I’ve always felt different from other women. Growing up I didn’t have many female friends. The girls I did become close with were, as I describe them, the kinds of girlfriends who call each other “dude.” In middle school and high school I strived to revel in my otherness, shouting (figuratively, desperately), “I’m a tomboy! I like punk music! I’m one of the only black people at my school!” When I went to college I shrouded myself with other unique identifiers. I loosely adopted Buddhism, developed a serious yoga practice, got several tattoos, and went vegetarian.

Being vegetarian became the cornerstone of my identity.

Following a vegetarian diet was easy for me. It was a conversation starter, it was a political statement, and it was an invisibility cloak. Giving up meat was an easy way to maintain my slim figure; something I hadn't had to think about when I was practicing daily for the high school dance team. It was something to take my mind off of my depression, which, despite being treated with medication, nearly incapacitated me during the winter and whenever I was in a relationship.

In the middle of my sophomore year at Ohio State University, I noticed this girl.

I’d see her everywhere, it seemed. We made eye contact as we passed each other walking across the quad between classes and eating Lucky Charms on opposite sides of the residence hall cafeteria, but we never spoke. I still don’t know who she is—the only thing I remember about her is that she had shoulder-length dark hair—but when I look back on my diary entries around this time, it was clear she awakened my same-sex attraction:

“Women are magnetic. They have this mysterious and hypnotic nature about them, some sort of sorcery...A woman is as the water. Sea-smooth waves, curving like a wake. And it be not an ocean without a little salt.” —Personal diary entry, April 15, 2008

That year I tried, timidly, to come out to my mom and best friend. They responded with a measure of skepticism—after all, I’d only dated men until then. It’s not the response you hope for when you entrust someone with a secret. Being a people-pleaser, I adopted their doubt as my own and went back into the closet, quietly identifying as bisexual but dating only men because "that’s what you do."

After that, I went from vegetarianism to veganism—if I couldn’t control my sexuality, I could at least control my diet.

I was running from myself. Because the basic need to eat is woven throughout each day, carefully curating what I consumed according to the tenets of veganism made me feel like my life was in order even when my mental health was not. I was using veganism as a distraction device—a challenge—instead of a positive lifestyle change, and because of that I never learned how to eat intuitively. When, years later, veganism hadn’t “cured” my struggles with body image and depression, I decided to try bodybuilding to get the physique I wanted and thereby become happy, finally.

The classic bodybuilding diet consists of lean meat, eggs, rice, and oatmeal, a clear departure from my past of plant-based eating. I felt some guilt about abandoning the diet and philosophy I had ascribed to for eight years, but the structure of the new program felt comfortable. I resigned myself to the fact that food was no longer for enjoyment; it was for fuel. I loved the attention I got from other people: They gawked at my newly muscular upper body, questioned my pill chest full of vitamins and supplements, and admired my ability to eschew donuts at the office in favor of reheated cod and green beans.