Only a Body

Fitness is a great tool to avoid the stupidity of intellectualism

“‎As I get older I see that running has changed for me. What used to be about burning calories is now more about burning up what is false. Lies I used to tell myself about who I was and what I could do, friendships that cannot withstand hills or miles, the approval I no longer need to seek, and solidarity that cannot bear silence. I run to burn up what I don't need and ignite what I do.”
― Kristin Armstrong

I didn't want to be a body. I wanted to pour myself into a word.

I hated anything physical. I hated being forced to trudge outside in the sunlight. I didn't like the flaunting curves of nature, the way that every tree and sunset seemed to waggle its useless beauty above me while I panted in its shadow, sweat seeping through my shirt, mud soaked into my shoes. (Suffice to say, I wasn’t a very sporty or athletic kid.) I didn’t want to play dodgeball or run laps around the school. I wanted to play inside my imagination.

There was a flagrant pain to mere existence. While poets and parents crowed about the splendor of the scenery, I only felt the mosquito at the back of my neck. Why couldn’t they see how mundane it all was? How boring? Even the camera in my mind’s eyes was more interesting than anything in the outside world. Thoreau had obviously never played Pokémon Red on the Gameboy color or read Philip K. Dick or duked it out in Smash Brothers. If he had, then maybe he wouldn’t have spent so much time waxing about the autumnal sun.

I wanted to be a video game character.

I wanted to be a character in a book.

I wanted to be on a mission with all the repetition erased. I wanted my life to have a purpose that followed a surge of constant craving. Most writers didn’t seem to jive with reality, and neither did I. I figured they must’ve been lying when they talked about the beauty of the world. It was another literary exaggeration. It wasn’t real, in the way that vampires and magical carnivals weren’t real.

Skin was not meant for pleasure. The ache of my body was just the constant reminder that I was ugly flesh, and that flesh was only a vehicle to allow me to return to the delights of my fantasy life, over and over again. If I focused too much on my body then I was reminded that my lungs burned when I ran, and my back throbbed when I did push-ups, and that the thing that people called love wasn’t actually love at all, because wasn’t love just obligation and disappointment and warm tears in your throat that you could taste when you tilted your head back?

It was better to just pretend that I was nothing. I projected my life into other worlds.

But the first time I lifted weights, everything changed.

I still remember that weekend clearly; My dad took my brother and I to his gym and I did squats on the smith machine. The next several days I could hardly sit down or go to the toilet. I felt an excruciating soreness throughout my entire lower body.

Something in me shifted. I didn’t feel like the soreness was something to avoid. Rather, a part of me enjoyed it. I had a sense of pride about it. I wasn’t sore because I’d failed at something. I was sore because I’d pushed myself and done something difficult. I had become stronger.

I wanted to do it again.

Maybe this was something I should’ve learned when I was getting dodgeballs thrown at my head or running the Presidential fitness test (after not running at all for the rest of the year) until I felt like vomiting. I was always told I was “unathletic”, and I just thought that was just my birthright and there was nothing I could do to change it.

When I first started lifting weights, I grasped what nobody had ever been able to teach me. It was such an extraordinarily simple lesson, one that I should’ve learned years and years ago. Yet I didn’t, and the weights became my master. They revealed to me the fruits of reality. They revealed to me that I could not retreat from my body like I was the ghoul that haunted it; that I was my body, from toes to brainstem

All of this leads back to one single lesson. The ultimate lesson. Maybe the only lesson.

The lesson was:

I could become better.

My dad gave me a strength training book with a 3 month program. I made sure I added enough weight so that I could barely finish each set. If I wanted to grow, I needed to make the struggle a part of my routine. I was often the only girl in the weight room at my college gym, but I didn’t care. My thighs started to thicken. I actually got biceps. I also started doing an hour everyday on the elliptical before I lifted weights, because I discovered I actually liked pushing myself. I liked how the sweat and the burn made a bottle of water taste like liquid crystal. I ached, but it was a good ache. It even made walking around afterward enjoyable. I’d go to one of the dining halls afterward and devour a chicken breast and some broccoli and it felt like I’d earned its new delicious taste.

