Things you learn as you go along
Do not be a person who only sacrifices, and do not be one who only gives. Understand what it means to accept from someone else what they have to give, and to recognize when it is offered.
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I suppose that I have just always been a little bit fat, and in elementary school, girls who are a little bit fat don’t get picked first for kickball teams at recess (or picked second, or fifth, or even next-to-last). Me? Everyone knew I was chubby, clumsy, and a nerd. So I was never team captain of anything out-of-doors. It wasn’t even so much that I didn’t like sports or being active, because I really always have. I loved skating and riding my bike as a kid, loved swimming and jumprope, even kickball sometimes. I played every sport I was allowed to join at school, even though I knew I kinda sucked, and even though I knew my teammates would remind me as such. But it was never that I hated sports, or moving around, or learning something new. It was the social ostracism of being a chubby and clumsy girl that made me hate team sports to the ends of the earth, and it was the harsh climate of judgment that made me quit and start avoiding P.E. and sports at any cost. Along with starting to think of myself as the opposite of an athlete, I started to think of myself as incapable, and not as worthy, and ugly, and ultimately, hating my body and believing it didn’t deserve care.
As I journeyed to adulthood, these attitudes about myself didn’t change much. I was sort of fraudulently teaching young girls about having a positive body image in my work life, while internally struggling with such negativity toward myself. Slowly, though, I learned (and still am learning) to understand how to see myself as myself, not in comparison or contrast to something else. And then I found out about Crossfit.
NOT a Crossfit guy
I was terrified, but after many months of gentle suggestion by someone whose opinion I trust, I decided to try it. I scoured the internet for the “right” Crossfit gym for me–and found that a lot of Crossfit places emphasize a very rigid, militaristic, bootcamplike, extreme vision of fitness, and started to lose my nerve. Then I found the website of a gym that showed pictures of regular-looking people doing amazing-looking things, and they were smiling and looked like they were enjoying it.
I went to my first introductory class right as May was starting; the workout was 1 minute on a rowing machine, 1 minute of push-ups, 1 minute of box jumps (internal dialogue: “what! what the fuck! what person can jump on top of that?!”), and 1 minute of air squats. Then, as I later learned to be the custom of Crossfit, I did that all over again. And then over again. And at the end, the coach propped me up as I struggled for breath, she asked me how long I thought that had taken, and my brain was a jumble even though I knew it was only 12 little minutes. I realized how hard my body had worked in such a short time and I thought, hey, that was kinda fun. I signed up for the first set of classes where the coaches would teach each of the major types of Crossfit movements, and prepared to learn a whole new language. I was very fearful, because I didn’t want to start trying and then learn that I couldn’t do it. I learned a lot about Crossfit in the first week, and while my ass was thoroughly kicked by the foreign movements and new muscles being woken up from 28 years of sleep, I also discovered where I already had some ability–my legs were strong, and I was pretty flexible, and I learned quickly. Finding out that there was something at which I was naturally able, and also that I could learn to improve at the things where I wasn’t naturally able, was the kickstart I needed to feel confident and let go of being too afraid to fail.
Annie Thorisdottir, 2011 CrossFit Games winner
And maybe that’s the thing that has kept me going more than anything else; I’m not looking at myself in a mirror every day and going, “well, my stomach is flatter and my arms are more toned, so I guess it’s working.” I’m not standing on a scale with my fingers crossed that I’m finally under some imagined benchmark number. I’m in the gym, with a barbell resting steadily on my shoulders as I squat underneath the weight, and I am stronger and stronger. I’m running around the block and actually making it back through the doors without having to stop to walk. I’m doing pull-ups with a rubber band for assistance, and then finding that I need to move to the next rubber band that offers less resistance because I’m able to lift more of my own weight. I’m doing push-ups off of my toes instead of my knees. I’m jumping on that same box from day 1, except now I can do 20 in a row before I even feel my legs getting tired. Yes, my body looks different, because my muscles are more developed to support the movements I’m performing, but I’m not thinking all the time about what these movements are doing for how my body looks. I feel like I have reached a new peak in that journey of separation from the “ideal body” and what it looks like, and it’s because I learned how to understand my body’s functional value rather than just its aesthetic value.
Four months of Crossfit has turned me into a slightly competitive person, but not in the way you might think. I look at the woman next to me who is deadlifting twice as much as I am, and I am excited for the possibility of getting there someday, not jealous or down on myself. I look at myself and my own progress, and every day I challenge myself to do better or do more or do it faster or more efficiently. And I keep improving and keep feeling the difference and pride of being able to do something like that. So why do I keep doing Crossfit? It makes me stronger, physically and otherwise. It makes my relationship with myself a lot better. I’ve made friends and we share our victories and progress and support each other. It’s fun, it’s motivating, and it makes me feel like a superhero when I can lift 75 lbs. over my own head. It’s something I look forward to after stressful days in a chronically stressful job. It’s a way for me to take care of myself. It’s difficult, and makes me feel good when I can push through anxiety or exhaustion to finish strongly, rather than crumble beneath those feelings. I feel better in so many ways, and I know it’s because I have learned how to be myself in my body, and because I know there is a road ahead where challenges lie, and know I can meet and exceed them, and have no reason to doubt that I am capable.
