DermaQ ad: The day I gave up was a Tuesday

The day I gave up was a Tuesday, and the thing I remember most clearly is that I was not upset. I was cleaning out the bathroom cabinet because the shelf had gone sticky. I took everything off it and put it on the floor and then I just looked at the floor for a while. The blue Nivea Q10, still almost full. A Palmer's Cocoa Butter I had bought because my mother swears by it. A Bio Oil from an airport. A jar of Frank Body scrub that had gone hard in the middle. A dry brush. I got a bin bag and I put all of it in the bin bag, except the dry brush, and I tied the top and took it out to the bin outside because I did not want to see it in the kitchen. Then I made lunch. That is what giving up actually looked like for me. No crying. Nobody knew. I did not announce anything to anybody. I just stopped, the way you stop calling a person back. I was thirty nine and I had been trying since about thirty five. It was never one big effort. It was a long series of small reasonable ones. I moved more. I drank the water. I did the brushing every morning for a whole winter, and my skin was softer and nothing else changed, so I kept doing it as a nice thing and quietly took it off the list. I started lifting weights and I am still lifting, and my legs are stronger than they have ever been, and that is real and I am not giving it up. But by then I had also worked out that whatever this was, squats were not aimed at it. The scale stayed the same the entire time. Same number, different body, no week on the calendar I could point to. Here is the part that is hard to explain to somebody who has not had it. I was not sad about my legs. I had made peace with my legs. What I had lost was something else. I had stopped believing that there was a version of trying I had not tried yet. That is a quieter thing to lose and you do not really notice it going. So when Dana said it, in a kitchen, in August, at somebody's birthday, I was not receiving information. I was making conversation. Dana used to work at a body treatment place two towns over. She left it years ago and does something with payroll now. I made a joke about a changing room mirror. She did not laugh at it. She asked me whether anybody had ever actually told me what makes the dimpling. Nobody had. I said I assumed it was fat, because that is what everything I had ever bought had implied. She said it is not really about the fat. She said there are small bands of tissue under the skin that hold it down in places, and the dimples are where those bands pull, like a button pulling on the back of a couch cushion. Some pull hard. Some barely pull. That is why two women the same size do not look the same. And then she said the sentence I did not want at that particular moment in my life. She said a cream sits on top of the skin, and the pulling happens underneath, so the creams had not failed me. They were never in the room. I am giving you that the way she gave it to me. I do not know the science past what she said. I want to be honest about what happened next, because it is not the part these stories usually include. I did nothing for two months. I did not go home and start researching. I made a cup of tea and we talked about her sister. I thought about it in the car. And then I let it sit, from August until nearly October, because when you have already grieved something, hope is not a relief. It is a cost. It asks you to open an account you closed on purpose, and I was not sure I had it in me to close it a second time. What finally moved me was small and stupid. I was putting away laundry and I found the drawer with the three pairs of shorts I keep and never wear, and I thought, I am forty in March. The looking took one evening and it was discouraging. Everything was the same object in a different box. Cups on a marketplace for eleven dollars. A machine that looked exactly like the one Dana had described, shipping from overseas, with a manual nobody had translated properly. Wands with a dial that went up to twenty and no explanation anywhere of what twenty was for. I found a thread of women asking each other how long, how often, which setting, whether that temperature was safe on legs. None of them knew. One of them still had a burn scar a year later. One had not been able to get the thing off her leg. That was the wall, and the wall was not money. The hardware is forty dollars and nine minutes away. What I could not find was one of them prepared to tell me how to use it without hurting myself, which for a woman who has already quit once is the entire question. The one I ordered was the first that treated that as the product. Nine levels of suction and a rule about which one you begin on. Two weeks on level one. Not a recommendation, a rule, in writing. It releases by tilting it to the side and never by pulling it off. The heat takes a few minutes to come up before you move it anywhere. A soft red light runs on its own while you work, nothing to press or set. And a ninety day program arrives by email telling you what to do on which days, which sounds like a small thing unless you have been one of the women in that thread. The first night was ten minutes on one thigh, with oil, on level one, in front of the television. It was warm and slow and slightly boring. I remember thinking, this is it, this is the whole thing. I want to tell you what I noticed first, because it was not my legs and it took me weeks to spot. I stopped doing the arithmetic. There is a thing I used to do standing in front of an open wardrobe in the morning, a quick silent calculation about where I was going, who would be there, how long I would be standing, whether I would be sitting down. In November I realised I had not done it in a while and I could not tell you the day it stopped. My sister asked me in October if I had changed my hair. It is not gone. I need to say that plainly because I have been sold things and I know how this reads. Four weeks in, in the same bad light, it is softer. There is less of a shadow. In a photograph nobody else would find it and I would find it immediately. What actually changed is that I have an account open again, and I did not expect that to be worth anything. The link below is the same page I sat on for about ten minutes before I ordered, reading the returns terms twice, because I am the sort of person who bins a full jar of cream and means it. I am not going to tell you what it will do for you. I am telling you that it took four weeks and ten minutes at a time, and that I gave up two months before I started.