What is the word? Trepidatious is a good word. Trepidatious, while possibly not a real word, is still the word I will use to describe the feelings that I had deep inside when it came time to tell my friends about what I wanted to do to myself, with the cutting and the slashing and the hacking up inside my body. The weight-loss surgery. But it wasn't the cutting and the slashing--I mean, I'd like to believe I'd have no problem sharing with my friends the need to undergo an appendectomy, or an amputation after I had rescued a child from a burning building but got caught in the inferno as the structure collapsed around me. As happens all the time.

And if I told them that--I mean, when I tell them that--they totally support me and go, "Wow! That's so interesting!" and nod and wait for me to finish my sentences and are, in their secret hearts, very proud of me for my awesomeness, and their own awesomeness in choosing friends who do not suck and also buy them pretty good birthday presents. That is the thing that was so hard to remember, though, when it came time to tell them about the weight-loss surgery--they would be proud of me. How could I remember that, when I spent most of my time being anything but proud, and everything up to and including completely ashamed?

I realize now that I had cut myself off from my friends as I started to gain weight, because getting dressed was a chore, and looking at myself in the mirror was a chore, and digging up out of the creeping depression enough just to function was a chore, without having to deal with being social. Being social began to sound like a terrible, horrible nightmare, and the more depressed I got, the more convinced I became that my friends hated me because I never hung out and hated me because I was lame and hated me because I was fat. It seems like a leap of logic to you, sitting out there in Internet land, with your rational brains and your logical thinking. At the time, for me, my mind was clear as crystal, and twice as breakable.

I think I wanted to tell people--the people who I kept pushing away from me, who still meant so much to me except I couldn't explain it because that would take effort and I had to use all that energy to breathe in and then back out again--that I was fixing myself. That I knew I was hard to love right that second, being all awful and distant and especially being so fat, but it would be better soon. I was going to make everything okay, and then you would be okay with liking me again.

I didn't want to tell people because it was embarrassing. It felt humiliating, like I was standing in the middle of the town square with a gong and a mallet, howling and beating an invitation to citizens both young and old to come and see the giant fat girl who was so giant and so fat. It was admitting that I was so enormous that I needed something like weight-loss surgery. Ordinarily fat people could just diet, do some walking, and emerge from their chrysalis like an "after" in a fucking Jenny Craig commercial. I was admitting that what worked for every other person in the whole world wouldn't work for me, and I was a big, fat freak. Awesome!

But, you know, you can't disappear from the world entirely for a couple of months, re-emerge breathing heavily after every effort, turning down all food offered to you, drinking only tepid water and halving your size in a miracle number of months without arousing some suspicions in the breasts of the more alert of the people in your life, even those who you've tried to hide away from. They always find you, and they always figure that shit out.

It would make a better story if I could set the scene and make it so dramatic and filled with a terrible beauty and a deep emotional resonance, my coming out to the people in my life. Except it really wasn't. I think I kind of squeaked "weight-loss surgery!" at them, and they said, "What?" and then I had to explain slowly and with blushes and most everyone I told was kind of startled, but mostly glad for me, because I seemed excited by it, or happy because I was doing something for myself. As far as I can tell, nobody was quietly gleeful, hoping I would die on the table and they could have my stuff, so that was a relief.

We talked about it, and they were curious, and helpful and concerned. And because this is how things work in my head, I made them all promise that things would be okay and nothing would change between us, just because I got skinny and they stayed--well, as gorgeous as they ever were.

"You promise?" I said anxiously. "Of course we promise!" they said. "It'll be okay." Or, they said, "You could just get new friends. Better friends. Your skinny-Anne friends who like you better now that you're skinny, and you can leave us all behind. When are you going to start auditioning new friends? Are you going to replace us all at once, or one by one? Should we start preparing? Do your new friends think that your puns are funny?"

"My new friends will never, ever be mean to me like you people," I said, and I knew that we would be okay, and that I was very lucky.

So far I have not had to go out and get new friends who don't hate me for--whatever it is I thought they'd hate me for, because that is how my brain works. They'd hate me for being fat, they'd hate me when I got skinny. They'd hate whatever I'd become, as I worked toward whoever I was going to be, at the end of this.

I keep hoping that I am not going to change, and that my life will stay the same as ever and as safe as ever, and yet over and over I realize that everything is going to change, that as the contours of my body change the contours of my life and my personality emerge shaped differently and so brand-new, so hard to parse and so hard to control. But the landmarks, those monuments, those people I love, stay the same.