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Tags: body image, crossfit, embodiment, exercise, feminism, fitness, girls, health, mindset, self esteem, strength
Creation-ism
It’s a constant learning experience, living in the space that is created between being the absolute most stressed I’ve ever been, and the absolute happiest I’ve ever been. Most of the time, it’s the happiness that has earned the louder voice of the two (and that tells the other to be soothed, that things will work out ok eventually). I think it’s because I know I created that happiness, and chose it. And because I know I continually choose it over whatever potentially scary or difficult things threaten it. I have learned to be so much more brave than I ever knew was possible; I take that sometimes scary step out into each day, and I smile and look everyone in the eye. And I engage, and I do not run away from anything. Every day, I create the life I want.
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Tags: happiness, life
The feeling of what happens
Someone is gone.
This person was just a few years older than me, and he wasn’t a very very close friend, but there was something about him that had a strong impact on me. His death a few weeks ago has had even stronger an effect, to the point that I almost can’t fully understand how much it has unsettled me.
Around this time last year, my life was undergoing a radical shift (that I chose to make, that I wanted, that I knew I needed). I was beginning to learn how to live for myself, to do what I wanted for me, to let go of the things I tried to do for other people that kept me small and afraid. This person was, at the same time, leaving to a country across the ocean from his home and family and everything that was comfortable about his life. I remember sitting across a table from him one afternoon, eating and laughing, and thinking to myself that he was probably a lot like me—scared of things being different, scared of things being something beyond what he could handle, but even more scared of things staying the same, so he was readying himself for a huge leap that would change his life. In my own process at the time, I felt so much terror and excitement about the newness ahead of me that I knew I would face. Thinking about up and moving to another country to create a whole new life was amazing, inspiring, but too much, too scary, too overwhelming. I thought, “how can he do that? He must have something in him that I don’t have in me.”
He went for it, and from all that I heard, he found expansive joy and purpose in creating that life for himself. I have taken my own steps toward creating something like the fearless life, too, and today I am an entirely new person for it. But I still struggle at times with the thought that I’m not strong enough yet to handle this thing or that thing—that something might still be too challenging or too far beyond my capacity.
He died suddenly, and was barely past 30. There is no way to understand or make sense of it. There is no way to placate, or to explain how a young, happy, strong, vibrantly alive person can just disappear like a speck of sand in the wind. There is no way for his family and friends to say, “well, ok, he lived a good life and now he has died.”
I’ve felt angry a lot. Angry that things are unfair for people who try so fucking hard to have happiness and love and a little bit of peace. Angry that this person had the most precious thing taken from him, and that his family had had something so precious stolen from them too. Angry that Charles Koch and Muammar Gaddafi and Snooki and Catholic priests who rape children are all alive and walking around on this planet, but that a good person was taken away in the height of happiness and contributing to others and creating good. At his funeral, the priest talked about how it’s not the length of your book that’s important, it’s what happens in the book. I stared out the window of the chapel, looking out at the city still shrouded in its sleepy early morning clouds, and thinking that his life was this never-to-be-finished novella that started with quiet, then became a journey of someone fighting against the ugliness of the existing world, and trying so fiercely to generate some beauty, and then the story just ended abruptly and nonsensically.
I think this is what we are all trying very hard to do, trying to fight back against the inevitable and incomprehensible. And I think we probably all tend to think at one time or another, “this might be too hard” or “this might be too scary,” so we hesitate and wait for a better time when we are more prepared. But what if there just isn’t a “better time” for anything? What if the best time is right now, while you’re feeling it in your heart and bones? What if you are never going to be more ready or less scared? What if the best time is whenever you choose it to be?
This thing, death, makes no emotional sense. But it is the single most powerful thing that reminds us to live as much as we can, because this one precious life is what we have. So what I can take away from any painful loss, and what I can pass along from my heart to whatever tiny fraction of the world is willing to listen to me, is don’t wait. Don’t wait to do something that has a chance to make you brilliantly happy, or to make someone else brilliantly happy. Don’t wait to do something that scares you. Don’t wait. The perfect time isn’t going to come, because there’s no perfect time. The perfect time is whenever you do it. So don’t wait. Don’t wait to take the leap. Don’t wait to go to Spain or Japan. Don’t wait to take a new job that makes you feel more valued. Don’t wait to tell someone you want to be with them forever. The truth is that the only thing you have to lose is the chance to do it some other time. Don’t wait.
