Needles

The other day I watched my friend Samantha get a tattoo. She got to talking with the tattoo artist about his clients’ various bad reactions to the tattooing process.

“I had one lady scream so much I had to stop working on her,” he said, guiding what looked like a small electric drill over the lines he had drawn in ink on her arm. His own arms were fully encased with twisting patterns of red and black. “She just kept yelling, ‘Fuck! It hurts so much!’ I was like, sorry, we can’t do this anymore.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Samantha. “I’m an acupuncturist.”

“Oh,” he said knowingly. “So you use needles, too.”

“Yeah, and I have a lady just like that,” she said. “Every time she sees me, she says, ‘You are not going to stick a needle right there.’ And I say, ‘Oh yes I am.’ I have to fight her about it every time. It doesn’t seem worth all the trouble.”

“Oh, but I would be like that, too,” said the tattoo artist. “I hate needles.”

Of course we laughed at him.

“I know, it sounds silly,” he said. “My doctor always makes fun of me when I don’t want to get a shot. He says, don’t you work with needles all day long? And I say, yeah, but not hypodermic needles.” He shuddered a little at his own mention of them.

“Yeah, actually, I hate them too,” said Samantha.

“I hate how long they are,” the tattoo artist said. “And what I especially hate is when they put them in sideways and you can see the needle sliding around under your skin.”

It’s a very human thing to be scared of things that puncture our skin. Most of the shots that we get don’t hurt that much—not any more than banging our heads or stubbing our toes, things we don’t live in terror of—but we just don’t like the principle of having things stuck into our flesh, ruining the illusion that our bodies are permanent and coherent manifestations of our souls and not a bunch of malleable matter, just like everything else.

My cat was not scared of shots at all. Whenever she had to get a shot at the vet, I expected her to cry and protest as the needle was inserted, but she would just look slightly nonplussed; her more violent objections were reserved for the rectal thermometer. When I had to give her subcutaneous fluids at the end of her life, I was far more disconcerted by the needle than she was. She would sit calmly once she resigned herself to the fact that I wouldn’t let her move around, which was the only thing bothering her about the procedure.

When I have to get a shot, however, I anticipate it nervously all day. I had to have a tetanus booster a few months ago, and I was sure it was going to be excruciatingly painful. My previous tetanus shot was fourteen years earlier, when I cut my foot on the filthy driveway of my apartment building. The next morning, at the university clinic, the nurse chastised me for not having come in as soon as I cut myself. Then she reopened the wound on my foot and spent five minutes flushing it out with a hypodermic needle the size of a turkey baster.

Then she gave me the tetanus shot. And then she told me that I looked like I was going to faint, and wouldn’t let me leave until I had consumed a packet of saltines and a little can of juice.

Preparing for my recent tetanus shot, I tried to discount this memory—it couldn’t have been as painful as I remember. But when I told a few coworkers that I was going to the hospital for a tetanus shot, they all said, Oh, I hate that one. That one hurts a lot. They rubbed their upper arms and winced as they remembered.

I was pretty shaky by the time I got to the hospital.

“Why are you so bruised?” the nurse asked me as I pulled up my sleeve to expose my arm. I had several purple spots on my upper arm from being grabbed, and a large round bruise on my bicep where someone’s heel had landed as I tried to catch her side kick.

I was tempted to make a joke about my boyfriend beating me, but then I remembered that I was at a hospital. “That’s from kickboxing,” I said.

“Well, be careful,” said the nurse, rubbing alcohol on my upper arm.

“I don’t like needles,” I told him, as he prepared to stick one into my arm, hoping that he would distract me with some conversation.

“Yeah, nobody likes this shot” he said. I felt a prick on my arm, the smallest little pinch.

“That’s it,” he said. “Not so bad, right?”

“Wait,” he added. “Didn’t you just say you’re a kickboxer? And you’re scared of a little needle?” He started laughing.

I did feel pretty stupid, considering the shot didn’t hurt at all. But I feel better knowing that nobody likes shots, not even people who make their living sticking needles into people.

Well, that is, except for the people who like getting things stuck through their bodies: piercing enthusiasts, masochists, those people who get suspended by ropes through their muscles as a hobby. I assume they like having their bodies cut into for the same reason that most people don’t like it, for the same reason people want to go spelunking or climb up the sides of cliffs or fly in airplanes: because you’re really not supposed to.

