"What are the causes to which we enlist our bodies? We employ them for love, for work, for battle. From the earliest days of our kind, this essential trio: sex, toil, combat. And the subaltern uses, among them art and sport, beauty and play. I have danced with my body, unfettered and happy. I have labored with it, washed and cooked, dug and carried, and I have surrendered it to the endeavor of birth and triumphed in what it could bring forth: babies, for whom it then provided milk and solace. But always, even so, my body has felt beside the point, almost literally a thing adjacent to, apart from, me. I have tried to lose it, to leave it behind in train and bus stations, as it were, and short of that, to hide it, to disavow it, to deny knowledge of it, responsibility for it, pleasure in it.
Until I got in the ring."