You know that saying, “I worked/played/cried/talked my ass off”? For a good chunk of my life, that was what I wanted most to do.
I tried to diet my ass off. When that didn’t work, I became anorexic and tried to starve my ass off. When that didn’t work, I tried to exercise my ass off. Along the way, I even tried to pray my off ass.
It has never gone away.
Nature gave me what is sometimes called a classic “pear shape”—a phrase applied to female bodies, golf clubs, diamonds, and pears. In the case of women, it means having a thin upper torso, breasts a B cup or smaller, a narrow waist, curvy hips, ample thighs, and a big old round butt.
It’s also a British phrase describing things that have gone terribly wrong and morphed out of symmetry and into distortion—plans, projects, or relationships, for instance. And my ass.
At six or seven or eight I wasn’t aware of my body as parts; it was all just me. I can look at my third grade photo now and see that my teeth were already an awkward mess that would require two sets of braces while my eyebrows were graceful arcs I’d never need to pluck, but at the time the photo was taken, all I saw when I looked in the mirror was my face. All I felt when I tried to use or know my body was my body. My elbows, for instance, were just my elbows, as opposed to nice or knobby protuberances I’d been blessed or cursed with.
But then that puberty thing happened, and my body changed. I became aware of it as something other than just ME. My mind, you see, was me; my body was the awkward packaging that me came in. I became aware of other bodies; I became aware that other bodies were aware of my body. And smack-dab in the middle of all that awareness was my gargantuan ass.
Though I know this can’t be the case, it seemed my butt appeared out of nowhere. One day I was a happy enough kid, minding my own kid business. Proud owner of an impressive Barbie doll collection, I hated practicing the piano so much that I would volunteer to empty every trash can in the house to escape it. I would read almost anything as long as it had nothing to do with monsters or organized sports. I dreaded any form of physical exertion that involved catching or throwing or hitting a ball, though I adored dancing and riding my bike. My favorite foods were ice cream and steak, and I liked to eat giant spoonfuls of brown sugar when my mother wasn’t looking. Life was good, that day.