Bachelors

When I showed up at my friend Nelson’s house, his sofa was gone.

“It was really torn up,” he said. “I’m going to get a new one.”

He paused for a moment, hesitating to explain further.

“I’m thinking of getting a leather couch,” he said, a wary tone in his voice, as though he was testing my reaction.

Our other friend, Prospero, looked at me expectantly.

“I have a leather couch,” I said. “I like it.”

“What color is it?” Prospero quizzed me, his voice conveying that my answer would carry some significance.

“Black,” I said.

Prospero furrowed his brow. It seemed that I had given the wrong answer. “Hmm,” said Prospero.

“Why?” I asked.

“Prospero thinks that getting a leather couch means you’re a confirmed bachelor,” said Nelson. “Especially if it’s black.” His tone seemed to indicate that I had invalidated this theory.

Nelson and Prospero are both single, childless men in their forties. I’ve been noticing that virtually all of my older male role models seem to be destined for permanent bachelorhood. They travel a lot by themselves, for work and fun. They have set routines that would make it difficult for them to share their lives with someone else. I gather from comments they make that they sometimes date, but they don’t ever talk about who they are dating or bring the people they are dating around to any social events that I am at.

This is the key element defining bachelorhood: the lack of interest in finding a partner who will be integrated into one’s life in a meaningful way. Wikipedia says that one usage of the term refers to “men who do not have and are not actively seeking a spouse or other personal partner” (my emphasis). In other words, the term suggests not only unmarried status, but a commitment to an ongoing life of singlehood.

Many of my older female role models are single as well. But their attitudes about relationships seem to be different than those of my male friends. So far, my female role models all express the goal of finding someone to be in love with, to spend the rest of their lives with, even when this goal is contradicted by their tendency to date men who do not share it. My friend Loretta is very similar to Nelson and Propero: she is in her forties, independent, owns a house, has an active social life, and is usually dating somebody whom most of her friends don’t know very well or at all. She doesn’t get to be a bachelor, though her gender is one of the only things keeping her from being one. The only other difference is that, unlike my male bachelor friends, she claims to be looking for a permanent partner, though I don’t believe it’s a priority for her.

The distinction between bachelors and unmarried women is that the men are seen as mysterious and independent, while the women are a confusing aberration. Men are given permission for their relationships to not invade the core of their identities. People assume that a bachelor is dating somebody, and that it doesn’t really matter who that person is. But a woman who does not integrate her lover into her social life is seen as sexless (she must not have a lover) or as predatory and masculine (think of Samantha on Sex and the City), a loose woman who, as she enters middle age, will have her own gender-specific term applied to her: cougar, a word that gets applied to women who date younger men, even when the age difference is as small as five years, a gap that is not considered noteworthy if the genders are reversed. As a society, we don’t have a ready-made concept for a mature woman who is single, independent, and sexual.

Women don’t get to be bachelors. We have words like “spinster,” “old maid,” “maiden aunt.” Our decision to remain perpetually single is not glamorous but rather pathetic, a sign of our lack of desirability or sexuality. When entertainment magazines call an older male celebrity like George Clooney a “bachelor,” it adds to his mystique, precisely because of the sense of individualism and even selfishness that it suggests. When they refer to an unmarried woman, like Cheryl Crow, she has simply failed in her attempts to stay with the men who she has been publically connected with.

Why did Prospero associate leather couches with bachelors? Presumably because they have many of the qualities favored by bachelors: they are durable, practical, easy to clean, not fussy, not warm or excessively comfortable. Those are, incidentally, all of the reasons that I enjoy my leather couch.

“I guess I am sort of a bachelor,” I said to Prospero.

Or at least I hope to be one. I’m still at an age—my mid-thirties—where unmarried people are still considered to be not yet married, where we have not entered into the post-childbearing era of confirmed bachelorhood yet. I figure I have until forty or so before I am officially an unmarried lady. I’m hoping by then that the meanings of words will have shifted, and I will get to be a bachelor instead of a spinster.

Swinging the Other Way

“Your lifestyle is evil,” says the brown-robed monk to the medieval layman. “You must change your ways.”

“But I’ve always been like this,” says the man.

