Do you remember our first time? That time we were both 19 and drunk off Skyy vodka, staring at each other through the blue glass and chasing each shot with a handful of skittles.

I had no furniture, really. It was my first apartment and the only fixtures in the living room were my boyfriend’s futon and his enormous flat screen. There was a lamp, too — bulbous and ugly, sitting on the floor next to us and sending warped shadows over the far wall. We made hand puppets and laughed ourselves dizzy.

My then boyfriend was there as well. He sat playing video games in the background of our antics, then moved in to the bedroom without either of our noticing.

Our drinking together became a semi-regular thing when we were newly independent, yet still restricted by the semi-isolation of our youth. It was just us, and we would always roll around on my living room floor in just shorts and a bra, listening to music and touching. Touching hair, face, and eyelashes. Breathing in each other’s exhales and playing with the way goosebumps rose on lightly brushed flesh. It never crossed over to sexual, but rather quivered like a wire pulled taught between what was straight and what wasn’t.

I took care of you that night. Neither of us knew our limits and ended up tag-team puking in the dark bathroom until early morning. I remember holding back your hair and fetching you water bottles, which you would subsequently lose in the dark of the tub. Despite my own sickness I catered to you, holding your hair and rubbing your back. I willed myself sober as I stared at the swirling ceiling, if only so that I could keep bringing you water and make sure you didn’t actually pass out. Once the birds started chirping outside and the night was mostly over you finally quieted, which is when I pulled you over to rest your neck and head in my lap.

Years earlier you had fallen asleep on me in a similar way. We were at Natalie’s house and a boy two years ahead of us had died in a gruesome car accident. You were devastated, the tragedy hitting too close to home. I was nestled into the corner of their living room couch and you had your head on my lap, breathing softly onto the tops of my knees as I stroked your hair for hours.

I look back at all of this, and everything in between, and I wonder…how could you not have known?

Its complicated to be in love with someone and want to be them at the same time. I think this phenomenon is something that many insecure lgbtq folks feel and yet no one seems to talk about. It is the exact reason it took me so long to get over you — not only was I so woefully inadequate in comparison to your person, but I was also head over heels in love with a straight girl. The lines between those two things were not lines at all but rather undulating tendrils of mist, twisting and gathering behind my eyes until everything I saw and did was tinted with dark.

In most ways you were exactly what I wanted to be. Thin, athletic, naturally lovely and curvy in only the proper places. You put no effort into your beauty and yet it screamed to be noticed. As captain of the field hockey team, indie-music fan and straight A student, you were every guy’s crush and the bane of every girl’s existence. In comparison, I was the binge eating shy girl who desperately wanted to be your number one. Even more-so I wanted to be your equal — something so painfully out of my reach that it helped fuel my downward spiral into what has almost killed me, time and time again.

You were never bad to me, but the difference between us was always clear cut; I was your ugly counterpart. The supporting role in the block buster that was your life. The fat friend.

None of this is to say I hold any of what happened against you. We were both kids and yet you were living that life of a new “adult,” college aged and thriving within the body you were given. You worked hard, at both school and physical wellness. I respected that. I loved that. But I hated it, too.

I haven’t spoken to you in years and if I’m honest, I haven’t thought about you in almost as long…at least not in any depth. The only reason I am now is because my therapist brought you up as today’s subject for the EMDR therapy we are doing, and suddenly I’m that age again. Fifteen, staring at your back as you change clothes in front of me. That onslaught of both jealousy and desperate admiration feels like being cleaved through by an ice pick. It cracks my sternum and shatters inward to where my heart is supposed to be, but instead all that’s there is the throbbing ball of vapor that tinted everything so dark all those years ago. The warring urges of wanting to run my hand up and along the smooth curve of your waist, not just to satiate lust but to compare it’s heft to my own, spark against the knowledge that I never actually will.

It is so confusing. Even now, a full decade later.

How could you not see? After everything I did to support you, to care for you, to pick you up out of your literal vomit and carry you to the couch? How could you not realize, as I willed myself sober those nights so I could watch over you while you slept off the alcohol, that the depth of affection rolling off me was more than just platonic?

