For years, I made my living as a creative director in advertising — a little like Don Draper on Mad Men, minus the desk-side bar cart and the Old Fashioneds. My vices were stashed in a filing cabinet: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Cool Ranch Doritos and icy cans of classic Coke.
Afterward, the anxiety would set in. Had I smudged chocolate or orange cheese dust onto the pages of my PowerPoint presentations? Would everyone suddenly realize I had nothing in common with the toned athletes, pint-sized pop stars and teenage idols I was paid to help market?
What I failed to recognize was that my body was already telling the story. At 5-foot-2 and close to 300 pounds, my private shame was hardly hidden. It felt as if it had been spelled out in rhinestones across the seat belt extenders I needed on my regular JFK-to-LAX flights — a warped pageant sash reading: Little Miss Food Addict 2018.
Somehow, I had climbed to the upper ranks of an industry built on aspiration, despite never feeling aspirational myself. I had grown up as a sweaty, overweight kid in a bright beach town in Florida — the girl chosen last in gym class.
Classmates mocked my dimpled thighs. At school dances, no one asked me onto the floor. And in the world around me — on television, in films, in magazines and in advertising — I rarely saw anyone who looked like me.
Even so, after finishing college in 1999, I headed to New York to pursue the media career I had always wanted. I knew women who looked like me were not expected to be in front of the camera, so I settled comfortably into a role behind it.
In many ways, the more deeply I absorbed the industry’s message about where I belonged — unseen, supporting people deemed more attractive — the more professional success came my way.
With every major job I landed, I spent more time moving through rooms filled with some of the most beautiful people in the world. But I understood the unspoken arrangement: They would always be them, and I would always be me.
‘I understood women like me had no future in front of the camera, so I took my place happily behind it,’ writes Lu Chekowsky
As SVP of Brand Creative at Comedy Central, Chekowsky oversaw the promotional ad for the Roast of Justin Bieber
In all my executive-level jobs at companies like Wieden+Kennedy, the ad agency for Nike, MTV, Comedy Central and Facebook, I was grateful to spend my days breathing the same air as some of the world’s most famous people I was responsible for making more famous, even if it meant a big part of my job was understanding how their bodies would always be worth more than mine.
For a few years early in my career, I thought maybe I could change things from the inside; that I could put more people that looked like me in my final product. But the deeper I fell into the image machine, the more it became clear that would never be possible.
No one buys things when they like themselves. There always has to be an unattainable version of a person we have to chase to try and become. That’s just capitalism.
So I left that dream behind, and instead gladly gave notes to the photo retoucher about how an actress’s belly wasn’t flat enough to be featured on a Times Square billboard. Then, later that night, I’d go home and order a 10-pound bag of Chinese food to binge alone to try and swallow my disappointment in myself.
For most of my career, I sold the promise of perfection while I was fat, sick and out of frame.
That whole time, my body was screaming at me to take better care of myself, but I ignored it. There was never any time to consider the state of my health in the present because I was always too busy working on behalf of The Future.
This is because The Future is the only place advertising can exist. It is why ads are always talking about the ‘future you,’ the ‘brighter tomorrow,’ the ‘happiness that’s waiting for you,’ after you’ve bought the right things in the right order.
Manufacturing The Future made me feel powerful. I was a real-world fortune teller, not like one of those fraudsters with a flashing neon palm-reading sign outside a storefront on St. Marks Place in New York. I knew exactly what people would be obsessing about long before they did because it was my responsibility to implant a steady stream of obsessions, and fears and anxieties and dreams, deep into their brains.
It was my job to pull people’s attention away from the truth of their own lives long enough to convince them they needed to buy a different one.
My Future work took so much energy. It was always on me to stay one step ahead of the trends so I could anticipate how to keep audiences wanting more by producing new, sparkly stuff for them to covet.
As VP and creative director for brand creative at MTV, she worked with Katy Perry on this promotion for the MTV VMA awards in 2013
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Chekowsky during her time at Comedy Central: ‘That whole time, my body was screaming at me to take better care of myself, but I ignored it’
The video featured a shirtless 21-year-old Bieber being pelted by eggs
This meant I couldn’t just work in The Future; I also had to live there. So, I got myself a cute studio apartment on the corner of I’ll Deal with It Later Street and One Day I’ll Figure It Out Boulevard, where every day was filled with a long list of things ‘to do later, when I’m not busy,’ or ‘after the shoot,’ or ‘when I’m back from LA.’
But that time never came. Instead, every minute was filled with a rainbow of rectangular, neon calendar invites for dumb meetings and red exclamation emails that required me to respond that second to another Hollywood emergency.
My body became an afterthought. Mammograms went un-mammo’ed. One-hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar-per-month Equinox memberships mocked me for nonuse on my credit card statement. Lettuce after lettuce after yet another lettuce went uneaten in the moldy crisper drawer in favor of DoorDash or expense account dinners or bags of Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano Cookies I’d consume in one sitting.
The Future was where I’d promised myself I’d eventually – one day soon – finally get to the annoying business of my body and my mind. In the meantime, there were year-end targets to hit.
I was always living so far ahead in The Future that I couldn’t see the billion ways I was hurting myself in The Present with food, bad men and the meditation tapes of self-loathing I played on a loop for myself every night like lullabies.
I wanted to believe that tomorrow could always be better, just like the ads I made promised everyone, as if The Future were some kind of Clinique counter, handing out gifts with purchase. Buy this mascara and get a lifetime supply of happiness, safety and health for free.
The Past was a thing I tried not to think about that much, even though I dragged it behind me everywhere I went. I looked at my past the same way I’d watch horror movies: with my hands covering my eyes, barely peeking out through my fingers.
I never took too long a look at where I’d come from; I just kept wishing The Past could have been less disappointing than it was.
She also worked on promotional campaigns for MTV shows including The Real World
While in her role at MTV, Chekowsky created ads for the series Teen Wolf – many of which involved scenes of the shirtless lead actor Tyler Posey
Mostly, I thought about my past in advertising terms: I’d had a crappy before and I wasn’t going to be happy until I became a full-fledged after.
I lived like that as long as I could, always months and years ahead of where I stood, until one day The Future and I had a falling out. It turned out no matter how many ads I made about product launches, sales goals, celebrities or world-changing technology, I hadn’t once stopped to notice how none of this work I was doing on behalf of The Future guaranteed I’d get to have one for myself.
I was stuck. Like I was inside a scene in one of those old movies where the characters get lost in the desert, so they start to imagine there’s a lake of cool, fresh water nearby. They crawl on their hands and knees to get to it, but every time they get closer, the lake keeps moving farther away and only after scooping fistfuls of dry sand into their parched mouths do they learn the truth – the lake was always a mirage. There was never any water there.
And then I got sick. Really sick. And my relationship to The Future changed. I no longer wanted to make it to The Future so I could be skinny or sexy or young forever there; I just wanted to live long enough to see it.
Don’t Buy What I’m Selling – On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self by Lu Chekowsky is published by Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group