Filed under: general rambling and so forth | 2 Comments
Tags: death, fear, happiness, life, meaning, psychology
Please excuse all of the “fuck”s in this post. I have a hard time dealing with this level of stupidity without losing a little bit of my usually excellent command of vocabulary.
Islamophobes gonna Islamophobe. OK, this video is about some Tea Partiers just general whackjobs (I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here) in Orange County, CA who are protesting a Muslim charity organization simply because it’s Muslim and there are Muslims there (some particular Muslims I guess). There’s not some hidden agenda like a mosque they’re building on Ronald Reagan’s dog’s grave, no giant monument that says “WE HATE YOUR GOD, ONLY ALLAH IS ALLAH”. They raised money for poor people (what, Orange County? you don’t know what those are?). The kicker is that some elected Republican officials showed up to show their support and advocate murdering Muslims, as you saw Deborah Pauly do in the video.
1. “Go home”? These people are from fucking Orange County just like you, fucking idiots. Why don’t you “go home” to Norway or Canada or England or wherever the fuck your several-generations-past ancestors struggled from so that you could grow up to waste your life being ignorant racist pigs.
2. “9-11! Never forget!” Don’t worry, no one will forget because you won’t let them. I *almost* forgot once, but then I saw a magnetic yellow ribbon on someone’s car and I remembered, thank goodness. Phew, that was close.
3. You’re going to bring up the Constitution, really? That’s funny… have you ever sat down and read it? Because there’s this one part that says “don’t fucking force your religion on anyone else”. Christianity is NOT the US’ national religion, in case you were not aware. People have the right to be Muslim in the United States, just like you have the right to be the bigoted degenerate you choose to be.
Now, here’s what REALLY gets me: around 2:40 in this video, one man starts screaming that “Muhammad was a child molester” and “pervert”. Uhhh, have you heard what’s going on at your local Catholic church lately?
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Tags: article, culture, discrimination, fear, hate, information, islamophobia, mindset, power, privilege, racism, stereotypes, stupidity, thinking
Good news
Whatever terrible shit happens, whatever disappointments or pains you feel, the good news is that you’re still you.
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Gifts
It is a gift that you give freely, without expectation or demand, and without anticipation of something in return. It costs nothing to give, and when you give it, the quantity you have only multiplies. It is fully willing and generous. If you give without expectation, then there’s no need to hide or feel afraid, and no need to develop the self-protection that empowers fear. If you give without expectation, there’s no reason to ever be hurt.
Expectations turn another person into an object, just a vehicle for your ideas of what should be. If you can give of yourself without expectation of return, you are free to be completely present with another person—fully listening, fully hearing, fully seeing, fully understanding, fully loving. When you fully love, you do not reject the pieces you dislike in order to try to change them; when you fully love, you do not hold on to past hurts or keep a score. The truest and purest gift you can give is love without reservation or judgment.
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Tags: happiness, love, psychology, relationships
Give me a reason
Sometimes I see things fitting together so seemingly perfectly, with such a natural ease, that I think I sort of understand why so many humans explain that fitting-together as the “meant to be”-ness of fate, or the will of god. I imagine it’s simultaneously comforting and motivating to feel that there is some force making good things happen for you, particularly because you do your best to be good and feel you are deserving of goodness in return. I can think of people who have told me that they thanked god for their health and happiness and what good life-gifts they received, like babies or spouses or promotions or the perfect home. What awe people must feel at having been so loved and cared for by this god who fulfills their hopes, and I wonder if people feel cradled so softly by the certainty that fate will provide them answers and abundances. I certainly don’t categorically have problems with the people who hold these ideas as important guiding principles—and please know that I intend no disrespect to them, either. But I suppose this is where my understanding starts to falter. I don’t share those ideas, because I already have all of the reason I will ever need, without the idea of doing something for god/fate.
I think there is a non-theistic parallel idea to being ‘blessed’ by fate or god that I connect to very strongly, which is that in the vast and innumerable possibility of a chaotic and random multiverse, I’m brilliantly lucky to have stumbled into the knowledge of the people and things that I like about my reality. I don’t think I am a particularly special example of family Hominidae, or that you are, or that Nelson Mandela or Mohandas Gandhi are/were (well, maybe Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi). I think that I was lucky enough to be born a thinking and feeling animal, and equipped with the skills that I need to make good use of both of those abilities, and I’ve been lucky by chance to have been able to know the important people in my life, to possess the abilities that have allowed me to excel in my chosen profession, and, I feel, as a human. And then there’s another, equally important piece to it: I’m lucky enough to have the constant, almost infinite choice to act to preserve parts of my reality, or to choose to move on. I have the opportunity to control what my life is like to a staggering degree. I have the power, and feel empowered, to hold on tightly to what I find to be meaningful, and I know it is fully my choice.
