The Buffet Heiress

Chapter 1: My Curious Career

The hows and whys of how I ended up in my particular line of work would likely bore you, or be of little relevance to the story that I am about to tell. Just know that I loved my job, and over my forty-seven years as a therapist, I’ve been able to help dozens of people over the years tackle their disorders and mental disabilities.

I know it’s hard to believe, looking at me in this damned gown. I’m nothing but gray hair and gristle now, but when I was a younger girl, I struggled with being overweight. I- I… was quite a bit overweight, I suppose. But when I finally beat my bad eating habits and lost the weight, I decided I wanted to help others do the same.

Food addiction therapy wasn’t a very common field at the time, still isn’t, but I’ve always taken pride in my specialty, and the confidentiality that came along with the oath that I swore.

But I’ve been retired for at least two decades now. And, as I sit here in my twilight years, the winded tales of my past errors and experiences the only agency that I possess left as more and more of my body wears itself out and prepares itself for the worms, I would like to tell the story of the one patient that I could never help, the only patient in almost fifty years that I ever failed, completely.

I would like to tell you the story of the Heiress.

INTRO

The details might be a bit foggy. This story is almost three decades old, after all.

I’d already had my practice for about twenty years at that point. I was exiting my prime as I pulled in to my mid-forties, but I would like to think that I’d done so with grace. I had the most luscious, luxuriant brown hair when I was younger, long and wavy, and it still looked beautiful to me even as the grays started to settle in.

I had developed the beginnings of crow’s feet; too many late nights at the office, I suppose. But my eyes were still bright, and, more importantly, kind.

Most women might resent the loss of their youthful appearance, but I was grateful. I looked older, sure, but wiser, more experienced; patients were beginning finally to take me seriously upon first meet without me having to win them to my side over the first few sessions.

When I’d first started out, I was quite the looker, believe it or not.

I was curvacious; I’d recently lost a lot of weight but not all of it. What had remained had settled itself in the places men crave… I was full-figured and pretty as a rose, almost as beautiful as my granddaughters on their wedding days. And while I’d certainly never complain, the patients that I would see, the women in particular, would always have a hard time believing I could identify with them, that I’d ever felt food dependency on the same level as them or if they were just some sort of… exhibit to be gawked and scowled at.

But as I’d gotten older, my glow had gotten dimmer, and a bit of my softness had returned. My morph from buxom and bodacious into doughy and droopy had taken a good decade and a half or so, but it had undeniably happened.

While most women dread losing their looks as they age, I found within it a small blessing that greatly rocketed my relatability.

The frumpier I became, the more ready my patients were to let their guards down with me. It drastically reduced the time it took for my patients to make breakthroughs when they felt that they were truly opening up to someone who had walked a mile in their shoes. Sure, I wasn’t as attractive anymore, but I was something that was equally important.

I was believable.

Still, I always kept a photo on my desk, clearly visible to my clients over my shoulder. It was a picture of me back in my college days, back when I’d been over three times heavier and binge eating my way through my master’s degree, thinking that there was no way that I would ever entered my thirties weighing less than a quarter of a ton.

And I always, always referred to that photo as documentation that I was living proof of what I believed. That, if someone as far gone as me could manage to turn her life around and lose over three hundred pounds, and keep it off, mind you, then the same could be possible for each and every person who walked into my office.

Of course, that mentality changed the day that Christina Cheng walked into my office.