I think I’m doing better. I know I’m doing better. So why does the scale still freak me out? Why am I still afraid of a silly number?
I asked Willow that today. I told her how this morning’s number is haunting me, how I’m afraid that if I see it, I’ll backslide. I told her how weighing myself used to be the first thing I did every morning and how if the number was higher than the day before, my mood was ruined.
If the number was lower, I was happy. Elated. Overjoyed. I was every synonym in the thesaurus. But only for about ten minutes. Then I started worrying about what would happen if I gained weight the next day.
“Then why use the scale?”
“We have to get weighed in here,” I pointed out.
“Yes,” Willow agreed. “Because we’re making sure you get to a healthy weight range. That’s our responsibility. Your responsibility is to lessen the power that number has over you.”
Willow’s right. The scale is like a magnet, pulling my body and my mind to it. I remember how the morning of our class trip to the amusement park, I weighed more than the day before. While everyone else was having fun on the Ferris wheel and going on the Corkscrew roller coaster seven times in a row, I was moping and obsessing.
I remember getting on the scale last month and losing a whole pound in a day. Before I stepped on the scale, I was upset. I’d gotten a 70 percent on my math quiz, way lower than my usual scores. I was tired and cranky and still had to read five chapters for Language Arts and go for another run.
Then I saw the number. The lower number.
I felt like I’d won the lottery. I felt like I could lift a car over my head or bend a steel bar in my hands. The anxiety and exhaustion slid off me like a snakeskin, coiling on the floor by my feet. My new skin was relief. Power. Invincibility.
Then, after a few minutes—even a few seconds—the snakeskin started to grow back. It covered me from head to toe, thicker than before. Harder to shed than before.
My next thoughts always came quickly:
I could get that number lower.
I should get that number lower.
If I’m not careful, I’ll gain it back.
I never let myself rest. I always had to go for the next run, skip the next meal. I never reached the finish line.
Willow pulled a scale out from under her desk. It was old and black. My heart did a double beat in my chest. I had to get weighed again?
“What would happen if you stepped on this and you saw a high number?”
I’d have failed.
I’d be fat.
The world would be over.
I shrugged.
“What would happen if you saw a low number?”
“I’d win.”
Willow cocked her head to the side. “You’d win what?”
I thought for a few seconds. “When I get on the scale and the number is lower, I feel like I can take over the world.” I peeked at Willow. She didn’t look disgusted. “I feel like I’m powerful. Like I’m the best at something and no one can take that away from me.”
“It makes you feel good,” Willow echoed. “It makes you feel in control of your life when it’s spinning out of control.”
“Yeah.”
“Does it make you feel bad, too?”
“All the time.”
“More than it makes you feel good?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I hate the scale. I hate how it makes me skip parties because cake would make the number go up. I hate how it makes me sad when everyone else is happy. I hate how I can’t stop thinking about how every single thing I do will affect it and how it keeps calling me names.”
“The scale is a machine,” Willow said. “An appliance, like a microwave or a blender. It’s something human beings crafted and put together. Something that can be taken apart.” She pulled open her bottom desk drawer and took out a different scale, this one in pieces. I stared at them: The cracked window where the numbers appear. The inner workings, shiny and metal, strewn over her desk. The red needle and the circle filled with numbers that somehow define who I am.
Parts.
That’s all the scale was: a broken collection of parts.
It wasn’t human. It wasn’t real.
It didn’t have power over me.
It shouldn’t have power over me.