“It is unacceptable to the church,” says the monk.

The punch line of this comic strip, which hangs on the door of the office next to mine, is that the layman is not, as the narrative hints, gay. Rather, he is left-handed. The implied commentary is that Christianity’s condemnation of homosexuality is equally ridiculous as its earlier condemnation of left-handedness.

While the comic strip is set in what appears to be medieval times, the situation it depicts is much less antiquated than that. Both of my grandmothers were naturally left-handed. Both were converted in grade school to writing with their right hands, and they spent the rest of their lives passing as right-handed. My father’s mother wanted me to be similarly converted; I remember her exhorting me to color with my right hand when she would babysit me, until my right-handed parents told her to cut it out.

I really like the comic strip because I have always felt that the gay and the left-handed were natural compatriots. We are a similar sort of minority, a minority based on an unusual behavior or preference rather than something visual like race or cultural like religion. We are aberrations that pop up within a family, whereas most other minorities are raised in a family of others like themselves.

For those whose gayness or left-handedness revealed itself at an early age, both conditions have been attributed variously to genetics, hormone exposure in the womb, and early childhood influences, though none of these connections can be proven absolutely. And just as homosexuality can, for many people, be a conscious choice made in adulthood, so left-handedness can be learned by those not naturally inclined towards it, generally because someone lost the use of his or her right hand.

This issue of innate characteristic versus choice is a high-stakes debate where homosexuality is concerned. George Lakoff points out that liberals tend to see homosexuality as a genetic fact, while conservatives tend to see it as a choice. I ask my students why this would be, and they always figure it out right away:

If something is a choice, then it can be a wrong choice.

I always think the entire premise of the debate is odd, because I have met many gay people who have known they were gay since their earliest memories, and many others who made conscious decisions to become gay in their twenties and thirties because they felt logically that they would have better relationships with people of their same gender (though yes, predictably, these were all women).

Ultimately, whether it is an innate behavior or a conscious choice doesn’t really matter; what matters is that everyone should have the right to do what is most comfortable or desirable for them, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.

I first discovered being left-handed was an identity category, and an abnormal one, when I joined my first-grade class, a week after school had started (I had been moved from a different class).

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?” the teacher asked me in front of all of my new classmates, immediately after introducing me.

I must have looked confused, because she clarified: “Which hand do you write with?”

I thought about it for a moment and then raised my left hand.

“Great,” she sighed, her voice annoyed. “You’re the only one. Now we’re going to have to order you some scissors.”

Throughout grade school, I faced similar minor persecutions. I was chastised constantly for my poor handwriting, my inadequate scissor-handling skills, my difficulty mirroring moves in gym class that were modeled by a right-handed teacher. In sixth grade, we were required to write in-class essays in erasable pen, which is impossible for left-handed people such as myself, who, due to the enforcement of right-slanting letters in our remedial cursive classes, write with our hands curled above the pen, thereby smearing the runny ink all over the pages and our hands. In what I still think was a really masterful stroke of smart-assed passive aggressiveness, I learned to write upside-down for these in-class essays, a skill I still have to this day.

These inconveniences were small, the same kinds of little indignities that all kids face, but they reinforced the idea that being in the minority was something to minimize, to work around, to avoid inconveniencing others with. As an adult, I have seen so many left-handed people try to learn to kickbox right-handed because they did not want to keep asking for special explanations of how to do things. It seemed easier to just do what everyone else was doing. Some of those people, like me, had teachers who caught their deception and forced them to train left-handed; others trained for years in a less-comfortable stance before attempting to retrain themselves as southpaws.

These kickboxers make me think of my grandmothers spending their entire lives writing with their less-coordinated hand. I think of all the gay people forced to pass as straight through the ages, those who got married and carried on affairs on the side, or perhaps just dreamed of it. I think of all the left-handed people writing and working and doing sports with their non-dominant hands, and how many never reached their full potential as athletes and artisans and even writers because they could not use their more-skilled hand.

The needs of minorities are always seen by the majority as frivolous and inconvenient, whether they are needs for political representation, needs to read about people like ourselves in school, needs to be able to marry our life partner of choice, or even just needs for scissors that have the left blade rather than the right blade on top. We need to stand up for people’s rights to have these needs met, especially when we find ourselves in the majority, when it would be easy enough not to care.