I didn’t expect anything from you. I don’t resent your lack of romantic affection toward me, but rather the complete disregard you had for me as a person. Especially when, in truly thinking about all that our relationship was from the moment of meeting to the last time we spoke, it is so very obvious that you did know.

You knew and you used it to your advantage. I was your back up plan, your plan B for whenever a boy slighted you, or for when you wanted to feel better about yourself.

I was the emotional support.

I was the stool you sat upon while you puked booze into a bathtub.

I haven’t thought about any of this in such a long time. Its reactions like these that are the reason I dread going to these therapy appointments, but are also the reason I know it is necessary. The emotions feel like sludge being dredged from a swamp floor, all mud and viscera.

As with most of what I write here, I have no tidy ending. My whole objective for writing is to help myself work through these things as well as, hopefully, help show others that they aren’t alone in their own struggles.

Navigating an LGBTQ adolescence is, usually, a pretty miserable and confusing experience. Especially when combined with the normal teen angst and other mental or physical illnesses with which so many individuals struggle.

You are not bad for loving your best friend. You are not evil for being jealous of him or her, or for feeling that sense of anger and hurt that is triggered when you feel romantically for someone who can not return those feelings. Experiencing these emotions don’t mean you hate the person or that you resent them.

They simply mean you are human. Like everyone else.

Like what you read? Here’s more:

• To All The Boys I’ve F*cked Before
• A Contemplation of Thick Thighs

For a portion of 2012, I was semi-dating a man named Joe.

It was more of a revenge thing than anything else. I wanted to like him, but in reality I was still caught up in the remnants of an abusive relationship and my “dating” this guy was just a way for me to stick it to the original boyfriend. It was my way of saying, “You were wrong. Looks like other men want me, after all.”

At that point in time I was smack in the middle of a healthy weight range, and my body was solid in a way that rooted me to the earth like an oak tree. Since early childhood, I’ve always had inexplicably muscled legs. Like bricks under my skin, the muscles of my thighs would form impressive ridges as I walked, something I was both proud of and thoroughly disgusted by. Proud, because men seemed to like them. Disgusted, because it was always the wrong kind of man.

One evening in the early autumn of 2012, I was laying on my Mom’s living room floor with Joe. At this point I still lived with her and he had proposed we watch a movie, so there we were, awkward and very aware that my mother was one room over. It was dark, our stretched out bodies forming amorphous blobs on the floor in the shadows of whatever light was emanating from the movie on screen.

We didn’t have any living room furniture, so our being on the floor was innocent. I was laying on my belly, arms folded beneath my chin and legs bent up slumber-party style, Joe laying beside me in a similar manner. We were talking about something stupid, I’m sure, but then a very distinct lull swallowed the conversation and for a few moments we just existed, looking at each other.

“Can I tell you something?” Joe said suddenly, more a declaration that a question. He was That Guy, the one who always segued into inappropriate questions and comments under the “can I ask/tell you something?” guise. A true conversational cloak and dagger.

I didn’t answer, instead just raising my eyebrows for lack of a better response. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what he was going to say, but from experience I knew that, no matter my response, he would find a way to voice it anyway.

Which he did moments later.

Simultaneous with his suddenly acute tone, thick with something primal sludging up his vocal chords, Joe reached out one (just one) finger and, sliding that finger lightly up the back of my thigh and under the hem of my shorts, he said,

“You have big thighs.”

Just like that. Random, insulting, and lusty in a way that made my skin crawl.

I remember this moment because it was so thoroughly revolting. My subsequent reaction to those four words, as well as his barely-there touch, made me want to dissolve into the carpet, through the floor, into the earth to just roll around with the worms and dead things for the rest of all eternity.

“Well…fuck you too then,” I remember saying.

He laughed.

Here’s the thing about a woman’s thighs: More often than not, they are irrefutably and earth-shatteringly sexy. That’s what I think, anyway, as I navigate through this life of mine and take in all the different brands of female beauty this world has to offer.

It’s so strange, because on other women I think thicker is incredibly attractive. Heavy hips poured into tight jeans, a strong and healthy core, soft shoulders and a sleek neck; “thick like honey,” as Sam Hunt sings.