I was still often lost in my head. I’d skip the classes where the professors just read straight from the textbook and spend half a day sleeping in bed. The world would feel so heavy it was like I was anchored to the sheets. I suffered spasms of depression. I read Jean Paul Sartre and Camus and identified with the absurd more than a reasonable person. Just like the protagonist in Nausea, I sometimes looked at my hand and saw a foreign entity; a fat white worm I wanted to shake off me. I’d gotten my head so twisted that even the simplest concepts of existence confused me. I felt like a bag of blood floating in a world of dark symbols. Everywhere I turned I was met with sharp teeth and cruel laughter and confusion.

But whenever I lifted weights I was allowing myself to take hesitant sips of reality. Week by week, I became stronger. I learned that the fruits of reality were something that had to be earned. I had to obey my master, the weights, or he would punish me with failure and injury. But if I followed his commands, if I did the proper amount of reps, with the proper form and resistance, with the proper amount of rest, then I saw a positive return.

There are plenty of charlatans and fakes in this world. Someone can easily convince others they are a great writer because of their presence and popularity. But you can look at someone who claims to be fit and right away know if they’re telling a lie or not. They wear the truth on their body. There’s little room for bullshit.

Fantasy was comfortable and fun. You could even learn things in fantasy to take back to the world and create useful tools. But if you indulged too much in its easy comforts, then it made you weak. It could teach you to blind yourself to simple truths. Intellectuals and writers have often convinced themselves their complex feelings must require complex solutions. Their egos often won’t allow them to accept that sometimes even the labyrinthine garages of their emotional issues could benefit from sunlight, or sweat, or a coffee date with a friend. They have often experienced misery in their lives and thus create entire worldviews to justify why that misery is a good thing, actually. They are a helpless doll of the universe, a kind of breathing maladaptation, who had no other choice but to accept the ugly window created by their perception.

In “Sun and Steel”, a book by Yukio Mishima, he talks about intellectuals such as himself, or the “night people.”

“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”

I was a person who “indulged in nocturnal thought.” I convinced myself of a lot of stupid things over the years. I did things that made me unhappy because I didn’t understand the rules of reality. I was lost in a morass of ideas. I’d go this way and that, pulled by seductive ideas that if I’d viewed them in practical light would have been stunned and dumb and drooling.

But when I lifted weights I couldn’t succeed by deceiving myself. I had to follow the rules.

I could write about exquisite women draped in fur and lace, the allure of forbidden romance, the sleek designs of monsters with ebony carapaces and demons with crystal teeth. Yet in my real life beauty itself was an alien concept. I had to teach myself to enjoy the sun. The splendor of sunsets and warm beaches was not something that every eye got to appreciate.

People talk about exercise being “boring,” because its rewards are not yielded simply because you desire them. A fit body is not something you can order at a kiosk or flip on a switch for. You can’t get it just because you were lucky or had rich parents. It is not a sudden spurt of enjoyment inserted like a needle full of a good feeling. It is long, and slow, and the results come from consistency and adherence. But the longer you exercise, the more you often come to enjoy it, because you find there is a different kind of pleasure in doing things that are difficult. It does not announce itself with glitter and champagne. It transforms you with slow precision from the inside out; like a burning light that destroys rotting wood to allow its glow to pierce through

I’ve lifted weights throughout my entire adult life, but last year after I had my child and needed to rebuild my body was the first time I really locked in and understood it was something I needed to be consistent with. No more 90 day challenges. No more “30 days abs.” No more pushing until I thought I’d pushed enough, so I could stop. No more hitting my goal weight and then taking weeks to drink beer and eat pizza and sit at my computer.

I’ve come to realize that a break is not a sufficient reward. It’s self-destruction in disguise. I didn’t want a break from lifting weights and hitting the cardio machines. Not really. I wanted a break from reality itself. I wanted to sink back into the dark dream of my own creation where nothing mattered, and the pieces of my life could be arranged and rearranged in the liquid morass of my indulgent suffering. It’s not my fault that I’m weak.

Stupid.

This is, don’t you understand? This is it. All that you see is all that you get. Life cannot be bargained with or betrayed. If you try to transform the laws of reality, you just end up breaking yourself against the impenetrable barrier of truth. That’s why some people become uglier every year, become more hateful every year. They’ve found life lacking and don’t realize it’s because they have failed to understand a fundamental truth. They must obey.

No more breaks. Not ever.