Nine years ago, just after a divorce for the right reasons after I’d married for the wrong ones, I found myself in a gym. Often. Hours I didn’t want to spend at home were spent in a strip mall that housed a women’s only fitness center. The most visited nearby businesses? A bowling alley/bar and a bakery. Guess which one I spent more time in prior to this gym era?
I was worried about my health, my looks, my future, my potential to find a new human to hopefully share my body with someday or to at least not gross myself out when I passed a mirror. I was scared. Desperate. And, well, lost enough to think a gym could be the answer.
I’d had a gym dalliance before, one that was for all people, not just ladies. My cousin worked there for a bit, and I would show up with a gangster rap playlist and good tennis shoes and then destroy myself on the elliptical. The best my legs ever looked, that summer.
The new gym, we’ll call it Lady Town, had a number of classes I liked including a Body Flow class that made me feel, for the first time, like this meat suit could move—well, sometimes. Other times I lay on the mat and prayed no one would notice I had not one more position in me. At Lady Town they also had trainers who did complimentary evaluations in the hopes that you’d buy a package of ten sessions for $200. I had a gaping hole in my life and a credit card, so why not?
My evaluation was shocking. I was told I was likely pre-diabetic. The bearer of this news had no medical training, but she did look, admittedly, amazing in Lycra leggings. She also said my body was tired and likely “believes it is 90 years old.”
I was 38.
Do I even need to say I signed up for personal training sessions?
Do I need to admit I only attended two?
Do I need you to know that I never returned her calls or went to that gym on the days I knew she worked?
Do you find this story pathetic or familiar?
Do we need to start finding new ways to talk about health without telling people shitty things they can’t unhear that stay with them for years and make them wonder if, or when, but more likely if they ever lose the magical amount of weight—which would admittedly be more now than it was nine years ago, to reach the promised land of whatever it is they’re aiming for—if they lose it, will the shitty thing still rattle around some nights like when you get a song stuck in your head and keep waking up with its lyrics on repeat so that you have to silently hum the national anthem to get it to go away and then, an hour later, the earworm/shitty thing returns and you feel like you’re going nuts but also kind of have gotten used to the yellow wallpaper of it all and might just miss it if we’re gone?
I can see you get where I’m going.
Tonight at 47, my body feels 9000 years old. Achilles tendinitis, allergies, rosacea, dry skin, and a litany of other delights remind me no one can change this but me.
I spent last night listening to a writer speak beautifully about grief and loneliness and music and love and basketball. I was inspired and moved and noticed the stars and moon above my backyard when I got home as if I was seeing old friends I’d been missing. I watched him speak from a black folding chair that did not buckle beneath me though I feared it might. My ass and legs and feet fell asleep in that 90 minutes. I crossed and recrossed my arms only to discover they’ve gotten a bit too large to do that comfortably, so instead I attempted other configurations that would be, in small doses. less uncomfortable until I could stand and breathe and note the weight of my body as I rose to applaud a man who seemed filled with light in contrast to the concrete inside my bones.
It is a marvel to wonder what this body believes. That it is 90? Maybe. That it is functional, sort of, for now? That it is a machine made years ago in a factory that no longer makes machines and, in fact, it never made its own machines and couldn’t now if it wanted to? Which it doesn’t.
I’d love for it to do more. I’d love to see it sit without squirming, sleep without waking. But mostly I’d love for that woman at Lady Town never to have said those words when I was so clearly trying to be better.
Isn’t that what we should all try to do? Give each other the best words we can to set a course in motion, leaving the judgment for another time?
I think so.
If you ever need words form me, I promise to try.
Shannon Carriger 