Pesty

When I woke up on Saturday morning, my cat was already begging to go outside. “Meow,” she said, shooting a meaningful look towards the front door as I passed her on my way to the bathroom.

“Now?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

I live in an apartment building, so my cat can’t wander the halls unsupervised. I didn’t feel like following her around the building; I wanted to sit around, drink tea, and read things on the internet.

“Meow,” she said again, walking briskly from the door to my feet and then back to the door.

“Wait until I make tea,” I said.

A few minutes later, tea in hand, I grudgingly opened the door. Despite all of her expressed urgency, she hesitated to venture out into the hallway once the opportunity became available.

“Out,” I said, pushing her into the hall with the side of my foot.

She put on a little show of being indecisive about where to go, with so many options available. But I knew exactly where she was headed. Soon enough, she had turned towards the staircase. I followed her down the stairs and into the hallway below. She stopped briefly to sniff the crack under the second door before continuing to her ultimate destination, the one she had been visiting faithfully every day for the last two weeks.

It was a greasy-looking spot on the floor between the second and third doors. She stopped, sniffed it, then abruptly threw herself head first onto it, rolling nimbly onto her back as the side of her face hit the ground. She rolled around on the spot for a moment, then regained her composure. She seated herself at the side of the spot and proceeded to sniff it again, her expression contemplative. Her concentration remained unbroken as a large male neighbor came lumbering past her, something that normally would have sent her flying back up the stairs towards home.

“What’s so interesting?” I asked her, leaning against the wall and blowing on my steaming tea. “Did a dog pee there? Did someone’s garbage leak?”

She was too busy to answer me. She stayed in the spot for five minutes with no sign of growing bored, her nose to the ground, while I sipped my tea.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more.

“That’s plenty,” I said, scooping her up with my non-tea hand. I carried her back upstairs to the apartment, where she immediately began to meow again.

“No,” I said. “Too boring.”

I took my half cup of tea over to my desk and sat in front of my laptop. I sipped it as I replied to an email. Then I logged into Facebook, where I examined a series of photographs that a friend-of-a-friend took on a trip to Italy with her girlfriend. Her girlfriend is cute, I decided.

My cat sat on the floor next to my chair as I clicked through pictures of the cheerful couple riding in a gondola. I think I heard her sigh audibly as she watched me.

My cat Pesty died just before Thanksgiving this year. I wrote this piece about her in September, before I knew just how sick she was. I was lucky to have her for twelve years; she was a wonderful, lovely kitty.

Testing Your Boundaries

I lay on my stomach on wrestling mats while a strong man pressed what felt like his fist or elbow, or maybe some other kind of blunt weapon, into my lower back, putting the full weight of his body behind it. I tried to focus on breathing, drawing in breaths as deep and regular as I could make them, because this hurt a lot. The spot he was pressing into felt like the precise origin of the nerve that had been cramping up my lower back, tightening my right hip, sending flashes of pain down my calf and into my ankle.

Despite the fact that I had been in almost constant pain for several months, this fist or elbow accessed extra-deep pain that I didn’t realize was hiding there, like the pea under the mattresses, a crippling vulnerability that I did not know I had.

“Hmph,” said the thai massage practitioner, releasing the elbow. “You’ve been testing your boundaries.”

Testing my boundaries? What do you mean?

“Have you been throwing roundhouse kicks?” he asked me.

Of course, I wanted to say, scandalized. I could feel my face conveying my horror. Please, please don’t tell me I can’t throw roundhouse kicks again.

When I had my first encounter with the sciatica, I couldn’t stand upright for a day, could barely walk for a week, couldn’t touch my toes or lift my leg more than two feet off the ground for two months. It was now a month and a half since I had started throwing roundhouse kicks again, and I didn’t know what I would do with myself if he told me I had to stop.

“Yes, but…” I said, about to explain how I was throwing them so carefully, light, not full-power.

“For someone coming off sciatica, it’s pretty risky to be throwing them at all,” he said. “That’s testing your boundaries. Seeing how much you can do before you get injured again.”

I started to protest, to justify my actions: No, no, I was being careful.

“It’s okay, everyone does it,” he said. “Everybody wants to test their boundaries. That’s why we do so much stuff that hurts us.”

