More Than I Can Stomach

I have this one memory of my father. There aren’t many, and the ones that exist are mostly fucked. Cry me a river, I know.

Anyway—we’re at my great-grandmother’s funeral. My dad’s dad’s mom. It’s the repast, and I’m sitting at the helm of the plastic-draped table, thinking about that one time Granma got me to eat a liverwurst and mustard sando on fucking wheat bread, no less. She had called out to the kitchen from the bed she lived in down the hall, hollering for feedback through lupus laden lungs. I was shocked to report back that, “It was good, Granma!” and meant it — unlike that time she got me to try okra, and it violated my throat.

The wings at the repast were good. I didn’t know who had cooked what, just that I was eating to avoid conversation with kin I’d accidentally avoided for years. I dangled a limp wing while I glazed over the room. Everything was exactly as she left it: the untouchable crystal cabinet still untouched, the vinyl-covered couch still stiff, the plastic hallway runner that had eased her wheelchair through the narrow hallways of her carpeted Brooklyn apartment.

The salad I’d put on my plate wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all me, but I ate it for crunch. The internal sound made by mauling iceberg lettuce is a nice way to drown out the thought of a slow death.

I don’t really recall how or when, but my father came to sit at the table with me. He might have been saying something; he might have just been there. I chose to focus my eyes on the plate in case of either. The house moved around us—lowered heads, food in hand, people finally allowed to eat on the couch. Granma would’ve had a fit.

Every family has its villains and its heroes and in attendance today was my father’s mother, the former, who subsisted on a steady cocktail of rage and brown liquor for decades. Needless to say, my father never liked her, because she never liked him, so I was dead on arrival.

“She doesn’t even eat like us.” Her bony, fatty build gangled past the table. She was a drunk and a hypocrite, so it was always open aim at my jugular for being white. Marc, her partner, sauced as he had been with her for the last three decades, would still go even redder in his peachy cheeks whenever she spoke of his people with such anger. I’m almost positive he was a DV survivor.

My father retaliated with the quickness. “This is her second plate,” he bit, the retort simmering enough to invoke silence without even looking in her direction. I saw her give me a final lookdown of disgust, then choose her battles and walk away. My father and I never talked about it. I always knew I was the afterthought in that exchange. I knew backstory when I whiffed it. His mother would always disown him for procreating outside of the race. Quiet as the quip was, it single handedly changed the way I ate for the next 15 years.

In that moment, it was like my father used me, my appetite, as a pillar of pride on which the manifestation of his poor choices could stand. In that moment, I was waving the right flag — there was irrefutable evidence of my right to bloodline being devoured with greasy fingers in prime time. There had been other moments across the brief encounters I had with my father’s family, where there had been encouraging critique of my food inhalation and so, a growing understanding that this was a doorway to acceptance.

There had been other moments, brief flashes of praise from that side of the family, where inhaling food was the secret handshake. I ate like an adult, they said. High praise. It meant I played in the big leagues and I flexed that in restaurants that handed out trophies for demolition. I still hold the record for youngest person to finish some burger at a restaurant in Seattle. For years, I ate like my reputation depended on it—even after my father left for Florida. All that was left were thinning connections and thickening habits. What I eat reflects where I am mentally. If I’m eating, you’ll know whether I’m present or astrally projecting into the void. The issue wasn’t what I ate—I cleaned my greens. The issue was how much. First plates were previews for the encore, and by college, I was still performing. Just without an audience.

I didn’t get my shit together until my early 20s, just before I graduated and life put me solely in charge of the food spend. It was the twenty-five pounds of alcohol weight that I had put on freshman year that really did me dirty. I didn’t know something clear could make you big big. I switched from partaking in Friday night fried chicken extravaganzas at the dining hall to eating raw vegetables and salmon. That sucked pretty quickly, but it worked, and I lost 30 pounds in 2 months.

Truth be told, I still eat under the thought that “the banquet is in the first bite” and proudly recommend eating as quickly and with as much gusto as you want, no matter how expensive or esteemed the dish is; it’s never going to taste as good as that first bite anyway. Recently in India, I learned how clean plate culture indicates the welcoming of another round, and to stop the flow of food, you must leave a few morsels on the plate as proof of satiation — but I learned this well after being stuffed with paratha and dal.

Once I made it to a whole new physical shape and after a long-distance telephone flare-up from my father, I felt haunted by the remnants of a last name binding me to a family I felt I’d been purged from. I took a sharp left somewhere in the Valley to a Los Angeles courthouse and changed my surname. I ate a practical portion of my favorite seafood that day in celebration of a small win.

 But even now, during my fittest years, when I see family, someone will clock my portions, ask how I did it—mouth full of burnt ends and creamy salads. I keep a second stomach reserved for moments I think I’ll need to prove myself. I’d still rather be stuffed than othered.

Sometimes I look at BBQ plates with a distinct need for domination, or eat a second mini round of food when I feel gluttonous for flavor — a consumption challenge still gets me high. I don’t know if we ever get to shed the skins we’re made of, hiding peeled pieces in a box somewhere to remind us of how far we’ve come. Maybe we just constantly pick at it like a bad scab, letting it heal slightly, not sure if we actually want the whole thing to come off, enjoying the subtle surge of pain from the rooted scale.

There's No Crying in Corporate

It’s been about a month since I doused my obsolete office job in gasoline and finally sat back to enjoy the flames. My desk-girlie experiment came after years of gig work and on the heels of liberating myself from an inept group of tea-colonizing siblings — now fending for themselves without my melanated hands in the mix, though they literally still use them in their marketing.

