When you're sixteen and struggling to forge an identity out of a morass of hormones and daydreams, remarks like that cut a deep groove in the brain. I trace the ongoing, victorious-feeling semi-starvation of my twenties directly back to adolescence - as a way of showing those assholes that I could control my appetites... Which is so sad, in retrospect, because of course no one cared.

As an adult I generally feel this pressure to be thin, not from men, but from other women. As a silent or not-so-silent competition, a constant monitoring of who's thinner, comments about it - either compliments or veiled insults doesn't matter - it always drives me nuts.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.