I know lots of people who seem perfectly content within their boundaries, who don’t feel the compulsive drive towards self-destructive activities, whether they are "healthy" or "unhealthy." Still, I had to agree that for most people I know who are heavily involved in any athletic activity, there is an element of self-destructiveness driving them. This isn’t just true of martial artists, though the self-destructiveness is a bit more self-evident in their sport. But I’ve seen people pursue hobbies like spinning or Pilates with equal reckless abandon, working out through colds, flus, bad backs, sprained shoulders.

My friend Julian plays soccer with a compulsiveness that could easily be called an addiction. He continues to play through all sorts of injuries that should rightfully preclude him from athletic activity, not just a game here and there, but all-day marathons. His Facebook updates regularly look something like: Supposed to be resting my hurt knee. Playing three games today, two scheduled and one sub.

It’s an addiction, certainly. But at least it’s a healthy addiction, people tell me, usually after pointing out that running sprints in between two kickboxing classes might be seen as a bit compulsive.

One common definition of addiction is behavior that we cannot or will not stop, despite its negative consequences. Are our twisted knees and sprained ankles and wrenched backs and broken toes and fingers negative enough consequences to counteract all the positive outcomes of our training? Are our healthy addictions really so different than all of our other types of compulsive boundary testing?

My adorable punker student Miranda was complaining about one of her friends:

“I hate going out with Sammy because she just wants to get drunk. I keep trying to explain that I don’t do that,” Miranda says.

“You don’t drink at all?” I ask her.

“No, I don’t see the point,” she said. “Sammy is like, ‘Let’s get a bottle of chartreuse and drink the whole thing.’ And I say, ‘That’s going to make you throw up.’ And Sammy smiles and says, ‘That’s okay.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? That’s what you want? Really?’ I don’t get it.”

It’s good that she doesn’t get it, but I do, and there’s a good chance that you do, too. All too clearly, I remember that drive to drink myself half-unconscious, the weird unlikely pleasure of stumbling around like a half-witted idiot, of feeling poison in my body that was not quite enough to make me sick, but almost.

When I began doing martial arts, I suddenly lost all interest in drinking. The reason was not, as my friends presumed, because I needed to be rested and healthy for my workouts, although that was certainly a concern. Instead, the part of my psyche that had decided that semi-oblivious intoxication was a great idea was now sated. Throwing roundhouse kicks by the hundreds, continuous punches for minutes on end, running on a treadmill after class when I was so tired that even walking was difficult, getting punched in the face and kicked in the leg and slammed to the ground—these activities seemed to satisfy the same need for self-punishment and sickness that drinking previously had.

Miranda has approximately eight piercings in her face and ears, several tattoos, and is considering getting designs branded into her skin.

“Do you think your friend enjoys drinking the way you enjoy getting piercings?” I ask her.

She wrinkles her nose skeptically. “Maybe,” she says, indulging me.

She might disagree, but it seems to me that the negative consequences are part of the appeal of so much that we do. Why else do we work out until we’re sick and broken? Why do we poke holes through our bodies and inject ink under our skin? Why do we purposely cultivate unnaturally large muscles, drink poison for fun, eat chemicals that make us hallucinate, follow strangers home from the bar, work until 5 a.m., drive down country roads at 120 miles per hour, pick fights with people we care about, breathe in burning smoke to help us “relax,” fall in love with people who make us miserable? Why would we hurt ourselves if it didn’t make us feel good?

This illustration is a drawing I did during my first year of martial arts training, depicting my love-hate relationship with bruises.

Being Aggressive

A girl comes flying in at me, her arms whirling like a pinwheel, throwing punches and kicks all at the same time, a writhing ball of fury and rage.

What did I do to this girl again? I search my mind for some past offense. Did I make fun of her poor arithmetic skills back in fifth grade? Or did I unwittingly erect a shopping mall on top of her ancestral homeland? Did she think I was flirting with her boyfriend? Because I definitely wasn’t, but you know how some girls get. Or maybe she overheard me making a dismissive comment about her pink boxing gloves…

Oh right—this girl wants to beat me up because we are in a kickboxing tournament. So I suppose that’s her job. Come to think of it, wanting to beat her up is my job, too.

Why did I want this job again?

