I came home from my freshman year of college and announced to my stepmom that I was getting fat.

She asked me how school was going. Leaning up against the dining room table, I said, “I think I’m gaining weight on my sides and I can’t make it go away.”

She looked at me as though there was something very obvious I was missing. I stood there, patiently awaiting sympathy.

“That weight isn’t going away,” she said. “It’s not fat. You just have hips now. Those are hips.”

She was right. It wasn’t that I was putting on extra pounds. It was that, at 18, I’d finally hit the last stage of puberty. My hips had grown in. I wasn’t pleased.

I had retired from competitive gymnastics at 14. It was abundantly clear at that point that I was not going to be Gabby Douglas or Kyla Ross. Plus, the 16 hours in a gym every week were keeping me from having any kind of normal high school social life. I couldn’t do chorus or student government, my grades were slipping, and no one invited me to Friday movie nights, because they knew I couldn’t come anyway. I was ready for a life that didn’t revolve entirely around chalk-filled leotards, grips for the bar, and competition hair grease.

By the time I quit, every other girl in my class had made it most of the way through the puberty trenches — and I hadn’t even hit puberty yet. I didn’t have my period, I was as flat as flat could be, and I had no hips. I was proud of what my body could do, but I also basically looked like a 10-year-old girl with a six-pack, even though I was about to be a sophomore in high school. That year, an extraordinarily mean girl (who, it should be noted, had made it through puberty without having much luck in her chest area) told me I had a chance at being pretty if I got a little taller and maybe got boobs. While it certainly wasn’t the reason I decided to quit, I was admittedly jealous of the girls who, all around me, were starting to look like women.

I gained 20 pounds in the first two years after leaving the sport. I did, as a matter of fact, get boobs, but much to my teenage chagrin, they came with stretch marks. My six-pack stayed for a while, but gradually sank farther from the surface of my stomach. My muscle lines became less pronounced. My once-bony cheeks got fuller. And it took four years, until after my 18th birthday, to get the last piece of my grown-up, retired-athlete body: my hips.

Part of me had waited a long time to have what I considered to be a “normal” body; one that could make me look my age instead of like a girl still waiting on her 12-year-old molars. But once I got that body, it felt foreign to me — like I wasn’t quite fitting into my skin the way you’re not sure a pair of jeans fits well enough to buy.