Navelgazing
Oct. 21st, 2006 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonI wanted to write about becoming a more physical person -- so I'll have to start off by saying what I mean. What I mean is feeling that using/experiencing the body is an essential part of almost every day; getting deep pleasure from working with the body as well as from doing mental things; not feeling like "I" am separate from "my body" (though we'll see how I feel about that when I'm old, or if I suddenly become a quadriplegic); feeling like I can for the most part work with my body, change it, let it change me. That sort of thing. To some people those things probably seem self-evident and how can you live any other way?, while to others they hardly even parse.
I used to be one of those people. When I was growing up, I pretty much thought of myself as a brain on a stick. My brain was the only thing I ever got positive feedback on (with the exception of a jealous "you're so skinny" here and there). I hated the effort of exercise, hated getting sweaty and finding it hard to breathe and feeling so tired, and feeling outdone by Sarah every time, every way. The only physical things I liked were a) bacon and eggs and b) getting my back scritched. (Based on that,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heisenbug is probably dying to claim that I haven't changed at all.) PE classes were the worst part of my day; no, I didn't mind the locker room, I just minded being sweaty and breathing hard, and HATED being picked last for every team, every time. It was so fucking public. I'll never forget one time in 5th grade when I thought I wasn't picked last, and when I was halfway over to the team that picked me, they said "no no, we meant the other flexagon". I had to go back. Then I was picked last. Would there have been so much harm, little fifth grade captain, in just letting that mistake go? Odds were 50% you'd have been stuck with me anyway.
And yet, an aside: when I was 13 they had us run laps for 22 minutes and then they placed us in one of 4 groups depending on how far we ran. I hated running. I wound up in the lowest group with the really challenged kids, which I knew couldn't be right since I had done okay in swimming lessons all summer. The next time I ran harder, and wound up in the highest group with the people who were athletes; and when they had us hang from a bar I held on second-longest. Hmmmm. That was the year I also played around with yoga, from a book. I made a little game of squatting down smoothly in the library and standing up again; also of standing straight up from sitting cross-legged. An intriguingly good year for physical growth, in retrospect. But socially it was terrible, and after that year we went back to having just one PE class and I never really tried again.
One of the first things that changed me was sex, the summer I was 16. See, I thought my face was ugly but I never thought my body was ugly. All this physical stuff is about skill, confidence and the experience of being... it's never been about how I physically look. So when Tomcat came along and, over the course of an interesting summer, brainwashed me into believing me I was beautiful and sexy, I really had no problem beginning to think of myself as a sexual person. Tomcat also showed me that massage and martial arts were fascinating (and sexy), and that winter I wanted to do pushups just like him. So every night before bed I'd try to do more pushups than I had the day before, and I actually kept that up for about 20 nights... I went from ~3 pushups to ~25. I felt strong and I was in love. In my job at Burger King, I felt like I was dancing while I made the burgers. I must have still been an awkward, clumsy teenager, but I was starting to feel different.
College helped again, just by having specialized PE courses and requiring that I take something. Here there were no unavoidable, humiliating group sports. Here I could and did take tennis, swimming, weightlifting (though this was after I already knew how to lift), ballet (I left in tears the first time, after the teacher moved too fast and I couldn't understand and just felt humiliated, but I took it again), gymnastics (though I was dreadfully inflexible), ice skating and I can't remember what else. The classes weren't enough to get or keep me in shape, but they taught me that being instructed in SOME physical pursuits was fun. I never did anything that required a team, and that meant there was no pressure at all; messing up was something that only affected me, and I didn't mind messing up. Since when had I been any good athletically anyway?
The summer before junior year, I lived withniralth. We had internships in a painfully small town. She suggested I come and lift weights with her at the company gym; I asked why and she said something like "what else is there to do around here?" A compelling point. I went. niralth never said anything about "bulking up is bad, let's just try to tone" so I lifted as much as I could. I liked the fact that lifting seemed open to anyone; the motions required were large and slow. It didn't take any skill to get started. By the end of the summer I liked how I looked (and, though I didn't figure it out at the time, I was getting much more coordinated. My proprioceptive system, long out of whack, was getting calibrated by moving all those weights around. And all along I had been enjoying the deep pressure of the weights, without knowing it). After that I kept lifting. I stopped hating cardio so much and I did a little running too.