In the moments before this fight, I thought: I am going to lose, and I don’t care at all. Actually, that sentiment might be backwards. What I was really thinking was, I don’t care at all, and so I am going to lose.

I knew that’s a bad way to think, so I began saying a mantra to myself: Want to win, want to win. It wasn’t a statement but a command. You need to want to win.

I felt like I was faking wanting to win through the entire fight. I knew that body kicks were supposed to score the most points, so I thought, You want to win, so throw more body kicks. I made sure that every time my opponent threw any punch or kick, I would throw one or two body kicks in return.

That should be enough to win this thing, I thought, counting up the kicks. Because I want to win.

But this girl wasn’t counting her kicks. I’m not sure what she was thinking, actually. She was flying around so quickly that she never planted enough to hit me with anything that hurt at all. So I don’t know if she was really trying to hurt me—if that were her goal, she probably could have done it. (And I don't say that to dismiss her abilities, because I wasn't trying to hurt her, either). But she definitely wanted to win, wanted it with all her being; every movement manifested desire to dominate, to aggress, to be the best, to be on top.

This desire for dominance is perhaps something I just don’t have in me. I love “friendly” sparring, with my friends or with strangers. I love seeing if I can keep up with an opponent, seeing if I can withstand whatever that opponent throws at me, figuring out ways to trick that opponent into opening himself--or occasionally herself--up for a kick or punch.

I don’t know if those feelings will ever translate into me being a good competitor. I do get angry and competitive when I spar sometimes, usually when I feel like someone is hurting me. That never happened during my fight. I never felt scared, hurt, attacked, all the things I am used to feeling during my regular sparring with people who are bigger and stronger than me. I felt more annoyed, irritated, like being poked over and over by an annoying twelve-year-old playmate.

I had anticipated that once something hurt, my desire to hurt my opponent back would kick in. That’s what fighters always tell you: You think you don’t want to throw hard punches at this person, until he starts throwing hard punches at you.

I have experienced this enough times in my training, times when I was terrified, when I felt, with good reason, that someone was trying to hurt me. The thought that always comes into my head at these moments is: I am going to fucking kill you.

I've always thought I would be scared of my competitor in a tournament, and always expected that this desire to kill would be a central feature of any competition I did, for better or for worse. But that self-defensive rage never kicked in during my fight against this 106 pound ball of antagonism. I mean really, can’t we settle this in some more civilized manner? Why am I fighting you again? I felt completely calm, logical, aloof. That’s actually how I had wanted to feel, and I had worked very hard on being calm and collected as I approached the tournament. Unfortunately, being calm and collected may not actually be the best way to goad oneself into an irrational fury.

The worst part about my want to win mantra is that I then did feel angry and upset when I lost. But I was counting, I thought, indignantly. I threw like a million body kicks! If I just needed to look more aggressive to win, I wouldn’t have bothered throwing all those kicks.

Being disappointed that you lost is the most horrible part of not wanting to win enough, because then your not wanting to win seems like the most pitiful sort of sour grapes: well, I didn’t want to win anyway. So really, I am not sure if I did or didn’t. But I do know what I thought as I watched my opponent jumping up and down before each round began, barely able to contain herself, as I stood waiting quietly: Whatever she’s feeling over there that’s making her act that way, I can’t imagine feeling like that.

One of my teachers told me that I needed to do at least one more competition. “You need to do one more so that you can win,” he said.

“I won’t win,” I said. “If I’m doing it just to win, I’ll lose, and then I’ll have to keep doing them and it will just make me lose more and more.”

“Don’t think like that!” he chastised me.

But it’s true, or at least I can’t see any other truth at the moment. I know this is not a particularly objective or logical moment, a week after this fight, when I am trying to process what it meant and how to think about it. And I know that these conflicting feelings are part of the point of competing, that it is supposed to teach us deep lessons about who we are and what our place in the world is. Right now, I feel my place in the world is not in a competition or a performance, not testing myself in some formalized public way, or that if I do so, it’s only for what I got from this, which was some really helpful video footage that I can study to improve my sparring. Right now, I feel that I will always lose, because I just can’t imagine wanting to win enough to make it happen.

One of my favorite things I got from this fight are the photographs my friend Amy took of me, with perfect lighting for drawing. And yes, I did this one myself, with heavy coaching from Adam. I have been working on my coachability.

