It’s also the first time I started noticing men’s bodies as more than just bodies, but as objects of desire. Young gay kids are plagued with the dual struggle of wanting to be with the bodies that haunt us and wanting to be like them, those desires often irrevocably tangled up in one another. I didn’t know if I was watching the other shirtless boys because I wanted to look like them, or because I liked the way they looked, or both. I didn’t know if the shame I felt was about my own body or my own desires. And the confusion made it all not worth thinking about at all. And so, I ignored my own body. I ignored its growing size. I ignored that the food I was eating was related to the rate my body was expanding.

And so, I brought my weight and its baggage to college, where I discovered dining hall waffles and new depths of stress and caffeine and alcohol and more mature, cut bodies and eating burgers at midnight and ramen noodles and boys with cute, muscled thighs and brownies from the dessert station and chugging cheap beer. I gained the freshman fifteen for four students all on my own, because there was too much to worry about besides my weight. And my body escaped me.

Meanwhile, I came out as gay (but not as fat) in 2011 and started learning how much gay culture favors the thin and the fit and the muscled. It’s the first time I went to a gay club and saw people who were gay like me, which was at once liberating and suppressive. It was the first time I saw how important it was for gay people to look like some unattainable ideal. “Look at all these thin people being thin together” was my most searing thought, and part of the reason why I never seriously tried dating after that night. Dating felt too much like putting myself on sale at a deli counter, to be picked alongside finer, shinier pieces of beef. I felt too much like a wedge of ham surrounded by beautiful cuts of prime rib.

That summer, I decided to try to take control and joined the gym across the street from our house. And if you’re thinking, “The gym was just across the street this whole time and you didn’t go before then?”—yes, that’s exactly where it was, but any gym that was not directly beneath my body at any given moment might as well have been in another country. But, motivated by the insecurity of my newfound gayness, I walked over to the gym one morning, paid the necessary seven-million-dollar membership fee, signed my name in blood, and committed myself to looking like Matthew McConaughey by the end of the summer.