For example, the closest friend I have came into my life when we were 12 years old, and I could easily have been born in another state or city or even just attended a different school, and I’d never have met her. I was lucky enough to have met her, and then realized my capability to keep her in my life by actively maintaining contact and a bond between us for the past 15 years (and followed through with action, consistently). I have never had the thought, “we were just meant to be the best of friends,” but instead I internally recognize my good luck, and the motivation I feel inside myself to keep her in my life. I try to communicate to her how much love and respect I have for her with the actions that maintain our relationship. It is the same with all other relationships in my life that weren’t originated by genetic ties—I am lucky enough to have that relationship, and so I do what I can to protect and maintain it (whether that means consistent effort at sending emails or calling to say hi, or, in the best cases, just being myself and respecting and appreciating the other person for being himself or herself).
It is a direct line of cause and effect, and encourages me to remember that I have power over myself but also the power to be good to others—for no reason other than that they deserve that from me because we are all humans together. Be good because it’s good for you and for others. Love because it’s good for you and for others. Pursue knowledge and truth because it’s good for you and for others and for everything that exists. I guess what I’m saying is I can’t imagine the need for any more reason than that.
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Tags: acceptance, action, atheism, conscience, happiness, humanism, love, purpose, reason, religion
Thanks-giving
Ode to Thanks
Pablo Neruda
Thanks to the word
that says thanks!
Thanks to thanks,
word
that melts
iron and snow!
The world is a threatening place
until
thanks
makes the rounds
from one pair of lips to another,
soft as a bright
feather
and sweet as a petal of sugar,
filling the mouth with its sound
or else a mumbled
whisper.
Life becomes human again:
it’s no longer an open window.
A bit of brightness
strikes into the forest,
and we can sing again beneath the leaves.
Thanks, you’re the medicine we take
to save us from
the bite of scorn.
Your light brightens the altar of harshness.
Or maybe
a tapestry
known
to far distant peoples.
Travelers
fan out
into the wilds,
and in the jungle
of strangers,
merci
rings out
while the hustling train
changes countries,
sweeping away borders,
then spasibo
clinging to pointy
volcanoes, to fire and freezing cold,
or danke, yes! and gracias, and
the world turns into a table:
a single word has wiped it clean,
plates and glasses gleam,
silverware tinkles,
and the tablecloth is as broad as a plain.
Thank you, thanks,
for going out and returning,
for rising up
and settling down.
We know, thanks,
that you don’t fill every space-
you’re only a word-
but
where your little petal
appears
the daggers of pride take cover,
and there’s a penny’s worth of smiles.
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Wide awake
I can’t imagine what it is like to be a person who doesn’t feel a lot. I have always been a person who feels a lot; in growing older, I have been able to more accurately compare myself to others and how I perceive their everyday level of emotional engagement with life, and I’m up to around 95% certainty that I truly am more sensitive and emotionally expressive than the overwhelming majority of other people appear to be. I’m also fairly certain that, barring some future traumatic brain injury, this feeling and expressing part of me is a stable and “forever” thing about who I am.
Being like this on my own is fine. I know how to navigate a world that is too insensitive for my delicateness. I know to avoid the television news, I know not to hold on to anger because it will inevitably seep out around the unmonitored corners of my best attempts at suppression. I know to try my hardest to see the positive, no matter how impossible it seems.
But the trust involved in being honest and fully myself with another flesh and blood human person is tremendous. While being sensitive, being observant, being particularly feeling, means that I have had ample opportunity to create a thick skin that can protect me from getting too easily hurt, somehow I have never actually been able to do that. And sometimes it feels like I’m fine, but sometimes it feels like I’m a walking burn victim, all of my dearest flesh exposed to the air that, just with the slightest whisper of wind, becomes electrified with pain. If I opened up so much, it seems very possible that I could be crushed to death so quickly I wouldn’t even realize it. It seems so possible, and it’s happened enough times before, and there’s no reason to ever want to try to do it again.
But I still want to try again anyway. I want to be completely and fully myself because it’s the only way of being that feels worth it at all. I want to feel the fear of getting hurt, and run straight up against it. I want to never be exhausted from holding back. I want to walk through my life feeling as though I’m being utterly authentic, whether or not it’s scary, whether or not it’s “right”, whether or not it’s going to hurt if my feelings aren’t accepted or returned. Because I’m pretty sure that the secret that makes it worth it is when I do my best to be myself and be honest about what I feel, it will not just be accepted, but appreciated. And it will not just be returned, but loved. I could not ever really need much more than that.
Filed under: general rambling and so forth | 2 Comments
Tags: authenticity, happiness, honesty, psychology, thinking
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