Halfway through my shift at Jersey Mike’s, I’m on the brink of passing out. I’ve been on my feet for three hours with no breaks. Everyone is yelling at me—parents, toddlers, retirees, teens from my high school, employees from Mod Pizza next door, DoorDash drivers who shove their phone in my face like their life depends on the timely delivery of a #13 Original Italian sub. I reek of onions and vinegar. I’m hot and sweaty and uncomfortable, partaking in a trauma ritual I share with the rest of my coworkers.
Except, unlike them, I am wearing a belt an inch below my ribs that squishes my stomach so tight I feel like I might puke up my gallbladder.
I don’t eat the Italian subs. In fact, I hardly eat anything. I relentlessly track my calories in my Notes app, never exceeding 1,200 a day. I’m surrounded by food that I do not wish to eat, if I were even allowed to (Employee Handbook, Page 6). Dying by wasting away at a chain restaurant in a suburban Texas strip mall would be a sad way to go. Also sadly, if I die like this, I’ll be memorialized in my dumb uniform, also known as “proper workplace attire”: Converse, khakis, store-issued polyester shirt and apron, Jersey Mike’s ballcap, KN95 face mask. My pants are missing the mandatory solid black or brown belt (Employee Handbook, Page 22) and are instead hoisted up by a feeble shoelace. Under the layers of my uniform, no one notices the leather cinching my organs.
I received the belt for my First Communion in elementary school. It was the first time I had been forced to wear nice clothes to church instead of basketball shorts and a neon Nike tee. The belt was too big for me, so my dad had to drill an extra hole into the leather. Until starting the job at Jersey Mike’s, I left the belt to rot in the dusty back corner of my dresser, still pristine.
During high school, I always thought of this belt as a corset, the kind of Regency-era girdle I’d seen women wear in the Bridgerton series. In actual history, these garments were made of wood or bones, tied in the back with a ribbon. Corsets were used to straighten posture or create a suitable silhouette. Whether for vanity or necessity, they defined proper society. Who cared if I was a boy and had no prospects of debuting into society, if I could mimic nineteenth-century debutantes’ outfits with a simple belt? I used this theory as a justification for something that was, objectively, an odd thing to do.
But a corset—or whatever it was—did not bode well for an eight-hour shift in quick service. I was expected to be able to lift up to 40 pounds (Employee Handbook, Page 23). I had to be ready to climb a ladder to grab soda concentrate or squat to the ground to clean a toilet. Though there was hardly enough room for more than four people behind the front counter, I somehow took well over 7,000 steps per shift (which, at my height, weight, and age, burned approximately 233.33 calories). I became winded quickly. I saw stars when I ran from one side of the store to the other. Luckily, when I whined about being tired, my coworkers saw it as an attempt at camaraderie, allowing me to hide in plain sight.
I do not know why I started regularly wearing my belt to compress my intestines, not in a way that is complete. It wasn’t healthy, and it made a negligible change in my appearance. I do know when I started, though. I had on the belt during one of my high school Zoom classes, and no one could see anything below my clavicle on the screen. As the class went on, I shimmied and finagled the belt up my torso until it encircled my ribs, willing my body to shrink to fit into its confines. The action was mindless, but I must have known that it was strange. I knew that if I put some force into my moves, I could tighten one belt hole and crack a bone. It was thrilling.
I would know if I cracked a rib because I could see them, the thin ridges lining my torso, skin pulled so tight to my chest it looked like a washboard. I had two percent body fat. Professional bodybuilders, when going to competition, only have as low as three percent. I insisted that I was never hungry so often that my friends joked that I had Crohn’s disease. I lied to my parents when I skipped meals.
I had to attend religious education classes for my First Communion. In one of the cultish Catholic movies we had to watch, I saw a nun with a cilice, a medieval garment of spiked metal and cloth that she wore around her thigh. I learned that it was for penance, to punish yourself so you could get closer to God. I’m not religious—not since I was thirteen—but I guess my belt served this purpose. It pinched and chafed and squashed my insides for no good reason, except maybe proving to the anorexic gods that I was worth something.
Looking back, my best guess is that this was all a need for control or an intense obsession with perfection. I am sure it was irrational, this severe discipline I exerted on my body. But it’s difficult to ascribe a definite reason. I have gaps in my memory, and all I’m left with are snapshots where I watch myself like I’m an astral projection. The quandaries of high school seem small in retrospect—grades, deadlines, family, friends, crushes—but perhaps they all added up. I thought if I could fix my appearance, shred every ounce of fat off my body, wither myself away to a shell of organs and blood, then naturally, of course, everything else in my life would have to run according to plan.
I do not know when I stopped. I know that at some point I left my job, and that by the time I started college, I wasn’t trapped analyzing nutritional information anymore. I never got help, but I’m still on the email list for an online therapy service. Maybe I stopped because I knew that the belt never worked. It was destined to fail, because my undefined goals were unattainable. I was trying to both waste away and be noticed, to be helped and ignored.
When my shift is about to end, I am about to pass out. I’ll faint either in the store, or worse, when I’m driving home going 60 in a 35 zone and the cops will find my mangled remains with Megan Thee Stallion still blaring on the stereo. To stay conscious, I steal half a loaf of bread to eat in the walk-in freezer. This violates the ethics code (Employee Handbook, Page 6), but I still sit on a metal rack next to slabs of beef and vats of sauce and take small bites like a Victorian peasant boy. I loosen the belt for a moment. The bread feels like a brick in my stomach.
Tristan Hernandez is a senior in Pierson College.