Geneen Roth

My father put his hands down my pants, kissed me on the lips, called women broads. And nothing I saw or heard as I was growing up taught me that what he was doing was aberrant or wrong. One man masturbated in front of me, others grabbed my breasts on the subway, pinched my butt, made lewd comments as I wove through crowds. Although these events were always degrading, I believed without knowing I believed that this body was meant to be used, not considered with kindness.

Then my erstwhile therapist handed me a six-foot piece of red string and told me to make a circle around my body, close the ends together, and sit in its center. She told me that the space inside the circle was mine, just mine. Oy, I thought, rolling my eyes. Here we go into the land of psycho-spiritual babble. But in the next second, I blurted: my body isn’t mine, I’ll get in trouble, other people won’t like it. Then I cried.

It was both shocking and not shocking that there was little sense of body-ownership or the power that comes from standing in my own two shoes. Years of having this body shoved and grabbed and pinched had made me into my own metaphorical shover and grabber and pincher: I treated my body the way it had been treated, without boundaries, and with disrespect and contempt.

After practicing the red string project with my therapist and noticing the relief, amazement and sheer power of closing the ends of a measly piece of string, my attitude about my body began to shift. This translated into being willing to listen to the signals it had been broadcasting for years and that I’d been ignoring: the need for rest, discernment about what I ate, where I wanted to spend my energy, who I wanted to be with. I realized that being nice was overrated and that “No” and “I don’t want to” are complete sentences. Eventually, I began teaching the red string project to my students and every time, the reaction was the same: I never knew I was allowed to: have my own body, say no, remain with myself and in my own boundary no matter what someone else is doing or saying.

My first pair of high heels was navy blue, and from Chandler’s on Queens Boulevard. They matched my dress for the eighth grade prom I was going to the following week with Gary Stein. They were so deeply unutterably uncomfortable. I couldn’t really walk in them (and didn’t understand how anyone else could either), and they also gave me blisters on the back of my feet. But walking wasn’t the point. These shoes were for looking at. Thirty seconds after I hobbled into the prom, I threw them off.

Half a lifetime later, when I was on the Oprah Winfrey show for Women Food and God, I figured I needed a new outfit. So I went shopping in Chicago a few days before the show. I chose a simple black suit. All good. But then I needed shoes with a teeny heel (as I still can’t walk in heels). I found a pair of simple black shoes, had the pants hemmed to match the height, and that was that.

On the day of the show, I brought the new black suit with my new shoes (still in a box) to the Oprah set and when I put them on, I realized they’d made the pants way too long, and that in the shoe box, were two left shoes. Uh-oh.

I called one of the assistants, told her my story, and she sent two people to Neiman Marcus to return the shoes and bring back another pair—this time, with a left and a right shoe, and with a higher heel.

The assistant returned with eight boxes of shoes, with ten minutes left until the Oprah show began. I was like Cinderella trying to find the shoe that fit—and only one did. Ahh. But it had such a high heel that once again, I couldn’t walk—and as there were now five minutes left until I had to walk onto the set, I decided the best thing to do was to ask for help. Tell the truth, as embarrassing as it was.

I turned to the assistant and said, I can’t walk in these and they are the only ones that fit. I need help, and I can’t think of what to do, but maybe you can.

No problem, she said. And the next second, two men appeared and stood on either side of me, told me to put my elbows on their hands, and give them my weight. Holding me two inches above the ground, we walked onto the stage. Me, looking as if I was walking but actually walking on air, and the two men, looking like my valiant bodyguards. They sat me down in the chair opposite Oprah. I crossed my legs so that my new impossibly uncomfortable shoes could also have some time on television. My mother says I looked as if I was born in those shoes. Now they grace the top of a wooden hutch in my dining room (see photo). I figure that if baby shoes can be bronzed, those shoes can have their place in my house.

Yesterday — Thanksgiving — might have been fabulous. It might have been fabulous and awful. It might have been just awful — in some ways, perhaps not in others.

What do you do on the day after if you:
*ate too much
*fought with a relative
*said something you wished you hadn’t said
*done something you wished you hadn’t done
*didn’t do what you said you would

and there they were: Hostess Snoballs. A whole rack of them. And although I know I’ve possibly written about them more than the Hostess company has, I can’t help but write about them one more time.

As I stood there looking at the Snoballs, I remembered how badly I wanted to eat and eat and eat them as a kid. How much I believed that they were the promised land. I believed they represented everything I wanted: soft, fluffy, sweet kindness.

from our Asilomar retreat, which is happening now:

This morning, at our first eating meditation, a woman said — this is a paraphrase, not her words exactly — Oh My God — I get it. All these years I’ve been trying to fix myself. I’ve been working on myself, thinking I was going to finally get to the point where what was wrong wouldn’t be wrong anymore. But now, here, I see that I could have kept that up for the rest of my life because really, there is always something that seems like it needs to be changed or fixed. But when I drop the story of being broken, when I see that it’s like a mantra I keep repeating (I’m broken, I’m broken, I need to be fixed, fixed, fixed), there is a wholeness that is also here. A softness. Something that has never been broken. And it feels like love.