So I started Noom again. I lost 10 pounds on this program the first time and they stayed off. But I quit when I felt I was becoming too obsessive — counting every calorie, not enjoying food, compromising my stomach for another beer instead of a slice of bread or a cracker. Before this compulsion turned into an eating disorder, I felt like I needed a breather. So I took one. For about 6 weeks. But now I am back.
This time around it feels good. I feel much healthier and I know what I am in for. Joining Noom right after I moved to Honolulu was my first experience with dieting. Looking back I can see I didn’t know what I was in for. And that’s the thing: Noom states they are not a diet, and I bought into that. Like with almost every other relationship in my life, it was gaslighting — a slow coercion aimed at bending me to the other’s will. You might think I am exaggerating here, but I truly am not. With the rare and glorious exception of my incredibly woke, feminist husband (he would surely cringe if he heard me call him that) and my other like-minded, often empathic friends, every single other relationship feels like a wrecking ball headed straight into my soul, trying to rip me up and remake me into the Pygmalion dream they had in mind.
Coming to Hawaii gave me a new start. I was ready for a fresh beginning. But within two weeks of starting a new job (and about three weeks into my Noom diet) here I was in old, familiar patterns. It all started with an old local named Damion Baka, a man who eventually referred to himself as Yoda — implying, yes, that I was his Princess Leia.
It all started out innocently enough, and truly we did have an instant connection. But once again, this is because I am open, wide open like empaths are, ready and waiting for someone to come in and crash us. So within just a few days, Baka Sensei (as he also referred to himself) is bombarding me with emails and roses and champagne and wine. And sausage and BBQ and lobster rolls. Those were my real weaknesses. He had me at homemade venison sausage, I can’t lie. I should have seen the red flags, how fast things were escalating but of course, like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to the exotic, the unusual, the supernatural. Did Baka really have secrets to share with me, secrets only an 83-year-old man can know? If he was truly an exorcist like he said he was, I wanted to know how he did it.
For the meantime, I suggested we hang out while I followed him on his daily business, which mostly involved procuring flowers and distributing them to various women around town and making the rounds of his usual businesses. What exactly was this work you did? I went in naive and trusting. I’m reminded of that Hozier song, “Someone New.” It’s true, I DO fall in love with someone new every day, even if it’s just in a general benevolent sort of way, wishing them well and wanting to know them more. I can’t help it. I love people. It’s both my superpower and my weakness.
So anyway, as I’m riding along with Mr. Baka on his rounds, he suddenly says, as one never does, “I don’t believe in polygamy, but…” This leaves a big heavy question mark hanging over my head. Baka is allegedly married though no one that I have talked to has ever met or seen his wife. In fact, everyone else where I work, including my boss who has known him his entire life, didn’t even know he was married. But Baka swears to me that he is married and he will show me a photo of her which, according to him, will shock me, for what reason I am not sure. She was much younger than him when they were married over 60 years ago, but this is not the reason, he says. Is she Jabba the Hutt, I wonder? Or is she mere skin and bones? He then, in the car, jokingly referred to me as his “sub-wife.” I thought I had misheard him. But then a few days later he wrote in an email, referring to when a woman at the flower shop asked who I was, he said I was his “co-wife,” and he told me maybe she could be his co-wife too.
This chilled me to the bone. Who the actual fuck was this DOM, or dirty old man, my boss, too late, jokingly referred to him as?
I wasn’t about to sit around and find out. This is where I knew I needed to make my quick exit, my vanishing act that I am actually pretty good at by now with all of my experience of belonging to various cults for short amounts of time. As a friend of mine said, you have this great way of going in deep and then, right at the last moment saying, nope! and jumping out. When Mr. Baka wrote to me and said he would be coming to me on bended knee with a kimono, I knew it was time for me to make a break.
I told my boss and coworkers what was going on. Not all of it — how could I possibly explain it all at this point? But just the part about the excessive gifts, how I felt uncomfortable and the kimono. Allegedly all of this was to be in exchange for a bit of translation he wanted help with, but even after all of our emails and hanging out with him for a day and all the times he came by work to chat, I still had no clue what he wanted me to translate for him.
One of my coworkers was quite furious with me for not being forthcoming with her but the reason I hadn’t told her was because he had said so many ugly things about her. His main purpose, he said, in talking to me alone was to warn me about her. She was bipolar. She had a reputation. I did not want to get mixed up with her, she had burned him too many times in the past and he wanted nothing to do with her, which was why he was recruiting me to get the sake and wine and all that he wanted from our distributors. Me, being new to everything, thought I could weigh the situation myself and make a judgement. But in the end, I just decided to cut relations with Baka and for everyone’s peace of mind, trust my coworker and stop keeping secrets from her.
Well, Baka was furious. Sayonara, he wrote to me. Adios and “all that jazz,” he said. From then on, whenever he came to our store, which was almost every day, he would make it a point to not look at me but go straight for my boss’s office to discuss whatever latest bit of mischief he was into. Then he started to bring gifts to everyone else but me. He would bring flowers and hand them to my coworkers in front of me through the glass outside and whisper to them, “These are NOT for Jeannie.”
It was clear that he was wishing me harm. It was all so bizarre and I didn’t want it to get to me but it did. It has. Meanwhile my coworker who he talked all that shit about is now on his good list. She is the one who gets flowers every day now. It blows my mind how everything changed so fast. And furthermore, all of this petit drama, the secrecy, the back-stabbing, sort of spiritual and psychological warfare, is taking a toll on me and my younger coworker who finally, last week, put in her two-weeks notice.
Right now, at this point, I don’t know what I am going to do. But just next week, I am taking a two-week holiday and immediately following my “bipolar” coworker is taking hers. So this will give me some time to think. And breathe. I really need to breathe.
Which leads me to why I started writing all this. Why am I dieting again now? It’s because I am taking control. I am not sure if that is fucked up or not, but my weight and my health are things I can take control of. Noom teaches you to train and befriend your inner elephant. I named mine Bessie. I am making peace with Bessie. I hope I am not taking on too much but I am cutting back on alcohol, cutting out bong hits, cutting out my late-night binge eating trying to fill that hole inside me left behind from the wreckage. Not the wreckage of just Damion Baka, of course, but of all the men, all the people in my life who have tried to control me in one way or another. I am taking control of my life now. Watching that needle on the scale go down and down, lifting weights and seeing my body become more and more defined is a satisfying thing that only I have control over. It’s an inner fire that no one else has to know about and no one else can touch. I don’t know if it’s healthy or not, and maybe I will quit Noom and dieting again if I feel I am burning out of control. But for now, I am finding a new way. To your gaslighting, I will apply trailblazing. And if you get in my way, men of my life, I will burn you to dust.
