Growing up, I was a self-loathing Igor who carried the queen's books. My job was to be the sarcastic sherpa, quietly providing the farce and adoration then becoming part of the wall when cued. I don't know when it was, but at some point I realized the obvious truth that I was a hideous goblin under a bridge, that the sound of my voice was like audible feces, and the presence of my body in a room was like bringing a moose carcass to brunch. I adopted the posture that Katie Holmes had as Joey in Dawson's Creek: shoulders as high to one's ears as possible, as if I could shrug my existence away. (To this day, I legitimately blame Dawson's for my back problems.) I ate cucumbers and saltines—not because I wanted to look a certain way, but because I was so sad my appetite disappeared. It was the perfect costume; I was the smallest person in the room inside the smallest person in the room.

And then puberty was like, WA-BAM. Physically, I went from Justin Bieber to Jessica Rabbit. I gained 30 pounds of thigh, booty, and certified American jugs. And I quickly learned big boobs have the effect of announcing your presence in a room as if you're cradling Gilbert Gottfried singing the opening to the "Circle of Life." Pretty hard to disappear into the wall, which is what I'd taught myself to do before my tits grew to the size of pudding-filled manatee pups.

So in my 20s, I had to work doubly hard to disappear. The word "sorry" escaped my mouth a hundred times a day. I spent most of my time at parties trying to convince women that I hated myself, then had social hangovers about those conversations.

But then in the weirdest turn, I became an actor who auditioned to play women who say things like, "Does this look like mauve to you?!" Women who look in the mirror and see something beautiful. A nightmare for the terrified tiny person trapped beneath the blonde and boobs.

Tiffany Nicholson

Then I booked Glow, a series about women's wrestling in the 1980s with a cast of 14 women. I panicked. I'd hoped I could skip thinking about my body as an existing thing altogether. Being an actor offers the option of thinking of your body as the gross ghost between your head and the floor made up of triceps, obliques, and nipples. Having to use this gross ghost in a functional way was not something I had ever thought about.