via a poem by Lucille Clifton, see below.
FavD is just the age and identity stage of the Rutgers teammates, and she learned as they have, what it is to be judged harshly and unfairly by competing cultural forces, just because you love something and work at it everyday meaning to excel -- if you succeed to the point that they begin to notice you, they've got a "lesson" coming your way! They will label you, to see if they can get to your own sense of identity and undermine it, redefine it. Cultural Power of Story.

. . .I’ve survived spending almost every day with people who challenge my physical self-esteem.

Allow me to explain: I dance. I have spent endless mornings and afternoons and nights with people who look like models, if not super models. My best friend is 5′ 6″ and weighs 110 pounds. I am the national average, physiologically, and yet I am an elephant in comparison to almost everyone I know.

I think it is a good thing that I began with a fairly high opinion of myself, otherwise, I don’t know how I would have handled spending the majority of my time in a room with beautiful girls, and a mirror on every wall.

I vividly remember one of the internally ugly beauties calling me “pillow stomach”. I must have been ten or eleven, and it hurt.

But oddly enough, I responded to the outside pressure not with change, but with consistency - I accepted the fact that I looked different as an outward sign that I was different. It’s lucky, I thought, that no one will mix me up with them, because we are not the same. I am smarter, I am stronger.

Maybe it’s human nature to define ourselves in the face of adversity, all I know is that the self-image of different and special stayed with me. And that is why Lucille Clifton’s “homage to my hips” feels like a credo.

“these are big hips.

they need space to move around in.

they don’t fit into little pretty places.

these hips are free hips.

they don’t like to be held back,

they have never been enslaved,

they go where they want to go

they do what they want to do.”

Reading it, I can’t help but smile. My hips don’t fit into little pretty places, and neither do I, mind, body, or spirit. And I can’t help but be thankful for that. . .