Dear Reader,
Just a head note about this one—this essay is about my recent journey with weightlifting and how it’s influencing my perception of time, effort, and how I take up space.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about weightlifting here. As a thin, able-bodied person, I know that I need to be considerate when sharing stuff about my diet and exercise online. If discussions of exercise and diet are triggering for you, proceed with care. While I know that I’m pushing back against narratives about who weightlifting is for (ripped, cishet dudes) by publicly talking about doing it as a queer afab person, I’m not sure how much the world needs to hear about going to the gym from another thin white person with enough time and disposable income to go to the gym—especially in our age of toxic fitspo.
Ah, but that habit of constantly undercutting myself and assuming that nobody would ever want to hear what I have to say before I even say it—that’s what this little newsletter devoted to undermining.
Anyway, on to what I wanted to tell you:
Last month, I took Oliver Burkeman’s Designing Your System for Creativity course. I’d signed up for it in January, when figuring out how to make more and better time for creativity—especially writing—was on my mind. If I could have taken it right then, I would have, but instead I bought it at the early bird discount and waited two months. By the time the course actually rolled around, I had begun Casey Johnston’s weightlifting program LIFTOFF and was thinking much more about weight training than my creative practice. I’m glad that I took the course, though, and more glad that I have the recordings and documents so I can revisit them when I’m in a better headspace for it.
One of Burkeman’s modules that stuck with me was on reading and why it’s so difficult for so many people to finish books nowadays, even those who have access to books and the time to read them. The answer is that reading takes more time than we’ve been conditioned to believe it should. By way of analogy, he showed us a “slow TV” video shot from the caboose of a train going from Oslo, Norway to the arctic circle. The video is 10 hours long, not because the train is moving slowly, but because that’s just how long it takes. Even with a fairly high-speed train, traveling from Oslo to the arctic circle takes 10 hours and there’s no amount of montaging or jump cutting or fast-forwarding or before-and-after-pic-ing that will change that reality. Reading is the same way: even if you’re a fast reader, you’re still going to have to sit with a book for a few hours in order to finish it because that’s just how long it takes.
Much has been said about the way that high-speed, high-variety media have shortened our attention spans, but film, TV, and especially the internet have also influenced how long we think it takes to do something. In other words, they’ve shortened our attention spans regarding our own lives, not just the things we read or watch. I wish I could find it, but years ago I came across an article about how the montage technique in film has made us collectively expect that things happen a lot more quickly than they really do, and with a lot less effort. When we watch the famous montage in Rocky, for instance, we’re watching presumably several weeks of training condensed into 3 minutes. What we’re not seeing is the drudgery of a dude waking up, doing his workout, showering, eating, going about his day, going to bed, and then getting up to do the same thing over again dozens of times. We’re just getting the highlight reel.
And while Rocky is a fictional film, social media has kicked the montage effect into high gear with people showing only the highlights of their workout progress or whatever else they wish to document. Since social media poses itself as a facsimile of reality, we (usually subconsciously) expect that gaining muscles or slimming down or knitting a sweater or growing a garden should only take the amount of time that it does to scroll through pictures of those things.
And yet I as I’m confronted with my discomfort taking up space in the gym and afterwards eating a lot of food and needing a lot of rest, I realize that for many years I have been negotiating with the universe, trying to convince it that I can take up less space than I actually do.
But sometimes reality is heavy and just won’t budge. I’ve been doing LIFTOFF for about 7 weeks and it’s teaching me two lessons: lifting weights takes as long as it takes and it takes up the amount of space that it takes up. You can’t negotiate with weight to make it weigh less, you can’t negotiate with your muscles to get stronger more quickly than they can repair themselves*, you can’t negotiate with your body to need less food or sleep than it needs to recover from lifting.** No montages, no magical before-and-after pics. I just have to show up three times a week and struggle to lift heavy things. When I do that and get good sleep and eat what feels like a looooot of food, I can lift a little bit more weight each time.
And as for taking up space: to get stronger, I have to take up space on the power racks, even if it’s between one dude deadlifting 315lbs and another dude doing clean and jerks with 135lbs. I have no choice but to show up there with my dinky warmup weights and my little notebook telling me what I need to lift. To not care if anyone is paying attention to what I’m lifting or judging me for it.
Over the last 7 weeks, not a single person at the gym has been remotely rude to me or seemed to question my presence there. And yet I as I’m confronted with my discomfort taking up space in the gym and afterwards eating a lot of food and needing a lot of rest, I realize that for many years I have been negotiating with the universe, trying to convince it that I can take up less space than I actually do. That perhaps if I took up a little less space, if I ate a limited diet, put my energy into fewer things, didn’t speak up so loudly about what I’m thinking or feeling, that perhaps the harm that I do could be lessened. That maybe my unearned privilege could be reduced, and maybe with it my carbon footprint, and maybe with it the load that I contribute to suffering on Earth.
This negotiation—to make myself small in order to lessen the burden I must be on everyone else—is what has directed so many of my life choices. But another force inside me has been pushing back against that. I got into weightlifting because there is a small part of me that says, “I want to be strong.” Not toned, or lean, or ripped—just strong, to feel capable and well. Which is another way of saying, I want to be here, to take up space. And maybe even lend my strength to someone else, but in order to do that I have to eat the food I need to eat and rest the amount I need to rest and keep coming back to lift the non-negotiable heavy things.
Yours,
Emily
*Well, without steroid use, but I’m not going to go there.
**Though there are many influencers out there selling people the lie that you can.