It made him seem vain and insecure in ways that were understandable rather than laughable.

If you’re our age and single, dating kind of has to be an act of reckless optimism, right? The triumph of hope over experience?”

so really, wouldn’t it have been a waste of time to fret about my thighs or belly?

I actually think this was a profound lesson about how with incomplete information, we choose our narrative.

All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me.

senselessly, I mumbled, “You can leave the mollusks.”

(I thought this one’s name was not Madison but Addison, and then I thought that surely I had to be making that up).

I believed the perceptions undergirding my sketches arose from my being invisible or at least underestimated, including being mistaken for someone nicer than I was.

Sally, apparently “lone wolf” is something of a misnomer. A wolf who strikes out on her own tends to do so only temporarily, when moving on to the next stage, before finding a new pack.