I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: (But I'm Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez

Author:Chelsea Devantez [Devantez, Chelsea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, Form, Essays, Biography & Autobiography, Women, Topic, Celebrity & Popular Culture, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780369736246
Google: BK3UEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2024-06-03T22:00:00+00:00

DELTA, DOLLY, TINA, CAROL, JANE, and RACHEL

For all the early 2000s Tree Girls

I learned to read when I was very young, and like most early readers, I was incredibly annoying about it. Whether we were moving to a new house or a new state, books were my constant when I was growing up, and I’d lug them by the pound wherever we went. As a teenager, that love parlayed into magazines, and I can remember shamelessly standing in the aisle of the supermarket to read all my favorites while irked shelf-stockers nudged me out of their way. In one particularly inspired issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, I read a quote that said, The cure to insecurity is education. I was insecure about everything, and all I had to do was learn my way out of it? An early advanced reader’s dream!

In high school, I took in every book I could get my hands on, yearning for something to fix me. I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (I could only master 5), Women Who Love Too Much (rude), You Can Heal Your Life (can you, tho), Never Eat Alone (surprisingly, not about eating disorders), and The 48 Laws of Power (too many laws! Even the Lord has less). I read Rich Dad Poor Dad, and honestly, both dads? Losers. I read all of Suze Orman’s books, and now I taste blond highlights and a bold blazer whenever I sip a $4 latte that could have gone toward a house. I read all the spiritual books around our house, Osho, The Four Agreements, The Alchemist. But none of them held the answers I was looking for.

At the same time that I was reading these tomes, I had somehow taken all of the agony I had experienced in my life and focused it solely onto the scale at the Curves gym, where I worked out for a free-trial month alongside the moms of the high-school boys who called me fat. Ah, sisterhood! I felt that if I could somehow get thin, all my problems would disappear: my classmates would respect me, my mom would get rich, and I would fly off into the sunset on a teeny tiny magic carpet made out of a dELiA*s S/M corduroy crop top. I began dieting, then bingeing, throwing up, and on my worst days, chugging ipecac, because as great as I was at the bingeing, I was not so great at the purging.

My magazine obsession soon narrowed into fitness magazines, and I dove into a manic phase where I would only read the Before and After stories and the little diet graphs at the bottom detailing the two Oreos they would eat for dessert. A cup of plain nonfat yogurt as a treat. A tablespoon of peanut butter. A half of a frozen banana mashed up so you can pretend it’s ice cream. Or how about when Kelly Clarkson told a magazine that she sucked on a frozen grape to cut sugar

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