When you quit smoking, everyone gushes with praise and encouragement, and you love it, even through the jittery delirium of nascent nicotine withdrawal.  You let yourself eat a little, because hey, in twelve years you probably smoked a hundred thousand cigarettes, and these things take time, right?  Okay, so those extra-large egg rolls from the Twin Dragon become habitual.  So do cookies, and cheese, and peanut butter, and, um, the occasional spoonful of mayonnaise.  But you’re so supported.  Everyone, including you, waits for that day you wake up and say “Hey world, I feel fucking great.”

But instead, a month into it, you’re squeezing yourself into a pair of safari pants you swear fit yesterday.  Why the hell all of a sudden are they pulled so tight over your ass?  Could that really be…your ass?  You grab it with both hands and squeeze.  It’s real.  Those are your hips, too, looking like two hams stuffed into your safari pants, and come to think of it, isn’t that a spare tire cascading over your waistline? 

Nothing’s the same again.  You’re not the same.   You’re hearing voices.  But isn’t that actually  your voice.  Apparently some obsessive version of you showed up the day you first noticed a change in your ass (coincidence?  I think not), squatted right inside your head and started talking trash.  Where did she come from?  And why does she keep ragging on your hips?   Screw her.  You walk your buxom ass out of your bedroom in your safari pants anyway, even though they’re hugging it like Saran wrap.  After all, you have places to be.  But Squatter girl’s tough.  She just kicks back, puts her feet up on the coffee table of your mind, and cranks up the volume to your life’s new soundtrack, which sounds something like “hips hips hips hips HIPS HIPS HIPS,” screeched at a glass-shattering decibel.  You manage to push through the cacophony to ask your roommate, “Are these pants … ill-fitting?”  They’re not, she says.  But they do look different.  Part of you believes her.  But Squatter girl can’t get enough of the whole scene, and pretty soon she’s curled up on the floor, a mess of tears and whooping with laughter. 

Of course when you come home that day you try on every pair of pants you own.  You explode from all of them.  You fixate on a cute pair of cropped jeans, which you will try on at least once a day for the indefinite future. You reason you’re spending less time trying on pants that you used to spend smoking cigarettes.  But you’re not sure whether tugging on a pair of jeans and staring at your ass in the mirror for fifteen minutes a day is any less noxious than tobacco smoke.

Within weeks you’ve picked up a host of new habits you don’t recognize, like cruising internet celebrity sites and looking at pictures of skinny actresses.  Much to your chagrin, your mind quiets like an appeased baby when you do this.  And face it, your taste in reading’s gone to the shitter.  That Michael Pollan book you bought lays unfinished on your nightstand.  Same with the Gay Talese.  When you go to the gym – yes, you do that now, too, at least four times a week – you leave your New Yorker on the floor next to that scary elliptical machine and instead opt for US Weekly.  You cannot believe Britney Spears changed Sean Preston’s diaper on the floor of that SoCal Victoria’s Secret.  What was she thinking?  

You feel your thighs swell as you sweat and look at pictures of skinny actresses trouncing around LA in skinny jeans.  When you finally tear your eyes away from these images, you realize that most of the women in the cardio room are reading the same sort of thing.  Suddenly the atmosphere seems sinister.  It occurs to you that a loosely organized succubus network may exist, its sole mission being to separate women from their right minds.