“Your calves are massiff”
It’s amazing how comments like that can stick with you well into your forties.
I was 18 when that remark was thrown at me in the supermarket, long before calves became part of my vocabulary. But I did know massive — and its Bristolian counterpart, massiff — was not a word I wanted to hear in relation to me or my body parts — and I knew he wasn’t using calves as slang for boobs because mine were dainty triple-A’s that couldn’t even fill out a training bra.
There was only one way to get clarity, my usual source of wisdom — my dreadlocked musician friends. And sure enough, they informed me that my calves were indeed massive for a girl and then they pointed their calloused fingers towards the bulbous things on my lower legs.
And that was it, suddenly I knew I had calves, not lean ballerina calves, but massif, manly bodybuilding calves, and I hated them. Over the years, I researched muscle atrophy and considered binding them in leg corsets — should such a thing exist.
It took 18 years to recognise that man was complimenting the posterior portion of the lower leg.
It was 2015 when my latest genius idea for curing my BDD involved entering a bodybuilding competition because, you know, I’ll be happy when… I’m leaner than fat free yoghurt.
During competition prep, a gym-goer made a comment about my legs. “You have decent lines in your calves”, he said. When I asked him “please speak English, I don’t speak the language of muscle”, he clued me in.
Here’s what I think I understood. My calves have the shape and density of sweet potatoes and apparently that is a good thing.
Although the bodybuilding competition didn’t cure my BDD (more on that later), and I still don’t necessarily like my calves, I no longer let my calves rule my life. Today I am wearing shorts to the supermarket, without shame and without liberal camouflaging layers of self-tanner.
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