Body - How Do You Feel About The Vessel That Carries You

And why do you have so many feelings about it?

I had a horrible workout today. One of those where nothing works and you feel like you weigh a ton and have never done an exercise before in your life. Sometimes it just goes like that. I try to muddle through them anyway.

I have never had a great relationship with my body, and I don’t even mean primarily in the looks department. It just isn’t one of those cool bodies that can effortlessly do cool things. It’s always been on the slightly heavier side, even when I was a young girl. It always had crappy knees and piss-poor coordination, no real talent for any sports that were accessible to me at the time.

I was always lowkey jealous of the girls who trained ballet, or gymnastics. That effortless movement, being able to trick gravity, to negotiate with it. The sea was my territory, gravity had no reign there and suddenly movement was effortless. I had amazing lung capacity and was always a very solid swimmer - never particularly fast but with a surprising amount of endurance.

I guess it was the Harbor seal body type.

Yes hello! Photo from Pexels by Daniel Torobekov

On land, however, I was decidedly not gifted. My family generally labeled me clumsy, though I later realized what it was - lack of proprioception, another fun neurodivergent thing. It’s that thing where you aren’t good at knowing where your body is in space, so you keep knocking your forehead against the kitchen cabinets or getting your sweater hooked on door knobs. 

This meant that everyone was largely in agreement that sports were not for me. 

As I grew older and started to finally parse through all the shit no one bothered to explain during my youth - PCOS and how annoying it is, the seven thousand reasons for working out that have nothing to do with beauty or weight loss, the hundreds of cool and unique sports I could totally be good at that had nothing to do with elementary school dodgeball and people constantly trying to hit you in the head - I realized there was so much more nuance to what I ‘could’ or ‘couldn’t’ do. 

Being particularly blessed by the Gods of ADHD, of course I tried everything. From kapoeira to tennis to cardio kick boxing to swimming, diving, snowboarding, weightlifting, climbing, biking, skiing, hiking, kayaking, skating, and darts. (It is TOO a sport.)

The fun thing about starting a new sport when you’re this type of human is that you will consistently be the worst person in the room at whatever everyone is trying to do. I have no natural proclivity or talent for it, and I have been in this position often enough to know that somehow everyone will intuitively be fine with doing something - like an over-the-shoulder roll, or just trying to kick up to handstand, or climbing that damned rope in PE class, or doing a vault jump, or a cartwheel, and I will 100% not even be able to attempt it.

Plants never feel bad about their inability to cartwheel

There will always be a few helpful people who will demonstrate how easy the thing is for them, as if there is a chance that will suddenly make me see it was just my defeatist attitude that was holding me back. ‘Look, it’s easy, just do this!’ (I know these people largely mean well, but there is sadly still a special place in hell for them. Sorry, I don’t make the rules). Then I will go home, work on some progressions, practice a little obsessively, watch a bunch of videos on it, and eventually have a 50-50 chance of actually managing to do it.

It takes me a lot of psychic build-up every time to place myself in that position again. But I realize it’s either that, or I don’t get to do shit.

The last time I had started a gym routine, they offered me a free consultation with a trainer, as a sort of honey trap. He had a list of questions to help us ‘formulate my goals’. He asked how many pounds I wanted to lose. I said I didn’t really care. He gave me a bit of a look but recovered smoothly into asking what goals did I want to use, then, if we weren’t going to track weight.

‘I want to be able to jump over a fence’, I stated, with superb confidence. 

‘A…. fence?’ I had caught him by surprise. To his defense (de-fence, get it, har har, I’m sorry, I’ll show myself out), it was just Econofitness. Not Cirque du Soleil.

‘Yeah, you know? Like if you’re running and there’s a fence, and you sort of lean on your palm and vault your legs over it?’ 

He wrote it down dutifully. ‘Vault…… over…… a…… ffffence.’ 

He didn’t end up giving me any fence vaulting drills, but to be fair I didn’t end up signing up for his services, so maybe that’s on me. Maybe the fence couldn’t be inserted into that one workout we did. 