By the time I graduated from college I was working out 5x/week or so, and although I never have been able to think of myself as an athlete I always felt athletic after that -- so in a way the story is over. Ever since then, I have always lifted weights. I kept figure skating for a while, then spent a couple of years getting the martial arts thing out of my system. Finally (er, finally so far) I switched to vinyasa yoga, and this has been the best thing yet. It requires (and builds!) the strength of a lifter, the balance of a skater, the endurance and breath control of a runner, and the focus and control of a martial artist. What it doesn't ask of me is really fast, powerful motions,and that's all right. For now I enjoy, and do better with, motions that are slower and more controlled, and I'm okay with that.
My body is good overall; it's healthy and brings me joy. I love its tenacity, its functionality, its patience, its adaptability and its ability to snap me back to the present. Of course, of course I want it to be better at quite a few things, and I work on them all the time, but this is part of being physical. The whole point is that the process of trying is itself enjoyable, is part of me. (Ask me sometime how many mentally based things I want to be better at.) I am proud that after many self-sabotaging attempts I am consistently working on becoming more flexible. I may never be flexible by my own standards, but I'll be a person-who-stretches, and if I am that person for long enough, I may become flexible after all. I've done enough other things over the course of my life that a younger me would have considered crazy/impossible.
I didn't realize until I wrote this just how long the change took me. All my life? 10 years, from when I started lifting to right now? I've never had any particular physical talent (or great expectations) and sensory systems don't develop overnight. Confidence, the confidence that you really have changed and can now try things you wouldn't have dared try before, takes a lot longer. Still, I was never aiming to change; if someone was trying, then maybe they wouldn't find this too dispiriting. Y'all can let me know. :)
I used to be one of those people. When I was growing up, I pretty much thought of myself as a brain on a stick. My brain was the only thing I ever got positive feedback on (with the exception of a jealous "you're so skinny" here and there). I hated the effort of exercise, hated getting sweaty and finding it hard to breathe and feeling so tired, and feeling outdone by Sarah every time, every way. The only physical things I liked were a) bacon and eggs and b) getting my back scritched. (Based on that,
heisenbug is probably dying to claim that I haven't changed at all.) PE classes were the worst part of my day; no, I didn't mind the locker room, I just minded being sweaty and breathing hard, and HATED being picked last for every team, every time. It was so fucking public. I'll never forget one time in 5th grade when I thought I wasn't picked last, and when I was halfway over to the team that picked me, they said "no no, we meant the other flexagon". I had to go back. Then I was picked last. Would there have been so much harm, little fifth grade captain, in just letting that mistake go? Odds were 50% you'd have been stuck with me anyway.And yet, an aside: when I was 13 they had us run laps for 22 minutes and then they placed us in one of 4 groups depending on how far we ran. I hated running. I wound up in the lowest group with the really challenged kids, which I knew couldn't be right since I had done okay in swimming lessons all summer. The next time I ran harder, and wound up in the highest group with the people who were athletes; and when they had us hang from a bar I held on second-longest. Hmmmm. That was the year I also played around with yoga, from a book. I made a little game of squatting down smoothly in the library and standing up again; also of standing straight up from sitting cross-legged. An intriguingly good year for physical growth, in retrospect. But socially it was terrible, and after that year we went back to having just one PE class and I never really tried again.