Looking for a fresh challenge to flex my business acumen, I landed at one of New York's classically sterile and criminally overpriced gym chains. To be clear: most NYC gyms are either overpriced or overcrowded. Usually both. Then, just to add insult to injury, they’ll expect you to be grateful for the privilege of becoming a walking billboard for their brand.

I was in sales — an industry built on the fine art of polished half-truths, emotionally manipulative storytelling, and making someone else’s millions feel like your small win. The job? Easy. My body was the first pitch. Women needed to see living proof that weight loss was real while Brooklyn dads needed someone to laugh at their self-deprecating comments, and the hardcore gym rats just wanted to know other gym rats were nearby. I represented some version of “motivation” to most prospects.

The only real hurdle? Price. But (ripping this straight from my script), I could never talk anyone out of their wallet, nor would I try, but if you’re serious about a new lifestyle, there comes a moment when you price out the bullshit and price in commitment. That price? Around $500 at sign-up. They get a membership, I get 1.75% commission, and the company gets another annual hostage worth $3.2K.

That’s corporate gym sales in a nutshell. You walk in crying about feeling fat, skinny, post-natal, post-COVID, peer-pressured — whatever your flavor of shame — and I regurgitate it with perfectly-timed guilt triggers, lofty visions of what could be, and then hit you with: “Good news — we take Apple Pay.”

You can’t hate the player. But you can certainly hate the game — because no matter the industry, the hustle stays the same. Everyone’s just trying to make a buck, especially in NYC, where commission gets taxed like it’s your second job. This pressure cooker breeds two main predators: sharks and snakes.

A shark knows their shit. They can sell in their sleep because they probably do. Sharks rarely have a life outside of work — they're obsessed with crushing quotas or comparing metrics like dick size. Usually both.

Snakes? Slimy little coworkers you can’t take your eyes off. They steal sales, manipulate clients, and dry-hump the company’s leg in plain sight. Snakes aren’t necessarily good at the job — just persistent. They skip team-building, opting to tongue the manager’s bleach-blasted asshole instead, and somehow they slither their way into the purgatory of “middle management” — not skilled enough to lead, but useful enough to keep around as a human footstool.

When I think “corporate,” I still picture that ‘90s corner office: leather furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows, a single majestic palm in the corner. Outdated? Sure. But the symbolism sticks — it’s the promised prize for those who climb the mythical “ladder.” Stay long enough. Rim the right holes. Play nice. Someday, the office is yours.

That myth hasn’t changed, just the perks have. Loyalty used to buy you a pension; now you get free snacks and a ping pong table. Companies know we’re wise to it — which is why they’re repackaging middle management as “vertical growth,” with shiny new titles and insulting pay bumps. They’d rather spin the revolving door than invest in the people actually keeping the lights on.

I saw this firsthand — upper management trying to dangle fake futures in front of me like carrots, whispering about promotions that never came, because they needed my output for their bonuses. Near the end, it hit me: most corporate higher-ups are terrified. Of their boss. Of their finances. Of their likeability. Of losing the comfort they brown-nosed their way into. I watched them attempt to sell the lie of trading your time for status; that might one day become wealth.

When my faith wavered, they’d toss the same sentiment at me: “There’s more money to be made if you just stay on the path.” A classic sales tactic. Except here, the currency was time — and even the shittiest sales rep knows that’s a no-refund policy.

I left on a beautifully empty Saturday. Gray skies outside, though you wouldn’t know it from the windowless office I’d been entrenched in for over a year. I looked around, really saw the place — the room that devoured 9 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week. The place where I made over a million dollars in sales for a company that denied me a proper raise, then dangled a shitty little promotion I was supposed to cream myself over.

I bought an IKEA couch with the raise. It worked out to less than $90 per biweekly paycheck.

I wanted to be mad. Mad at the money. Mad at the snake boss stealing sales in plain sight. Mad at the lazy upper management who wandered around like caffeinated Roombas. Mad at NYC for taxing my commission at 40%. But mostly, I sat with the deeper truth: no one put me here but me. No one kept me here but me. And for a minute, I almost choked on the idea that I might’ve actually believed I was climbing a ladder. And that’s how they get you — not by breaking your spirit, but by feeding it just enough to keep you quiet while they bleed your talent dry for profit.

But my soul was leaking out. My relationship was unraveling. My creative work was rotting in the drawer while I clocked in, smiled pretty, and served up digestible professionalism to people I didn’t respect. 

The pill finally went down with a gulp of truth: you can’t keep your whole self intact while doing a job designed around pleasing people. It’ll never be me.

So I packed up my desk, cleared my locker, nabbed a few office snacks and hugged the real ones goodbye before getting scooped by my man in our monster truck.

We didn’t make it a full block before I spotted a trainer I adored heading in. I rolled down the window and yelled from the passenger seat: “Yo! I just quit!” to which she didn’t miss a beat: “Fucking iconic!”

With that, I took my first real breath in months. It wasn’t relief per se — more clarity. The kind you get when you stop lying to yourself about where you are, who you’re serving, and what it’s costing you because the truth is, if you're still convincing yourself it's "not that bad," it already is. The truth is, corporations don't fire creatives, rather seek them for innovation that their flatlined tenured goons can no longer produce— they’ll smother us in fake opportunity and beige benefits until there’s nothing left but compliance. I knew if I’d stayed any longer, they’d have hooked me up to the IV and drip fed me just enough praise to forget I was an artist. I left before they could siphon the last of my joy and sell it back to me in quarterly bonuses and though the anvil of uncertainty lurks inevitably, the taste of freedom will forever outweigh it.