No. 1: 🛀🏻🏃🏻♀️🌯
Your roommate is never home. She comes to Burbank for pilot season and the occasional weekend, so you have the two-bedroom apartment on Pass Avenue to yourself most of the time, down the hall from the little girl who’s always losing roles to Dakota Fanning. So her mom says. The walls are thin and you wonder if neighbors can hear you cry in the shower, homesick for a home you never had and heartbroken for a guy you never officially dated, but fell in love with nonetheless.
You’re eighteen and no one knows your waist-length hair is curly, or that you’ve developed an eating disorder after your modeling agent tells you you’re a bit “full” and not to kickbox because it’ll add bulk. So you run. Run a block, walk a block, run a block, walk a block. You return home sweaty with sport bra tanlines and eat five Triscuits, then fifty crunches in front of Regis and Kelly before collapsing on itchy beige carpet that smells like socks and peach-scented powder. One day you suspect it might be the birth control that’s making you “full.” Hm, acne or weight gain? Acne. It hides better. Two months later, you’re 102 lb and booking the likes of Z. Cavaricci and Rip Curl.
Your eating disorder doesn’t last long. Turns out it was the Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo, so you chase all the yummy food LA has to offer. Burritos are your favorite. Breakfast burritos, wet burritos, dry burritos. It’s a taco town, but you like burritos best ’cause it’s like getting three meals for one and they’re cheap, tasty, filling. People ask how you stay so skinny as you take your foil-wrapped pillow to-go. Well it’s not like you eat the whole thing at once. This fatty’s four meals, at least.
Your weight or lack thereof is something people will never stop commenting on, so you reconcile to feigning gratitude for thinly veiled compliments that feel like jabs. Sometimes you can’t. “Eat a burger,” one bitch sneers in a casting hallway. “I do eat burgers,” you retort, thinking of adding, “Maybe you should stop,” which you don’t because you know she’s just jealous and self-hating. Maybe her agent told her she was “full.”
Your loneliness aches but don’t fret, friends are coming.
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