specific.
Not thin.
Not aspirational.
Strong.
Capable.