(What gave me the fence idea is this insanely awesome comic by the wildly relatable Allie Brosh, if you haven’t heard of her yet you are in for a treat)

I’ve never had much of a self confidence issue, about appearance or otherwise, and I really wonder if that’s somehow tied to the neurodivergence too. And here I don’t mean to say I was confident about my looks - I am not, as the children would say, delulu. I have gravitated between looking reasonable and looking a little unfortunate throughout my life. But I didn’t see why that should affect me in ways beyond the inevitable. 

Sure, it’s not the best body, it definitely doesn’t function at peak performance, it’s a mix of attractive and unattractive qualities, very tall for a girl, sweats frankly a weird and alarming amount, but also it’s, like, mine. I don’t think we should be ashamed of having a body. It’s kind of like driving a slightly beat-up used car. You’re not winning any races… but it gets you around, you know?

(Incidentally on the subject of sweat, after three solid decades of searching I have finally found a natural deodorant that, you know, works. It’s called Native and a) it is expensive and b) no this is not a paid promotion, they don’t know I’m alive, but it has been a revolutionizing element for me. I am so in love I would happily marry it, in several different fragrances, so we could all form a nice fragrant polycule together. If you’re someone who sweats a lot you get why this is such a big deal for me). 

Other people, however, have shown a lot of concern over the years. ‘Oh you would be so pretty, if you just lost a little bit of weight!’ ‘You’d look nice if you didn’t wear glasses!’ ‘Won’t you TRY to do something about those eyebrows?!?’ 

I don’t believe this is only a women’s issue, no matter how much society has tried to make it ours. I know my husband also worries about his muscles getting flabby (they aren’t), or his stomach getting pouchy (it isn’t, he is honestly annoyingly in shape for someone who doesn’t work out a whole lot. I, on the other hand, am absolutely busting my ass at the gym for the most mid body in all of human history). We’re all well aware of how the way we look affects the way we are perceived in the world, including how trustworthy, professional, charismatic, or competent we appear. 

But there seems to be a lot less energy directed at what our bodies can do. 

And that’s literally all I’m interested in. My weight training journey is a fun one to talk about, I think, specifically because I have got absolutely nothing spectacular to report. Have I lost a ton of weight? No. But have I achieved body recomposition and gained a ton of muscle while losing inches off my waist? …..Also no. Ok but have I at least become capable of doing impressive things like hand stands and cartwheels? 

….yeah, no.

It has all gone at a, like, profoundly pedestrian level. I didn’t gain a ton of energy. I don’t sleep particularly better than before. None of those flamboyant over the top promises people throw at you when they’re trying to get you to start exercising happened to really happen. 

Continuing to stubbornly bloom is a pretty cool form of resistance.

And yet working out is a core pillar of my life right now. It raises my dopamine for sure. It fills me with a weird joy. 

It has profoundly changed how I feel about my body. I have watched it go from struggling and creaking with every clumsy move to finding balance and strength in complex compound movements. I’ve watched it gain muscle memory for various exercises and intuitively understand how to position or angle itself to make an exercise more effective. I’ve seen it creep millimeter by excruciating millimeter towards the simplest of goals - like proper push-ups, which I’m still pretty far from nailing - and not give up even though success didn’t come quickly.

This is maybe my biggest takeaway. I admire my body far more for not giving up on things that remain out of reach, than I would admire it for being able to do those things, if they had come to me easily. And that is not to say you’re not super cool and absolutely badass if you can just naturally do backflips, or splits, or if you’re deadlifting 300kg, or any other impressive thing. You rock! Go you! But since that is not me, my achievements must lie elsewhere. 

So for now, I’m celebrating tenacity. And you can celebrate whatever feels right. If you don’t have tenacity you might have flexibility. Or softness. Or stature. Or elegance. Or brute strength. Or the most stunning eyebrows. Or an inspiration to improve at something. All of these are worth celebrating, because who the hell gets to decide what traits are coolest? 

You do.

Also yeah, if you’re working on something and it’s just not coming together, and you’re starting to think maybe it won’t, maybe you just don’t have it in you, remember that any meaningful change is slow. I’ve been working on a proper push-up for ……a year and a half now? Still not there. But I can show you the glacial progress. Glacial but undeniable.

So if it’s something you want - keep digging. You got dis.