Stuff you don't know until you learn...

If I've discussed this before, please forgive me, my mind is feeble from study...

Since it's practically the end of the school year at all the local elementary and middle schools, the rec center is overrun with classes of students bussed in to go swimming, play basketball, climb rock walls and otherwise stop driving their poor teachers insane for a damn minute already. As such, the locker rooms have been overrun with girls just entering puberty. Not surprisingly, this magical time is accompanied by a lot of body comparison, as many studies and my own anecdotal evidence suggests.

More than once this week I've overheard one little girl exclaim to a peer "it's not fair, I'm so [fat, flat chested, short, tall, skinny, ugly, whathaveyou] compared to you!" and it reminds me of my own envious, misspent youth. I've talked at some length in the past about my own body issues and how far I've come on the road to body acceptance, but I think more generally, there are a number of things we need to teach kids.

First, kids need to be taught to love their bodies. Whatever your spiritual affiliation, I believe that we can all agree that, extraordinary measures aside, we really only get the one shot at this earthly vessel, at least in this lifetime, so we may as well feel affection toward it, even if it isn't always the physical manifestation of the us we envision in our mind's eye.

Next, it's important to understand that loving your physical being doesn't equal complete acceptance of exactly what you look like right now as your forever body. It's good to set goals and seek to be the best you that you can be. The sticking point for most people (including me, often enough) is that we tend to overemphasize the "best" part at the expense of the "us" part. Though the majority of us simply don't have it in our DNA to set a world record in most athletic pursuits, there's nothing preventing us from setting and breaking our own personal bests.

It's also important that we reject the one size fits all approach to fitness and activity. Not everyone has to run distance or lift heavy. Not every kid has to play basketball or join the swim team. It's crucial to find something that speaks to you, and I believe that such a thing exists for everyone, if only they'd try enough things to find it. Along this same theme, it's important to be okay with being a beginner at something. Lots of people suck at this, but you would really think that children would be exempt, since they're beginners at life, let alone soccer or tennis. They're not. Largely because PE teachers, coaches and parent praise those who already can do without taking the time to acknowledge the progress of those who have not yet done. It's not how you train a puppy, nor should it be how you build up a student.

Finally, it's important to teach children the power of their own efficacy. As discussed above, everyone has their own ability cap, but realistically, few people even truly try to reach theirs because they don't believe in their own capacity to affect change. This train of thought is harmful because it breeds learned helplessness and does nothing to help us develop our own agency. It is paramount to feel that we are capable of influencing our own destiny, even if we have to rewrite our objectives every now and then.

Obviously, this isn't going to stop teen girls and boys from being uncomfortable in their own skin all the time, we all have things we'd like to change about ourselves, but just acknowledging the depth and breadth of our potential and being willing to engage in exploring them is, in my opinion, an integral part in being who we want to be in the world and within ourselves.

Visibility

Most of the time, I really like feeling invisible. Shopping, at a coffee shop (after I've gotten my coffee, particularly), sometimes even in the classroom. One of the most appealing aspects of urban living has always been the relative anonymity it affords. Walking down the street barefoot? Being female while wearing a tie? Sitting on a bench outside a shop for way longer than necessary? Chances are, no one is going to notice. Though it sometimes backfires (personal attacks, robberies, etc.) the freedom associated with obscurity makes the city my big comfy concrete blanket.

Conversely, one of the toughest things about lifting heavy in a university rec center is that I have no anonymity. In the free weight room there might be 1 woman for every 5 men, and maybe 1 for every 20 who actually use the platforms and squat racks.

More often than is comfortable for me, every guy resting between sets gives me a side-eye as I'm racking, cleaning, dead lifting, squatting. Though I can only guess at their thoughts, more than once I've been pressured to finish my sets early, so sometimes at least, I'm guessing they think I'm taking up their space. Sometimes the ladies I encounter aren't much friendlier. Earlier this week, I overheard a female undergrad student turn to her friend and ask if she suspected that I was male or female. At the time I was clean and pressing a heavy load (for me), cheeks puffed out, face red, not giving even a single fuck about how I looked.

So, with my safety blanket nowhere to be found, I often remind myself in the locker room that I'm here because I love lifting and lifting heavy. Then I brace myself, and get under a bar.

Toward the end of my session this morning, it was time for hang cleans and I had my eye on some heavy shit. I'm focusing, mostly succeeding at ignoring the staring kipping pull up dude across the room, I finish my warm up set, and just as I put the bar to the floor, I hear a voice.

"I just wanted to say, you're a real inspiration. Keep it up." 

I turn around, and an older woman I'd seen doing some pretty inspiring stuff herself around the rec is smiling at me. 

"Really." She says.

I pause for a moment, stunned, smile and say "Wow. Thank you!"

Sometimes not being invisible is okay, too.

Welcome To the Jungle/Remix To Ignition/all the other songs that let us know that it's time to get started...except for Let's Get It Started, because the Black Eyed Peas are just awful.

This is a blog.

I created this fine piece of internet paraphernalia just under a year ago when my life had taken a turn for the crazy in a few different ways all at once. I was still at the mercy of gravity, but aside from that, most the pieces of my life that I'd come to consider constant had disappeared, or at least begun to shift.

In my angst and befuddlement, I thought "I need to write this, all of these feelings and such, down!" So, I wrote one entry. I never published it and I didn't come back for almost a year. This might have had to do with the dark abyss of depression I was sinking into at the time or it could just be because I'm a very negligent blog owner. It's very hard to tell.

This morning as I was driving to school, I decided it was time to write something else. It's been six hours since then and I've sat through two exercise science lectures, so I have no idea what sparked my creativity flint at the time, but I'm here anyway.
 
So I'm going to write some stuff, maybe. Possibly I'll create a record of things that I learn, very likely I'll recount things that have happened to me or that I've happened to recently. More likely still is that I'll forget that I even created this thingamabob until sometime next year. Most likely, I'll end up mentioning jiu jitsu. Only time will tell.