Drs. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks (Interview Archive)
Gay: Good question. My situation wasn't unusual, I think. For a long stretch I simply had no idea how to say honest things out loud. Angry, scared, sad, attracted to someone, whatever the feeling happened to be, I couldn't name it. It didn't register. I came up in a time when men were supposed to be the quiet, steady type who kept everything inside.
Katie: The men especially.
Gay: Right, we didn't talk about any of it, so this was genuinely hard for me. On top of that I was raised in the rural south, in a town with no psychologist, no therapist, nobody in that line of work. We had orange groves. Whatever training I absorbed early on left me badly equipped to say anything that mattered. More than once in my twenties a woman would tell me, "You never say how you feel," or ask, "Can't you tell me what's going on inside you?" They may as well have been speaking another language to me.
Katie: They were.
Gay: One day stands out. I was living in New Hampshire, and I was carrying a lot of extra weight back then. These days I'm about 180 pounds, which at six feet is fine for me, but at the time I was heavy. A guy came right out and asked me, basically, why I was so fat. I launched into the whole routine: thyroid trouble, the explanations I'd collected from doctors, all of it. Then I went home and noticed I was angry that he'd even asked. Why the anger? I kept inventing reasons in my head, telling myself he was jealous or something like that. The thing wouldn't leave me alone, and eventually it hit me that I had lied to him.
Gay: If he asked why I was so fat, the true answer would have been something like: I'm completely cut off from my body, I don't understand my own feelings, I haven't figured out what I want to do with my life, and I'm not sure I've found anything yet worth living for. I was twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four at the time. Lying awake in the middle of the night, I finally admitted that the whole mess came down to one ten-second thing I'd failed to say.
Gay: What I should have told him was closer to this: "I don't know. I'm desperate to figure out what to do about my weight. I'm so sad that I'm this heavy, and I'm frightened I'll never find the real body somewhere underneath all of it."