“Why does Uncle Neil act so weird?” I asked my mother.

Neil was her brother, twelve years her junior. That big gap between their birth years meant that he was actually closer to my age than to hers. I was probably about eight when I asked the question, which would have made Neil eighteen. And like may eighteen-year-olds, he was moody and self-involved. His latest annoying behavior was to come over to where I was sitting and demand, “Scratch my back.” Which I did, but didn’t especially like it.

“It’s hormones,” she said. “When you get to be a teenager, your body starts producing these chemicals called hormones. They help your body develop into an adult, but they can also make you act a little crazy.”

That was alarming. “When do the hormones go away?!” I asked.

“They don’t,” she said. “You just get used to them.”

The reason I remember this brief conversation so vividly is that I suddenly felt that I was doomed, and that sense of impending doom lasted for years. I didn’t want those hormones. Other people might get used to them, but I was sure I wouldn’t. Once they arrived, I feared that I would have to battle them for the rest of my life.

I learned early on that my body was not my friend. When I was a year old, I was sent to a hospital for a hernia operation — an experience so terrifying that I still have a memory fragment from that night in the hospital, alone in a crib in a vast room, crying with all of my strength as I watched the fluorescent lights overhead turn off, one by one. When I was seven, I had a bout of asthma that was so serious that the family doctor came to the house at night and considered sending me to the emergency room. (He eventually determined that it was triggered by an allergy to aspirin, which I haven’t taken since.)

I had other reasons to resent my body. In addition to my allergy to aspirin, I developed allergies to dust, molds, and grass, for which I had to get injections — one in each arm — every weekend. I also was allergic to mosquito bites, which caused them to grow into huge welts on my arms and legs. I had flat feet, thick ankles, and puffy breasts, which made embarrassed to be seen without many layers of clothing. When I reached adolescence and the dreaded hormones arrived, the main result was not weird behavior but painful acne cysts on my face, chest, and back, from which I still have scars.

My mother wasn’t much help with all this, because she’d always had her own body issues. She had been a chubby girl with very heavy thighs and unruly curly hair. As a teenager, she spent nights crying in her room, wishing that her body would turn into an onion so she could peel away the layers. She spent much of her life dieting, including taking prescription amphetamines for a time. In preparation for my Bar Mitzvah reception, she spent months losing weight and then hours having her hair and makeup done. I remember her gazing into the mirror and saying wistfully, “I’m never going to look this good again.” (She eventually fulfilled a lifetime dream by having liposuction in the 1980s, followed by a face lift, and she proudly sent out before-and-after photos.)

My sister and I both tended toward chubbiness, so we were put on Weight Watchers from the time we were young. My sister’s response was to severely limit her calorie intake for the rest of her life, while mine was to binge-eat out of a constant sense of food deprivation.

There are many more examples I could offer (and in fact did offer, before I realized that this post was turning into a catalog of complaints and then edited most of them out). But the main point is that I never developed any sense of comfort, much less identification, with my body. There was me, and there was my body, and we only reluctantly shared the same space. Occasionally we could make a deal — my body learned the physical techniques that allowed me to perform as a mime, and I would reward it by giving it the exercise that those performances demanded — but most of the time we merely coexisted.

Interestingly, the thing that allowed me to reconcile with my body was a practice called Breema, which is a philosophical path toward self-understanding embedded in a practical form of therapeutic bodywork. One of the foundations of Breema is that our sense of separation — the idea that there’s me, and then there’s everything else — is all an illusion, that calling myself “me” is no different from a drop of water in the ocean claiming that it has an independent existence. Breema reminds me that I am not my body, but that my body is a tool that, through attention to breathing, weight, and posture, can help me learn to be present and experience the unity of all that exists. Nevertheless, I’m always amazed by people who seem to be naturally embodied, who appear so at ease in their skin. The place where I encounter this the most is Las Vegas, where young people (mostly women) dress in as little clothing as possible and pose on the street for tourists to take pictures with. I always wonder, how did that happen? Somehow, when they hit adolescence, they didn’t just “get used to” the hormones; they embraced them and made them their own. I’d love to know their secret.