One of the first things that changed me was sex, the summer I was 16. See, I thought my face was ugly but I never thought my body was ugly. All this physical stuff is about skill, confidence and the experience of being... it's never been about how I physically look. So when Tomcat came along and, over the course of an interesting summer, brainwashed me into believing me I was beautiful and sexy, I really had no problem beginning to think of myself as a sexual person. Tomcat also showed me that massage and martial arts were fascinating (and sexy), and that winter I wanted to do pushups just like him. So every night before bed I'd try to do more pushups than I had the day before, and I actually kept that up for about 20 nights... I went from ~3 pushups to ~25. I felt strong and I was in love. In my job at Burger King, I felt like I was dancing while I made the burgers. I must have still been an awkward, clumsy teenager, but I was starting to feel different.
College helped again, just by having specialized PE courses and requiring that I take something. Here there were no unavoidable, humiliating group sports. Here I could and did take tennis, swimming, weightlifting (though this was after I already knew how to lift), ballet (I left in tears the first time, after the teacher moved too fast and I couldn't understand and just felt humiliated, but I took it again), gymnastics (though I was dreadfully inflexible), ice skating and I can't remember what else. The classes weren't enough to get or keep me in shape, but they taught me that being instructed in SOME physical pursuits was fun. I never did anything that required a team, and that meant there was no pressure at all; messing up was something that only affected me, and I didn't mind messing up. Since when had I been any good athletically anyway?
The summer before junior year, I lived with
niralth. We had internships in a painfully small town. She suggested I come and lift weights with her at the company gym; I asked why and she said something like "what else is there to do around here?" A compelling point. I went. niralth never said anything about "bulking up is bad, let's just try to tone" so I lifted as much as I could. I liked the fact that lifting seemed open to anyone; the motions required were large and slow. It didn't take any skill to get started. By the end of the summer I liked how I looked (and, though I didn't figure it out at the time, I was getting much more coordinated. My proprioceptive system, long out of whack, was getting calibrated by moving all those weights around. And all along I had been enjoying the deep pressure of the weights, without knowing it). After that I kept lifting. I stopped hating cardio so much and I did a little running too.By the time I graduated from college I was working out 5x/week or so, and although I never have been able to think of myself as an athlete I always felt athletic after that -- so in a way the story is over. Ever since then, I have always lifted weights. I kept figure skating for a while, then spent a couple of years getting the martial arts thing out of my system. Finally (er, finally so far) I switched to vinyasa yoga, and this has been the best thing yet. It requires (and builds!) the strength of a lifter, the balance of a skater, the endurance and breath control of a runner, and the focus and control of a martial artist. What it doesn't ask of me is really fast, powerful motions,and that's all right. For now I enjoy, and do better with, motions that are slower and more controlled, and I'm okay with that.
My body is good overall; it's healthy and brings me joy. I love its tenacity, its functionality, its patience, its adaptability and its ability to snap me back to the present. Of course, of course I want it to be better at quite a few things, and I work on them all the time, but this is part of being physical. The whole point is that the process of trying is itself enjoyable, is part of me. (Ask me sometime how many mentally based things I want to be better at.) I am proud that after many self-sabotaging attempts I am consistently working on becoming more flexible. I may never be flexible by my own standards, but I'll be a person-who-stretches, and if I am that person for long enough, I may become flexible after all. I've done enough other things over the course of my life that a younger me would have considered crazy/impossible.
I didn't realize until I wrote this just how long the change took me. All my life? 10 years, from when I started lifting to right now? I've never had any particular physical talent (or great expectations) and sensory systems don't develop overnight. Confidence, the confidence that you really have changed and can now try things you wouldn't have dared try before, takes a lot longer. Still, I was never aiming to change; if someone was trying, then maybe they wouldn't find this too dispiriting. Y'all can let me know. :)
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-21 03:15 pm (UTC)i was picked last in gym once (we didn't do it often) and i was HORRIFIED because it was picking teams for this general fitness test and i was not a horrible runner and my sit and reach was certainly good etc… but because i was horrible at anything involving catching or throwing nobody thought of me as any good
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Date: 2006-10-21 11:00 pm (UTC)By the way, though this is off topic, yesterday we worked on transitioning from handstand to chaturanga with as much control as possible. I totally thought of you and that you would probably enjoy trying it. :) If you do, though, be careful of bumping your chin on the floor like I did.