Being Skinny

For the last few months, I have been having an experience that I gather would be envied by most adult Americans; I have been losing weight without trying to. A few small changes to my diet and exercise regimen have had the inordinate effect of causing me to drop about ten pounds, which is almost eight percent of my former body weight.

This weight loss has exposed me to something else that I wasn’t pursuing: unsolicited approval from casual acquaintances. This is especially true at one of my kickboxing schools, where I have been receiving a number of compliments.

A sweet but slightly unhinged middle-aged woman who takes every chance she gets to try to knock my head off with wide, looping haymaker punches appears behind me as I am warming up and pats me on the shoulder.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” she says, smiling, as I turn to face her.

“I suppose,” I mumble back, embarrassed at being complimented for this.

She smiles encouragingly at me. “You look good,” she adds, before heading off to grab a jump rope.

A friendly young kickboxer stops me on my way out of the gym. “You’ve really slimmed down,” he says.

I nod and shrug, not sure how else to respond.

“You’re not psyched about it?” he asks me.

“I wasn’t really trying to lose weight,” I reply.

Now he looks unsure of how to respond. We are clearly speaking different languages.

“Well, you look really fit,” he says finally.

This is a compliment that I can comfortably, even happily accept. “Thanks,” I say.

Of course, I have to appreciate their desire to say nice things about my physique; still, a part of me is tempted to respond with snotty answers:

I just got over pneumonia.
I have cancer.
I have an eating disorder.

After all, it seems to me a bold assumption that a person who has lost weight a) did so intentionally, b) did so in a healthy fashion, and c) is happy about it.

I’ve never felt good about being complimented on my weight, and I don’t compliment other people on theirs. Weight is bound to fluctuate, so the backhanded compliment is always implied: you look good now, but when you gain that weight back you won’t look as good.

The praise that I have been getting communicates to me that I needed to lose weight, which I don’t believe I did. Ten pounds ago, I was far from overweight; I was what most people would call thin, curvy, and athletic in build. I ate an extremely healthy and light diet, my weight was smack-dab in the middle of the “normal” BMI range, and I trained vigorously about fifteen hours per week.

I wasn’t trying to lose weight, nor have I ever tried to lose a significant amount of weight as an adult. The changes in diet and exercise were just to increase my fitness level, adding daily pull-ups, increasing my running speed, cutting some starch out of my diet. These were all things that I have done in the past, for limited periods of time; but for reasons I am not totally sure about, right now seems to have been the perfect time for these changes to stick. I can understand that I look fitter at this weight, but I resent the implicit suggestion that I was significantly less fit, or really less acceptable in any way, at my previous weight.

Perhaps the greatest reason I am not “psyched” is because I don’t feel that I necessarily look better at a lower weight. I have been enjoying looking more muscular and less soft, but I’m not sure this look is what I’d call attractive, at least not in any feminine sort of way. I associate my own skinniness with hard work, self-discipline, and a certain level of deprivation. Ever since I was a teenager, I have noticed that I am sexually validated for being skinny, yet I feel more ascetic and disembodied at my lowest weight. My figure is too spare to be sexy--my chest and hips are smaller, and my clothing floats around me like it's on a clothes hanger.

When I think of the woman and men I find attractive, they generally have a decent portion of body fat covering their nice, limber, hard-earned muscles. Sexuality seems like it should be associated with appetite, with indulgence, not with plain beans and steamed kale.

A friend of mine wrote an article once discussing women’s feelings of inadequacy when they compare themselves to models in fashion magazines. She urged women to think of these “perfect” models as objects of attraction, and to ask themselves: Am I attracted to this skinny, fashionable, painted woman? If not, what kind of women am I attracted to?

My own answer was easy: strong women, physically and mentally, smart women, creative women, women with wicked, clever facial expressions, brave women, women who are as wonderful with a BMI of 27 as they are with a BMI of 18.5.
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Thanks to Sondra Gates for letting me use the drawing of She-Hulk, which she purchased at an auction benefitting breast cancer research. I was especially excited to learn where she got the drawing, since one of my favorite strong, brave, and creative women is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and yet somehow manages to throw crazy scary hooks and roundhouse kicks every week.