One More Year

More weights, feels the same.

Self-improvement is exhausting.

Dear Readers,

I started weight training earlier this year. This is because I am rapidly aging and feeling it, and while I get snarly about many fitness trends (being healthy is great, presenting fatphobia as factual medical info is not!), I do want to be strong enough to lift a car off of a cat (should this need arise) and so instead of simply following a cool lifting trainer on Instagram I actually messaged her and signed up.

At our first session, my trainer said “oh this part is hard for a lot of people emotionally because people can’t accept how much strength they actually have” and to be honest I shrugged it off because at that point I’d been back in therapy for like six months and the idea of opening myself up to believing in different possibilities for myself, well, I hadn’t FIXED IT ALL THE WAY but I had leveled up. I am genuinely thrilled that brain therapy started before weight lifting because apparently there are annoying emotions in everything, and it helps to have a professional minding them.

One really hard thing about weight lifting is that I don’t really ever feel like I am getting better. This is because I pay a woman to put weights and medicine balls and other stuff in front of me and then tell me how many times to lift them and for how long. It just is really hard and even though I know this is one of those mental health things I am working on, I don’t think I am strong! Not that I can’t believe this possibility for myself (again, thank you, therapy), I just think I have so far to go before that’ll be true! Right now I think of myself as a delicate flower (but, like, slightly grosser) who could wilt easily or, like, have my leaves fall off.

Am I the plant or the awkward fool in glasses, sometimes two things can be true at once

The thing is, though, that it turns out that I WAS getting stronger that whole time. It just didn’t feel like it because my trainer was putting heavier and heavier weights in front of me. I didn’t know! They stayed the same amount of hard! But they were not! I mean, they WERE but only because I had gotten so much stronger.