What’s a country that’s at the top of your bucket list?

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How was it for you, being nineteen? Were you happy? I at nineteen was very much not, but was trying very hard to convince myself that I was. The year was 2009, and it was springtime: the spring of my freshman year of college. I was spending it on a study abroad trip to Germany with the other German majors.

It was a group of twelve of us students: nine young men and three women, and our department head: a brilliant man whom I rather idolized in an intellectual way, but who I’m pretty sure was disgusted by me, at that time. They all were. Everyone was, even my own parents.

And rightfully so. If you read this blog, you’ve probably heard me refer to my “Revenge Fat” or “Revenge Ugly” phases, by which I mean certain phases I’ve gone through with my ED in which I gain weight on purpose and/or stop taking care of my appearance as like an act of angry rebellion against the tyrannical voices in my head. These phases always follow severely restrictive phases, like the pendulum swinging violently in the opposite direction. It’s always a very sad way to live, and thankfully I haven’t fallen into it again for a long time (come to think of it, not since buzzing my hair off in 2015); the pendulum has gradually slowed to a manageable middle ground. But the worst and most definitive episode of Revenge Fat was this time in early 2009.

I was straight up gross. I’m not implying that all fat people are gross, because they are absolutely not, but I certainly was. I’m not a naturally heavy person, I don’t carry weight gracefully. At my highest weight ever, sweaty and smelly, just eating all the time with reckless abandon and telling myself I was “free.” (I won’t go into the whole history of all the events that led up to this episode; suffice it to say that, although I am still mad at myself for it, I also don’t think it was entirely my fault — I’d had a certain mentor in 2008 who gave me (and many others in her care) some very poor, dangerous guidance, when we were in a very vulnerable, mentally-susceptible place; but that’s a story for another day.) I was fat, on high doses of Zoloft and alcohol and just so much food, dousing myself in heavy perfume and heavy brightly-colored glittery makeup and draping myself in cheap costume jewlery and telling myself I felt so pretty, while also wearing baggy sweatpants every day, because they were the only comfortable thing to wear. They allowed me to forget.

In retrospect, nearly twenty years later, I can actually feel somewhat grateful that I went through this wretched stage. For a few months there, I got to experience life as a fat woman. So now, unlike many normal-sized women, I know firsthand what it’s like to be treated as subhuman and invisible and not a real woman. It’s subtle sometimes, this discrimination — I vividly remember, for example, my professor’s inadvertent grimace as he turned his face away from me at a restaurant, and the way salespeople in shops would act like they couldn’t even see you, the way people talk down to you without meaning to — but it’s very real. Almost twenty years later, and having never been actually fat again since that brief period of time, I still haven’t fully recovered my identity; even though I haven’t been actually fat in a really long time, and it was such a short period of time, it makes a permanent impression on you, being treated like that. The little ways people make you aware that you are disgusting to them. I may be thin now, but I think I’ll always identify as a fat girl, because of that time.

So, this was where my head was at, while physically I was on this fantabulous six-week expedition to the south of Germany, alongside eight rich frat boys, one fat nerdy mildly-autistic boy who was the laughingstock of all the other kids, two rich beautiful sorority girls, and one brilliant, athletic professor who was my hero. Even the nerdy boy, who was kind and pleasant to me, made it plain to me in conversation, in his innocent autistic way, that I wasn’t like the other two girls on the trip and could not be treated as such. (Randomly, my other main memory of him on that trip: he wore “toe shoes,” those weird rubbery “FiveFinger” walking shoes; Google it, if you don’t know what I’m talking about; he and his weird toe shoes were the absolute butt of everyone’s jokes the whole time; probably they were saying the same things about me and my sweatpants, though.)

Also grossed out by me was my host family: a middle-aged mother and her two beautiful, stylish grown daughters, living in Bayreuth. Aware of how disgusting I was to them, I didn’t like being around them, despite how friendly they were. So in my free time in the afternoons after class at the Üniversität Bayreuth and a hefty lunch at its cafeteria, I’d go for a lot of long walks around the city by myself with my headphones in. (It was on one of these walks that I wandered into a tattoo parlor and got my left eyebrow pierced, on a complete whim; that was my life then.) Headphones, Zoloft, stuffing my face, stuffing it down. Everything was fine. I was so free.

I often walked to the Hofgarten, which was mere blocks from my host mother’s house, and one of my favorite spots that I’d discovered on the whole trip. Maybe because I discovered it on my own.

Have you ever been there? It’s a big green park, a peaceful green oasis in the city, with curving pathways, little bridges over ornamental streams, lush flower beds so perfectly well-maintained that they feel native; shady mature trees; and at one end stands the eighteenth-century palace with a big fountain out front. A little paradise, a postcard from every angle. I was always there alone, invisible, listening to my tunes, people-watching. It was an escape — but it was also a moment of clarity. Alone, at the end of the school day, with the emotional aid of my music, I could actually take some things carefully out of the sealed mental box and look at them, and study them a bit.

I remember one overcast, wet afternoon — the snails were always out in spades, on those post-rain afternoons, big fat garden snails clinging to the foliage, much to my delight — it was one of those afternoons that’s gray and bright at the same time, the sky a flat sheet of pale gray, the sun hidden but its light everywhere. That kind of weather feels protective, makes you feel safe. I wandered out from the shade of the trees into the brightness in front of the ornate Rococo palace. Such a romantic place. I stood at the fountain, looking all around. No one else was there, on that overcast weekday, at least not that I can remember.

One day, I thought then, one day when I am happy and have found the right person, I will come back here with him.

It was a little promise that I made to myself and kept quiet about, but didn’t forget — still haven’t forgotten.

Eight years seems like not much time, at all, now; but it felt like a very long time, like lifetimes even, elapsed between spring 2009 and spring 2017 when I finally got married. To a guy with, coincidentally, a German last name and German heritage. Obviously I’d still have loved him even if he had an unfortunate last name, but I really lucked out, name-wise, as a former German major and a Germanophile in general. Germany has just always appealed to me, for so many reasons. I couldn’t have been more excited to change my last name.

He’s never actually been to Germany, though. Maybe one day we’ll go there, and maybe even stop at the Hofgarten Bayreuth, but, funnily enough, it doesn’t feel that important anymore. I no longer really care as much about international travel; I’ve seen very well that wherever you go, there you are, and life is just life wherever. Some places are beautiful — so what? Is it really worth all that money to drag yourself all that way and go “wow, this is pretty”? I dunno. I no longer feel bound to this promise I made myself. And besides, my husband is more interested in seeing Japan, if we ever do travel internationally, so that’s at the top of the bucket list, now, above Bavaria, and I am more excited to make this dream come true for him than to check off some little box on some mental list that some dumb fat nineteen-year-old once wrote.

That’s the thing — it stops being about my bucket list, my happiness, my this and my that, when you’re actually finally happy; it becomes more about your. I probably wouldn’t have understood that back then. I didn’t understand a lot of things. I wish I could say I forgive that younger version of myself, for all that, but tbh that’s probably still a long way off.