Today is the day I find out what I’m made of. Today is the day that I see for myself just how pretty I can be.

I shower my body with cold drops of water, a pentecostal fire renewing me with every freezing drop of liquid. My heart beats with the intensity of a snare drum as the facet creaks off. The ritual is about to begin, and the priest is waiting to pass judgement upon me.

The scale of my life shifts with the weight of the scale in the bathroom. I breathe in, the oxygen escaping the room and into my lungs.  This was the moment, my moment, the arbiter of my destiny. The scale begins to whir like the gears of a complex machine roaring to life, and I brace myself for the judgement I am about to receive.

126.5 the scale flashes back at me. The number cuts deep, deeper than any knife ever could. This kind of wound is the wound of the heart, one that cannot be seen, only felt.  I look into the mirror and a menacing reflection of myself laughs in triumph at my despair.  Margie, I call her, a name just as despicable and pathetic as my own.

“Ha, that proves it, I hear her say. You are worthless after all. You think you’re beautiful, sweetie? You’re not. You want to feel beautiful, sweetie? You got to be beautiful.’

I get ready for the day, putting my business skirt and shoes on. My coat hangs past my arms as if I were a kid trying to wear his dad’s jacket. “A small? I hear Margie say in a mock tone of voice. “Surely, you can do better than that, fat ass.”  I didn’t say anything, but the worst part is knowing deep down that Margie was right.

As I walk to work ,every glass window, bathroom mirror, and cafe is a reflection, a reflection of the fat, ugly monster on the inside.

The world I see is not one of qualities and colors, but of numbers.  I deal with a lot of numbers in a day.  Number of hours on the job, number of clients helped on business calls. Numbers are everywhere, numbers are life,  but the most important numbers are in food, in calories. You see,  Calories are more than a number. They are an identifier. Just as everyone has different eye color, facial features, and birthmarks, everyone has a different number of calories. If I didn’t know anything else in my life, I knew this: the number 500.

500, 500 card game, 500 Days of Summer, 500 Miles, the Proclaimers.  Da, da, da, da, da, da, the music of my life always and everywhere followed the rhythm of 500. This was who I was, not Margie, not a girl. 500. If someone came up to meet me, I would respond: “Hello, 500 is my name, nice to meet you.” But sometimes I admittedly was not 500, sometimes I got tired of carrying this name around with me and was 2,000, maybe 3,000. I could hide it for awhile, stuffing the Twinkie’s rappers underneath my bed, but it wasn’t long until Margie found out that I had my hands in the cookie jar, and she was not happy.

“3,000! 3,000!  You think you’re 3000! You’re not! You’re 500 and you know it!” Margie points a long bony finger to the bathroom door, as if putting a disobedient dog in its kennel, a menacing smile appears on her face.“ You know what you have to do.” I shake my head in protest, but Margie is resolute, as firm as a statue. She puts a long bony arm around my neck, as if she were a serpent squeezing its prey. “

You want to be beautiful, don’t you? Well, you better start acting like it sweetie. Now get in there and do your business!”

I saunder to the porcelain throne, obeying the orders of my queen. The queen and the throne in history were one in the same. They are the same.

The human body is meant to eliminate waste, it is proper, it is natural.  To go against this is to go against the laws of nature. Expulsion, then, is not a burden but a necessity, expulsion of food in particular is a necessity. Let me be clear: what I was doing was what every single religion ever  taught has ever done: seeking repentance. Ridding myself of all those awful, awful calories was a form of confession. I was confessing,  confessing my sins to Margie that I was no longer 500, and that by going through the proper rituals of initiation on the pew, phew. I, too, could be born again, a 500.

I wonder now as I did then just how many women were indoctrinated into the cult of 500, seeking repentance everyday by ridding themselves of all that envious glucose and sugar and fat, only to find that like a drug dealer, you were always waiting for that wonderful dose of self-punishment, that burst of adrenaline that reminds you just how wonderful it can feel to truly hate yourself.

Make no mistake, I was a drug dealer, but the drugs I dealt were not cocaine, nicotine, or heroin. No, the drugs I dealt were the ones I gave myself. Hatred and imperfection were like a drug, giving me an inescapable high everytime I could purge myself of all the awful crap inside of me just to do it all over again. It was more exhilarating than a roller coaster,  more pleasurable  than sex.

I don’t think most people go through life intending to harm themselves, to make themselves purposely think that they are the most ugly piece of crap in the world, but I guess it just kind of happens. Somewhere along the line someone makes a comment about how fat we are, how we have zits on our nose, or something like that, and apart of us just dies on the inside. It doesn’t help, of course, that women are constantly bombarded with images of starving models, rail thin bodies, and utterly ridiculous crap like: “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Clearly, whoever wrote that has never tried cheesecake because cheesecake is just fucking amazing.

My initiation rituals with Margie continued on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Every week the scale got lower and lower, but my confidence in myself did not get any higher. It didn’t matter if the scale read 122: I wanted to push the envelope. “122? Screw that, why not go to 115, 110, 90 lbs?” It was like a game of limbo with myself where everyday I would repeat the same sing-song mantra “how low can you go,” “how low can you go?” Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t testing at what point I would just disappear into thin air, like some kind of screwed up David Copperfield trick  because that was exactly what I was doing.

As the weeks went on, dressing in my small clothes was like a baby wearing a business suit: far too baggy. So I began to shop for extra small, kid’s– sometimes I wonder if some of the shoppers didn’t stop to look at me, but I quite frankly didn’t care. I was agent 500, and I was on a mission to stay that way.