In May this year I played the prompt-based card game We’re Not Really Strangers with two new friends. We landed on the question “What is something about me that surprised you?” and one of them said to me “Your love for sports, especially because you don’t look athletic.” The other agreed. And I was fucking hurt.
Since then we’ve had many debates both silly and serious about what it means to look and be athletic but it stings every time. I’m definitely fitter than both of them, why did I care so much how I looked?
I have been an athlete since I was 4 years old, I started with dancing, tennis, and swimming, then basketball, netball, and long distance running. I competed my whole life, (including in Model United Nations and Debating at very high levels), and when I started university at 18 that all stopped. I didn’t want to compete anymore.
During the pandemic, my brother introduced me to a personal trainer he was enjoying working with and Ashan was the most impressive educator I had met in a long time. From our first consultation and assessment he taught me countless things about my body, how it has learned to move, and how it has the potential to move – happier and healthier. Ashan’s expertise is in postural adjustment so training with him has felt like learning the alphabet to my body, the absolute fundamentals. Anatomy, kinetic chains, muscle-mind connection, breathing, stability, mobility, and strength are all part of the language.
But the language to what? What was I learning to express?
I’m now realizing, at 23, its the language of survival.
Towards the end of the summer my brother got married (an endeavor demanding of your energy and liver), I got 2 tattoos, a belly button piercing, and lasik surgery. It was a lot to put my body through but my recovery impressed me. I had trained hard all summer – lifting, playing basketball, learning to box, stretching. I was strengthening my body but also my mind and heart’s understanding of what I am capable of; demonstrating over and over again to myself that I can feel better. So by survival, yes fight or flight, I am more confident in my ability to chop it up if I need to, but also recovery. I felt like a 5 ft tall battery and I was super charged.
Since reading Parable of the Sower I’ve been trying to optimize my chances at survival in the wild. In a way, its the same thing my mother did, and women have done for aeons, consider their chances at survival aboveall. So, if there’s one thing anybody is inheriting from me it better be some fit genes.
Hanging out with my two dogs this summer was profound. Ruby is a 1 year old labrador who wants to play all the time and Izzy is a 7 year old rescue who wants to cuddle and nap all the time. Ruby really pushed me to play the last couple months, to catch, throw and kick balls, run and hide, dodge and jump. And in doing so I got to spend quality time with her and learn so much from her. Same with any toddlers I hung out with. Play is the medium of the wise. Also, play is fucking fun.
I knew a dude in college who constantly mentioned he was a child actor, that’s not how I’m trying to be, claiming glory from my youth sports championships but this comment about not looking athletic has been a slow healing wound for me. Some of it is from a place of vanity and a dissonance of how I see myself versus how others see me, but there’s so much more. I felt I had disappointed my coaches, they believe in me. I also felt I had failed to communicate, I may not be a competitor but I am still a contender – for survival and for play.
And I guess that’s important to me, for you to know, as my friend, that if we’re in the mean streets or on the playground, I can throw and receive, I can land and fly, I am an athlete.