Yet like many human beings with eating disorders, I do not see beauty in those same features when they are applied to my own body. In beauty’s place festers disgust, sin and failure. And this is something I’m really struggling with lately, especially when it comes to my thighs.

Because they’re back. I have legs again. And hips. I’ve been thrust smack dab into the throws of a second puberty and I have no idea what to do with this new, fleshy body of mine.

On paper, my reasons for hating this new shape are transparent. The weight I’ve gained is symbolic for something else entirely — ugly men, who always smell like dirty laundry and stare blatantly at my crotch if I happen to be sitting pretzel style. Men like Joe, who’s gaze is like teeth sinking into my flesh the way they would sink into a steak. Its not a flattering thing, but shameful. And there is no denying that the thinner I got — the more weight I lost and its subsequent effect on my corporeal substantiality — the less I attracted men like Joe. Instead, this ethereal quality that an underweight body imposes attracts a “higher ranking” sort of male. Kinder, gentler, and much less likely to reach out and run an awkward finger up the back of my shorts.

This is all in my experience, of course, but its been so glaringly distinct that I’m actually ashamed of the male gender on a whole. Not all, but most. Y’all should be better than this.

I am floundering within this healthier weight the way one flounders as they lucid dream. I know I’ll wake up soon, and be back within the emaciated caricature that I began 2019 with. It was a safe and clean body, one I was confident going outside in, one that I didn’t feel embodied the very definition of gluttony and an ugly, predatory lust. A brand of lust that has nothing to do with actual attraction to the female form but everything to do with power over it.

Reality sees that I wont wake up soon. This is me now and it looks like I’m stuck this way. I draw comfort from the fact that I’m not alone — I’m more normal now than I was then, after all.

And it’s not like this new, stronger form is a bad thing. For one, I’m a hell of a lot warmer now than I was back when I had a gaping thigh gap. I can wear jeans, which I couldn’t before the weight gain because they didn’t make them in a size small enough. I’m not constantly dropping my phone by placing it on my lap and having it slide right on through to the floor, and I’m gifted with an ability to walk, skip, and run the way my spindly little deer legs previously could not manage.

Even more importantly (to me, anyway,) I’m finding that the shame I feel toward these thicker appendages runs parallel to an equal, concurrently occurring swell of confidence. The way I go back and forth between feeling alright about my body and wanting to hide it forever is borderline violent, but certainly to be expected throughout the process of gaining health, as well as weight.

I bought two pairs of jeans last month, both high waisted and snug. They hug my hips and make my ass look good — even if, despite the heaviness of my lower body, the ass itself leaves much to be desired.

(In many ways, my natural weight is curvy in all the wrong places.)

I will put on these jeans, and suddenly find myself admiring the firmness with which I now exist.

I will be walking down the street and find myself strutting a little, knowing fully well that I am no longer cowering behind emaciation. Instead, I’m gripped with a new and powerful feeling of being. Being alive, being grounded, being a woman.

My efforts to separate weight, particularly the size of my thighs, with sexual predation are on-going. It is a perpetual bickering match between the ghosts in my brain and I’m just kind of existing here, at my keyboard, trying to sort out their voices into some sort of coherent belief. Hopefully one that isn’t so brutally harmful to me as my eating disorder was.

Because half the time I like this new body. I’m proud of it. I want to strut around and use my heavier form to bulldoze all the men out there who are like Joe. Men who see female flesh and believe its there for them, and that the woman it belongs to should be grateful for their harsh and greasy touch.

In existing within this new body it’s becoming increasingly clear that the body itself is not at fault for any abuse or harm that has been inflicted on it.

A healthy form is not something that is, by nature, worth the degradation I’ve always associated it with. Rather, my hips and belly and thighs and shoulders, all the parts of me that are now so much softer than before, are just as lovely as these same parts I see on other women and admire so deeply.

It is this that I want to continue learning, and it’s what I want to teach others as well. I want to flip a magic switch so that we (as women) can see our physical forms how others see us; we are forest trees, our health and strength growing roots into who we are to the people around us, as well as who we are within ourselves.

That is what health gives us. That is what is important.

Like what you read? Here’s more:

• An Imperfect Body
• What Is More Important Than Weight Loss?

A Contemplation of Thick Thighs was originally published in Invisible Illness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.