It was difficult to be me in 2007. I was, to my disappointment, much shorter than the average height. Our finances forced my parents to choose between a pediatrician and a dentist, which meant that I never got braces to correct the space between my front teeth or my right-side snaggletooth. I was desperately addicted to the internet, from the edgelording of 4Chan to the privilege-checking of Tumblr (though we didn’t have names for edge-lording or privilege-checking back then) to the unremitting capitalism of YouTube (we’ve always had a name for that). I made very little eye contact, preferring instead to study the textures of the ground and my shoes. This wasn’t because I was shy—I actually could start a conversation with anyone willing to talk to me—but because my eyesight was so bad that at seventeen, I was halfway to being legally blind, and making eye contact meant showing whomever I was looking at the disturbing degree to which the lenses of my glasses magnified my eyes. The glasses were the worst thing about me, possibly the worst thing about anyone. I had begun wearing them at age two, and my eyesight had deteriorated in the intervening fifteen years so that I had 20/100 vision by the time I was a junior in high school and reading was only possible with bifocals. Pretty girls in ribboned pigtails and Aéropostale approached me in the hallway, asking with polite concern how I’d done on some trigonometry quiz or AP US history test. They did this as if being kind to me would guarantee them entry into a top-tier college. I told them—truthfully—that I’d received a 98 or 99 (I’d always received a 98 or 99), which infuriated them. I wasn’t supposed to be self-sufficient, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to be capable of outperforming them.

Things got worse when I arrived at Last Chance Camp, where even the younger prisoners towered over me, muscular, shadow jawed. The camp, which was really called Wellspring, was run by a former pastor, an ex–Navy SEAL, and a group of early-twenties “counselors” who were supposed to discipline us by forcing us to do hard work. It was located on a farm in rural Colorado, on land we cultivated by ourselves with only shovels and hoes as though we were medieval serfs. We would be awakened at 5:00 in the morning by the ex–Navy SEAL blaring a police siren from his Honda Civic as he drove down the gravel road behind our cabins. Then a lucky quarter of us would be placed on mess duty, making breakfast while the rest of us performed “inspection,” which meant cleaning every inch of every cabin and standing outside while the former pastor and the ex–Navy SEAL inspected each of them. Both the former pastor’s and the ex–Navy SEAL’s names were Doug, so we referred to them by their last names: Mr. Kimborough (the former pastor) and Mr. Sledge (the ex–Navy SEAL). Kimborough would sometimes compliment us on our cleaning, but Sledge always found something out of place, some crumb or pocket of dust untouched by our washcloths and brooms, and for these small errors he would make us run three times around the entire property. This happened so often that I couldn’t remember going to breakfast not sweating, too hot and dizzy to eat whatever warm mash those on mess duty had prepared. We would be worked so hard for the rest of the day that I should have had an appetite, but I never did. I typically ate a boiled egg or a rock-hard potato for lunch, and then I choked down half of whatever protein-rich mash was being served for dinner. Being rotated onto mess duty didn’t help the problem, either, because I didn’t know how to cook—no one did, really. I lost twenty pounds I didn’t have to spare.