Meanwhile, despite my body’s resistance, gym class continued on, growing more complicated and militaristic. Just when I thought I’d mastered the art of evading the kickball, we’d graduate to dodgeball—the most cruel and unusual way to teach children jihadi warfare—and I’d have to learn a whole new set of elusion tactics. Once my wounds healed from dodgeball, we’d level up to basketball (hardened leather is much less forgiving on the flesh), then football (hardened leather, now pointy!), then volleyball (softer ball, way more flailing limbs), then badminton (sports, now with metal weapons!), then tennis (metal weapons, but heavier!), and so on and so forth until I could identify the type of ball walloping me in the face with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back.

By the time we moved on to track and field, I was in high school, and physical activity became less about breaking the human body, and more about all-out destroying the human spirit. We were introduced to the “pacer test,” a medieval-torture-device-turned-physical-contest in which an audiotape projected a series of ever-quickening beeps as we students were forced to sprint from one side of the gym to the other before the tape chimed next. The number of times you could sprint back and forth without failing to beat the buzzer or succumbing to death was translated into a value applied to your worth in life. And not to brag, but my value clocked in at around three whole times, which statistically meant I was faster than a country turkey, but slower than an angry hippopotamus. I’m not even ashamed to say I ran a twenty-one-minute mile in ninth grade, and to this day it remains the fastest I’ve ever moved.

Perhaps gym was simply the educational system’s way of pushing both our bodies and minds to new extremes. Perhaps that’s why my body has always been so aggressively frail, because I never tried hard enough to make it stronger. But I always preferred to treat my body like a set of fine china: too fancy and delicate to use (unless the pope is in town).

It’s no surprise, then, that I’ve grown distrustful of physical activity in my mature state. For me, fitness will always equal shame and pain, broken bones and the bad kind of balls to the face. Going to the gym will always feel off, because I’ll never feel like I belong. The people who are there are the people who were picked before me, the people whose bodies actually work, the people whose bones are strong and intact.